The economic and political model that emerged in Yugoslavia after the Stalin split is called samoupravljanje — self-management. It was developed by the Yugoslav theorist Edvard Kardelj, with input from Tito and the philosopher Milovan Đilas (who would later, in the late 1950s, break with the regime over questions of intra-party democracy and spend years in prison for it).
The core idea of self-management was that, in a Marxist framework, factories should not be owned by the state but by their own workers, organised through workers' councils that elected management, set production plans, and distributed profits. The model was, in its rhetoric, a return to the Marxist idea of the "association of free producers." In practice, the workers' councils operated under heavy supervision from the Communist Party, the trade unions, and the federal-republican planning agencies. Real autonomy varied enormously by enterprise and by decade — limited in the 1950s, expanded in the 1960s and 1970s — but it was, in even its diluted form, a genuine institutional innovation that distinguished Yugoslav socialism from every other Communist system.
The economic results were mixed but, by Communist-bloc standards, generally good. Yugoslav GDP grew at an average annual rate of around 6% between 1953 and 1980, one of the highest sustained growth rates in Europe over that period. Industrial output increased about tenfold. Urbanisation transformed the country: from 20% urban in 1953 to 50% by 1980. The country built up a substantial industrial base (the Zenica steelworks, the Iskra electrical equipment factory in Slovenia, the Crvena Zastava car plant at Kragujevac making Fiat-licensed Yugos, the Energoinvest engineering combine at Sarajevo, the Industrija Motornih Vozila truck plant at Rakovica). It built up an export-quality tourism industry along the Adriatic coast that, by 1980, was bringing in around $1.5 billion a year in hard currency. It built up the highest level of consumer-goods availability in any Communist country.
The opening to the West
The most distinctive feature of Yugoslav life under self-management — the feature that made the country different from every other Communist state — was its openness to the West. Yugoslav citizens had passports good for foreign travel; by 1970 about a third of the population had visited a Western country. Yugoslav workers went on guest-worker contracts to West Germany, Austria, and Switzerland; by the late 1970s there were perhaps 800,000 Yugoslav Gastarbeiter in Western Europe, sending remittances home that became one of the country's largest foreign-currency earners.
The cultural opening was equally distinctive. Western films played in Yugoslav cinemas (with some delay and selective censorship). Western pop music played on Yugoslav radio. Western newspapers were available at hotel newsstands in the major cities. Yugoslav writers, filmmakers, and artists travelled to Western festivals; Western artists travelled to Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s — Dušan Makavejev, Aleksandar Petrović, Žika Pavlović, Želimir Žilnik — produced films that competed at Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) won a critic's prize at Cannes; Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies (1967) won the Grand Prix in 1967.
Skopje, 1963
The most consequential single event of the self-management period was a natural disaster. At 5:17 a.m. on the 26th of July 1963, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the Macedonian capital of Skopje. The shaking lasted twenty seconds. About 80% of the city was destroyed or rendered uninhabitable; 1,070 people died; 200,000 were left homeless. The Yugoslav federal government, with substantial international assistance (the United Nations declared Skopje a "City of International Solidarity"; aid arrived from 78 countries), embarked on what became the most ambitious post-war urban reconstruction project in Europe.
The master plan, drawn up by the Japanese architect Kenzō Tange in collaboration with a Yugoslav team, was an exercise in concrete modernist urbanism on a metropolitan scale. The new Skopje — built between 1965 and 1980 — combined modernist apartment blocks, an enormous Brutalist post office (still standing), the Old Railway Station (preserved as the City Museum, its clock still stopped at 5:17), the cantilevered Macedonian Telecom building, and a residential ring of new neighbourhoods. The reconstruction is now considered one of the great achievements of post-war architectural modernism and is, since 2017, the subject of a slowly developing UNESCO heritage proposal.
The Spomeniks
The other distinctive cultural inheritance of the self-management period was the network of large abstract concrete monuments — the spomeniks — built across Yugoslavia between 1955 and 1985 to commemorate the Partisan war and the workers' movement. About 200 large spomeniks were built (and several thousand smaller ones), generally on sites of wartime battles, massacres, or partisan camps. They were designed by leading Yugoslav sculptors and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Vojin Bakić, Dušan Džamonja, Miodrag Živković) in a deliberately abstract idiom that avoided both socialist realism and explicit ethnic symbolism.
The spomeniks were intentionally non-figurative because Tito's regime understood that figurative wartime monuments would inevitably acquire ethnic-nationalist meaning (a statue of a Partisan soldier reads differently to a Serb, a Croat, a Muslim, a Slovene). The abstract concrete forms — flowers, wings, spirals, cubes, fists — were intended to commemorate the war without picking sides. After 1991 most of them were left to decay, sometimes vandalised; many were re-discovered by Western photographers in the 2000s and 2010s and became, somewhat to the surprise of their original designers, internet-famous as "lost monuments to a lost country."
The accumulating problems
By the late 1970s, however, the model was running into trouble. The self-management firms had developed a tendency to over-invest, over-employ, and over-borrow on the international markets. Inflation was creeping up. The country's foreign debt had grown to alarming levels — about $19 billion by 1980, a substantial figure for a country of 22 million. The 1973 oil shock had hit Yugoslav consumers hard. The 1974 constitution, designed to address the perennial issue of inter-republican relations, had decentralised power to the six republics and two autonomous provinces to such an extent that federal economic management had become almost impossible.
Tito himself was, by the late 1970s, in his late eighties and visibly aging. He had been the political organising principle of the federation for thirty-five years. When he died on the 4th of May 1980, at the age of 87, in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana, the country faced a question it had never had to face: how to continue without him.
The next chapter takes up the answer that no one wanted to give.
End of Chapter VI