The paper analyses the debate among French communists over the Yugoslav socialist model, both before and after the confrontation between the leaderships of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia ...(SKJ) and the Communist Party of France (KPF) during the 1968 student uprisings. Employing a comparative methods and historiographical research of archival sources, the article attempts to critically reconsider these issues. It investigates the sudden spike of interest among French communists in the historical evolution of the Yugoslav socialist model amidst the dispute within Europe’s extreme left. It also explores the level of understanding among French communists about the evolution of SKJ party politics and Yugoslav sociopolitical reality.
Tema rada je tretman političkoga tjednika Danas Predsjedništva Centralnoga komiteta Saveza komunista Hrvatske u prvoj godini njegova izlaženja, tijekom 1982. i 1983. Danas je počeo izlaziti u drugoj ...polovini veljače 1982., a već pola godine poslije postao je krupan politički problem. Tjednik se pojavio u razdoblju opće krize, s kritičkim, na trenutke i provokativnim pristupom izazvao je okoštalu i ostarjelu partijsku elitu odlučnu da brani svoj nedodirljivi položaj. U vrlo kratkom vremenu ustalio se na nakladi od oko 120.000 prodanih primjeraka, što svjedoči o njegovoj privlačnosti širokoj čitalačkoj populaciji, a s druge strane i utjecaju, što je zapravo zabrinjavalo partijski vrh. Pojavom Danasa počelo je nastajati kritičko javno mnijenje u socijalističkoj Hrvatskoj, što je dotad u većoj mjeri bila značajka Slovenije i Srbije. U obračun s tjednikom partijski vrh krenuo je u ljeto 1982. i privremeno ga je primirio početkom sljedeće godine. To je učinjeno smjenom glavnoga i odgovornoga urednika te dovođenjem novoga s mlađim pomoćnicima koji su bili na službenoj partijskoj liniji. Rezultat promjena bio je i drastičan pad naklade, što je tjednik doslovno svelo na životarenje i marginalan utjecaj.
The subject of this paper is the way the weekly Danas was treated by the Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia in the first year of its publication, during 1982 and 1983. Danas started being published in the second half of February 1982 and half a year later the periodical turned into a huge political issue. The newspaper appeared at a time of a general crisis; with its critical approach, at times even provocative, it frustrated the hardened and obsolete party elite which was determined to defend its hitherto inviolable position. Within a short period of time, the weekly attained a circulation of 120,000 copies, which testifies to its wide appeal as well as to its influence, which in fact distressed the party leadership. With the appearance of Danas, a critical public opinion started to come into being. The party leadership started to deal with the weekly in the summer of 1982 and temporarily discontinued it at the beginning of the following year. This was done by the replacement of the editor-in-chief with a new one, along with young associates who were willing to toe the party line. The result of the changes was a drop in circulation, which literally reduced the weekly to eking out an existence and having only marginal influence. The penalization of Danas was in fact an example of shutting down any public opinion unacceptable to the party leadership, through the principle of democratic centralism and its concrete implementation in practice. It was actually a conflict within the party in which lower-ranking communists lost out.
The conception of total people’s defence and social self-protection, as the Yugoslav defence-protection system was called, began to be implemented after the Warsaw Pact countries’ invasion of ...Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Yugoslav communists believed that this sudden and successful aggression could be effectively opposed only through the organised engagement of all available societal potentials, based on its revolutionary experience and reflections on Marxist classics regarding arming the populace. This was the beginning of a conception of defence that visibly burdened the society, increased the already large military budget, and prompted the militarisation of society. Although the security of society, called social self-protection, was discussed at the same time as defence, the true impetus for its theoretical and practical formation was the infiltration of the paramilitary cell Feniks (Phoenix) into Yugoslavia in summer 1972. In contrast to total people’s defence, whose implementation was considered successful, the implementation of social self-protection ran into numerous problems because security was from 1945 to 1966 exclusively the responsibility of the security service, and therefore difficult to accept in other social structures. For this reason, on several occasions the League of Communists initiated its acceptance on all levels of organisation in party and social-political structures. A relatively efficient fusion of these two protective complexes was achieved only in 1979, after the founding of committees for total people’s defence and social self-protection, which were supposed to secure the leading role of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in the defence-security system.
