Yugoslavia
From The UCSC Wikipedia Trust Project
Yugoslavia (Jugoslavija in Latin, Југославија in Cyrillic, English: "Land of the South Slavs") describes four political entities that existed one at a time on the Balkan Peninsula in Europe, during most of the 20th century.
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia (December 1, 1918–April 17, 1941), also known as the First Yugoslavia, was a monarchy formed as the "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" after World War I and re-named on January 6, 1929 by Alexander I of Yugoslavia. It was invaded on April 6, 1941 by the Axis powers and capitulated eleven days later.
The Second Yugoslavia (November 29, 1943–June 25, 1991), a socialist successor state to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, existed under various names, including the "Democratic Federation of Yugoslavia (DFY)" (1943), the "Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY)" (1946), and the "Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY)" (1963). It disintegrated following the Yugoslav Wars, which led to the secession of most of the constituent elements of the SFRY.
The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) (April 27, 1992–February 4, 2003), was a federation on the territory of the two remaining republics of Serbia (including the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo and Metohija) and Montenegro.
The Union of Serbia and Montenegro was formed on February 4, 2003 and officially abolished the name "Yugoslavia." On June 3 and June 5, 2006, Montenegro and Serbia respectively declared their independence, thereby ending the last remnants of the former Yugoslav federation.
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Background
Southern Slavic State
The first idea of a state for all South Slavs emerged in the late 17th century, a product of visionary thinking of Croat writers and philosophers who believed that the only way for southern Slavs to regain lost freedom after centuries of occupation under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire would be to unite and free themselves of tyrannies and dictatorships. They gave it the name Ilirski Pokret (Illyric Movement) and gathered many prominent Croatian intellectuals and politicians around the new idea, but the movement started gaining large momentum only at the end of the 19th century, mainly because of the harsh policies against freedom movements among occupied southern Slavs practiced by Austrian and Hungarian dictators. As the Ottoman Empire grew weaker and Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece grew stronger after the Berlin Congress, hope for sovereignty of the South Slavic peoples in the Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary) increased, and the idea of a union between them gained momentum.
During the early period of World War I (which started in 1914), a number of prominent political figures, including Ante Trumbić, Ivan Meštrović, Nikola Stojanović and others from South Slavic lands under the Habsburg Empire fled to London, where they began work on forming a Yugoslav Committee. Their mission was to represent the south Slavs of the empire, and they chose London as their headquarters.
The Yugoslav Committee
The Yugoslav Committee (Jugoslavenski odbor) was officially formed on April 30, 1915 in London, and began to raise funds, especially among South Slavs living in the Americas. Because of their stature, the members of the Yugoslav Committee were able to make their views known to the Allied governments, which began to take them more seriously as the fate of Austro-Hungarian Empire became more uncertain.
While the committee's basic aim was the unification of the Habsburg south Slav lands with Serbia (which was independent at the time), its more immediate concern was to head off Italian claims in Istria and Dalmatia. In 1915, the Allies had lured the Italians into the war with a promise of substantial territorial gains in exchange. According to the secret London Pact, these included Istria and large parts of Dalmatia, which had substantial numbers of Italians living in the coastal cities surrounded by Slavs.
Although in 1915 the Serbian Assembly had pledged itself to work for the liberation of all Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, non-Serb members of the Yugoslav Committee became alarmed when the Allies offered Serbia lands that had not been reserved for Italians. These included Bosnia, Herzegovina, Slavonia, Bačka and parts of Dalmatia. Croat members of the Committee feared a carve-up of Croat lands between Serbia and Italy. There were also quarrels about the designation and command of units of south Slav POWs in Russia now being mobilised to fight with the Allies. The Yugoslav Committee wanted them to fight in the Yugoslav name, while Nikola Pašić (Prime Minister of Serbia), seeing in this a "Croat Army", wanted them to fight under the Serbian flag.
Corfu agreement
During June and July 1917, the Yugoslav Committee met with the Serbian Government in Corfu and on 20 July a declaration that laid the foundation for the post-war state was issued. The preamble stated that the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were "the same by blood, by language, by the feelings of their unity, by the continuity and integrity of the territory which they inhabit undividedly, and by the common vital interests of their national survival and manifold development of their moral and material life". The future state was to be called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and was to be a constitutional monarchy under the Karađorđević dynasty.
