ABSTRACT
Speculated on for more than a decade before it occurred and feared for its impact on Yugoslavia's stability, the death of the man who had led the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to power and had become the symbol of the post-war, socialist, self-managed, non-aligned Yugoslavia had remarkably few consequences. The "Yugoslav road to socialism" was abandoned in favor of a nationalist road to disintegration. In addition to the sudden and rapidly deteriorating economy at the beginning of the 1980s, a second and equally dangerous problem reemerged, that of ethnonationalism. In terms of regional development, while faster development of the insufficiently developed republics and the region of Kosovo continued to be proclaimed in the Seventh and Eighth Five-Year Plans of the 1980s, the struggle over a diminishing economic pie was becoming increasingly evident. By 1985 the economic crisis was characterized by stagflation, that is, stagnation of economic growth along with a sharp increase of inflation.