"The wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in neighboring Croatia and Kosovo grabbed the attention of the western world not only because of their ferocity and their geographic location, but also because of ...their timing. This violence erupted at the exact moment when the cold war confrontation was drawing to a close, when westerners were claiming their liberal values as triumphant, in a country that had only a few years earlier been seen as very well placed to join the west. In trying to account for this outburst, most western journalists, academics, and policymakers have resorted to the language of the premodern: tribalism, ethnic hatreds, cultural inadequacy, irrationality; in short, the Balkans as the antithesis of the modern west. Yet one of the most striking aspects of the wars in Yugoslavia is the extent to which the images purveyed in the western press and in much of the academic literature are so at odds with evidence from on the ground."-fromThe Myth of Ethnic War
V. P. Gagnon Jr. believes that the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s were reactionary moves designed to thwart populations that were threatening the existing structures of political and economic power. He begins with facts at odds with the essentialist view of ethnic identity, such as high intermarriage rates and the very high percentage of draft-resisters. These statistics do not comport comfortably with the notion that these wars were the result of ancient blood hatreds or of nationalist leaders using ethnicity to mobilize people into conflict.
Yugoslavia in the late 1980s was, in Gagnon's view, on the verge of large-scale sociopolitical and economic change. He shows that political and economic elites in Belgrade and Zagreb first created and then manipulated violent conflict along ethnic lines as a way to short-circuit the dynamics of political change. This strategy of violence was thus a means for these threatened elites to demobilize the population. Gagnon's noteworthy and rather controversial argument provides us with a substantially new way of understanding the politics of ethnicity.
Self-managing transformation of culture as a concept gained importance after numerous political and social changes in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), such as the adoption of a ...new Constitution in 1974 and the introduction of the Associated Labour Law in 1976. The term itself covers everything from party politics and workers’ (amateur) cultural practices, through free exchange of labour, to issues such as the humanisation of labour, interpersonal relations, and culture as a way of life. The proclaimed further democratisation of culture was to be achieved through the establishment of free exchange of labour between cultural workers (service providers) and workers in joint labour organisations (organizacije udruženog rada, OURs) and citizens in the local communities (mjesne zajednice, MZs), which was supposed to take place in the OURs and self-managing communities of interest (samoupravne interesne zajednice, SIZs). Through the establishment of bicameral delegate councils (one chamber comprising the ‘users’, i.e. the delegates of material production OURs and local communities, and the other ‘providers’, i.e. the delegates of culture OURs, amateur cultural-artistic associations, and independent artists), the cultural SIZs on the municipal level had to secure the conditions for satisfying the special and general cultural needs of all inhabitants of the municipality. This paper analyses the success of cultural reform on the micro level on the example of the Pula municipality, with special focus on the functioning of the delegate system.
After the USSR had lost the global “battle for the souls” against the Western world in the global aftermath of the great social and cultural revolution of the sixties, its potential for international ...integration of the progressive, socialist and leftist ideologies of the world rapidly declined, which opened up an era of Soviet isolationism. Yet at the same time, new major, “players” arose on the stage of international socialism. Communist parties of Western Europe, primarily those of France, Italy, and Spain, completed under the welfare state era their two decades long process of ideological evolution toward what was to become known as Euro-communism, and later as democratic socialism. In the aftermath of the great social and cultural revolution of the Western World during the sixties, and in the after-math of its falling out with the USSR following the Soviet aggression against Czechoslovakia after the events of the Prague Spring, the Italian Communist Party called upon its deputies and delegations of the foreign communist parties to attend the XII Congress of P.I.C., which was supposed to determine the future positions of the party concerning international affairs and conduct the long-awaited reconstruction of the party’s ideology, creating along the way the specific ideological line that was known among its contemporaries as the Italian path of socialism. Yugoslavia had been one of the strongest supporters of the Italian pathand of Italian criticism of the USSR. The Yugoslav delegation in Bologna conducted a series of talks with the Italian communist leaders and concluded a number of bilateral treaties with the Italian Communist Party. Also, the Yugoslav representatives used the occasion of their visit to strengthen relations with the representatives of the Italian Government. Sources show that Yugoslavia had started to take increasingly greater interest in the formation of the new European socialist ideologies, and the interest was apparently mutual, since the Yugoslav historical experience of breaking away from the Cominform two decades earlier and Yugoslav socialist ideas of selfgovernment of the working class had been one of main topics in the discussions that held at the XII Congress regarding the ideas for the reconstruction of the Italian Communist Party, its foreign policies, and its ideology.
U uslovima duboke ekonomske krize, posledica albanske pobune na Kosovu 1981. i sve očitijih slabosti društveno-ekonomskog i političkog sistema, političke krize i sporovi u posletitovskoj Jugoslaviji ...su bili neretka pojava. Tokom 1983. između rukovodstava Srbije i drugih republika, ali i srpskih pokrajina, izbilo je više nesaglasnosti, pre svega oko odgovornosti za politički neželjene pojave na sahrani Aleksandra Rankovića, pitanja izbora Draže Markovića za predsednika Predsedništva CK SKJ i sprečavanja objavljivanja knjiga koje je vlast ocenila kao politički nepoželjne.
A new category – the civil right – was added to the register of internal enemies of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, which the communist regime understood to be the groups and ...individuals who have been considered the critical intelligentsia in post-Yugoslav interpretations. The direct reason for its introduction was the assessment that the intellectual opposition and enemies across Yugoslavia were uniting to achieve a partnership position vis-a-vis the League of Communists. The assessment was unfounded, the intellectual opposition, irrespective of how we define it (dissidents, critical intelligentsia, and the like) had very little influence or strong association. It was limited to intellectual reviews and magazines whose circulation was small and whose humble influence could be measured in numbers as several hundred interested people. The regime considered the civil right as its most dangerous opposition in the middle and second half of the 1980s due to its intellectual constitution. Such an assessment was the usual exaggeration of the system which had a habit of giving unacceptable phenomena a decidedly greater significance than was the case. The civil right should be approached as a phenomenon that can be the stimulus for research on intellectual history in the non-liberal society of the last few years of socialism. This new type of enemy greatly “benefited” nationalists, a significant number of whom were assigned into the civil right category, which subsequently meant milder treatment as accusations of nationalism were the severest qualification of the regime in the 1980s, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. Serbian and Slovene nationalism benefited the most from the new category. The greater part of the civil right from the mid 1980s was already holding posts, which were undoubtedly nationalist, as early as 1989.
Tema rada je veliki štrajk u riječkoj luci koji je izbio u lipnju 1969. godine. Iako je taj, na momente i nasilan, izljev radničkoga nezadovoljstva iznenadio i uznemirio partijski vrh, u ...historiografiji je ta epizoda ostala gotovo nepoznata. U radu ćemo analizirati uzroke štrajka, njegove posljedice i reakcije koje je izazvao u državnom rukovodstvu. Korišteni su izvori iz Arhiva Jugoslavije, kao i relevantna periodika i literatura.
Klubove jugoslavenske nogometne Prve savezne lige, a dijelom i Druge savezne lige, sedamdesetih godina XX. stoljeća zahvatila je komercijalizacija, koja se očitovala tako da su svi odnosi unutar ...kluba kao i odnosi s drugim organizacijama bili podređeni osnovnom cilju: kako osigurati dovoljno sredstava za financiranje troškova. Stručni i pedagoški rad u klubu bio je prepušten nekolicini stručnjaka. Sve ostale, poglavito društvene radnike u klubu, zaokupljalo je kako prikupiti dovoljno sredstava za financiranje kluba. Uglavnom se vodila briga o različitim dopunskim djelatnostima u klubu, a manje o radu i problemima nogometnoga sporta. Takvo je stanje poticalo razvijanje najamnih odnosa, kupoprodaju nogometaša, a samoupravljanje u klubu svodilo se na formalno potvrđivanje zaključaka prihvaćenih u uskim skupinama. Donošenjem Zakona o udruženom radu nastojalo se samoupravne odnose uvesti i u nogometne klubove Prve savezne lige.