The unification of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs
As the Habsburg Empire dissolved, a National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs took power in Zagreb on 6 October 1918. On 29 October, the Croatian Sabor (or parliament) declared independence and vested its sovereignty in the new State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs. The Yugoslav Committee was given the task of representing the new state abroad. However, quarrels broke out immediately about the terms of the proposed union with Serbia. Svetozar Pribićević, a Croatian Serb, a leader of the Croatian-Serbian Coalition and vice-precedent of the state, wanted an immediate and unconditional union. Others (non-Serbs), who favoured a federal Yugoslavia were more hesitant. They feared that Serbia would simply annex the former Habsburg territories. The National Council's authority was limited and the Italians were moving to take more territory than they had been allotted in an agreement with the Yugoslav Committee. Political opinion was divided, and Serbian ministers said that if Croats insisted on their own republic or sort of independence, then Serbia would simply take areas inhabited by the Serbs and already occupied by the Serbian Army. After much debate, the National Council agreed to unification with Serbia, although its declaration stated that the final organization of the state should be left to the future Constituent Assembly. The most prominent opponent of this decision was Stjepan Radić, the leader of the Croatian Peasant Party (Hrvatska Seljačka Stranka, HSS). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was declared on 1 December 1918 in Belgrade.
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
King Alexander's dictatorship
Following this, King Aleksandar I banned national political parties in 1929, assumed executive power and renamed the country Yugoslavia. He hoped to curb separatist tendencies and mitigate nationalist passions. However, Aleksandar's policies soon ran into the obstacle of opposition from other European powers due to developments in Italy and Germany, where Fascists and Nazis rose to power, and the Soviet Union, where Stalin became absolute ruler. None of these three regimes favoured the policy pursued by Aleksandar I. In fact, Italy and Germany wanted to revise the international treaties signed after World War I, and the Soviets were determined to regain their positions in Europe and pursue a more active international policy.
Alexander attempted to create a genuine Yugoslavia. He decided to abolish Yugoslavia's historic regions, and new internal boundaries were drawn for provinces or banovinas. The banovinas were named after rivers. Many politicians were jailed or kept under tight police surveillance. The effect of Alexander's dictatorship was to further alienate the non-Serbs of the idea of unity.
The king was assassinated in Marseilles during an official visit to France in 1934 by an experienced marksman from Ivan Mihailov's IMRO in the cooperation of the Ustaše, a Croatian separatist organization that pursued Nazi policies. Aleksandar was succeeded by his eleven year old son Peter II and a regency council headed by his cousin Prince Paul.
The 1930s in Yugoslavia
The international political scene in the late 1930s was marked by growing intolerance between the principal figures, by the aggressive attitude of the totalitarian regimes and by the certainty that the order set up after World War I was losing its strongholds and its sponsors were losing their strength. Supported and pressured by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Croatian leader Vlatko Maček and his party managed the creation of the Croatian banovina (administrative province) in 1939. The agreement specified that Croatia was to remain part of Yugoslavia, but it was hurriedly building an independent political identity in international relations.
Prince Paul submitted to the fascist pressure and signed the Tripartite Treaty in Vienna on March 25, 1941, hoping to still keep Yugoslavia out of the war. But this was at the expense of popular support for Paul's regency. Senior military officers were also opposed to the treaty and launched a coup d'état when the king returned on March 27. Army General Dušan Simović seized power, arrested the Vienna delegation, exiled Paul, and ended the regency, giving 17 year old King Peter full powers.
The beginning of World War II in Yugoslavia
Hitler then decided to attack Yugoslavia on April 6 1941, followed immediately by an invasion of Greece where Mussolini had previously been repelled. (As a result, the launch of Operation Barbarossa was delayed by four weeks, which proved to be a costly decision.)
Yugoslavia during the Second World War
The invasion of Yugoslavia
Template:MainAt 5:15 a.m. on April 6 1941, German, Italian, Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces attacked Yugoslavia. The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade and other major Yugoslav cities. On April 17, representatives of Yugoslavia's various regions signed an armistice with Germany at Belgrade, ending eleven days of resistance against the invading German Wehrmacht. More than three hundred thousand Yugoslav officers and soldiers were taken prisoners.
The Axis Powers occupied Yugoslavia and split it up. The Independent State of Croatia was established as a Nazi puppet-state, ruled by the Catholic fascist militia known as the Ustaše that came into existence in 1929, but was relatively limited in its activities until 1941. German troops occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as part of Serbia and Slovenia, while other parts of the country were occupied by Bulgaria, Hungary and Italy. During this time the Independent State of Croatia created concentration camps for anti-fascists, communists, Serbs, Gypsies and Jews, one of the most famous being Jasenovac. A large number of men, women and children were executed in these camps, most of whom were Serbs. According to Mile Budak, Croatia planned to kill a third of Serbs, convert a third to Catholicism, and ethnically cleanse the last third.
