It happens from time to time in human societies that hate and anger
burst their banks, that they destroy everything, overshadow reason, and
silence all better human instincts. While they rage it seems as if it were
Doomsday and that instead of everything that stands, lives, shines, moves,
and speaks, only a dead ocean of hate and anger will remain-as reason unto
itself. But a deeper and better considered view shows that it is not so,
and that hate and anger do not destroy life-they only transform it. This
world is fashioned in such a way that love and reason lead to the construction
of better order, but hate and anger remove evil and injustice. Only hate
and anger can erase the frontiers of rotten empires, move the foundations
of crumbling institutions, and bring down wrongs, in a swift and pure way;
wrongs that threaten to reign supremely and lastingly. Because hate gives
strength and anger provokes movement. Afterward, hate quenches and anger
abates, but the fruits of strength and movement remain. That is why the
contemporaries, living in such historical circumstances, see only hate
and anger, as if they were apocalyptic beasts, and the posterity, on the
contrary, only the fruits of strength and movement.
-Ivo Andric
Andric did not have to spell it out. In Yugoslavia, hate and anger have to do with nationhood. Their troubling face is evident in their inclusiveness. Even the brightest spirits of Yugoslavia have not been spared. There is a poem among the posthumously published papers of Danilo Kis titled "The Poet of Revolution on the Presidential Ship," in which Kis, the most cosmopolitan of Serbian writers, assumes the persona of Tito's Croat protocol officer. The cynical and affectedly dainty Croat lectures his Serbian ward on the etiquette of entertaining the Great Leader, taking all along unpleasant potshots at Serb attitudes ("by the way, they say, you do not love the Croats too much"), Serbian language ("surely, over there in Sumadija and Srem, you do not say it as . . ."), and Serbian provincialism ("how do you say in the environs of Cacak"). Kis was angry at what he imagined to be Tito's Croat retinue. The unspoken point was that access and power were used to humiliate les autres.
That much was right. Despite the high-sounding words about the "trinominal people" (tinder the Karadjordjevices) and "brotherhood and unity" (under the Communists), the essence of Yugoslav politics has been the national question. Stripped of all the nonessentials, this has meant the clash of conflicting national ideologies that have evolved in each of Yugoslavia's numerous national and confessional communities, reflecting the historical experiences of the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and other constituent nationalities. For most of its duration, certainly until 1939, the first Yugoslav state (1918 -41) represented a compromise between Yugoslavist unitarism and Serbian supremacy. All the institutions of the prewar Serbian state, most especially the monarchy, the army, the central administrative apparatus, the church (or more correctly, the privileged position of the reconstituted Serbian Orthodox patriarchate) were preserved and extended in the South Slavic lands of the former Habsburg Monarchy (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia- Hercegovina), as well as in Kosovo and Macedonia (acquired by Serbia in the Balkan wars Of 1912-13), and in Montenegro (united to Serbia under the conditions of military occupation in 1918). Serbia's predominance, sometimes brutal, sometimes merely clumsy, was justified by two different, frequently competing, but oftentimes complementary ideologies. The first of these-easy to understand but unappealing to the non-Serbs - was the ideology of Great Serbian nationalism: the idea that all Serbs, however defined (linguistically, religiously), should be gathered within one state. The second, a far more complicated system of allegiance, was that of Yugoslavist unitarism. This ideology claimed that the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes constituted a single Yugoslav people. Hence, those who insisted on absolute equality among the interchangeable "tribes" were either small-minded or prompted by foreigners. Besides, the industrial northwest (Slovenia and northern Croatia) was richer and bound to get through without scathe. Hence, contrary to the wishes of many high-minded unitarists (numerically insignificant, but politically influential among the Croat and Slovene intellectuals, less so among the Serbs), integral unitarism came to be regarded as an implement of Serbian hegemony and therefore increasingly discredited.
Throughout the interwar period, the resistance of the non-Serbs and the intransigence of the Belgrade authorities precluded the search for an early solution of the Yugoslav national question. The Cvetkovic-Macek agreement of 1939, which established an autonomous Croatian banate and brought the Croat leaders into a semblance of power, could have augured the beginning of Yugoslavia's restructuring. The prospects were indeed conditional, since the nationalist opposition among the Serbs considered the "concessions" excessive, whereas the nationalist opposition (among the Croats and the other non-Serbs) viewed the "agreement" as trifling. The Second World War interrupted the new management of the national question with singular ferocity. The occupying powers (Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria) went after the Serbs, and encouraged the anti-Serb excesses among the other nationalities. Serbia itself was reduced to a special German zone of occupation, which was increasingly garrisoned by Bulgarians. The marginalization of Serbia meant the aggrandizement of Croatia, which, organized as an "independent" ally of the Axis, and ruled through the Ustasas (Insurgents), a minuscule Croat Fascist organization, was independent mainly in the scale and folly of both institutionalized and "irregular" anti-Serb violence. At the same time, the predominantly Serb guerrillas, or Chetniks, initiated anti-Croat and anti-Muslim violence, which was necessarily smaller in scale, being the handiwork not of a state, but of armed bands, themselves increasingly drawn into the Axis web.
