A balance-of-power system is a system in unstable equilibrium, where countervailing forces hold each other in suspension. The decision of a major actor to defy the rules of the system in hope of overthrowing or revolutionizing that system may, under appropriate conditions, evoke an antirevolutionary coalition fearful of the risks of system change. Yugoslavia in the 1960s was in a particularly unstable equilibrium because the republics had not been able to agree on the basic premises of federal policy. The successes of the national-liberal coalition had built up an expectation of change among the coalition’s remaining—and, by attrition, ever more radical—activists. The intersection of economic grievances with the perception of cultural threat eventually propelled the Croatian leadership beyond the bounds of tolerable political behavior, provoking a systemwide crisis.

Economic Exploitation

The economic reform has come down, in historical memory, as a partial success. After all, it made possible the economic boom of the late 1970s. But in the short run the reform produced disappointment. Economic growth slowed from 9.7 percent annually in the prereform period (1954-65) to 6.0 percent annually in the immediate postreform period (1966-70). The rate of increase of employment also slowed—from 5.9 percent annually in the earlier period to 1.0 percent in the subsequent period. At the same time, however, labor productivity rose measurably.¹

In Croatia, the economic reform was disappointing. Croats found their expectations often unfulfilled, and in some cases, their economic position actually deteriorated. A leading Croatian economist claimed, further, that economic resources and credits were more concentrated in Belgrade after the reform (specifically, in 1967) than before.² The reform had been forged by the forces of devolution but seemed only to have served to further advance the centralization of resources. Even four years after the reform, Belgrade’s banks had a stranglehold on the Yugoslav economy, controlling more than half of total credits and some 81.5 percent of foreign credits. As of 1969, according to a Croatian economist, Croatia brought in about 50 percent of all foreign capital but controlled—between Zagreb, Split, and Rijeka—scarcely more than 15 percent of total credits. Belgrade’s foreign trade companies, moreover, were said to enjoy a virtual monopoly, garnering 77.1 percent of Yugoslav income in this sector, with Ljubljana accounting for most of the rest (19.4 percent) and Zagreb for a mere 2.4 percent.³

In the course of September and November of 1971, Hrvatski tjednik, the weekly newspaper of Matica Hrvatska, published a series of articles that gave detailed information about the secret contents of the so-called Green Book (Analyses of the Conditions of Crediting the Hotel-Touristic Organizations in the Coastal Region of Croatia). The book attempted to show how Belgrade’s banks had monopolized credit in Dalmatia and squeezed out the indigenous Croatian banks. Belgrade export firms were also exploiting Croatia unfairly, Hrvatski tjednik charged. For instance, Progress, a trade corporation in Belgrade, illegitimately reaped huge profits at Croatia’s expense throughout 1971 by the sale of ships earmarked for the Croatian merchant fleet, using, as a cover, fictitious companies registered in Liberia and Luxembourg.⁴ It was bad enough that the Serbs were penetrating the Croatian hotel industry; worse yet was the Croats’ growing perception that their resources were being drained away by Serbia. Thus, during the 1965-69 period, the very time when investments in the Croatian hotel and tourist industry began to climb at a fast pace, profitability slumped: the reason, charged Hrvatski tjednik, was Serbian manipulation of investment credits and terms.⁵ In some of the most controversial cases, Serbian corporations allegedly applied political pressure in order to obtain long-term agreements of a colonial character. In other cases, bribery may have been involved. Generalexport, for instance, whose main offices are in Belgrade, secured ten-year agreements with Croatian hotels in Jelsa and Primosten and a twenty-year agreement with one in Cavtat. According to Hrvatski tjednik, Generalexport obtained these agreements through political pressure and, though putting up only 10 percent of the capital in each case, assured itself of the legal right to lay claim to at least 50 percent of the foreign currency earnings of each of the two enterprises. It also established “service committees” that exercised wide authority in the management of the hotels without being bound by explicit regulations. In every case, Generalexport was assured a fixed dividend even if the enterprise went into the red. Nor was this an isolated case. Belgrade’s Jugoslovenska Poljoprivredna Banka similarly extracted foreign currency privileges as terms of agreement with the Veruda enterprise in Pula and the Piava laguna enterprise in Poreč.⁶

It was impossible to divorce economics from politics because it seemed clear to an increasing number of Croats not only that they were being exploited but also that they were being exploited as Croats. The Croats noted that Generalexport, the same Belgrade company that was knee-deep in the Croatian hotel industry, “was permitted to set up its own airline long before permission for a Croatian airline was granted.”⁷ Since this was Serbia’s second airline, the Croats could only conclude that the forces of unitarism were still entrenched. More disturbing to Croats was Šime Djodan’s argument that Croatia had been forced to accept a deficit in trade with every other republic in the Yugoslav federation, even while netting a sizeable surplus in foreign trade.⁸

Djodan, an economist by training and a leading Croatian nationalist, identified Croatia’s interests with liberalism and associated Yugoslav conservatives, insofar as they were partial to centralism, with “opposition to self-management.”⁹ By so doing, Djodan laid claim to the primal source of legitimacy in the system and forced his opponents to reply. The opening volley in the antiDjodan campaign was fired in 1969 by Croatian conservative Stipe Šuvar. Writing in Naše teme, Šuvar maintained that Djodan’s evident dissatisfaction with economic policy had political implications that were damaging to interethnic relations in Yugoslavia.¹⁰ Through his prism, Šuvar saw three idées fixe in Djodan’s writings: (1) the harmfulness of the policy of favoring the accelerated development of the underdeveloped areas; (2) the domination of Yugoslavia by Belgrade, federalism being only a façade to cloak the “Yugocrat bureaucracy” that really ran the country; and (3) the economic and biological impoverishment of Croatia as a result of central policies.¹¹ But a fairer account would probably judge that Djodan’s first contention was not that the policy of aid to the underdeveloped regions was “harmful” but that it was inefficient and, insofar as Bosnia was left out, mismanaged. Djodan put it like this: “The Fund for the Development of the Underdeveloped [Republics and Kosovo] is inefficient. It would perhaps be better to establish a bank for the development of all undeveloped regions, with its seat in Sarajevo, because Bosnia-Herzegovina is the greatest undeveloped area, and that bank would . . . work according to economic criteria.”¹² Djodan scored Belgrade for an iniquitous economic policy vis-à-vis Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina and for an inefficiency that undermined whatever benefits might have accrued to Macedonia or Kosovo. In Šuvar’s distorted account, however, we read only that Djodan believed that “Slovenia and Croatia, and by the same virtue Vojvodina, have sacrificed their faster development for the benefit of the undeveloped sectors.”¹³ Šuvar’s version obscured Djodan’s commitment to the underdeveloped regions, and Djodan emerged as the champion of the haves against the have-nots. It was only one step further for Šuvar to find that Djodan’s entire argument cast “aspersions” on the Serbian nation and was one with the gallimaufry of Croatian “petit bourgeois” nationalism.¹⁴

Others defamed Djodan and attempted to undercut his growing authority as a guru among Croatian youth. In May 1969, certain hostile agents appeared before the executive committee of the central committee of the League of Communists of Croatia to press a case that Djodan was trying to assure that new investments would occur only west of the Drina, that is, in Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia exclusively (though Šuvar himself admitted that this allegation was unfounded).¹⁵

In an article entitled “Where Dr. Stipe Šuvar ‘Discovers’ Nationalism and Where He Does Not See It,” Djodan categorically denied Šuvar’s allegation that he had questioned the policy of aiding the underdeveloped regions. Djodan reiterated the central issue, the unworkability of the autarkic model of development. He also underlined his conviction that in some ways Bosnia was the great unsung victim of Serbian “internal imperialism,” for that republic had failed to receive what Djodan felt was its fair share of industrial investments.¹⁶ Quoting at length from articles he had published up to six years earlier (i.e., as early as 1963), Djodan countered that he had not expressed concern solely for Croatian interests; he did, in fact, believe that economic assistance to Yugoslavia’s underdeveloped regions should be intensified,¹⁷ Djodan won this round but, after the fall of the Tripalo-Dabčevič-Kučar-Pirker triumvirate, he was arrested and jailed. He was unable to publish anything after that for some twenty years. Šuvar, by contrast, remained the Croatian secretary for education, culture, and athletics, and was later elevated to the central committee of the LC Croatia. Eventually Šuvar became secretary of the LCY with a one-year mandate. Šuvar’s legendary arrogance, however, and his firmly established reputation as the great antinationalist stigmatized him in his native Croatia for many years.

Cultural and Demographic Threat

It is a well-known constant of social psychology that perception of a threat incites collective affectivity and stimulates recourse to countervailing action. There is no surer way to rally any group around a flag than to convince its members that they are menaced by some other group and that their most cherished values are endangered. Threat perception may, thus, be manipulated. In the Croatian case, however, it seems not to have been manipulated, at least not consciously: those nationalists who anxiously warned Croats of impending Serbianization were convinced that the threat was real.

The Serbian threat was thought to take three forms: the demographic displacement of Croats by Serbs, the catering to Dalmatian sentiment in order to split Croatia in two, and the Serbianization of the Croatian language. It is interesting that these three phenomena should have been read by the overwhelming majority of Croats as symptoms of a Serbian threat. Population movements can, after all, be explained as strictly economic phenomena, and linguistic homogenization is a typical epiphenomenon of modernization. Even the stirrings of Dalmatian ethnic self-identity might have been interpreted as a genuine manifestation of endogenous currents. The public did not, however, view these developments as isolated features, and increasingly the talk was of Croatia’s need to defend itself.

Linguistic Homogenization and Its Foes

In December 1954, the cultural associations of those federal units in which Serbo-Croatian is the lingua franca convened in Novi Sad to make arrangements for collaboration on the creation of a common orthography for the entire country and to produce a definitive Serbo-Croatian dictionary. Although an official document dating from 1945 had seemed to accord distinct status to Serbian and Croatian (or Serbo-Croatian and Croato-Serbian, as they had sometimes been called), Matica Srpska, the Serbian cultural association, had succeeded in persuading other participants that creation of a unified standard dictionary and orthography was in the interests of Serbs, Croats, and Montenegrins alike.¹⁸

When the first two volumes of this dictionary were finally published in 1967, however, they inflamed the informed Croatian public. Common Croatian vocabulary and expressions were either excluded or relegated to the status of a local dialect; everywhere the Serbian variant was presented as the standard, the Croatian as the deviation. This consistency was more remarkable and objectionable insofar as a certain Dr. Miloš S. Moskovljević had been reprimanded the previous year for putting out an allegedly chauvinistic dictionary that had no entry for Hrvat (Croat), though Srbin (Serb) and related words (e.g., Srbovati [to act like a real Serb]) were well represented. Croatian linguists in Zagreb severely criticized the orientation of the new dictionary and issued a declaration of protest in the March 17 edition of the Zagreb newspaper Telegram. This “Declaration concerning the Characterization and Status of the Croatian Literary Language” demanded that Croatian and Serbian be considered two distinct languages and that recognition of this fact be incorporated into a reformulated Article 131 of the constitution, so that all laws and treaties would have to be published in four languages instead of three (i.e., Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian instead of Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian). The declaration continued by demanding that the government “guarantee the consistent usage of the Croatian literary language in schools, in the press, in public and political life, on the radio and television, wherever one is dealing with Croats, and that civil servants, teachers, and officials, without regard to their place of origin, use in their official functions the literary language of the area in which they are working.”¹⁹ This last clause was unmistakably aimed at the large number of Serbian bureaucrats working in Croatia, and the entire declaration had an overtly anti-Serbian flavor. Inevitably, the declaration aroused Serbian tempers and elicited an angry rebuttal only two days later. It also signaled the beginning of the “Croatian national renaissance,” which was to last just over four and a half years.

The declaration did not, however, resolve the immediate issue. Throughout the late 1960s, the cultural organizations Matica Hrvatska and Matica Srpska engaged in protracted discussions over the cooperative project. The central committees of the communist parties of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Montenegro conducted lengthy joint discussions concerning language policy.²⁰ Failing to obtain satisfaction in a joint enterprise, the Croats set about compiling a new Croatian orthography and dictionary and began the “purification” of Croatian from Serbian infiltration. Challenged by skeptics, Ljudevit Jonke, president of Matica Hrvatska, wrote in Kritika (1968) that the Broz-Ivekovic Dictionary of the Croatian Language, first published in 1901 but still generally considered authoritative in 1968, actually relied heavily on Serbian materials and cited Serbian roots as the sources of 90 percent of its words— an unacceptable device, according to Jonke.²¹ Serbian recalcitrance and Croatian dissatisfaction finally prompted Matica Hrvatska, the Croatian cultural association, to unilaterally withdraw from the joint project on November 22, 1970. Matica Hrvatska declared, on that occasion, that it saw no point in further cooperation in the writing of a Serbian dictionary.

