Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s seemed a stable success story, compared with many other states in Europe. Portugal and Spain had remained clerical-Fascist dictatorships until 1974 and 1975; Greece had a military dictatorship from 1967–74; Turkey had multiple military coups and invaded and partitioned Cyprus, in response to the threat of an invasion of that island by Greece; Germany and Italy experienced left-wing terrorism; and Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland had been kept in the Warsaw Pact by the brotherly action of Soviet tanks. Economically, while the UK had widespread strikes and massive disruptions, workers in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia enjoyed workers’ resorts (radničke odmaralište) on the Adriatic,Footnote ¹ living, working and relaxing in public architecture later celebrated by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.Footnote ² Many also built their own private vikendice, nominally small summer cottages but often larger.Footnote ³ Geopolitically, Yugoslavia was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), then taken very seriously by its own members and grudgingly acknowledged by the west.Footnote ⁴ The borders were open to almost all and tourism boomed. The Albanian autonomy movement in Kosovo seemed less threatening than the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque movement in Spain, or the Kurds in Turkey.

Of course, Yugoslavia was not paradise—elections were no more free than those in other socialist states with a Communist Party holding a monopoly on power, and there were imprisonments for political activities.Footnote ⁵ Neither was there a free press, though writing and reading between the lines were highly developed skills, and foreign papers from both east and west were available. In 1971, a political crisis in Croatia could have threatened Yugoslavia's stability. Yugoslavia's unique “self-management” socialism produced greater consumer goods than were available in the Warsaw Pact countries, but was not very efficient, and there was increasingly high inflation. Dennison Rusinow saw Yugoslavia as facing problems in 1977, but not more so than many other states, and did not foresee it coming to an end.Footnote ⁶ In late 1989, the American embassy in Belgrade foresaw Yugoslavia, the most prosperous socialist state, leading the transformations in eastern Europe.

But Yugoslavia did end, abruptly, into wars and their accompanying death, destruction, and displacements, events of the 1990s that produced a huge literature, much of it focused on war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law. They also pushed the accomplishments of Yugoslavia from focus. Dejan Jović notes that his political science students at the Universities of Zagreb and Belgrade know almost nothing about the former country even as they live in its legacies. Thus his ironic title, Introduction to Yugoslavia, of a book meant to introduce them and others to the foreign country that is their near past, and which is constantly present in two forms. Its “all-presence” (sveprisutnošću) is in the memories of many people and in the cultural, social, and other similarities between the formerly Yugoslav peoples and the successor states. But it is also present in its non-presence (neprisutnošću), especially in Croatia, as a taboo theme, not to be named except as the “former state” or “that state” (16). Thus, Yugoslavia became the non-present all-presence, that against which the new collective identities of the post-YU states and peoples are assessed.

Seven of Jović's nine chapters are extensively revised and updated works published from 2001 to 2020, re-written to form a single book. The new chapters are an introduction on “What Yugoslavia was and what it wanted to be,” and one on “Tito's Vision of Self-Management.” Jović took advantage of newly available archives, especially the personal archive of Josip Broz Tito, as well as interviews with leading figures from post-Tito Yugoslavia. The result is perhaps the best single book on Yugoslavia since Rusinow's The Yugoslav Experiment, and follows up on Rusinow's idea that Yugoslavia's self-management socialism in a multi-ethnic state was an experiment. Jović knows the experiment failed, but strives to assess actions and events as much as possible from the perspective of the times at which they took place, without presuming, as many other authors do, that Yugoslavia's ultimate collapse meant that the experiment was doomed from the start to fail.

The introduction presents four successive visons of Yugoslavia. The first (1919) was as the nation-state of a Slavic nation, of Yugoslavs, under a Serbian monarchy; but this was not accepted by many of its new citizens and was replaced in 1939 with an asymmetric federation, in which Croatian territories were united and Croats thus empowered. This second vision was terminated by the defeat of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1941 and the subsequent wars against fascist occupiers, Serb and Croat nationalists (including the Independent State of Croatia, 1941–45) by a communist army that fought successfully to create a new Yugoslavia as a federation, “national in form, socialist in content,” under rule by the Communist Party. However, newer generations of leaders in the 1960s and early 1970s developed the fourth vision, of Yugoslavia as a community of states (republics) with strong confederal tendencies. Rusinow, writing at Oxford, drew on J. R. R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings to describe the League of Communists of Yugoslavia as the “one ring to bind them” all. Jović differs in seeing the Yugoslav communists embracing the idea of the state withering, and its own power with it.

Socialism, though, was only part of the Yugoslav experience; the other was its functioning as one of the few truly multi-national states in Europe, composed of multiple nations (narodi), heritage communities each associated with a language and religion, and with territories that they saw as their homelands, unfortunately often overlapping. Yugoslavia from the start had been defined in opposition to classic empires, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, which held and in places competed for its territories. The Yugoslav federation was generally seen as a successful accommodation to the aspirations of these peoples, until suddenly it was not. But the reasons for its failure are not of purely academic interest. The European Union is another form of imperial formation, at least by the definition of neo-empire that Jović cites (39–40) from the works of Dominic Lieven and Siniša Malešević. Thus, Yugoslavia's experiences may have relevance for wider topics on relations within the European Union.

The subsequent chapters of the book expand on these themes. Ch. 2, “Yugoslavia as Project and Experiment,” recounts Yugoslavia's inception, with nationalism seen as a modern, progressive concept after World War I. The aggressive chauvinism in the 1930s and 1940s made socialist internationalism the progressive concept after World War II. The difficulty was always that most people regarded themselves as belonging to separate nations (narodi). The Yugoslav communists tried to coopt that form of identification. They were “revolutionaries who fought for the legal continuity of the ‘old’ state, but for a ‘new’ political order” (59), thinking that Yugoslavia could only function by building socialism, then communism, in a federal state.

The 1963 renaming of the country as the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia instead of the Federal Peoples’ Republic of Yugoslavia was meant to signal that the working class was the prime political actor, not the nations (narodi) (63, emphasis in original). This was the experiment, trying to build socialism in a federal state, in which as of 1974 the constituent republics and provinces of the Federation held most governing authority, at the expense of the central government. In giving primacy to building the working class and empowering them through their economic interactions in self-management of social property, the Yugoslav communists avoided trying to build a Yugoslav demos. But as Sabrina Ramet argued in the early 1980s, political power became concentrated within the republics and within the republican Leagues of Communists, with much of the interaction within the federation devoted to promoting the interests of individual republics at the expense of the others.Footnote ⁷ With the end of the socialist project, and lacking a Yugoslav demos, the experiment collided with the holders of power concentrated in each republic.

While Tito's actions are often mentioned in the course of the first two chapters, he becomes a central figure in Ch. 3, on “Foreign Policy: Actors and Structures.” Jović outlines the evolution of the internal politics of foreign policy in Yugoslavia, from an early period in which Tito acted “autocratically taking the majority of decisions informally and independently” (107). As the state consolidated and expanded its institutions, Tito remained the main actor but with assistance from the Foreign Ministry, the Party leadership and his own staff. The constitutional changes in 1974 that increased Republican power also created a collective Presidency, though Tito remained President of the Republic. In Jović's analysis, the republics developed their own capacities for influencing foreign policy, while Tito's personal interests became increasingly focused on NAM. Except in that context and in interactions with the major powers, Tito was more tolerated by Yugoslav politicians than seen as a key actor, treated almost as a “mythical and ritual figure” (108). Yet even in that role he provided a pluralizing influence in decision-making, which at his death became increasingly autocratic at the level of the republics.

Tito's role is also central to the fourth chapter, on “Tito's Vison of Self-Management” (samoupravljanje), the key concept and set of institutions meant to effectuate it that distinguished Yugoslav socialism from any other socio-economic system. The 1974 Constitution, with its 406 articles, structured Yugoslavia as a self-managing socialist community, and was accompanied by the nearly as long Law on Associated Labor governing labor relationships, in which workers were charged with managing social property, different from the state property of other socialisms. As Jović notes, self-management was much studied until 1990 but interest dropped totally with the end of Yugoslavia, though there is some recent interest in the concept as an alternative to other models. Jović's discussion of the concept and its development is among the best available.

The fifth chapter, “Comrade Tito, You're Responsible!,” shows unexpected limits on Tito's personal power. From 1954 through 1967, his office received about 30,000 letters per year, and members of his staff spoke with about 13,000 citizens. It is striking to see how critical many writers were of the operation of the system. Until 1964, letters were sent directly to the President, who read many and wrote brief instructions on them, occasionally meeting himself with a letter writer. Tito read the letters to keep himself informed on the concerns of ordinary citizens, unfiltered by governmental agencies. As the government grew, and as Tito's involvement came to focus more on international affairs, he no longer received the full letters, but only abstracts prepared by his staff.

