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09-25-2010, 10:24 AM
A TIME article from 1971.
THE moment was superbly stage-managed. Just as the chairman of Yugoslavia's Federal Assembly finished his announcement that Josip Broz Tito had been re-elected as the country's President for the sixth time, a side door was flung open. To a crescendo of applause, Tito himself stepped into the crowded marble-walled chamber. Deeply tanned, smiling broadly and dressed impeccably in a white tropical suit, he looked remarkably fit for a man of 79.
His re-election to a five-year term was a mere formality. Tito was appearing before the Assembly on a far more urgent and historic mission: to put into effect 20 amendments to the constitution that are aimed at a fundamental overhaul of Yugoslavia's political and economic life. He knows his time is short, and he fears that his system of participatory and highly innovative Communism may not survive him. Thus he is seeking to revamp the governmental framework so that the country's future will depend not so much on individuals as on stable institutions designed to prevent a power struggle for dictatorship or, equally undesirable, a return to a deadening centralized bureaucracy. Tito is also seeking to ease Yugoslavia's severe regional tensions, which could tear the country apart after his death—and give the Soviet Union an excuse to intervene.
The 23rd Man. Tito's new departures could have as profound an effect on the course of world Communism as his 1948 break with the Soviet-dominated Cominform and the subsequent economic innovations that have made the Yugoslav model the inspiration of East European reformers. The new measures included two main steps:
A COLLECTIVE PRESIDENCY. A 22-member collective leadership was installed in office last week as the highest executive agency in the country. Three members are chosen from each of Yugoslavia's six republics and two from each of the two autonomous provinces. The 23rd man, and the one who will run things as long as he is around, is Tito, who was named Chairman of the presidency. After he is gone, the chairmanship will rotate among the republics. In the event the Federal Assembly fails to agree on legislation, the collective presidency will have the power to rule by decree.
A STRONGER CABINET. In a departure from the usual Communist practice that relegates parliaments to the role of mere rubber stamps for party orders, the Yugoslav parliament and the new Cabinet will have considerable power to initiate and pursue policies independent of the party. Ministers will be required to answer questions in the Assembly, and the Cabinet will have the right to resign if the ministers feel that they cannot carry out their programs. The new Premier is Djemal Bijedic, 54, a Moslem who has been assembly president of the poor southern republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The 20 new constitutional amendments that the Cabinet and the collective presidency will put into operation will drastically alter the relationship between the central government in Belgrade and the republics and provinces. Since its creation in the wake of World War I, Yugoslavia has been an uneasy alliance of six republics with three official languages, three dominant religions and two alphabets.
Croatia and Slovenia in the north developed essentially as part of Europe under the Habsburg empire. To the south, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina for centuries stagnated under Turkish rule. The expansionist Serbs, who dominate the country numerically, want a truly unified nation of Yugoslavs. The Croatians dream of an independent—or at least vastly more autonomous—Croatia. The southern republics suffer from rural poverty, alleviated somewhat by the central government's distribution of wealth from the resentful northern republics. Only the Communist Party and Tito's leadership have been capable of holding the disparate parts together.
Firm Decisions. The new amendments aim to unify the country by granting greater autonomy to those parts. The federal regime will retain supreme authority only over foreign affairs, defense, internal security, monetary affairs, free trade within Yugoslavia, and some development loans to poorer regions. Control of such things as education, health and housing will be exercised entirely by the governments of the republics and the autonomous provinces. In a parallel development, the Yugoslavs are decentralizing their economic system and phasing out government subsidies.
Will it work? The standard Yugoslav reply is that Tito himself does not know. One danger, however, is that Tito may have gone too far in decentralizing the system; in the new setup, as in any loose federal arrangement, it would still take a strong leader to make firm decisions or resolve regional disputes. Early betting in Belgrade is that in the event of a crisis after Tito's death, the person most likely to provide that powerful influence would be Macedonian Party Leader Krste Crvenkovski, 50, who was elected last week to the post of deputy to Tito in the collective presidency.
Intimidating Exercise. The trouble is that the changes are coming at a time when the country is under severe internal and external economic and political pressures. Most of the outside pressure comes from Moscow. Fearful of a Sino-American deal in Asia, the Soviets are eager to consolidate their position in Eastern Europe. Their concern has been manifesting itself in a number of ways. Late last month, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev sent a personal letter to Tito angling for an invitation to visit Yugoslavia soon. With Tito scheduled to jet off to Washington for a state visit probably in October, and with Chou En-lai's having "gratefully accepted" an invitation to go to Belgrade in the autumn, Brezhnev is seemingly determined to warn Tito: don't get too chummy with the Americans and the Chinese at Russia's expense.