Matica Hrvatska’s position had been stiffened by Matica Srpska’s adamant insistence that Croatian is only a dialect of Serbian. But, when the Croats went their own way, the Serbs loudly protested. In January 1971, Matica Srpska objected that “The mechanical division of this language, which results from their [Matica Hrvatska’s] . . . decisions, is not only scientifically ungrounded but also unjust to our two republics as well as to the Croats in SR Serbia and the Serbs in SR Croatia.”²² Reinforcing the battlements, Mirko Čanadović argued in Politika, three days later, that the language of the Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, and Bosniak Muslims is a single language with negligible variations. Mate Šimundić replied in Kritika that Čanadović’s program would stifle the autonomous development of Croatian, Montenegrin, and so forth.²³ From a purely linguistic point of view, one might observe that Serbo-Croatian was “obviously” a single language; this was, however, a political, not a linguistic-scientific, controversy.

At approximately the same time, Matica Hrvatska issued another proclamation declaring that the Novi Sad agreement was “null and void” from the beginning and condemning Matica Srpska’s endeavors to systematically suppress the Croatian language. Professor Jonke was able to obtain an interview with Komunist and stated simply, “Matica Srpska says that we have a single uniform language, and we say that that is not the case . . . it is one language, but it is not uniform. “²⁴ Whatever conciliation seemed implied in Jonke’s concession that Serbian and Croatian were “one language,” the lines of battle were nonetheless drawn. In autumn 1971 the publication of the Croatian Orthography (Hrvatski pravopis) with a new dictionary of the “Croatian language” precipitated Serbian condemnations. NIN warned that the publication would exacerbate growing ethnic tensions between Croats and Serbs, not help to heal them.²⁵

Threat of Demographic Displacement

At the same time that the Novi Sad agreement was disintegrating, Croatian demographers began to speak of a demographic threat. To begin with, Croatia’s population was proportionately older than that of any other republic except Slovenia.²⁶ The Croatian mortality rate of 11.6 per thousand was second only to Vojvodina’s rate of 11.8 per thousand, and its birth rate (in 1972) was the third lowest, behind Vojvodina and Serbia.²⁷ Later, in the period between the 1971 and 1981 censuses, Croatia recorded the lowest birth rate (3.3 percent) of all the Yugoslav federal units—lower than Vojvodina’s 3.8 percent (second place) and far below Kosovo’s 27.4 percent.²⁸

Moreover, the large emigration of Croatian workers to Western Europe, which had formerly been construed as economic opportunity, was suddenly viewed as a Serbian plot to move able-bodied Croats out of their homeland. An official Yugoslav source recorded that 9.6 percent of the Croatian labor force was employed abroad in 1971—the highest proportion of all the federal units, and significantly higher than the Yugoslav average of 6.6 percent. Bosnia was a close second with 9.2 percent of its labor force employed as Gastarbeiter, but Serbia and Slovenia were far behind with rates of 3.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively.²⁹ Djodan claimed that more than half of Yugoslavia’s emigre workers in 1968 were ethnic Croats and that Croats’ net rate of emigration more than canceled out the rate of increase in the Croatian population.³⁰ Sociologist M. Rendulić, addressing a 1971 conference in Zagreb on “Population, Emigration, and Employment,” warned that the rate of natural increase in Croatia was declining and gradually approaching zero.³¹ These projections and forebodings were perhaps borne out by the results of the 1981 census, which showed that the number of Croats living in Croatia actually decreased from 3,513,647 in 1971 to 3,454,661 in 1981, while the number of Croats living in Yugoslavia as a whole declined from 4,526,782 to 4, 428, 135 during the same period.³²

This situation was compounded by another variable—the increasing influx of Serbs into Croatia. These Serbian immigrants were believed to be taking the places relinquished by the Croatian Gastarbeiter. As early as 1967—the same year in which the Telegram declaration turned the tide in linguistic trends— a certain Minić addressed an open letter to Miko Tripalo. “We want you to prevent any more Serbs from moving into Croatia,” he said plainly. “They are already talking of a Serbia [extending] all the way to Omiš. The Croatian nation will not pardon you!”³³ Simultaneously, concerned Croats organized to “reclaim” immigrants of earlier centuries who had hitherto been written off as Serbian. The immigrants were recast (as they had been during the war) as “Orthodox Croats,” thus confounding the traditional shibboleth that a Croat is Catholic and a Serb is Orthodox.³⁴

The Campaign to Split Off Dalmatia

As early as the end of the eighteenth century, when I. Kreljanović published his book Dalmazia autonoma, there was an articulate coterie of Slavs who viewed Dalmatia as distinct from the rest of Croatia. “Autonomists,” then as now, were fond of emphasizing the Mediterranean, even Italian, character of the Dalmatian culture and people. During the nineteenth century, autonomism found followers chiefly among the wealthier families of Dalmatia—merchants, entrepreneurs, bankers, and landowners—and the notion, which originally had a largely cultural hue, took on political overtones. In Ai Dalmati (1861), N. Tommaseo, a Dalmatian of Italian extraction, opposed the unification of Dalmatia with the rest of Croatia. He argued that the Dalmatian name was older than the Croatian and that Dalmatian culture was of a higher level, with dialect and customs that differed from those of other Croats. Hence, Dalmatian autonomists were pleased with the outcome of the Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich of 1867, because Dalmatia was allotted to Austria although the rest of Croatia fell to Hungary.³⁵

Most early Dalmatian autonomists were foreigners “together with a handful of native renegades schooled in Italy and Vienna,” as one Croatian nationalist put it.³⁶ The Dalmatian idea did not clash with the Croatian idea in an organic sense but, on the contrary, fed Italian irredentism as it was manifested during and after World War I. With the establishment of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, Dalmatian consciousness came to be seen in a new light. Nikola Pašić, the prime minister of Serbia and later of Yugoslavia, claimed in a 1914 telegram that “Dalmatia wants to be annexed to Serbia—that is its ideal, that is what its interests require, and it is the longstanding drive of the Serbo-Croatian nation.”³⁷ The concept is scarcely surprising, since it is well known that Pašić and his cohorts believed that Croats, Slovenes, and Macedonians were all in fact Serbs (the “tri-named people”) and that they all spoke dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Pašić’s separate reference to Dalmatia is interesting, for it is suggestive of what proved to be regime policy until the Maček-Cvetković Sporazum, namely, to divide the Croats into as many parts as possible and attempt to make those divisions permanent by cultivating and encouraging the development of local identity among Dalmatians, Istrians, Slavonians, Kordunians, and so forth.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has always resented the tenth-century transfer of Dalmatia from Byzantium’s jurisdiction to the jurisdiction of Rome. A Serbian textbook on the church, approved by the Main Educational Council in 1927 for use in the secondary and professional schools, referred to medieval Dalmatia as the “Serbian West,” counting as Serbian the bishoprics of Ston, Dubrovnik, and Kotor.³⁸ As the 1970s began, Serbian interest in Dalmatia was more openly expressed. The Serbian Orthodox Church, for one, published a book entitled Serbs and Orthodoxy in Dalmatia and Dubrovnik (Srbi i pravoslavlje u Dalmaciji i Dubrovniku) in 1971.³⁹ Srbi u prošlosti, a book written by Josip Potkozarac and published by a Smederevo publishing house in 1969, was belatedly banned by civil authorities in 1970 for its alleged effort to prove that the populations of Dalmatia, Bosnia, and other regions are purely Serbian and that “the borders of Serbia extend from Djevdjelija to Split.”⁴⁰ During 1971, a ring of Serbian nationalists that included Slobodan Subotić and Radisav Mićić printed and distributed pamphlets that called for the immediate organization of autonomous Serbian provinces in Dalmatia and elsewhere in Croatia and for the subsequent removal of these areas from Croatia.⁴¹ There were reports of “Serbian chauvinists” singing Chetnik songs in Dalmatia, and, as early as 1970, the central committee of the Croatian League of Communists considered it necessary to condemn Dalmatian autonomism as a “unitarist,” anti-Croatian ruse.⁴²

Croatian nationalists thus had reason to believe that Dalmatian autonomism was reviving in the 1960s, and Serbian interference was tangibly present. A contemporary Croatian writer observed that

autonomism has . . . persistently tried to drive a wedge into Croatia and to split off Dalmatia, the historical cradle of the Croatian state, from upper Croatia, dividing the Croatian nation into “Dalmatians” and Croats. But this would be only the first phase of the master plan, because afterwards the unitarists . . . would press for like autonomy for Lika, Banija, Kordun, Istria, Slavonia, etc., and the question arises whether, in their opinion, Croatia comprises even the area from Karlovac to Varaždin. Shattering the integrity of the Croatian lands and reducing Croats to a semination, they would at last be able to speak with ease of one language as the presupposition of the theory of a single nation—and all that as the condition for a single unitarist state.⁴³

The Dalmatians continue, to be sure, to view themselves as distinct from other Croats—but in most cases this feeling is as harmless as the Texan’s pride in being Texan. But the Croatian central committee took pains to make it absolutely clear that in its view no province in Croatia had any ethnic or historical basis for seeking autonomous status nor had it the right to do so.⁴⁴ Dalmatian autonomism could lay no claim to any kind of legitimacy, because it was nothing less than “treason” against the Croatian nation.⁴⁵

The Croatian Backlash

Threatened, as they saw it, with the suppression of their language, the obliteration of their people, and the usurpation of their land, the Croats reacted strongly. They repudiated the antimony of nationalism and patriotism and challenged the socialist doctrine that the latter is immeasurably superior to the former. They also began to look for institutional-legal measures to safeguard the Croatian nation from the Serbs. The argument made was that “the Croatian nation will cease to be manipulated and exploited only if it realizes its statehood, that it will be truly equal only insofar as it attains its sovereignty. If that is not achieved, then it will [continue to] serve as a plaything for other actors.”⁴⁶ And, in a classic expression of balance-of-power thinking, one Croat even argued that “Croatia must be set as the criterion at every moment, in every undertaking. Nothing can be done to benefit others that would at the same time be contrary to Croatia’s interests.”⁴⁷ The dividing line between statehood and secession or self-interest and rejection of fellow Yugoslavs was often fuzzy.

Early in 1969, Petar Šegedin, president of the Croatian Literary Society, wrote an article for Kolo (the bimonthly journal published by Matica Hrvatska) and spelled out Croatian grievances in detail. His chief complaints were (1) Croats are treated as illegal residents in their own country; (2) Croatian interests are subordinate to the interests of Serbia; (3) to feel Croatian under current circumstances is to be worthy of pity; (4) to lose one’s language is to lose one’s (separate) ethnic identity; (5) the Croatian nation has, by various nefarious means, been portrayed as criminal; (6) Croatia is still being equated with the Ustaše; (7) Belgrade is attempting to assimilate the Croats, that is, to Serbianize Croatia; (8) Croatia has become a “no-man’s land”; (9) Croatia has lost everything essential to the preservation of its culture: its native Croatian intelligentsia has been exterminated and Croatia is becoming a “science-less” land of ignorant peasants; and (10) the Serbs have a definite program designed to assimilate Croatian youth and to cause the Croatian nation to disappear without a trace.⁴⁸

Although the leaderships of Slovenia and Vojvodina supported the Croatian leadership until mid-1969 in its demands for further decentralization of the banking system and reform of the foreign currency exchange systems, the catch phrase “5 to 1” began to acquire currency among Croats as early as 1968.⁴⁹ The phrase signified the widely held view that Croatia’s demands for progressive change were always opposed by the other five Yugoslav republics and that Croatia therefore stood alone.