Jović presents a detailed account of the meeting between one critical letter writer and President Tito in 1967. Although a member of the League of Communists, the writer had been unemployed for more than two years and had been rejected multiple times when applying for jobs. He blamed Tito and the Party. Tito's staff prepared a brief biography of the letter writer, whom Tito then invited to his official residence in Belgrade. The transcript of their discussion is in the book. Tito called the President of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia to ask him to investigate the matter and help the petitioner find a job. Yet Tito's intervention did not work—the petitioner kept looking for work for two more years, writing to the President repeatedly, before finally getting a low-ranking position, apparently on his own.

Jović uses the saga of this letter writer in part to show the nature of Tito's awareness of the isolation of his position, trying to maintain his own sources of information on attitudes in the country. But Jović also demonstrates how, as the constituent republics became increasingly independent in many ranges of activities, the powers of the central authorities, even of President Tito himself, were attenuated. As happened in regard to foreign policy, Tito became a figurehead in domestic affairs. While many citizens turned to him for assistance, it became less and less possible for him to help them.

Possibly because of this diminution of his authority, Tito's passing from the scene in May 1980 did not cause an immediate crisis. Under the slogan “After Tito, Tito,” the collective presidency functioned as head of state, with the position of President of the Presidency rotating on a predetermined schedule for the next eleven years. Jović uses two in-depth studies of events in Croatia and Serbia, the two most central republics, to analyze the departures from Titoism, socialism, and ultimately Yugoslavia. Ch. 6, “Croatia in Socialist Yugoslavia,” sees Croatia in 1945 as the most politically and ideologically divided republic in the new federation, in part due to the weight of the fascist Independent State of Croatia of 1941–45, and in part reflecting the continuation of demands for Croatian sovereignty that had led to Croatia's privileged position in the “asymmetric federation” of 1939. Both of these factors were countered by strong pro-Yugoslavia, socialist and Partisan activities during the war and heavy participation by Croatian leaders in Yugoslav politics after it. The analysis of Croatian politics through 1990 is detailed, concluding that Croatian politics towards independence in that year were driven largely by the changing political directions of Serbia and Slovenia.

Thus, Jović devotes Ch. 7 to the events that brought Slobodan Milošević to power within Serbia in September 1987, the 8^th session of the League of Communists of Serbia (LCS), and its aftermath. Milošević staged what was essentially a coup within the LCS, broadcast live on television. Jović states that the meaning of this event was not immediately clear. Milošević promoted an “anti-bureaucratic revolution” that led some commentators, including US diplomats, to see him initially as a reformer, the “Serbian Gorbachev.” Milošević's efforts to succeed Tito as the central figure in Yugoslavia were frustrated by resistance, especially from Slovenia, which led him to focus instead on appealing to Serbs throughout Yugoslavia. Jović provides a highly detailed account of the complex political developments within Serbia, between Milošević and other republican leaders, especially increasing conflict with Slovenia, all against a backdrop of increasing economic difficulties and high inflation. Jović argues that Milošević found inspiration in Tito's seizure of power, increasingly advocating “revolutionary” violence, and initially with the stated goal of preserving Yugoslavia against separatist leaders of Slovenia and Croatia. While at first Milošević wanted to become a new equivalent of Tito and forcibly took control of Montenegro and the Autonomous Provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, his effort to spread his “revolution” to other republics were resisted, leading him to focus instead on trying to build a greater Serbia under the guise of maintaining Yugoslavia.

Milošević's “revolution” was thus a conservative one, which in Serbia blocked liberal-democratic reforms that were taking place in other republics and elsewhere in eastern Europe after 1989, under the guise of preserving socialism. Jović argues that Milošević's adoption of the logic of revolutionary violence against perceived liberal internationalist enemies drove the direction for Serbian politics “for the next twenty years and possibly longer” (323). Analysts of Serbian politics since the fall of Milošević's regime will find much to inform their work; both the Croatian and Serbian chapters are essential sources for scholars interested in revisiting the causes of the end of the Yugoslav experiment.

Ch. 8, on “Reasons for the Disintegration of Yugoslavia,” is a well-organized, updated review of various schools of thought on its causation: economic arguments, arguments about supposed “ancient hatreds,” nationalism, “cultural” arguments, international political involvements, the roles of individuals, and institutional failings. The discussions are detailed and complex. Jović's own preferred explanation (433–34) is that Yugoslavia's relative successes convinced the Party that their experiment in self-management had succeeded and that they could reduce reliance on the powers of the state to manage society—thus that the state finally did “wither away.” This reviewer is not convinced—the disintegration of Yugoslavia was organized first by Slovene and Croat social and political actors who believed strongly in building the power of their own republics as sovereign states of their respective nations (narodi), but were opposed to the competing claims of even limited sovereignty by Yugoslavia.Footnote ⁸ These claims seem not to have been due to “Fear[s] of becoming a minority and conflicts in post-Yugoslav lands,” as argued in the final chapter of Jović's book. Instead, the displacement of the working class as sovereign by each Yugoslav ethnonation (narod) in its own republic essentially replaced state socialism with state chauvinism, and the resistance to being a minority was not by the leaders of secessionist republics but by people whose status was suddenly reduced not only to that of ethnic minority, but also of ethnic minority targeted by majoritarian politics.Footnote ⁹ Chauvinistic majoritarianism has been recognized as the potential dark side of democracy, with the demise of Yugoslavia used as one example.Footnote ¹⁰ As I write, there is increasing anti-minority sentiment in the politics of European Union states. Disturbingly, it might be that Yugoslavia went from being avant-garde in state socialism to being such in state chauvinism. Thus, perhaps it was not the state that withered, but rather the concept of socialism, and with it, the concept of Yugoslavia.

Xavier Bougarel's With Tito's Partisans: Communists and Peasants in Bosnian Krajina, 1941–45 is relevant here, because it analyzes the struggle for the new Yugoslavia from the perspective of those trying to achieve it on the ground. This is not yet another military history of the Partisan movement. Rather, Bougarel takes inspiration from the political science literature on insurgent governance to undertake an analysis of the efforts by the Partisans to govern territories they liberated in western Bosnia. Bosnian Krajina was the heart of the Partisan movement but also constantly contested as one of the most heterogenous and impoverished regions of Yugoslavia. Bougarel's sources are internal notes and reports created by local communist cadres in the liberated territories, housed in archives in Sarajevo and Banja Luka. He thus writes a political history closely tied to localities, based on contemporary documents created by local Partisans themselves, as they struggled to bring order and establish their own rule in an unstable military and political environment.

The five chapters discuss main tasks that the Partisans faced and how they went about addressing them. The first deals with trying to (re)build brotherhood among the peoples (narodi) of this heterogeneous region after the terrible massacres in 1941 against all of them by the forces of one or more of the others, or by the occupiers. The Partisans, themselves not averse to the use of force, had to demonstrate that unlike their opponents, they would not engage in mass crimes against the peasants of any community. Since their movement was largely Serb at the start, they worked to recruit Muslims and Croats, having least success with the latter in part because the opposition of Roman Catholic priests; they were more successful in instrumentalizing Orthodox Christian and Muslim religious leaders. The Partisans also set about delegitimizing the political structures of the first Yugoslavia while starting to advance their own rhetoric and models of a communist society.

The next task was organizing as many people as possible into a new political and social order. Throughout Yugoslavia the Partisans organized “National Liberation Committees” (NLC), comprised of “honorable patriots” elected on local levels for six-month mandates by all age 18 and over, including women (71). These local committees were the lowest levels of a hierarchy that went up to the levels of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Yugoslavia as the basis of the new government. Though the positions were elected, nominations were negotiated to ensure representation of peasants, workers and intellectuals. The political parties of the previous state were co-opted.

Ch. 3 deals with the implementation of the “leading role of the Communist party” by recruitment of peasants into its ranks, accompanied by social works and propaganda, bans on other parties and recruitment into the Partisans as a Communist Army. This chapter contains no surprises but does provide much detail on how this was done, again drawing mainly on documents that were written by local people who had themselves been recruited into the movement.

The Partisans were operating in a peasant society in which much economic activity had been disrupted, and food was scarce. Ch. 4 recounts the Partisans’ efforts to rebuild a “moral economy” (acknowledging James C. Scott's work), an informal consensus between the Partisans and the peasant population on a just and legitimate economy (129) to feed the Army and the people. Though land remained under private ownership, its use was regulated by the Partisans. The advantage given to the Army for agriculture products was a challenge to the moral economy, which still had to feed the population. Bougarel argues that this process succeeded largely on the basis of fostering informal exchanges in a transitional period, accompanied by “voluntary” contributions, often less than freely given.

