Workers’ self-management in the ‘Yugoslav road to socialism’: market, mobilisation and political conflict 1948-1962

This is the first documented history of the birth and evolution of the workers’ councils system in Yugoslavia and the political conflicts that accompanied it. Straddling fourteen years, from the split with Moscow in 1948 to the re-opening of the national question for the first time after the Second World War in 1962, this thesis demonstrates that the progressive opening to the world market after the Tito-Stalin conflict intensified domestic struggles and centrifugal pulls on the federation. Using the archival materials of the ruling Communist Party, government and mass organisations, it explains the stages by which the market came to dominate the party-state’s mobilising strategies for society and the shop-floor. In Chapter 1, the introduction of workers’ councils is shown to have been a measure to reverse the extraordinary and democratising mobilisation that followed the break with the USSR, by splitting more advanced sections of the working class from those more tied to the countryside. Chapter 2 suggests that the umbilical cord set up from the West to ‘keep Tito afloat’ allowed the Yugoslav Communists to continue to invest in heavy industry over agriculture in order to escape underdevelopment. This created food shortages and massive resistance to managerial imperatives on the shop-floor. As the country fell deeper in debt, the government intensified market reform under the guise of expanding self-management in order to create an export sector. Chapter 3 sets the stage for open factional conflict in the leadership by noting the gulf between promise and reality in the workplace and on the terrain of complex and uneven domestic development. The main contribution of the thesis is to go beyond history as elite conflict and present it also as a process of class struggle with many mediating instances between the workplace and the state beholden to the world market

Varieties of capitalism or variegated state capitalism? East Germany and Yugoslavia in comparative perspective

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). This essay is a contribution to comparative capitalism studies. We begin with a critique of the ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ school, before presenting the ‘variegated’ alternative. We note difficulties of both schools in characterising statist challengers to the dominant market order. The rise of China has made this a pressing issue, one that raises questions: Is China capitalist, and since when? And how should one analyse the communist world, which has since the 1920s represented a substantial swathe of the global economy? We next present an account of capitalism that explains étatiste variants as the product of late development, and the ‘communist’ economies as a state-capitalist model geared to catch-up industrialisation. This obliges us to consider how to account for their differences. In the second half we take up this challenge, via comparative analysis of two state-capitalist economies: the GDR (representing the orthodox Soviet model) and Yugoslavia (a maverick, market-friendly variant)

From the Cold War to the Kosovo War: Yugoslavia and the British Labour Party

This paper traces the different approaches to foreign policy in the British Labour Party through the prism of its long-term relationship with Yugoslavia. It goes beyond caricatures of Labour and British policy as merely status quo powers in the Balkans. Relying on Yugoslav archival records, as well as secondary sources and the British press, the paper shows that Atlanticism was the dominant approach in the Labour Party from the early Cold War to the reconfiguration of international relations following the end of the Cold War. The roots of this orientation are traced to the dual class nature of the Labour Party as both a ruling class and working class party, which tied it ultimately to the geopolitical interests of the British state, but also created pressures towards a socialist foreign policy. That allowed Yugoslavia to rely on the Labour Party as a special interlocutor in the Western hemisphere in times of cooler relations with the USSR, but also as a potential ally in the country’s struggle to maintain foreign policy independence, despite economic dependence on the West. Nonetheless, the end of the Cold War changed priorities in Labour, with the Atlanticist wing quickly adopting a pro-interventionist line in Yugoslavia, following the US lead. The Left, previously distrusted in Yugoslavia because of its softness on the USSR, became the champion of anti-interventionist arguments. Both sides had had direct links with and experiences of Yugoslavia, but this paper argues it was domestic class interpretation of international affairs which determined post-Cold War alignments

Europe and the Greek issue: Profits, losses, missteps and uncertainties

The victory of Tomislav Nikolić in the presidential elections in Serbia last May surprised and worried commentators. For a long time, Nikolić had acted as deputy leader to war crimes suspect Vojislav Šešelj in the radical nationalist Serbian Radical Party but he split to form his own pro-EU Serbian Progressive Party in 2008. The fear was that he would now revert to his political roots and endanger Serbia’s just-gained candidate status for European Union membership. The subsequent formation of a government coalition that excluded the outgoing president Boris Tadić’s Democratic Party appeared to confirm Serbia’s change of course. Symbolically, Ivica Dačić, the outgoing Interior Minister and the head of the late Slobodan Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia, became Prime Minister

Mirroring Opposition Threats

Hugo Chávez and his Bolivarian Movement came to power in 1999 promising to refound the Venezuelan state and restructure the polity in ways that would build “popular power” through the promotion of grassroots participation, organization, and mobilization. Once in office, the Bolivarian forces launched a series of initiatives to sponsor organization and mobilization among supporters, which ranged widely in their functions and strategic purpose. State-mobilized organizations can be seen as operating in three different arenas of politics: the local governance arena; the electoral arena; and the protest arena. From an ideological standpoint, the Bolivarian Movement was oriented toward sponsoring organizations that could operate in the first of these arenas, helping realize Chávez’s vision of constructing a “protagonistic democracy” by establishing vehicles for citizen participation in local governance. In the terminology of this volume, these activities are best seen as a form of “infrastructural mobilization,” working to solidify political support and achieve the government’s longer-term aims

The Yugoslav communists' special relationship with the British Labour party 1950–1956

This article uses new evidence to investigate Yugoslav foreign policy through the prism of inter-party relations rather than traditional high diplomacy. It shows the Yugoslav Communists hoped comradeship with Britain's Labour Party would influence Western policies to counter the Soviet threat. Initial successes, especially a deterrent statement by the British Cabinet in February 1951, inspired great optimism. The Labour left was also delighted that Communism could be reformed and Cold War tensions lessened. However, ideological differences crystallised over the Djilas affair and Yugoslavia's choice for Non-Alignment. Only mutual opposition to the USSR during the crises of 1956 ensured their continuing friendship

Non-aligned cities in the Cold War: municipal internationalism, town twinning and the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia, c.1950-c.1985

In the Cold War, Yugoslavia was famous for its non-aligned foreign policy. Non-alignment was a policy of balancing between the superpower blocs, but also of forging global collaboration of non-aligned states and actors in international institutions, with a view to increasing their room for manoeuvre at home and abroad. Relying on local and federal archives, this article explores the role of municipalities in Yugoslav foreign policy in two parts. The first part shows that the national municipal association, the Standing Conference of Towns of Yugoslavia, interpreted non-alignment as the pursuit of mediation on an East-West and North-South axis, largely through the two principal international municipal organisations, the pro-Western International Union of Local Authorities and Eastward-leaning Fédération mondiale des villes jumelées—United Towns Organisation. The second part examines the multitude of direct municipal links pursued by Yugoslav cities in the East, West and South. The article finds that municipalities tended to prefer direct links in Europe rather than the Global South, and that Yugoslavia’s republics faced different ways between East and West in terms of their municipal links. These foreign policy divergences at different levels of the state raise important questions for understanding Yugoslav foreign policy in the Cold War

Neravnomeran i spojen razvoj: „novi trockistički međunarodni odnosi“

No abstract available

Constructing Yugoslavia: a transnational history; Remembering Utopia: the culture of everyday life in socialist Yugoslavia

No abstract available