Resistance movements
Template:MainYugoslavs opposing the Nazis organized resistance movement. Those inclined towards supporting the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia joined the Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland, also known as the Chetniks, a multiethnic, though largely Serb, royalist guerilla army led by Dragoljub "Draža" Mihailović. Those inclined towards supporting the Communist Party (Komunistička partija), and were against the King, joined the Yugoslav National Liberation Army (Narodno Oslobodilačka Vojska or NOV), led by Josip Broz Tito .
The NOV initiated a guerrilla campaign which was developed into the largest resistance army in occupied Western and Central Europe. The Chetniks initially made notable incursions and were supported by the exiled royal government as well as the Allies, but were soon restrained from taking wider actions due to German reprisals against the Serb civilian population.
For every killed soldier, the Germans executed 100 civilians, and for each wounded, they killed 50. Regarding the human cost as too high, the Chetniks' terminated war activities against the Germans, and the Allies eventually switched to support the NOV.
However, NOV carried on its guerrilla warfare. The demographic loss is estimated at 1,027,000 individuals by Vladimir Žerjavić and Bogoljub Kočović, an estimate accepted by the United Nations, while the official Yugoslav authorities claimed 1,700,000 casualties. Very high losses were among Serbs who lived in Bosnia and Croatia, as well as Jewish and Roma minorities, high also among all other non-collaborating population.
During the war, the communist-led partisans were de facto rulers on the liberated territories, and the NOV organized people's committees to act as civilian government. In Autumn of 1941, the partisans established the Republic of Užice in the liberated territory of western Serbia. In November 1941, the German troops occupied this territory again, while the majority of partisan forces escaped towards Bosnia.
On November 25, 1942, the Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia (Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije) was convened in Bihać. The council reconvened on November 29, 1943 in Jajce and established the basis for post-war organisation of the country, establishing a federation (this date was celebrated as Republic Day after the war).
The liberation of Yugoslavia
The NOV was able to expel the Axis from Serbia in 1944 and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1945. The Red Army aided in liberating Belgrade as well as some other territories, but withdrew after the war was over. In May 1945, NOV met with allied forces outside former Yugoslav borders, after taking over also Trieste and parts of Austrian southern provinces Styria and Carinthia. This was the territory populated predominantly by Italians. However, the NLA withdrew from Trieste in June of the same year.
Westerner attempts to reunite the partisans, who denied supremacy of the old government of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and the emigration loyal to the king, led to the Tito-Šubašić Agreement in June 1944, however Tito was seen as a national hero by the citizens, so he gained the power in post-war independent communist state, starting as a prime minister.
The Second Yugoslavia
Main article: Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
On January 31, 1946 the new constitution of Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia, modeling the Soviet Union, established six Socialist Republics, a Socialist Autonomous Province, and a Socialist Autonomous District that were part of SR Serbia. The federal capital was Belgrade. Republics and provinces were (in alphabetical order):
- Socialist republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the capital in Sarajevo,
- Socialist republic of Croatia, with the capital in Zagreb,
- Socialist republic of Macedonia, with the capital in Skopje,
- Socialist republic of Montenegro, with the capital in Titograd (now Podgorica),
- Socialist republic of Serbia, with the capital in Belgrade, which also contained:
5a. Socialist autonomous district of Kosovo and Metohija, with the capital in Priština
5b. Socialist autonomous province of Vojvodina, with the capital in Novi Sad - Socialist republic of Slovenia, with the capital in Ljubljana.
In 1974, the two provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija (for the latter had by then been upgraded to the status of a province), as well as the republics of Bosnia & Herzegovina and Montenegro, were granted greater autonomy to the point that Albanian and Hungarian became nationally recognised minority languages and the Serbo-Croat of Bosnia and Montenegro altered to a form based on the speech of the local people and not on the standards of Zagreb and Belgrade.
Vojvodina and Kosovo-Metohija form a part of the Republic of Serbia. The country distanced itself from the Soviets in 1948 (cf. Cominform and Informbiro) and started to build its own way to socialism under the strong political leadership of Josip Broz Tito. The country criticized both Eastern bloc and NATO nations and, together with other countries, started the Non-Aligned Movement in 1961, which remained the official affiliation of the country until it dissolved.