“Peoples Justice” is the last substantive chapter. Military courts functioned in the liberated territories and passed many death sentences against traitors and other enemies. Less well known are the civilian courts. The Partisans needed to create new judicial institutions that furthered their goals but did not needlessly alienate the peasant population or seem to rehabilitate the old legal order. The NLCs had judicial authority over cases of petty theft (krađa), grand theft (pljačka), hooliganism and disorder, and disputes between individuals. Cases were heard by a judge who was a member of the NLC, with elected jurors (porotnici) who were supposed to represent the ethnic and religious makeup of the region. They did not apply the laws of the former Yugoslavia or of the occupiers but rather developed their own standards. Of particular note is their general avoidance of fines and other monetary sanctions, as disruptive to the already shattered local economy. Instead, they demanded restitution, publicizing cases in which the guilty party herself or himself was said to have volunteered to pay restitution. Selection criteria for judges included having good reputations with their neighbors and being loyal to the national liberation movement, and Serb, Muslim, and Croat judges had to be included.

The Partisans also expressly prohibited proclamations of collective guilt or collective revenge, again trying to distinguish themselves from the occupation forces and those of domestic nationalist movements. The Partisans did not themselves always uphold these standards, and such cases were noted in the archives as well. They were increasingly punitive as the war neared its end. Bougarel thus ends this chapter with the ominous observation that the logic of the collective retaliation that took place in the Spring of 1945 was already developing in the liberated areas, despite the original efforts to avoid engaging in such conduct. It seems that as the Communists’ grasp on power consolidated, they became less solicitous of the views of others, and more brutal in their treatment of potential opponents. Until, that is, their need to develop away from the Soviet model of communism led to the development of what Jović calls a “half-open society” (34), in the 1960s through 1980s, which both he and Rusinow see as the Yugoslav experiment.

Comparing these two studies, it is apparent that what was missing by the end of the Yugoslav experiment was the willingness of Yugoslavs to struggle to preserve the multi-national country. Despite the massacres in 1941, when they succeeded in liberating territory, the Partisans were self-consciously working to recruit peasants into the new project of a socialist Yugoslavia, of brotherhood and unity. By 1991, however, after forty-six years of peace, the secessionist politicians of Slovenia and Croatia were able to recruit separate ethnonational armies to oppose the Partisans’ successors, the Yugoslav Peoples’ Army (YPA). The YPA itself became so unpopular that officers and soldiers deserted, and mothers came to Slovenia to reclaim their sons from it in the first days of the war.Footnote ¹¹ The YPA quickly became a Serbian army pursuing Serbian nationalist goals in opposition to those of other formerly Yugoslav peoples who had rejected Yugoslavia. No one, it seems, would defend multi-ethnic Yugoslavia any longer, but many were willing to fight to destroy it.

Coda: The Divided Kraijna: The region studied by Bougarel was among the parts of Yugoslavia most devasted by the wars of 1991–95. Only eight of the 142 municipalities in Bosnia and Herzegovina that were multi/ethnic in 1991 were still such by the 2013 census, two-thirds having single-ethnic percentages from 70% to 99%.Footnote ¹² In the Bosnian Krajina, the northwest (Cazin, Bihać, Bosanska Krupa, Sanski Most, Ključ) are overwhelmingly Bosniak; in the south, Kupres, Livno, Duvno and Prozor overwhelmingly Croat; most of the rest, overwhelmingly Serb; Jajce, Novi Travnik and Gornji Vakuf still have substantial Croat and Bosniak populations, though they are also divided territorially.Footnote ¹³ The Serb population in the north is augmented by Serbs driven from Croatian Krajina in 1991 and 1995, who cannot return.Footnote ¹⁴ Some of the division was the result of the campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” during and at the end of the war, but the ethnic homogenization continued after the end of the war,Footnote ¹⁵ despite internationally supported efforts to return people to the places from which they had been expelled.Footnote ¹⁶ While the provisions of Annex 7 of the Dayton Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia mandated the return of displaced peoples to where they had lived before the war, most who now return do so in coffins, to be buried in the places where they had grown up, thus leaving cemeteries as the last minority-inhabited territories in much of Bosnia.Footnote ¹⁷