Šuvar, brimming with antipathy toward these currents, blasted nationalism as an emotional, irrational mysticism “dragged up from the trash heap of history” (Trotsky’s pet phrase).⁵⁰ In response, he was deluged with letters, both signed and unsigned, and was personally upbraided by friends and acquaintances for being a “Serbophile, a Yugo-agent, a unitarist, a Rankovićite.” Šuvar refused to budge, however, and condemned the revival of “Croatian petit bourgeois nationalism.” Croatian nationalism, he said, was characterized by the conviction that all of Croatia’s misfortunes are due to the activities of the other Yugoslav nations (especially the Serbs); by dependence on, and willingness to serve, various foreign imperialist forces, thus betraying the indigenous peoples; by a mystic belief in the superiority of the Croatian nation; and by the tenet that Croatian nationalism, like Macedonian, Slovenian, and even Serbian (!) nationalism, can only blossom with the carving up of Yugoslavia.⁵¹ The thrust of Šuvar’s portrayal is unmistakable: Croatian nationalism is misguided, ethnocentric, and dangerous. But Šuvar’s ability to influence Croatian public opinion was minimal.

The Croats began to behave like a new “master race,” displaying the arrogant attitude that “we solve our economic problems by ourselves, why can’t you solve yours by yourselves?” “Many Croats, especially intellectuals,” and certain high-ranking party officials

behaved with unalloyed obtuseness toward their non-Croat colleagues, especially vis-à-vis the Serbs. For example, at a meeting of the Yugoslav Council on Visual Arts, the Croatian delegates walked out when they were defeated by a 5-to-l vote on the issue of moving the administrative headquarters to a different republic capital every two years at the time of biennial meetings. They dismissed the arguments of their colleagues from the other republics that biennial shifts were not only uneconomical, but self-defeating since close contact with foreign cultural groups and exhibitions—one of the organization’s principal purposes—could best be handled in Belgrade where all the embassies are located.⁵²

Visiting academicians coming to Zagreb to attend scholarly conferences were likely to find themselves being corrected by militant Croatophiles for use of Serbian words instead of Croatian. In the summer of 1971, the Croats set about compiling their new orthography for literary Croatian. The result was a dictionary stuffed with archaisms and exotic neologisms designed to eliminate anything that might be construed as a Serbianism. At the same time, a meeting of teachers and textbook writers demanded the revision of school history books to give greater emphasis to specifically Croatian achievements and called for devoting two-thirds of the time allotted to history lessons to Croatian culture and history.⁵³

Matica Hrvatska, whose championing of the Croatian language had made it the darling of Croatia, became the focal point of the nationalist revival. Hrvatski književni list (Croatian Literary Gazette), a weekly publication, took up Croatia’s cause early in the burgeoning crisis, and its subscription list accordingly swelled. Had a free election been held in Croatia in 1969 or 1970, Šime Djodan, himself closely affiliated with Matica Hrvatska, would indisputably have been elected to high office.

But the Croatian leadership was internally divided, and those leaders who were unfavorably disposed toward these developments attempted to abort the Croatian revival and to resist demands for greater autonomy. In a series of articles for Borba (February 14-20, 1969), Miloš Žanko, the prominent Croatian conservative, attacked the nationalistically inclined Hrvatski književni list. Immediately thereafter, the Third Plenum of the central committee of LC Croatia (February 21, 1969), roundly condemned the gazette for its nationalist orientation and put it on “probation.” The Zagreb city council of the League of Communists, still in the hands of the conservatives, observed on July 20 that

The so-called Croatian Literary Gazette has been appearing in Zagreb for more than a year. Through an analysis of the issues that have appeared thus far, one can establish, without any great efforts, that the editorial board of Hrvatski književni list has formulated a political program that is directly contrary to the policy of the League of Communists and that is at variance with the basic interests of the Croatian nation and of all the nations of Yugoslavia.⁵⁴

Within a matter of weeks, Hrvatski književni list was silenced and nationalist elements in the Emigrant Society (Matica Iseljenika) and the Institute for the History of the Workers Movement were neutralized. But that act scarcely deprived the nationalists of a forum, and Studentski list, Hrvatsko sveučilište, Kritika, Kolo, Dubrovnik, and Vidik continued to espouse nationalist viewpoints. Two periodicals catering to the youth, Tlo and Omladinski tjednik, also joined the nationalist ranks, and Hrvatski gospodarski glasnik adopted a nationalist stance in May 1971. In April 1971, Matica Hrvatska inaugurated Hrvatski tjednik, whose reportage far surpassed Hrvatski književni list’s in the radicalism of its approach. Its subscription list quickly outstripped all competitors, Vjesnik included. Even Vjesnik and Radio-Television Zagreb, though formally the organs of the SAWP of Croatia, actually figured as de facto agents of the nationalists as the crisis built.⁵⁵ Little surprise, then, that the suppression of Hrvatski književni list met with a welter of open criticism. In November 1969, Borba, unnerved by the continued criticism of this and other policies that was emanating from Kolo, Kritika, and Dubrovnik, warned that “there is a system to all this [nationalistic] lunacy.”⁵⁶

The Turning Point

Until the end of 1969, the Croatian party leadership had not taken a clear stand on the nationalist revival, principally because neither of its two principal factions had been able to get the upper hand. Žanko, who was at that time vice president of the federal Skupština, publicly attacked Petar Šegedin, Šime Djodan, Vlado Gotovac, Marko Veselica, and other prominent Croatian liberals, and, in a series of articles for Borba, charged that exclusivist nationalism was on the rise in Croatia.⁵⁷ Advocating a principle diametrically opposed to good balance-of-power logic, he exhorted delegates of the Chamber of Republics and Provinces to keep the interests of the entire community uppermost in their minds and to subordinate Croatian interests to Yugoslav interests.⁵⁸ As a result, he polarized the Croatian party, alienated most of his passive supporters, and provoked a counterattack. This came at the Tenth Plenum of the central committee of the LC Croatia (January 15-17, 1970), on which occasion Savka Dabčević-Kučar herself led the attack on Žanko. She claimed that the struggle against unitarism and the struggle against nationalism were two sides of the same coin but that, because of the influence of demented unitarists like Žanko, the LC Croatia had devoted its energies exclusively to the struggle against nationalism. She concluded that, far from concentrating on problems of nationalism, the Croatian party organization would have to devote greater attention to combating unitarism. Dabčević-Kučar interpreted Žanko’s behavior as disloyal, betraying an intention to topple the republican leadership and necessarily implying a readiness to mobilize intervening forces from outside the republic in order to achieve that end.⁵⁹ The LC Croatia rebuffed Žanko for antiparty views, stripped him of his posts, and attested that “the struggle against nationalism cannot be waged from unitarist battlements.”⁶⁰ From this point on, the Croatian party leadership drew steadily closer to the ideology of Matica Hrvatska and the nationalists. An internal alliance was being forged to replace the moribund interrepublican alliance with Slovenia, Vojvodina, and Macedonia. The Tenth Plenum was a turning point in another sense: it was the first time that a republican central committee had rendered an assessment of problems of further development (and of the state of interethnic relations) independently of central party organs. The republican leadership was coming into its own, speaking for Croatia as a body of Croatian politicians.

A new mood prevailed, a sense that the tide had been turned and that the unitarists were on the defensive. Two manifestations of this mood were a seminar held in Zagreb the following month on the theme “Socialism and the National Question” and a large symposium in Krapinske Toplice in March focusing on “The Relation of Class and Nation in Contemporary Socialism.” Participants at the latter event displayed a candor that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Most significant, this symposium all but ratified nationalism as a legitimate ideology. Zdenko Roter, one of those in attendance, was most explicit on this score, avowing that “it is necessary to accept nationalism as a positive phenomenon that makes possible the creativity and faster integration of a nation.”⁶¹ Others, including Esad Ćimić, echoed his sentiments. Anton Marušić went still further, portraying nationalism as a presupposition of democratic society and opposing nationalism to totalitarianism. More important still, the leadership identified itself with these currents. Tripalo remarked that “It would be good if we could disabuse ourselves of the habit of using the term nationalism’ only in a pejorative sense, for . . . nationalism can have various contents. I think that nationalism is our foe only when it develops into chauvinism.”⁶²

The Croatian revival reclaimed the heroes of the past. Croats began reexamining their history, searching for “lost heroes” who had been swept under the carpet by the communist regime. Stjepan Radić (d. 1928), founder of the Croatian Peasant party, became overnight the most popular politician in Croatia, with Miko Tripalo, the engaging secretary of the central committee, in second place, and Tito, possibly, a distant third.⁶³ In August 1971, the culture committee of the presidency of the League of Students of Croatia put up a commemorative plaque in honor of Radie on the façade of the Zagreb house in which he had lived and died. Subsequently, a statue of Stjepan Radić (Yugoslavia’s first) was unveiled in Metković, and there was even talk of erecting a monument to Radić in Zagreb.⁶⁴ The coastal town of Šibenik, swept along by the euphoria, canceled plans to erect a monument to the victims of fascism and decided to construct instead a statue of the Croatian king, Petar Kresimir IV.⁶⁵

More daring were efforts to rehabilitate a nineteenth-century Croatian military governor, Josip Jelačić, and restore him to the Valhalla of Croatian gods and heroes. Marx had savagely condemned Jelačić for his “reactionary” support of the Austrian kaiser in the suppression of the “progressive” Hungarian rebellion of 1848-49. The CPY had manifestly identified itself with Marx’s censure by renaming Zagreb’s Jelačić Square (Trg Jelačića) the “Square of the Republic” (Trg Republike). Nevertheless, in the spring of 1971, Zvonimir Kulundžić demanded that the LCY admit that it had erred in debunking Jelačić and he called on the party to erect a public statue to Jelačić, “the symbol of old Zagreb.”⁶⁶ The subsequent wave of letters to the editor of Hrvatski tjednik suggested broad support and enthusiasm for the proposal. The entire atmosphere changed —almost overnight. As Miko Tripalo recalled much later, “the whole political life, which had been closed to the public, now opened up and people started to speak their minds, both about the way things were then and about how things had been in the past.”⁶⁷

During Croatia’s flourishing national exultation, the (officially proscribed) traditional patriotic songs of the Croatian homeland were revived and could often be heard publicly in Croatia’s restaurants. Vice Vukov became Croatia’s most popular singer in the course of 1971, and also its most controversial. His specialty was songs of Croatia, and at least two of his concerts were banned by a nervous regime fearful of nationalist outbursts.

Matica Hrvatska went on the offensive, bent on “de-Serbianizing” the Croatian language. In June 1971, Matica Hrvatska organized an open meeting to discuss the Zadar Review (Zadarska revija). The discussion became intense and bitter, with Matica Hrvatska complaining that the Review’s language was “impure,” a concatenation created by the contributions of a staff drawn not merely from Croatia but from various parts of the country.⁶⁸ Matica Hrvatska also pressured Yugoslav Railways, objecting that its exclusive use of the ekavian variant (Serbian) was prejudicial to the Croatian language. Under additional pressure applied by Zagreb, Yugoslav Railways agreed that by September 1, 1971, all railway notices, schedules, and forms would be printed in the ijekavian variant (Croatian) as well.⁶⁹ Hrvatski tjednik, always in the midst of the fray, complained that the buses servicing the Zagreb airport were marked “Jugoslovenski Aerotransport”—correct Serbian—rather than “Jugoslavenski Aerotransport”—correct Croatian.⁷⁰ Hrvatski tjednik even initiated a column devoted to distinguishing correct Croatian from common Serbian infiltrations. Croatia was awash with nationalist euphoria, and the team of Dabčević-Kučar and Tripalo, firmly in the saddle, was riding the crest of the wave. But they had not solved the problem of how to reconcile Croatian nationalism with the imperatives of coalition politics.

The Catholic Church and the Nation

The Croatian spring—as it came to be called in the West—found considerable support in the ranks of Catholic clergy.⁷¹ Perhaps most clergy welcomed the new role being played by Matica Hrvatska, and especially in the towns of Rijeka, Split, Zadar, and Zagreb, Catholic priests became active in the national movement. Some Franciscans gathered data on the number of Croats holding political office in Herzegovina,⁷² others accused the party of discrimination against Croatia. Two priests published a “Croatian prayer” in a 1971 issue of Vjesnik Sv. Nikole Tavelića, portraying Croatia as “wretched and nameless.”⁷³ Split’s Archbishop Frane Franić himself took the initiative to organize a “double anniversary of the Croatian people” in Solin, in commemoration of the thirteen hundredth anniversary of Croatian Christianity and the thousandth anniversary of the construction of the first Croatian university at Solin. A huge contingent of seven cardinals, thirty bishops, and 300 priests turned out to attend the ceremonies. A decade later—in 1981—the regime turned down a church proposal to establish a “Catholic Croatian Day,” with the explanation that this would only incite national hatred between Croats and Serbs.⁷⁴

Revision of Croatia’s Constitution

Throughout the gathering maelstrom, the Serbs living in Croatia—who comprised some 15 percent of the republic’s population—occupied a unique and rather precarious niche. Their economic interests were inseparable from the interests of the Croatian republic and they were represented in the federal Skupština by the delegation from Croatia. Moreover, most of these Serbs spoke ijekavian or a mixture of ijekavian and ekavian, not the pure ekavian of their kin in SR Serbia. But the Croatian renaissance displayed systematic anti-Serbian overtones, and it was impossible for Croatia’s Serbs to be unaffected by this. The result was a growing controversy surrounding the status of the Serbs in Croatia and the impact of heightened Croatian national consciousness on their rights of national self-expression.

Inevitably, there were currents that gave the nationalist awakening the most negative interpretation possible. Before the end of the year, Hrvatski tjednik found it necessary to warn of the development of a campaign “to convince the Serbs in Croatia of two big lies”: that the aesthetic self-development of Croatian serves the exclusive purpose of setting Croatian apart from Serbian and that by means of this “artificial, exclusivist, anti-Serbian language and orthography, the Croats mean to oppress the Serbs in Croatia.”⁷⁵ But the explanation that the Croats were only embarking on “the elimination of what was by coercion and pressure forced on the Croatian language” failed to assuage the fears of Croatia’s Serbian community.⁷⁶ It searched for allies among Croatian conservatives and initiated a campaign to incorporate cosovereignty for Serbs in the Croatian constitution.

Professor Mihailo Djurić, a member of the law faculty in Belgrade, told a colloquium at the law school in March 1971 that Croatia’s Serbs needed special constitutional guarantees to safeguard their rights of national self-expression.⁷⁷ The Serbs zeroed in on the opening paragraphs of the Croatian constitution. Article 1 in the 1963 version read, “The Socialist Republic of Croatia is the socialist democratic state community of the Croatian nation (narod), established on the power of the working people and self-management.”⁷⁸ This article was preceded by an apparently innocuous section of “general principles” that began, “The Croatian nation, in harmony with its historical aspirations, proceeding from the right of self-determination, including also the right of secession, in common struggle with the other nations of Yugoslavia . . . united with the other nations of Yugoslavia in a federal republic of free and equal nations and nationalities.”⁷⁹ The Serbs perceived that they were excluded from participation in the “socialist democratic community” and denied explicit credit for their role in the “common struggle.” They therefore proposed to rectify these oversights with the following draft Amendment 1:

1. The Croatian nation, in harmony with its historical aspirations, in common struggle with the Serbian nation and the nationalities in Croatia and with the other nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia, realized, in the national liberation war and in the socialist revolution, its own national state—the Socialist Republic of Croatia—and, proceeding from the right of self-determination, including even the right of secession, in the free expression of its own will and in order to protect its national independence and freedom, to build socialism and advance multifaceted social and national development, conscious that the further strengthening of the fraternity and unity of the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia was in their common interest, voluntarily united with the other nations and nationalities in the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia.
2. The Socialist Republic of Croatia is the sovereign national state of the Croatian nation, the state of the Serbian nation in Croatia, and the state of the nationalities that live in it.⁸⁰

The insertions made explicit the rights of the Serbs in Croatia, but they also compromised the national status of the Croatian republic.

Matica Hrvatska immediately sprang forward with a detailed critique of the draft amendment. The very first sentence, said Matica Hrvatska, showed no cognizance of the fact that Croatian statehood is centuries old: “the Croatian nation . . . did not have merely historical aspirations—it had as well a state.” The draft, moreover, revealed traces of unitarism in speaking of Croatia’s having “united (ujedinjenja) with the other nations and nationalities in . . . Yugoslavia,” although the principle of federalism precludes unification. A better formulation would have been to speak of Croatia’s having chosen to associate (udruživati) with the other nations and nationalities. Again, the very order of presentation, albeit a carryover from the 1963 version, was open to objection: the first point, said Matica Hrvatska, should be an affirmation of the sovereignty of the Croatian national state, and only then should the text speak of Croatia’s voluntary association with Yugoslavia. The given order seemed, to Matica Hrvatska, designed to undercut the formal right of secession, even to contradict the literal meaning of the words themselves. Finally, Matica Hrvatska opened fire on the pivotal change being proposed:

Sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imperishable—that is the classic characterization and the only proper one. If then SR Croatia is the national state of the Croatian nation, it is Croatian sovereignty that is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imperishable. And, in that case, SR Croatia cannot be at the same time the national Croatian state and the state of the Serbian nation in Croatia and the state of all the other peoples that inhabit it. . . . We resolutely support the position that SR Croatia is the unique national state of the Croatian nation and that Croatian sovereignty is one, indivisible, inalienable, and imperishable.⁸¹

Hrvatski tjednik dredged up a fifteen-year-old statement by jurist Jovan Stefanovic to the effect that it would be erroneous to conclude, on the basis of “the regulation . . . regarding the equality of Serbs in Croatia, . . . that NR [narodna republika] Croatia is the republic of Croats and Serbs. It is the republic of the Croatian nation.”⁸² The paper complained that the draft reduced Croatia to a quasi-federation of nationalities. By contrast, the first constitution of NR Croatia (1947) had forthrightly described Croatia as the Croatian “national state of republican form.”

The effect of this confrontation was electric: all Croatia was fired into a state of excited agitation, and support for the concept of the Croatian national state became a fundamental test of republican and ethnic loyalty. One disconcerted reader of Hrvatski tjednik expressed his wonderment that the “unitarists” and Serbophiles had not yet proposed renaming the republic “Serbo-Croatia” (Srbo-Hrvatska).⁸³ Consistent application of the principle implied in the draft amendment would require redefining Macedonia as the state of the Macedonians, Turks, Albanians, and Bulgarians; Serbia as the state of the Serbs, Gypsies, Albanians, Hungarians, and others; Montenegro as the state of the Montenegrins, Albanians, Muslims, and Serbs; and so on.

Matica Hrvatska countered with its own draft of Amendment 1 for Croatia’s constitution:

Article 1. SR Croatia is the national state of the Croatian nation. National sovereignty—one, indivisible, inalienable, and imperishable—belongs, in SR Croatia, to the Croatian nation and it realizes it through its deputies and by direct expressions of its will.

Article 2. SR Croatia is a self-managing community of working people led by the working class. The self-managing rights of the working people are founded on their right to dispose of their [working] conditions, their resources, and the products of their labor, and on the political power of the working class. The selfmanaging rights of the working people are inviolable, inalienable, and imperishable.

Article 3. SR Croatia is a democratic system in which all citizens have equal rights. Citizens of SR Croatia are equal in their rights and duties, without regard to nationality, race, religion, or conviction. Citizens’ rights in SR Croatia are inviolable, inalienable, and imperishable.

Article 4. The principles of SR Croatia are: freedom, social justice, equality, fraternity and unity, solidarity.

Article 5. The national anthem of SR Croatia is “Our Beautiful Homeland” (Lijepa naša domovina). The official language of SR Croatia is Croatian. The capital city of SR Croatia is Zagreb.

Article 6. By its struggle for national liberation and its socialist revolution and in united struggle together with the Serbs in Croatia and members of other nations that live with them in the common Croatian homeland, and with the remaining Yugoslav peoples, the Croatian nation secured its right of self-determination, including also the right of secession, and founded its national state, which is a continuation of a centuries-old political-legal tradition of the Croatian state and homeland. Proceeding from its right of self-determination, including also the right of secession, and in order to assure its national independence, the building of a socialist society, and multifaceted national development, the Croatian nation voluntarily associated with (the) other peoples in the Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia.⁸⁴

However popular this version may have been with the majority of Croats, the Croatian conservatives still controlled a number of levers of power, and even some of those sympathetic to the concept of the national state feared that Matica Hrvatska might have gone too far. Members of the executive committee of the republic conference of the SAWP of Croatia, the executive committee of the central committee of the LC Croatia, and participants in the sessions of the Republic Coordination Committee for Promoting Discussion of the Amendments reacted vehemently to Matica Hrvatska’s proposed modifications of the draft amendments. Vjesnih sprang to the defense of the clause defining Croatia as “the sovereign state of the Croats [and] the Serbs in Croatia” and argued that “Serbian people live in Croatia, but very few Croats live in Serbia.”⁸⁵ It quickly became obvious—if it had not been clear from the beginning—that Matica Hrvatska’s original version was incapable of passage. In its issue of November 5, 1971, Hrvatski tjednik extended an olive branch and proposed a compromise set of constitutional amendments. The key changes in its proposals were (1) a change in the order of the introductory, fundamental principles, so that the founding of the Croatian republic and its right of self-determination would now be mentioned first and only subsequently would it be set forth that Croatia is “the sovereign national state of the Croatian people”; and (2) incorporation of explicit mention of “Serbs in Croatia” into Article 3, describing Croatia as the “homeland of all its citizens, Croats, Serbs in Croatia, and the members of other nations and nationalities who inhabit it.”⁸⁶

Matica Hrvatska lost this round, however, and the official governmental draft amendments were ultimately passed. Hence, from that point until the Croatian constitutional amendments of 1990, “the Socialist Republic of Croatia [was] the national state of the Croatian nation, the state of the Serbian nation in Croatia, and the state of the nationalities inhabiting it.”⁸⁷

Spread of Nationalism to Other Republics

Every federal unit was struck by nationalist outbursts in these years and, among all the non-Serbian nationalities, there were strong anti-Serbian feelings. The fall of Ranković had been a cathartic catalyst because, by branding the arch-Serb as arch-villain, it legitimized the release of pent-up frustrations even as it made their expression more practical. Nationalist discontent was most visible in Croatia and Kosovo, followed, in declining intensity, by Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina. The typical pattern was that ethnocentric behavior on the part of Serbian bureaucrats provided the stimulus for remonstration. There were even hints of this in pacific Vojvodina, where the so-called Rehák affair signaled the beginning of a breakdown in the Serbian-Hungarian equilibrium. Laszlo Rehák, an active member of the LCY, had complained in the Serbian republic assembly (in 1967) that the University of Novi Sad was dragging its feet in setting up the approved Hungarian Studies Institute; in response, the Serbian press hauled him over the coals for “nationalism” and mobilized forces sufficient to block his election as vice president of the executive council of SR Serbia. Though in some ways the most pacific of Yugoslavia’s minorities, the Hungarians of Vojvodina were ruffled by this development and affected by the train of events in Croatia. In an article for Uj Symposion (Novi Sad, August 1971), Sándor Rósza, a student at the University of Novi Sad, charged that Hungarians were victims of overt discrimination and that shopkeepers in Novi Sad were loathe to speak Hungarian. Rósza’s charges reached the absurd degree of portraying the Hungarians as the “niggers” of Yugoslavia, and the regime reacted swiftly and vengefully. Rósza lost his scholarship and his post as Hungarian-language program coordinator of the Novi Sad Youth Council and was sentenced to three years of strict imprisonment. Oto Tolnak was fired from the editorship of Uj Symposion and sentenced to one year in prison. Finally, Uj Symposion, under a new editor, had to print an apology for permitting publication of the offending article in the first place.⁸⁸ Nor was this an isolated instance. Indeed, as early as 1968, Dobrica Ćosić had cautioned the Fourteenth Plenary Session of the central committee of the LC Serbia that the problem of Hungarian nationalism in Vojvodina ought not be underestimated.

A far more serious flare-up of nationalism occurred in Montenegro, where, during this period, the anti-Serbian faction temporarily prevailed over its proSerbian colleagues. The latter group had traditionally been inclined to stress the close kinship, if not outright identity, of Montenegrins and Serbs; the former, in affirming the distinctiveness of the Montenegrin nation, made hostility to Serbia the core of its program. The Montenegrin Literary Society, following in Matica Hrvatska’s footsteps, became embroiled in various nationalist disputes, and the review Ovdje and the journal Stvaranje provided forums for nationalist discontent. Certain problems were revived and reexamined with great interest, including the ethnogenesis and formation of the Montenegrin nation (a politically sensitive subject even in 1982); the relation of the Montenegrin nation to the Serbian nation; the relationship of a possible Montenegrin variant to Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian); and various issues regarding the content of textbooks in Montenegro.

But, unlike Croatia, where officialdom represented the only stronghold for pockets of conservatives, in Montenegro the pro-Serb faction had deep social roots and recourse to alternative institutions. Forcefully resisting Montenegrin nationalist currents, a Serbian Orthodox Church symposium, meeting at Kosjerevo in the spring of 1970, alleged that the so-called Montenegrins had been forced to identify themselves as Montenegrins but were, in essence, Serbs.⁸⁹ But when Patriarch German began a speech shortly thereafter by saying, “We Serbs—of course, I believe that Montenegrins are also Serbs,”⁹⁰ even the conservatives were dismayed. NIN sprang to the attack and upbraided the patriarch for the “negation of the national sovereignty of certain nations,” a stance that, said NIN, derived from the tenet held by “certain elements” in the Serbian Orthodox Church that ethnic affiliation is only artificially distinguished from confessional affiliation.⁹¹

Nationalism even made certain inroads in Slovenia, though, lacking any tradition as a separate state, the Slovenes were somewhat more disposed to docility. All the same, the pattern was a familiar one. A prominent Slovenian writer and chairman of the League of Yugoslav Novelists voiced an early protest, complaining, in February 1967, that Slovenian resources had been siphoned off to build up the south and that this policy was contrary to Slovenian interests in both the long and the short run. Another Slovenian novelist, Marjan Rožanc, received a six-month prison term in October 1967 for having written an article for the Slovenian-language journal Most (which appeared in Trieste), in which he described the Slovenian nation as a sacrificial offering on the altar of Yugoslavism.⁹² Such sentiments spread to the general public of Slovenia, and there were reports of Slovenian workers noisily protesting the showing of films with Serbo-Croatian subtitles.⁹³ Not surprisingly, Stane Kavčić, head of the Slovenian government in 1970-71, tried to wrest as much political liberty for Slovenia as possible, gave preference to the construction of transportation links with the north and west rather than with Zagreb and Belgrade, and allied himself with the liberals in Croatia. Kavčić was opposed in Ljubljana by Sergej Krajger (in 1982 vice president of the Yugoslav collective presidency) and by France Popit (president of the League of Communists of Slovenia), both hostile to massive decentralization.⁹⁴ Although Kavčić himself clearly opposed secession, Mitja Ribičič, a member of the Slovenian party’s executive committee, had warned in 1967 of an incipient frondescence of separatist sentiment in Slovenia.⁹⁵ Alojz Vindiš later claimed that certain groups in Slovenia took advantage of the uncertainties of the early 1970s, “coquetted” with the idea of Slovenian secession from Yugoslavia, and envisioned the establishment of an independent neutral state based on the Swiss model and oriented to the West.⁹⁶

Nationalist chauvinism was, in a sense, most serious among Serbs—partly because, paradoxically, they considered themselves almost by definition immune to chauvinism. Yet, as early as February 1966, that is, even before the fall of Ranković, Komunist had charged that “some members of the LC Serbia have not studied the materials of the Eighth Congress of the LCY and the Fifth Congress of the LCS, in which all the aspects and problems of interethnic relations in our socialist community are treated very clearly and openly.” They continued to act, Komunist observed, as if they were a special caste whose voice had a certain priority.⁹⁷ Chauvinistic behavior has remained a problem where Serbs are concerned, and in January 1978, for example, Komunist was again castigating the forces of Serbian reaction.⁹⁸

Serbian nationalism was a particular problem among the Serbs of Croatia. It escalated at this time partly in response to the wave of Croatian nationalism, partly as an adjunct of persistent Great Serbian chauvinism centered in the Serbian republic, and partly as a reflection of the traditional, religiously derived distrust that Croatia’s Serbs have long felt toward their Croatian cousins. Prosvjeta, the Serbian cultural society in Croatia that was created in 1944, started to change its character around 1969 and became a stronghold for Serbian nationalists and a forum for former Chetniks.⁹⁹ Exploiting this institutional base, Croatia’s Serbian nationalists sought in 1970 to create a Serbian autonomous province within Croatia and demanded the establishment of a separate network of special Serbian schools; those further to the right even broached the idea of seceding from SR Croatia and attaching themselves to SR Serbia.¹⁰⁰ In one of its last meetings in 1971, the executive committee of Prosvjeta demanded (1) that Croatian and Serbian be recognized as official languages of SR Croatia and that all republican legislative acts be published both in Croatian and in Cyrillic-Serbian; (2) that a Chamber for Interethnic Relations be formed within the framework of the Croatian Sabor (Assembly), with the delegates from each national group chosen exclusively by the members of that group; and (3) that this chamber play a deciding role in all questions relevant to the equality of nationalities and that its decisions require the assent of all delegations.¹⁰¹ (Recall also that the Serbs were the first to be reprimanded by the federal government for having produced a chauvinistic dictionary—Moskovljević’s Dictionary of the Modern Serbo-Croatian Language [1966].)

Symptomatic of the same syndrome, experimentation with semifree elections in 1967 and 1969 led in Serbia to the election of opposition nationalists to the federal Assembly. Nationalism animated a large portion of the Serbian population, from the peasantry to those on the rungs of power. Thus, in a story recounted by Carl Gustaf Ströhm, Slobodan Penezić-Krcun, Ranković’s onetime deputy, even sought to pay Tito a compliment by saying that he had only one shortcoming—he was not a Serb!¹⁰²

All of these regional parties—whether one thinks of Slovenia or Croatia or Bosnia or Montenegro or Macedonia or Serbia—were internally divided, and typically the two chief political camps were liberals and conservatives. (This picture had local nuances in Bosnia and Montenegro.) In Serbia, the party was temporarily under the leadership of Marko Nikezić and Latinka Perović. Their position seems to have been that if the Serbian party could not control the center, it was better to maximize republic etatism (autonomy). Internally, the Nikezić-Perović group was associated with a degree of liberalization.

The Battle at the Center

After the passage of some nineteen amendments during 1967-68 that trimmed the prerogatives of the federal government, enhanced the status and powers of the republics, and granted the autonomous provinces near parity with the republics, a movement emerged to transform the federal government itself into an interrepublican agency. The chief advocates of this movement were Stane Kavčić, Slavko Milosavlevski, and Miko Tripalo, and the means of transformation were to be the network of interrepublican committees that had finally been established in mid-1971. One of the movement’s more alacritous adherents, Dražen Budiša, even suggested redesignating Yugoslavia the “League of Yugoslav Socialist Self-Managing Republics” as an explicit token of the system’s imminent metamorphosis into a confederation.¹⁰³

Although part of a package of twenty-three more amendments passed on June 30, 1971, stripping the federal government of most of its remaining prerogatives (limiting its powers in foreign affairs, defense, foreign trade, and the common currency and guaranteeing a common tariff system and the free flow of goods throughout the country), the committees themselves seem to have been conceived in a spirit of experimentation.¹⁰⁴ Amendment 33, adopted at this time, specified that economic questions of general interest were to be resolved through direct consultation with deputies of the republics. This was the legal foundation for the committees. In the last week of June 1971, Djemal Bijedić was asked to form a new government, and it fell to his administration to inaugurate the new committee system. By the end of August, the newly constituted Federal Executive Council (SIV) had managed to form most of its working bodies and had announced its determination to complete all appointments to the nascent interrepublican committees by September 2.

Five interrepublican committees were created: for developmental policy, the monetary system, foreign trade and hard currency, the market, and finance. Each committee would consist of nine members, one from each federal unit and a chairman selected by SIV from among its own ranks. Under Article 2 of the executive act that brought the interrepublican committees into legal existence, the new committee system was described as the mechanism whereby the republics and provinces participate in “the establishment of federal policy and in the passage of federal laws and other acts, as well as in the passage of regulations for the execution of federal laws and other acts if the mutual accommodation (usaglašavanje) of positions is prescribed in [the areas of] those laws or acts.”¹⁰⁵ They were authorized to consider any questions lying within their jurisdiction either at the request of SIV or on their own initiative, even if their involvement was not technically and specifically prescribed by the constitution. At the time of the committees’ birth, their creators argued that they would quicken the legislative process without impinging on the jurisdiction of SIV or of the federal Skupština. The committees were to render their evaluations to SIV and to the executive councils of the federal units. But the positions of an interrepublican committee could be overruled only if SIV could obtain the specific assent of the executive councils of the federal units (Article 12). This meant that the new committees would become the ultimate repository of power where economics was concerned.

A Coordination Committee was also established to act as a kind of supervisory board over the activities of the interrepublican committee system (IRCS). This commission is made up of the president of SIV, the presidents of the executive councils of the federal units, and eight members of SIV (one from each federal unit).

Before they came into being, while the procedures under which they would operate were still being discussed, the interrepublican committees were already under fire. Entrenched interests in the decision-making process feared that the new institution would result in the curtailment of their prerogatives. Critics repeatedly charged that establishment of the committees would unnecessarily complicate interrepublican negotiation and create, in effect, a three-phase legislative process (republics, interrepublican committees, and Skupština)— whereas previously the Skupština had handled matters in one phase.¹⁰⁶

But, far from producing a bottleneck in the system, the interrepublican committees proved very efficient. At the time the IRCS was created, there were some 124 questions of interrepublican importance that had not been resolved, even after months of debate. IRCS disposed of all these questions within five months—ninety-two of them in the committees themselves, thirty-two in the Coordination Commission. Satisfied with what was at least partly his handiwork, Bijedić told the Twenty-eighth Session of the presidency of the LCY: “I am convinced that, in our phase of development, we could not discover and pass decisions so quickly without accommodation via the committees and Coordination Commission.”¹⁰⁷ Dragutin Kosovac, president of the executive council of Bosnia-Herzegovina and ipso facto a member of the Coordination Commission, was even more rhapsodic and raved that the IRCS assured “the most rational decisions and these, in essence, represent the optimal interest of the whole.”¹⁰⁸

So smoothly did the committees do their work that other organs of decision making found themselves to the sidelines. Even the Federal Executive Council’s meetings merely ratified the decisions and conclusions of the Coordination Commission, now alternatively dubbed the “Supreme InterRepublican Committee” or the “Super-Government” (super-vlada).¹⁰⁹ The confederal character of this institution was unmistakable. Yet the system’s proponents looked forward to the further expansion of the powers of the IRCS. Ksente Bogoev, president of the executive council of Macedonia, argued that IRCS served to “neutralize manifestations of narrow economic nationalism, which periodically accompany positive tendencies” in the strengthening of the autonomy of the federal units. He urged that more intensive use be made of the committees and suggested that questions arising in the spheres of education, science, culture, and health also be turned over to the committees for resolution.¹¹⁰

Ilija Bakić, president of Kosovo’s executive council, echoed these sentiments and even thought that the committees might be engaged in the formulation of issues at an earlier stage, relieving the presidents of the executive councils of responsibility for all but the most crucial questions.¹¹¹ Such suggestions were naturally disconcerting to the conservatives, who were already in retreat.

Croatia Declares War

The various factions in the Yugoslav debate over the federalization of the LCY—democratizers, liberals, nationalists, humanists, and conservatives—had their counterparts within the League of Communists of Croatia (LCC). There were the “liberals,” such as Savka Dabčević-Kučar, Miko Tripalo, and their coterie, together with technocrats and other economic reformers; the “nationalists,” such as Šime Djodan, Marko Veselica, and the exploding membership of Matica Hrvatska; and the band of centralist-humanists known as the “Praxis group.” In addition to these three groups were the conservatives, including such persons as Miloš Žanko (by now discredited), Stipe Šuvar, Veljko Rus, Dušan Dragosavac, Jure Bilić, J. Radojčević, and Milutin Baltic (Radojčević, Dragosavac, and Baltic, significantly, were Croatian Serbs).

The nationalists had, by early 1971, found natural ideological allies in the liberals. When, in February 1971, the conservative members of the Croatian executive committee demanded that resolute action be taken against Matica Hrvatska, Dabčević-Kučar and Pirker—supported by liberal loyalists Tripalo, Dragutin Haramija, Ivan Šibl, Marko Koprtla, and Srečko Bijelić (president of the city conference of the LCC of Zagreb)—blocked them. Encouraged by this and similar signs of strength, Omladinski tjednik and Hrvatski tjednik floated the idea of convoking an extraordinary session of the LCC, hoping to strengthen the hands of the liberals further.

Conservative strength was, however, scarcely spent, and the antinationalist factions in the Croatian party scored a victory on July 23, when they succeeded in having Šime Djodan and Marko Veselica expelled from the party as “ringleaders” of ethnocentric turmoil. This decision was made by the presidency of the city conference of the LCC, where, Bijelić notwithstanding, the conservatives still had strength. But this victory was an isolated triumph, for the tide was turning against the conservatives. Bakarić, no conservative but no nationalist either, was retired to the back benches. Membership in Matica Hrvatska soared to 41,000 members in fifty-five branches by November 1971 (up from 2,323 members in thirty branches in November 1970).¹¹² And the nationalists steadily made inroads among establishment news organs. Among the local newspapers that became outspoken advocates of “Croatia first” were Slobodna Dalmacija, the weeklies Varaždinske vijesti, Brodski list, Vinkovačke novosti, lmotska krajina, VUS, and the clerically oriented Požeski list. In time, Vjesnik likewise drew closer to the nationalists. Radio-Television Zagreb began to carry all speeches of Savka Dabčević-Kučar in their entirety, while systematically curtailing programming from other Yugoslav stations and information regarding other parts of the country—except for material pertaining to the federal government.

During the summer of 1971, the periodicals of Belgrade and Zagreb engaged in polemics over a series of incidents and provocations, many of which were undoubtedly blown out of proportion if not essentially fabricated. The best known of these incidents is probably the “Podravska Slatina” affair, a story that broke on May 11, 1971, when Belgrade’s Politika reported obstructive activities by members of Matica Hrvatska on their way to a society meeting. The article portrayed the members as anti-Yugoslav Croatian nationalists—they were said to have been flying only Croatian colors lacking the red star on their car antennae (an allegation they denied)—and accused them of trying to break up a meeting of old partisans in the town of Podravska Slatina in Slavonia. The article was immediately lambasted by Croatia’s Glas Slavonije (May 13), which described the Politika article as “fabricated disinformation” that distorted an insignificant event so as to make it appear to Politika’s Serbian readers that the Croats were getting completely out of control. Yet the Politika version was also picked up by Komunist, Vjesnik, and Večernje Novosti, a Belgrade tabloid. By the following day (i.e., May 14), Glas Slavonije was nervously drawing the conclusion that Politika’s provocation was designed to undermine Matica Hrvatska’s prestige and legitimacy, throttle the reform movement, and abort passage of the constitutional amendments by portraying their chief exponents (the Croats) as nationalistic zealots.¹¹³ The central committee of the LCC appointed an investigative commission to look into the various allegations pertaining to the Podravska Slatina affair. After two weeks the commission concluded (on May 30) “that there had been no provocation of the meeting of partisans on the part of [Matica Hrvatska]” and that claims that the Matica cars were flying Croatian, not Yugoslav, colors were groundless.¹¹⁴ As the summer drew on, Matica Hrvatska became convinced that there was a determined campaign to paint it “as a nationalistic, even chauvinistic, organization”—a conviction that only deepened when, immediately after the Brioni meeting, party conservatives demanded that the organization be put in a straitjacket.¹¹⁵

In this politically fluid situation, the Croatian conservatives employed any and all available means in their struggle for control of the Croatian party. Ironically, they found natural allies in the so-called humanists of the Praxis group, who felt an ideologically rooted antipathy toward decentralization, nationalism, and even federalism (which the humanists viewed as an unnecessary compromise with dogma). When the Sisak district court banned the May-August 1971 issue of Praxis because of an article by Milan Kangrga that contained, among other things, “the most searing indictment hitherto printed in Praxis of the rising nationalist movement in Yugoslavia (and especially in Croatia), linking it intimately with the efforts of a new middle class to consolidate its position,” the conservatives took the issue to the republic’s Supreme Court.¹¹⁶ Both sides in the contest knew exactly how Praxis figured in the struggle. Thus,

the consistently outspoken and hostile attacks of the Praxis collaborators on the spirit of nationalism had made it increasingly urgent for the nationalist ideologues to discredit Praxis in the public eye and to impair, insofar as possible, its further activity. . . . It is unlikely, therefore, that Praxis’s strategic value in the struggle against “nationalist deformations” went unnoticed by the federal authorities, and it cannot be doubted that calculations such as these played some role in the Croatian Supreme Court’s 1971 decision to overturn the Sisak District Court’s ban on the contested issue of Praxis.¹¹⁷

By that point, the Serbs were putting pressure on Tito to curb the Croatian liberals,¹¹⁸ and Tito himself was watching developments in Croatia with increasing concern. Early in July, he traveled to Zagreb to talk with Croatia’s leadership. At a closed meeting, Tito revealed his misgivings that Croatia was sliding back to the atmosphere of the prewar era and implied that the republican leadership was losing control of the situation. “Are we going to have 1941 all over again?” Tito asked. “That would be a catastrophe.” Of special concern to Tito was the cult of Stjepan Radić. “Radie s organization was a kulak organization,” Tito snapped. “He hated communists and did not represent the interests of the working class. We offered to cooperate with him, but he didn’t want to have anything to do with us.”¹¹⁹ Tito also criticized efforts to bring back Jelačić’s statue, calling Jelačić a reactionary and condemning him for having helped suppress Louis Kossuth’s “progressive” revolution; indeed, Tito stated firmly that he would not permit any monument to Jelačić on the Trg Republike (Zagreb’s main square, casually referred to by Zagrebers, even today, as the “Trg Jelačića”). Tito even offered to make Tripalo prime minister of Yugoslavia in order to get him out of Croatia and away from the Croatian nationalists. But Tripalo declined. Clearly, Tito remained the ultimate arbiter in interrepublican and—so it seemed—intrarepublican affairs; when he brought the full force of pressure to bear, a republican leadership almost always had to yield ground, at least temporarily. But, since Tito was increasingly considering that Yugoslav stability was best guaranteed when Yugoslavia operated as a “self-regulating” system of broadly autonomous federal units, the republics, in practice, perceived his interventions as setting the limits of legitimate activity rather than aborting independent decision making.

Hence, the response of Croatia’s “national communists” to Tito’s July 4 lecture was not to cave in but to conclude that Tito was “poorly informed” and that it was necessary “to select proper representatives of the Croatian nation who will converse with Comrade Tito.”¹²⁰ The district (općina) committee of the LCC of Zadar circulated a letter among the presidency of the central committee of the LCC and all regional political organizations that questioned the sense of political responsibility of Baltic, Bilić, Dragosavac, Derosi-Bjelajac, and Radojčević (all Croatian conservatives) because of their interference in the efforts of the nationalists to capture the channels of political communication.¹²¹ The conservatives had to be neutralized, and Tito had to be wooed and convinced that, far from being a “key problem,” as he had claimed, Croatia was politically healthy. This the nationalists managed to do by mid-September, in a carefully orchestrated reception for Tito in Zagreb. Tito made an about-face and told his Zagreb audience on September 14, “I have been able to convince myself [on this visit] just how absurd certain stories about Croatia are—that there is no unity here, that people here think differently, that chauvinism blossoms and thrives here. None of that is true.”¹²²

Croatian nationalism now took a dangerous turn, however, riveting its attention on ethnically mixed Bosnia to the south. In the gathering storm, it was inevitable that Croatian eyes should turn to Bosnia—a territory that many Croats continued to believe was rightfully theirs. This territory had been a part of Croatia during the heyday of Ustaše Croatia, and some 20 percent of its population consisted of ethnic Croats. By now it had been openly admitted that, under Ranković, the state security apparatus had systematically persecuted Croats in Bosnia.¹²³ Matica Hrvatska claimed that Croats were still being denied their rights in Bosnia and other republics and, therefore, sought to set up branches in Bosnia and Vojvodina to cater to the needs of Croats in those areas. Viewing this as a kind of cultural imperialism, however, neither Bosnia nor Vojvodina would permit it.¹²⁴ Bakarić’s earlier charge that Matica Hrvatska was comporting itself as a shadow government was proving accurate.¹²⁵ Meantime—so claimed Oslobodjenje—Ante Paradžik, president of the League of Students of Croatia (LSC), with other members of the LSC leadership, was traveling around the districts of Herzegovina, organizing student meetings and attempting to court support for the recently expelled Veselica and Djodan.¹²⁶

In November 1971, Hrvatski tjednik added fuel to the fire by publishing statistics on the ethnic affiliation of members of elite bodies in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The paper charged that Croats were systematically underrepresented at all except the highest levels of republican administration, where they enjoyed pro forma proportional parity. Under the 1961 census—then the most recent set of population statistics available—the population of Bosnia consisted of 42.9 percent Serbs, 25.7 percent Muslims, 21.7 percent Croats, and 9.7 percent other nationalities. Yet Croats comprised only 11.1 percent of the Higher Economic Court of Bosnia, 16.6 percent of the republican constitutional court, 7.6 percent of the public prosecutor’s office, 12.5 percent of the undersecretaries, 15.3 percent of republican chiefs of inspectorates, and 17.8 percent of the republican secretariat for internal affairs. All presiding members in the judicial branch were Serbs, as was the republic’s secretary for national defense. And, though the Croats were generously represented among republican secretaries and their assistants, no republican secretary of Croatian nationality sat on the executive council (as against four Serbs and one Muslim), and there were no Croats in the republican secretariat for national defense or among directors of republican agencies. The trend penetrated into the media as well, where Croats comprised only 17 percent of the editorial board of Oslobodjenje and had only one of the six seats on the Board of Documentation. The general director of Radio-Television Sarajevo, the director of Sarajevo Television, the editor and director of Odjek, the director of the National Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the president of the Bosnian Academy of Arts and Sciences were all Serbs, and the director of Sarajevo Radio, the director of Zadruga, and the editors of Život, Izraz, and Pregled were all Muslims. The only important positions held by Croats in the media were the directorship of joint services of Radio-Television Sarajevo and the editorship of television programming—both clearly subordinate. The pattern was replicated in the structure of the bank directorates where, of thirty-two directors, directorate chiefs, and division chiefs, only three were Croats. The pattern even extended to the composition of the League of Communists of Bosnia-Herzegovina (LC B-H), where the Serbs were clearly overrepresented and the Croats drastically underrepresented. Citing 1966 figures, Hrvatski tjednik claimed that the LC B-H consisted of 57.14 percent Serbs, 26.30 percent Muslims, and 12.05 percent Croats.¹²⁷ (Remember that Bosnia’s Croats and Muslims played a large role in Ustaše activity and that the Serbs were the first to join the partisan ranks in World War II.)

But, waving aside Croatian objections that they were underrepresented in the Bosnian political structure, Hamdija Pozderac, member of the presidency of the central committee of the LCY and a prominent Bosnian politician, replied facilely that “no one is responsible for his work only ‘to some nation of his’ but rather to the working class and to all the peoples and nationalities in our selfmanaging socialist community.”¹²⁸ As the figures in table 10 make clear, the proportion of Croats in the Bosnian party declined steadily in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and even the somewhat higher tally recorded for 1981 (12.27 percent) was still drastically lower than the proportion of the Bosnian population consisting of Croats—18.38 percent in 1981.¹²⁹ Gradually, Croatian nationalists became convinced that the only solution was to incorporate the “expatriate” Croats into an expanded Croatian republic. Therefore, they demanded the attachment of the western part of Bosnia-Herzegovina to Croatia. Ironically, Serbian nationalists responded to this not by aligning themselves with Bosnia in a show of solidarity but rather by claiming the southeastern sections of Bosnia-Herzegovina for themselves.¹³⁰ One is reminded of Poland’s response to Hitler’s annexation of Bohemia: ultimately dependent on French and British support against the German menace, Poland nonetheless did not shrink from claiming the Teschen enclave for itself. Yet, by clamoring for territorial expansion at Bosnia’s expense, the Croatian nationalists had in effect “declared war” on Bosnia and on the federation itself.

Table 10. Membership of the LC of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Nationality

Sources: Othmar Nikola Haberl, Parteiorganisation und nationale Frage in Jugoslawien (Berlin: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), p. 209; Oslobodjenje, May 17, 1982, p. 5; and Oslobodjenje, March 29, 1984, pp. 2-3.

Croatia’s actions in 1971 mirrored Napoleon’s actions as he moved from defending France to his new project of conquering Europe. “The European states would have accepted Napoleon had he been willing to play according to the rules of the game.”¹³¹ In the same way, the Croatian party had good relations with the parties of Slovenia and Macedonia as long as Croatia was perceived to be “playing by the rules of the game.” Indeed, in the 1970-71 period, the Croats went to great lengths to establish a special relationship with Kosovo. This included the stimulation of historical research designed to reveal and emphasize traditional historical links between parts of Croatia and the Kosovo region. These efforts bore some fruit, and, on the occasion of one particular visit to Kosovo, Croatia’s Dabčević-Kučar was greeted as a queen by enthusiastic Kosovars. A certain solidarity also developed of its own accord between Croatian and Kosovar students. This spontaneous and natural solidarity, rooted in common resentment of the Serbs, was brought out, for instance, at a dinner for delegations from student organizations from all parts of Yugoslavia that convened in conjunction with a student conference in Ljubljana (May 13-14, 1971). When certain students began singing nostalgic songs about Ranković, the Croatian and Kosovar students predictably arose and left together.¹³² Yet, ultimately, by their excessive demands and intransigence, the Croatian leadership intimidated other republican leaderships and persuaded them that Croatia had become a greater threat to the system than Serbia. As usual, there were differences of opinion within the various republican elites. Crvenkovski and Kavčić refused to abandon the Croats, continued to lend them strong support, and were later removed from their leadership posts.

Earlier on, the Croatian leadership had begun to campaign for reforms of the banking, foreign trade, and foreign currency systems—reforms that were unacceptable to the leaderships of Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbia. Friction between the Croatian and Serbian leaderships became so grave that, at a meeting in Brioni in April 1971, the Slovenian and Bosnian representatives urged a public airing of the differences between the Serbian and Croatian leaderships in an effort to assuage them. The Slovenian and Macedonian leaders were particularly concerned about the implications of Croatia’s nationalistic fever as well as the growing intransigence of the Croatian leadership.¹³³ But the Croatian leaders could not back down at this point; they believed that compromising with the “centralists” would cost them their local support and, thus, their jobs in Zagreb.

On November 5, 1971, the Croatian central committee heard a report from President Dabčević-Kučar on Croatia’s foreign currency earnings, economic grievances, and economic woes in general. The Croatian government took a strong stand on increased retention of foreign currency earnings—a stand that was, at first, backed by the Slovenian party. Matica Hrvatska, of course, played an instrumental role in propelling the Croatian leadership further to the right. In an article that appeared in Matica Hrvatska’s journal, Kritika, Peter Šegedin, president of the Croatian society of novelists, repeated that Croatian policy must be predicated on self-interest and not on the interests of Yugoslavia as a whole.¹³⁴ Matica Hrvatska then called for use of Croatian as the language of command for military units stationed in Croatia, or, alternatively, if Serbian was retained as the language of command for the army, the establishment of Croatian as the language of command for the navy (on the grounds that 90 percent of the Yugoslav navy operates in Croatian waters). By the summer of 1971, Matica Hrvatska had lent its voice to demands for the enlargement of Croatian territory at the expense of both Herzegovina and Montenegro and had begun to mobilize ethnic Croats both in Bosnia and in Vojvodina.¹³⁵ By failing to suppress Matica Hrvatska at this juncture, the Croatian party leaders lost their chance to save themselves. In threatening the territorial integrity of two fellow federal units and alienating a third (Serbia) by their minatory pose vis-à-vis Serbs residing in Croatia, the Croats lapsed into a Napoleonic role. They had gone too far; thus, the appearance of an anti-Croatian coalition was to be expected. This coalition, of course, was not responsible for the defeat of the “Croatia first” movement, but its presence permitted the effective quashing of the movement by the federal government in league with the Croatian conservatives.

To replace the national-liberal coalition (with Slovenia and Macedonia) that had been united in the advocacy of specific liberal planks, the Croats sought to create an anti-Serbian coalition (with Kosovo and Montenegro) that was united by an aversion to the assimilationist policies associated with Ranković and, at least where Kosovo was concerned, by the desire for expanded political autonomy vis-à-vis Belgrade.¹³⁶ But these new partners were not as influential, useful, or even as reliable as Croatia’s former alliance partners, and the fragility of the new alliance would be demonstrated soon enough, when the slogan of “5 to 1” became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Nor could there any longer be doubt as to the ideological coloration of the Croatian troika: at the Twentieth Plenum of the central committee of the LCC (May 13-14, 1971), Miko Tripalo openly identified with the Croatian national movement led by Matica Hrvatska and Hrvatski tjednik. The intense and broadly based popularity that this generated for the troika was amply demonstrated when, in August 1972, the funeral of the former secretary of the Croatian party’s central committee, Pero Pirker, prompted a massive demonstration by more than 100,000 supporters.

The Croats began to press their demands with determination. Not only should the foreign currency retention system be renegotiated so that Croatia might retain a larger chunk of its earnings; it was even suggested that a separate Croatian currency be created.¹³⁷ Not only was the Croatian district of the JNA to become, in effect, a Croatian army, but also the Supreme Headquarters of the National Navy must be relocated to Split. Not only was there a need to further decentralize and reform the banking system, but Croatia should also have its own Croatian national bank with a governor appointed by the republican leadership and empowered to negotiate foreign loans independently.¹³⁸ Not only was republican statehood to be “more precisely” defined, but also—more concretely—the Croatian national Sabor was to be recognized as the highest organ of power in Croatia (relegating the LCC to, at best, second place).¹³⁹ Economist Hrvoje Šośic demanded that Croatia be represented in the United Nations.¹⁴⁰ Vladimir Loknar lodged a demand for the passage of an endogenous Croatian legal code.¹⁴¹ Others clamored for the printing of Croatian postage stamps.¹⁴² Ultimately, the nationalist group gathered around Matica Hrvatska explicitly raised the cry for complete Croatian independence; secession was fast becoming mainstream political sentiment in Croatia.¹⁴³ In ethnically heterogeneous communities, friction between Croats and Serbs became commonplace, and there were reports that in some communities residents were “arming themselves in anticipation of a physical showdown.”¹⁴⁴

Ironically, despite their huge popularity and the symbolic leadership of both the mass movement and the LCC, the national troika (Tripalo, Dabčević-Kučar, and Pirker) actually controlled neither. The popular movement, under the guidance of Matica Hrvatska, was antipathetic toward the key desiderata of the entrenched conservative faction in the LCC. The troika was thus confronted with an ineluctable choice between (1) allying with Matica Hrvatska against the conservatives and gambling that Tito’s confidence could be retained or the conservatives could be outmaneuvered, and (2) seeking a compromise with the conservatives and moving to bridle Matica Hrvatska. But the latter option was unpalatable because the liberals and the conservatives were separated by an unbridgeable distrust and because the liberals and the nationalists continued to share a number of common positions, especially where economic complaints were concerned. When Dabčević-Kučar addressed the Twenty-second Session of the Croatian central committee on November 5, it was abundantly clear that the choice had been confronted and the dilemma decisively resolved in favor of the national mass movement.

Collapse of the House of Cards

The Croatian conservatives were gathering their forces, plotting how best to administer the coup de grace to the liberal troika. In late October, Bakarić journeyed to Sarajevo to court Bosnian support. He hoped to escalate the intraCroatian party contest to the federal level in order to defeat the coalition of Croatian liberals and nationalists there. Branko Mikulić, a Bosnian Croat and president of the Bosnian party, was sensitive to the nationalistic propaganda washing over from Croatia and receptive to Bakarić’s wooing. Almost at the same time, Tito, closeted with Yugoslav army leaders at a secret meeting in Bugojno, Bosnia, was being shown “suppressed TV reels of Croatian Communist mass meetings, with only Croatian flags [missing the Communist red star] and with nationalist and anti-Tito slogans, songs, shouts and signs.”¹⁴⁵ Unnerved by the obvious exacerbation of the intraparty conflict, Tripalo made a show of force, telling a gathering in Vela Luka at the end of November “the policy that we are pursuing in Croatia cannot be changed. Our opponents think that that policy can be changed by replacing a few leaders. In order to achieve that, it would be necessary to replace thousands of leaders in Croatia. . . . We have taken our fate in our hands and we will keep it in our hands.”¹⁴⁶

The public did not know—but Matica Hrvatska and the student leaders apparently did—that the Croatian conservatives had undertaken a concerted effort to enlist Tito’s support in throttling the liberals.¹⁴⁷ At this point the Croatian Students Union, in a dramatic gambit designed to demonstrate support for the troika and outbid the conservatives, organized a massive strike, hoping to undermine the conservative move by making clear that conservatism lacked a popular base. Some three thousand students met in Zagreb on November 22, 1971, and unanimously voted to begin a strike at 9 a.m. the following day to protest the existing federal regulations governing hard currency, banking, and commerce.¹⁴⁸ At Paradžik’s prompting, the union also aligned behind the various linguistic, military, and political demands outlined above.¹⁴⁹ Interestingly, representatives of the Native Macedonian Students Club and of the Native Club of Kosovar Students, who were present at the meeting, firmly supported the Croatian students.

The following day, student meetings were held at many university departments in Zagreb and strike committees were formed. At 7 P.M., a plenum of the Croatian Students Union unanimously passed a resolution calling for a strike at all institutions of higher education in Croatia, and faculty deans, meeting in Zagreb, expressed solidarity with the students. Two months earlier, the student prorector, Ivan Zvonimir Čičak, had advised this very tactic when, on the occasion of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Stjepan Radić, he had told a university crowd that “students must be prepared to demonstrate, rebel, and strike, because their youth and their radicalism are the only guarantee to their nation for a better and brighter future.”¹⁵⁰ Nor did the liberal establishment wish to risk estrangement from the mass movement by distancing itself from the strike. Dabčević-Kučar commented, “I am deeply convinced that the motives of the greatest portion of the students who have undertaken this strike were positive and well meaning and progressive.”¹⁵¹

On November 25, the League of Students of Split convened an emergency plenum and enthusiastically endorsed the resolutions passed by the students in Zagreb. In Rijeka, students began circulating a petition for use of a chamber in which to convene a similar meeting. In Dubrovnik, the presidency of the Dubrovnik Student Union came out in support of the Zagreb resolutions. Within a matter of days, at least 30,000 university students across Croatia were on strike. By the beginning of December, students at the Zagreb law school had demanded the expulsion of all unitarists from the LCC, specifically naming Dragosavac (secretary of the central committee), Baltic (central committee secretary for SR Croatia as of 1980) and Bilić (president of the Croatian Sabor), together with Ema Derossi-Bjelajac and Čedo Grbić.¹⁵²

Until the autumn of 1971, Tito had hoped that it would be possible to effect a compromise with the forces in power in Croatia and to let things develop more or less on their own.¹⁵³ If the suppressed newsreel footage was not enough, the student strike helped convince Tito that compromise was impossible.¹⁵⁴

Liberalization, decentralization, and appeasement of Croatia had only fed the Croats’ ever-increasing hunger for autonomy. Indeed, military intelligence later uncovered evidence that some of the party leaders had been in contact with Croatian Ustaše emigre groups in West Germany.¹⁵⁵ At first, Tito considered sending troops into Croatia; eventually he decided to simply decapitate the Croatian party leadership. On December 1, Tito convened a joint meeting of the party presidiums of the LCY and the LCC at Karadjordjevo, Vojvodina. On this occasion, the famous Twenty-first Session of the LCY presidency, it became obvious just how isolated Croatia had become. The Serbian and Croatian conservatives led the charge, supported by ideological bedfellows from Vojvodina and Montenegro. Bosnia, Slovenia, and even Kosovo criticized the waxing exclusivist nationalism and called for stern measures against it.¹⁵⁶ Latinka Perović, Serbia’s spokesperson at the session, declared that “Yugoslavia will emerge from this crisis only if nationalism is wiped out in every constituent national group.”¹⁵⁷ Only the Macedonian representative, Angel Čemerski, showed any readiness to treat the Croatian liberals mildly.¹⁵⁸ The Croatian leaders were treated to a tongue-lashing for “unhealthy liberalism,” nonchalance with respect to counterrevolutionary groups, and use of student groups to advance their political aims. The Croats were told to put their house in order, but, given the denunciation of the policy pursued by the liberal troika, the Twenty-first Session could only strengthen the hand of the conservatives on the Croatian central committee.

Despite this, there was a scurry of activity designed to avert the inevitable. At a meeting of the city conference of the LCC of Zagreb on December 4, immediately after the Twenty-first Session of the LCY presidency, conference president Šrecko Bijelić omitted any mention of “nationalism” or “counterrevolutionary activity” in discussing the session’s resolutions and employed only bland and ambiguous references to “anti-self-management” and “antidemocratic forces.” He proposed the relatively mild remedy of meeting with representatives of Matica Hrvatska in order to sort things out.¹⁵⁹ Mirko Dragović and Pero Kriste, chairman and deputy chairman respectively of the LCC interdistrict conference for Dalmatia, made an attempt to stem the tide loosed by the Twenty-first Session. Kriste, after a hastily arranged meeting with Tripalo, assembled a number of political functionaries in Dubrovnik, told them that it seemed the Croatian leadership might be changed, blamed the forthcoming changes on the fact that Tito was “probably poorly informed” about the situation in Croatia, urged the mobilization of strong support for the troika, and suggested convoking an extraordinary congress in order to underline that support. Simultaneously, Dragović invited various leaders from Zadar (Sarić, Pera, Zanki, and Festini) to Hotel Solaris on the outskirts of Šibenik, where he also warned that Tito was poorly informed, the state security apparatus was behind the uproar, and the Croatian leadership required rescue.¹⁶⁰ Vjesnik (December 6, 1971) reported that working collectives and local assemblies in Croatia were voicing their implicit faith in and strong support of the troika. At the Twenty-second Session of the LCY presidency (December 9), Dabčević-Kučar defended herself and claimed that she and her cohorts would faithfully undertake such actions as were necessary in the spirit of the Twenty-first Session.¹⁶¹

Meanwhile, the Croatian conservatives demanded that they be provided a copy of the stenographic record of the Twenty-first Session (held December 1-2). The liberal troika, still formally holding the reins, tried to submit only an edited transcript. Finally, on December 12, the house of cards collapsed: Tripalo, Dabčević-Kučar, Pirker, and Marko Koprtla, hitherto a member of the executive committee, resigned their posts under pressure. In protest of Tripalo’s resignation, five hundred student militants demonstrated for four days in downtown Zagreb and demanded creation of a separate Croatian state—a response that only served to further implicate Tripalo and strengthen Tito’s hand. Helmeted riot police were sent in to occupy strategic points in Zagreb, while helicopters surveyed the streets from above. If necessary, the army was prepared to move in. A follow-up conference to the Twenty-first Session declared that “nationalism has become . . . the focal point for everything in our society that is reactionary, anti-socialist and anti-democratic, bureaucratic, and Stalinist.”¹⁶²

In the aftermath of the crisis, literally tens of thousands of members were expelled from the party, most for failure to toe the party line.¹⁶³ In the higher echelons of political authority, 741 persons were stripped of their posts and expelled from the party, another 280 party members were merely compelled to resign their posts, and yet another 131 functionaries were demoted. Of this total, the greatest number were to be found in Osijek, Zagreb, and Split (in that order).¹⁶⁴ Others—Djodan, Čičak, Marko Veselica, Hrvoje Šošic, Franjo Tudjman (the former partisan general), and Gotovac, editor of Hrvatski tjednik, were sentenced to long prison terms. Altogether some two to three thousand persons were imprisoned for political reasons in Croatia in the wake of the fall of Tripalo and Dabčević-Kučar; thousands more were held administratively (without formal charges) for two to three months.¹⁶⁵ Matica Hrvatska was shut down and its fourteen periodical publications (including the popular Hrvatski tjednik and Kolo) were put out of commission. Tlo survived only a few months longer—long enough to publish four 1972 issues. Dubrovnik was placed under provisional ban. Within a fortnight, the party removed the director of Radio Dubrovnik and the editors of Vjesnik, Vjesnik u srijedu, Vidici, Pitanja, Tlo, Jež, and Omladinski tjednik, and the staff of Radio Pula was obliged to engage in self-criticism. Wayward student publications in other republics were also “cleansed”: the editors of Student (Belgrade), Bota e Re (Kosovo), and a Macedonian student paper were replaced, and the editor of the Ljubljana student paper, Tribuna, was reprimanded. On May 8, 1971, the Twenty-eighth Session of the League of Communists of Croatia, meeting in Zagreb, adopted a resolution expelling Dabčević-Kučar, Tripalo, Pirker, and Koprtla from the party. The backlash continued through 1973, reaching a climax in October and November with the continued purge of writers, filmmakers, university professors, and former liberal leaders.¹⁶⁶ The Roman Catholic Church, whose adherents are concentrated in Croatia and Slovenia, also came under press attack during 1973 for alleged nationalism.

At the same time, however, Tito moved to undercut the popular bases of the Croatian nationalists by granting many of the nationalist demands. Thus, export firms were allowed to retain 20 percent of foreign exchange earnings instead of 7 to 12 percent, and tourist enterprises were permitted to retain 45 percent of their earnings instead of 12 percent.¹⁶⁷ In addition, the dinar was devalued (by 18.7 percent) for the second time in a year, boosting the value of Croatia’s foreign currency earnings and complicating the importation of goods and materials into less developed areas in Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia. Belgrade was even willing to concede that, in a sense, Croatia had been exploited; it admitted that Croatia’s contribution to the federal budget had been proportionately largest. Ekonomska politika noted that whereas, in 1970, Slovenia freely disposed of 62.2 percent of its social product, Serbia of 59.2 percent, Bosnia of 62.1 percent, Montenegro of 60.1 percent, Macedonia of 59.2 percent, Vojvodina of 59.0 percent and Kosovo of 59.7 percent, Croatia disposed of only 58.3 percent of its own income—the lowest figure among the eight federal units.¹⁶⁸

The Yugoslav federation had, to be sure, weathered the crisis—but not without demonstrating the flimsiness of system support founded only on groups’ perceived self-interest. Without an emotional attachment to the political aggregate, a multiethnic state is condemned to survive at best as a collection of jealous, warring competitors.

Disembowelment of the Interrepublican Committees

Despite the defeat suffered by the nationalist-liberals not only in Croatia but also in Slovenia and Macedonia, the interrepublican committee system, a byproduct of the liberal ascendancy, lingered on. The committees had been conceived, from the beginning, as a sort of experiment. But though the liberals and those who favored decentralization of decision making claimed that the experiment was a success in that it speeded legislation and furthered devolution, the conservatives condemned it as a failure, complaining that it had fundamentally altered the way in which the legislative process took place.

The conservative opposition to the IRCS was at first somewhat intimidated by its successes, though not complacent about them. Those outside the IRCS feared the growing power of the committees, and rumblings of discontent could be heard in the capital about the committees’ bypassing of the “self-managing structures” of decision making. More threatening to IRCS’s political survival was the growing perception that reliance on the interrepublican committees would lead to the atrophy of the Skupština, which would merely formalize decisions already arrived at in the committees. Mijalko Todorović, president of the federal Skupština, was one of the leaders of the opposition to the burgeoning new institution. “The Skupština is even today in an unfavorable situation,” he told Ekonomska politika, “above all because we have a kind of dual system in our sociopolitical system today. . . . We have neutralized all other democratic self-managing mechanisms and relations [including even the Skupština], with the result that the entire Yugoslav public waits, so to speak, to see what these committees will decide, waits to see what will happen.”¹⁶⁹ The public, in short, was reduced to a passive spectator. Some members of the Skupština voiced resentment that the work of drawing up preliminary drafts had now been turned over to the committees. In their opinion, this reduced the Skupština to a kind of rubber stamp. The danger, said Todorović, was that the interrepublican committees would monopolize the decision-making process and, as another member of the Skupština warned, “how can one speak of a parliamentary system where the parliament is reduced to a purely symbolic function?”¹⁷⁰ The committees, moreover, tended to closet themselves, leaving the Skupština in ignorance as to their deliberations. Avgustin Lah, president of the Cultural-Educational Chamber of the federal Skupština, complained, “They don’t tell us anything. I am a member of the Skupština and president of one of its working bodies and all I know is what I read in the newspapers.”¹⁷¹

The impression increasingly took hold that the IRCS was a potential shadow government that was gradually usurping the real power in the system and that the federation was about to be swallowed up by an explicitly confederal body. The Coordination Commission was repeatedly charged with bypassing regular government channels and with “taking over the affairs of state.” The IRCS had resolved the practical issues that had been laid before it, but in the process it had threatened most of the vested interests in the status quo ante. Increasingly, the talk was of muzzling the IRCS before it was too late.

IRCS advocates were quick to spring to its defense. “It would be harmful to destroy the current institutions of interrepublican negotiation (dogovaranje),” Stane Kavčič pleaded in Politika. “What is necessary is to perfect the existing forms and to adjust them to the demands and conditions of social development. “ The committees, said Kavčić, were

the most important element in the changes that we have brought about in recent years in our socioeconomic system. . . . [The interrepublican committees] represent significantly more than mere agreement in the area[s] of the questions concerned. Their meaning consists also in that they have very positive consequences for stability and for interethnic relations. In them I see a potent form of the struggle against nationalism, because they make it possible for all questions to be dealt with and solved legally—which contributes to the strengthening of interrepublican understanding.¹⁷²

For a while it seemed that the advocates of the committees might prevail. Kardelj even offered consolation, urging that

it is necessary now to oppose the frontal attacks on interrepublican negotiation and on the interrepublican committees, because every objective analysis has confirmed that the positive results achieved through this form of work outweigh the negative, especially if we have in view the earlier period when the federation and the republics were in reality paralyzed because of conflicts flaring up during the legislative process.¹⁷³

Yet, at the same time, Kardelj thought it advisable to subject the committees to “greater public supervision and control” and expressed doubts as to “whether they have been sufficiently protected from sundry bureaucratic distortions.”¹⁷⁴ Before the end of 1972, the interrepublican committees were already in retreat. The Interrepublican Committee for Developmental Policy was abolished and its functions were transferred to the Federal Committee for Social Planning. The remaining interrepublican committees were, shortly thereafter, significantly downgraded. Under Article 333 of the draft constitution (published in June 1973), they were no longer described as the arenas for the working out of interrepublican differences and the reconciliation of viewpoints—the function originally assigned to them under Amendment 33—but were defined merely as agents for the representation of the federal units (and of their executive agencies) “in the passage of regulations to accompany laws and other general acts.”¹⁷⁵

This wording was preserved in the executive act of June 1974, whereby the federal Executive Council formally demoted the interrepublican committees to their current status. Under this act, the committees were said to have been formed to ensure “the participation and consent of republican and provincial organs in the passage of regulations for the execution of laws, other regulations, and other general acts that are adopted by the Chamber of Republics and Provinces of the Skupština SFRJ” where such participation and consent were required by law.¹⁷⁶ The new wording absolved the committees of their former role in “the establishment of federal policy and in the passage of federal laws” and reduced them to consultative bodies where policy proposals could be sounded out. They continued to draw up legislation for the Chamber of Republics and Provinces (CRP), but even here the interrepublican committees had to yield an expanded role to a network of CRP committees. As Caca has observed, the proposals of the committees were often ratified without emendation by the federal Executive Council.¹⁷⁷ Legislation would henceforth no longer start in the IRCS but rather in the CRP, with the IRCS usually serving to smooth out the rough edges. The committees were indisputably subordinated both to SIV and to the CRP, and, even within their constricted domain, they no longer enjoyed decision-making authority.

Once the fulcrum of decision making, the IRCS committees were now a cog in the legislative machine. Ironically, at the end of 1978, the Federal Committee for Social Planning (FCSP) was abolished and its functions returned to a resurrected Interrepublican Committee for Social Planning and Development, restoring the original constellation of five committees.

Conclusions

Though only Croatia fell into the “Napoleonic syndrome,” the purge affected not only Croatia but also Croatia’s erstwhile fellow travelers in the other republics—including Kavčić and Leopold Krese in Slovenia, Crvenkovski and Milosavlevski in Macedonia, and those who, like Serbia’s Marko Nikezić, had fallen afoul of the conservatives for their “anarcho-liberal” temperaments.¹⁷⁸ But instead of leading to a return to centralism, this purge only prepared the way for still greater decentralization.

The entire period of the Croatian crisis may be viewed as one in which the political actors were testing the limits of legitimate political behavior and, in some cases, attempting to transcend them. It was also a period in which the processes of alliance building are exceedingly clear. Alliances existed as tangible understandings and were consciously pursued: indeed, alliance partners, among the federal units, were viewed as indispensable. Thus, when Slovenia and Macedonia backed away from the Croatian nexus, Croatia sought new allies in Kosovo and Montenegro.

But interrepublican conflict cannot be characterized one-dimensionally. On the contrary, the Croatian crisis case study suggests that in a multinational state, fundamental conflict is likely to be manifested on three levels: (1) the federal (or central) level, as a conflict between republican actors within a federal context; (2) the interrepublican level, as an unmediated conflict between the units themselves; and (3) the intrarepublican level, as a struggle between factions within the “Napoleonic” unit and a confrontation between cross-migrated diasporas (such as the Croatian Serbs or the Bosnian Croats) and their host cultures.