In an obvious exercise in intimidation, the Soviets staged massive maneuvers in Hungary last month and named them Yug, which means south in Slavic languages but has a special connotation in the present circumstances. For more than a year, agitprop teams have been spreading the message through Eastern Europe that Yugoslavia is on the verge of disintegration and that counter-revolutionary forces are poised to take over. That is precisely the pretext under which the Soviet Union intervened in Czechoslovakia. In recent weeks, high-ranking Soviet officials have bluntly told Yugoslav diplomats that the situation in their country bears all the earmarks of Czechoslovakia before the invasion.
Sorry States. While there is abundant evidence of Soviet pressure, there is no immediate sign that Moscow is planning an invasion. Moreover, while the Czechoslovaks declared in advance that they would not resist a Warsaw Pact invasion, the Yugoslavs have made it clear that they would fight. They have scheduled autumn maneuvers of their own in the rugged mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war games, the biggest since 1945, will stress cooperation between newly organized guerrilla bands and the regular army. The Yugoslavs are especially anxious about the possibility of a new outbreak of fighting in the Middle East. They fear that the Soviets might seize on such a situation and, in the name of Socialist solidarity, demand bases for their Mediterranean fleet on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast.
The Yugoslavs also fear that Moscow will exploit their internal quarrels, chiefly the one between the Catholic Croats and the more numerous Orthodox Serbs. The Croatians, whose territory includes the lucrative Dalmatian coast, have been complaining that the Serbs used their influence in the federal government to siphon off Croatia's tourism riches for use in other republics.
When Tito first proposed his constitutional changes in September 1970, bitter debate erupted among the republics, and old hatreds were fanned to white heat. Unwisely, Croatia's Communist leaders allowed nationalist fervor to build up, in hopes of exerting greater pressure on Belgrade for economic concessions. The agitation quickly got out of control. LONG LIVE FREE CROATIA signs began to appear in the republic. Autos that belonged to Serbs, 800,000 of whom live in Croatia, were tipped over. In an ironic turnabout, the big Croatian exile organization in West Germany, which historically had been strongly anti-Communist and anti-Russian, suddenly began to advocate an alliance with the Soviets as the only way to guarantee Croatia's rights.
By early last spring, the Kremlin evidently believed that Yugoslavia might be ripped asunder over its regional problems. So too did many Western observers. Tito summoned the country's leaders to his retreat at Brioni Island in the Adriatic and ordered them to stop playing on old hatreds. He stumped the country, at one point told a crowd: "The papers write that as long as Tito is there, he will somehow manage to hold it together, but if he should go, everything will fall apart. What a sorry affair if all this depends on only one man!" Thanks largely to the efforts of that one man, the situation has measurably improved.
Invisible Assets. To a large degree, the success of Tito's latest experiment depends on Yugoslavia's continuing prosperity. After enjoying a miniboom for nearly a decade, the economy, which manages to combine capitalistic profit incentives within a Communist frame- work, has run into a severe inflationary problem. Despite a partial price and wage freeze last December, the cost of living is now rising at an annual rate of about 14%. A 20% devaluation of the dinar early this year failed to quench the thirst for foreign goods or boost Yugoslav exports. As a consequence, Yugoslavia has a trade deficit of $1.2 billion, with a gross national product of only $14 billion. Two large invisible assets, however, help close the actual payments gap. Foreign tourists bring Yugoslavia some $400 million, while the 800,000 or so Yugoslavs who work in West Germany and elsewhere send home another $400 million.
Even if the economy does retain its rosy glow, however, a more serious prob-lem remains. Milovan Djilas, author of The New Class and former right-hand man to Tito, urged a diminution of centralized rule and greater personal freedoms as long ago as the 1950s. For his pains, Djilas spent nine years in Tito's prisons. Now he is worried that a 23-man presidency might go too far toward de-centralization and do more harm than good. "A 'collective presidency' instead of a president," he wrote last fall, "will aggravate rather than lessen the inefficiency of the administration and the bickering of the already dissociated chiefs." Still, from his booklined study on a shaded Belgrade street, he pronounces himself pleased with the divorce of the Communist Party from everyday government affairs and the liberation of the economy from bureaucratic party controls. "You see," he told TIME Correspondent David Tinnin, "in Yugoslavia, the problem was that bureaucracy was in conflict with life, and in the end life prevailed.
THE moment was superbly stage-managed. Just as the chairman of Yugoslavia's Federal Assembly finished his announcement that Josip Broz Tito had been re-elected as the country's President for the sixth time, a side door was flung open. To a crescendo of applause, Tito himself stepped into the crowded marble-walled chamber. Deeply tanned, smiling broadly and dressed impeccably in a white tropical suit, he looked remarkably fit for a man of 79.
His re-election to a five-year term was a mere formality. Tito was appearing before the Assembly on a far more urgent and historic mission: to put into effect 20 amendments to the constitution that are aimed at a fundamental overhaul of Yugoslavia's political and economic life. He knows his time is short, and he fears that his system of participatory and highly innovative Communism may not survive him. Thus he is seeking to revamp the governmental framework so that the country's future will depend not so much on individuals as on stable institutions designed to prevent a power struggle for dictatorship or, equally undesirable, a return to a deadening centralized bureaucracy. Tito is also seeking to ease Yugoslavia's severe regional tensions, which could tear the country apart after his death—and give the Soviet Union an excuse to intervene.
The 23rd Man. Tito's new departures could have as profound an effect on the course of world Communism as his 1948 break with the Soviet-dominated Cominform and the subsequent economic innovations that have made the Yugoslav model the inspiration of East European reformers. The new measures included two main steps:
A COLLECTIVE PRESIDENCY. A 22-member collective leadership was installed in office last week as the highest executive agency in the country. Three members are chosen from each of Yugoslavia's six republics and two from each of the two autonomous provinces. The 23rd man, and the one who will run things as long as he is around, is Tito, who was named Chairman of the presidency. After he is gone, the chairmanship will rotate among the republics. In the event the Federal Assembly fails to agree on legislation, the collective presidency will have the power to rule by decree.
A STRONGER CABINET. In a departure from the usual Communist practice that relegates parliaments to the role of mere rubber stamps for party orders, the Yugoslav parliament and the new Cabinet will have considerable power to initiate and pursue policies independent of the party. Ministers will be required to answer questions in the Assembly, and the Cabinet will have the right to resign if the ministers feel that they cannot carry out their programs. The new Premier is Djemal Bijedic, 54, a Moslem who has been assembly president of the poor southern republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The 20 new constitutional amendments that the Cabinet and the collective presidency will put into operation will drastically alter the relationship between the central government in Belgrade and the republics and provinces. Since its creation in the wake of World War I, Yugoslavia has been an uneasy alliance of six republics with three official languages, three dominant religions and two alphabets.
Croatia and Slovenia in the north developed essentially as part of Europe under the Habsburg empire. To the south, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina for centuries stagnated under Turkish rule. The expansionist Serbs, who dominate the country numerically, want a truly unified nation of Yugoslavs. The Croatians dream of an independent—or at least vastly more autonomous—Croatia. The southern republics suffer from rural poverty, alleviated somewhat by the central government's distribution of wealth from the resentful northern republics. Only the Communist Party and Tito's leadership have been capable of holding the disparate parts together.
Firm Decisions. The new amendments aim to unify the country by granting greater autonomy to those parts. The federal regime will retain supreme authority only over foreign affairs, defense, internal security, monetary affairs, free trade within Yugoslavia, and some development loans to poorer regions. Control of such things as education, health and housing will be exercised entirely by the governments of the republics and the autonomous provinces. In a parallel development, the Yugoslavs are decentralizing their economic system and phasing out government subsidies.
Will it work? The standard Yugoslav reply is that Tito himself does not know. One danger, however, is that Tito may have gone too far in decentralizing the system; in the new setup, as in any loose federal arrangement, it would still take a strong leader to make firm decisions or resolve regional disputes. Early betting in Belgrade is that in the event of a crisis after Tito's death, the person most likely to provide that powerful influence would be Macedonian Party Leader Krste Crvenkovski, 50, who was elected last week to the post of deputy to Tito in the collective presidency.
Intimidating Exercise. The trouble is that the changes are coming at a time when the country is under severe internal and external economic and political pressures. Most of the outside pressure comes from Moscow. Fearful of a Sino-American deal in Asia, the Soviets are eager to consolidate their position in Eastern Europe. Their concern has been manifesting itself in a number of ways. Late last month, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev sent a personal letter to Tito angling for an invitation to visit Yugoslavia soon. With Tito scheduled to jet off to Washington for a state visit probably in October, and with Chou En-lai's having "gratefully accepted" an invitation to go to Belgrade in the autumn, Brezhnev is seemingly determined to warn Tito: don't get too chummy with the Americans and the Chinese at Russia's expense.
In an obvious exercise in intimidation, the Soviets staged massive maneuvers in Hungary last month and named them Yug, which means south in Slavic languages but has a special connotation in the present circumstances. For more than a year, agitprop teams have been spreading the message through Eastern Europe that Yugoslavia is on the verge of disintegration and that counter-revolutionary forces are poised to take over. That is precisely the pretext under which the Soviet Union intervened in Czechoslovakia. In recent weeks, high-ranking Soviet officials have bluntly told Yugoslav diplomats that the situation in their country bears all the earmarks of Czechoslovakia before the invasion.
Sorry States. While there is abundant evidence of Soviet pressure, there is no immediate sign that Moscow is planning an invasion. Moreover, while the Czechoslovaks declared in advance that they would not resist a Warsaw Pact invasion, the Yugoslavs have made it clear that they would fight. They have scheduled autumn maneuvers of their own in the rugged mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The war games, the biggest since 1945, will stress cooperation between newly organized guerrilla bands and the regular army. The Yugoslavs are especially anxious about the possibility of a new outbreak of fighting in the Middle East. They fear that the Soviets might seize on such a situation and, in the name of Socialist solidarity, demand bases for their Mediterranean fleet on Yugoslavia's Adriatic coast.
The Yugoslavs also fear that Moscow will exploit their internal quarrels, chiefly the one between the Catholic Croats and the more numerous Orthodox Serbs. The Croatians, whose territory includes the lucrative Dalmatian coast, have been complaining that the Serbs used their influence in the federal government to siphon off Croatia's tourism riches for use in other republics.
When Tito first proposed his constitutional changes in September 1970, bitter debate erupted among the republics, and old hatreds were fanned to white heat. Unwisely, Croatia's Communist leaders allowed nationalist fervor to build up, in hopes of exerting greater pressure on Belgrade for economic concessions. The agitation quickly got out of control. LONG LIVE FREE CROATIA signs began to appear in the republic. Autos that belonged to Serbs, 800,000 of whom live in Croatia, were tipped over. In an ironic turnabout, the big Croatian exile organization in West Germany, which historically had been strongly anti-Communist and anti-Russian, suddenly began to advocate an alliance with the Soviets as the only way to guarantee Croatia's rights.
By early last spring, the Kremlin evidently believed that Yugoslavia might be ripped asunder over its regional problems. So too did many Western observers. Tito summoned the country's leaders to his retreat at Brioni Island in the Adriatic and ordered them to stop playing on old hatreds. He stumped the country, at one point told a crowd: "The papers write that as long as Tito is there, he will somehow manage to hold it together, but if he should go, everything will fall apart. What a sorry affair if all this depends on only one man!" Thanks largely to the efforts of that one man, the situation has measurably improved.
Invisible Assets. To a large degree, the success of Tito's latest experiment depends on Yugoslavia's continuing prosperity. After enjoying a miniboom for nearly a decade, the economy, which manages to combine capitalistic profit incentives within a Communist frame- work, has run into a severe inflationary problem. Despite a partial price and wage freeze last December, the cost of living is now rising at an annual rate of about 14%. A 20% devaluation of the dinar early this year failed to quench the thirst for foreign goods or boost Yugoslav exports. As a consequence, Yugoslavia has a trade deficit of $1.2 billion, with a gross national product of only $14 billion. Two large invisible assets, however, help close the actual payments gap. Foreign tourists bring Yugoslavia some $400 million, while the 800,000 or so Yugoslavs who work in West Germany and elsewhere send home another $400 million.
Even if the economy does retain its rosy glow, however, a more serious prob-lem remains. Milovan Djilas, author of The New Class and former right-hand man to Tito, urged a diminution of centralized rule and greater personal freedoms as long ago as the 1950s. For his pains, Djilas spent nine years in Tito's prisons. Now he is worried that a 23-man presidency might go too far toward de-centralization and do more harm than good. "A 'collective presidency' instead of a president," he wrote last fall, "will aggravate rather than lessen the inefficiency of the administration and the bickering of the already dissociated chiefs." Still, from his booklined study on a shaded Belgrade street, he pronounces himself pleased with the divorce of the Communist Party from everyday government affairs and the liberation of the economy from bureaucratic party controls. "You see," he told TIME Correspondent David Tinnin, "in Yugoslavia, the problem was that bureaucracy was in conflict with life, and in the end life prevailed.