The Chetniks, however, were ostensibly the army of the Yugoslav government-in-exile. Their leader, General Draza Mihailovic, officially was the minister of the army in the Allied-recognized, London-based cabinet of King Petar II. Hence the inability of the government-in-exile to project a broader-based Yugoslav-rather than Serb-image, and the unwillingness of the non-Serbs to acknowledge this government as their own. The principal beneficiary of these troubles, which were seemingly intractable to diplomacy, were the Communists. Although the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) had only 6,600 members in October 1940 and some 17,800 additional members in its youth organization, it could boast of a tightly reined leadership under Josip Broz Tito, mobility and militancy among its predominantly youthful and artless cadre, significant influence among the intellectuals in all areas of Yugoslavia, and, perhaps most important, an attractive program for the solution of the national question. The liberation of Yugoslavia, according to Tito, could only be accomplished as the liberation of all of its peoples as separate individualities. Hence the decided-though arguably uneven-emphasis on the "liberation of Croats, Slovenes, Serbs, Macedonians, Albanians, Muslims, etc." within a Soviet-styled federal state. The Communist program, in short, was the negation of two ideological strains of interwar order. In stressing the equality of nations (not just some nondescript nationalities or ethnicities) the Communists were overturning Serbian hegemony. In stressing the individuality of nations they appeared to be toppling Yugoslavist unitarism. The military expression of this negation was the defeat of the Chetniks and the dethronement of the king. Though the Ustasas and other antiunionists, too, were defeated, their defeat was of a different order. They lost as Axis allies, not as an alternative to the Communist program for the solution of the national question.
Without communism there would not have been a postwar Yugoslav state. Tito's domestic policy was determined by the Soviet federal model, which not only was more apparent than real but actually put a premium on the power of the center. As a result, the Yugoslav national question initially was transformed from the prewar conflict of opposing national ideologies into the conflict over the structure and composition of the Yugoslav federation, played out mainly within the constitutional-political frame. Initially, at least, Tito had need to stroke Serb national sensitivities. Himself a Croat, his support was thinnest in Serbia, where the Chetniks had their base, and strongest among the Croats, the Serbs of Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, and in Montenegro. From 1944, Tito increasingly restrained the federalist expectations of the non-Serb segments of the KPJ. He could not agree with those of his non-Serb comrades who insisted on preserving the proclaimed rights of nations and federal units (republics since 1945). Nor did he wish to lend immunity to formal axiomatic constructions that protected the republic-based Communist parties or prompted the growth of separate national institutions. Such approaches might carry weight with the non-Communists, but the running of Yugoslavia would in no way differ from the running of the KPJ.
Tito's conflict with the Croat and Macedonian national Communists (Andrija Hebrang, Metodi Andonov-Cento) pointed to the slow drift, not just toward centralism, which is immanent in Communist dictatorships, but toward the revival of Yugoslavist unitarism and the policy of amalgamating the South Slavic nationalities into a single Yugoslav supranation. The unitarist revival accompanied the break with Stalin in 1948, and was thereby an aspect of the country's bureaucratic transformation, but on an anti-Stalin platform. Edvard Kardelj, the second man of the Yugoslav Politburo and the topmost Slovene Communist and party reformer, was the first notable personage to resist the new unitarism. In 1957 he warned that "bureaucratic centralism," connected with its "ideational-political manifestation of great state hegemonism," was still vibrant in Yugoslavia. Moreover, based on bureaucratic-centralistic tendencies, there appeared new attempts at the revival of "old chauvinistic 'integral Yugoslavism,' as a tendency of negating the existing South Slavic peoples and aimed at affirming some sort of a new 'Yugoslav nation."' Kardelj denounced the "absurdities of such tendencies," which "necessarily undermine the genuine fraternal relations among the independent peoples of Yugoslavia" and warned that the "remnants of old Great Serbian nationalism" were seeking contact with unitarism under the cloak of Yugoslav unity. After several reversals typical of Tito's pragmatic course, Tito himself joined Kardelj's reform faction in July 1962. The reasons for Tito's shift are complex but essentially had to do with the realization that his federal system was in danger of being devoured by creeping Serbian hegemonism after the passing of the Partisan generation.
The removal of Aleksandar Rankovic in 1966 signaled Tito's victory over "domestic conservative-centralist forces" that were entrenched in Serbia. There followed a series of moves that restricted the prerogatives of Rankovic's machine and legitimized greater national liberties for the Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Albanian minority. In fact, Tito's unstudied way of handling the national question led him in the 1960's and the 1970s to espouse the same formal axiomatic constructions (rotating party and state presidency, exact proportionality in party and state organs by republic and province of origin, limited tenure of office, formal harmonization of interests among the federal units in legislation) that he eschewed in the 1940s. Decentralization was enshrined in the constitution Of 1974, which shifted considerable power to the republics and autonomous provinces, encouraged the growth of regional bureaucracies, and placed great emphasis on the management of state affairs by consensus. Nevertheless, this constitution retained the majority of power for the federal center and the ruling party, and was, hence, by no means the code for a confederacy. In fact, the constitution of 1974 was Tito's answer to the intraparty opposition of national and modernizing provenance. Tito countered the Croat Communist leaders Savka Davcevic-Kucar, Miko Tripalo, and many others, who were purged in December 1971 after a biennium of Croat national communism, with an ostensibly antiunitarist device predicated on the "national statehood" of the republics. He countered Serbian Communist leaders Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic, who were purged in October 1972., with an ostensibly unitary device predicated on the "socialist self-managerial" status of the republics and party monopoly.
Tito's death in May 1980 did not unlock the door of Yugoslav chaos. Yet retrospectively it seems that Tito died in the last ditch of Communist federalism. The constitution of 1974 was meant to reaffirm national equality but also to impose party control over the growing national movements. Its provisions lifted Serbia's autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo to a level almost