The economy
Template:MainAlthough rigorously socialist in developing its industrial base, Yugoslavia allowed a certain amount of capitalist incursions, in the spirit of pluralism. This openness to western investment, however, sowed the seeds of the federation's demise. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia enjoyed stability and peace. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the growth of Yugoslavia's gross domestic product averaged 6.1%. There was 91% literacy and an average life expectancy of 72 years. The state provided housing, health care, education, and child care. Citizens lived well on a per capita income of $3,000 a year (in 1980 dollars), with one month paid vacation, plus a year's maternity leave, if needed. Respect for workers was a central concern of government and society.
Population
The population of the large Yugoslavia in 1980 was 23,000,000 million.After it broke in 1990 15,200,000 million.
The government
On April 7, 1963 the nation changed its official name to Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Tito was named President for life.
In SFRY, each republic and province had its own constitution, supreme court, parliament, president and prime minister. At the top of the Yugoslav government were the President (Tito), the federal Prime Minister, and the federal Parliament (a collective Presidency was formed after Tito's death in 1980).
Also important were the Communist Party general secretaries for each republic and province, and the general secretary of Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Josip Broz Tito was the most powerful person in the country, followed by republican and provincial premiers and presidents, and Communist Party presidents. A wide variety of people suffered from his disfavor. Slobodan Penezić Krcun, Tito's chief of secret police in Serbia, fell victim to a dubious traffic incident after he started to complain about Tito's politics. The Interior Minister Aleksandar Ranković lost all of his titles and rights after a major disagreement with Tito regarding state politics. Sometimes ministers in government, such as Edvard Kardelj or Stane Dolanc, were more important than the Prime Minister.
The suppression of national identities escalated with the so-called Croatian Spring of 1970-1971, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders, but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics in Yugoslavia and provinces in Serbia.
Ethnic tensions and the economic crisis
The post-World War II Yugoslavia was in many respects a model of how to build a multinational state. The Federation was constructed against a double background: an inter-war Yugoslavia which had been dominated by the Serbian ruling class; and a war-time slaughter in which the Nazis made use of the earlier Serbian oppression to use Croatian fascism for barbarous acts against the Serbs and also exploited anti-Serb sentiment amongst the Kosovar Albanians - and some elements in the Bosnian Muslim population - to bolster their rule.
There has been one structural element in the post-World War II Yugoslav state's stability: the joint concern of the USSR and the USA to maintain the integrity of Yugoslavia as a neutral state on the frontiers of the super-power confrontation in Europe.
The economic crisis was the product of disastrous errors by Yugoslav governments in the 1970s, borrowing vast amounts of Western capital in order to fund growth through exports. Western economies then entered recession, blocked Yugoslav exports and created a huge debt problem. The Yugoslav government then accepted the IMF's conditionalities which shifted the burden of the crisis onto the Yugoslav working class. Simultaneously, strong social groups emerged within the Yugoslav Communist Party, allied to Western business, banking and state interests and began pushing towards neoliberalism, to the delight of the US. It was the Reagan administration which, in 1984, had adopted a "Shock Therapy" proposal to push Yugoslavia towards a capitalist restoration.
This, naturally, undermined a central pillar of the state: the socialist link between the Communist Party and the working class. The forms and effects of this varied in different parts of Yugoslavia. First in Kosovo in 1981, where the links between Yugoslav communism and the population had always been the weakest and where the economic crisis was most intense, there was an uprising demanding full republican status for Kosovo, as well as unification with Albania.
In 1989 Jeffrey Sachs was in Yugoslavia helping the Federal government under Ante Marković prepare the IMF/World Bank "Shock Therapy" package, which was then introduced in 1990 just at the time when the crucial parliamentary elections were being held in the various republics.
One aspect of Yugoslavia's "Shock Therapy" programme was both unique within the region and of great political importance in 1989-90. The bankruptcy law to liquidate state enterprises was enacted in the 1989 Financial Operations Act which required that if an enterprise was insolvent for 30 days running, or for 30 days within a 45 day period, it had to settle with its creditors either by giving them ownership or by being liquidated, in which case workers would be sacked, normally without severance payments.
In 1989, according to official sources, 248 firms were declared bankrupt or were liquidated and 89,400 workers were laid off. During the first nine months of 1990 directly following the adoption of the IMF programme, another 889 enterprises with a combined work-force of 525,000 workers suffered the same fate. In other words, in less than two years "the trigger mechanism" (under the Financial Operations Act) had led to the lay off of more than 600,000 workers out of a total industrial workforce of the order of 2.7 million. A further 20% of the work force, or half a million people, were not paid wages during the early months of 1990 as enterprises sought to avoid bankruptcy. The largest concentrations of bankrupt firms and lay-offs were in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia