Tito's funeral on the 8th of May 1980 was attended by 128 foreign delegations, including four kings, thirty-one presidents, twenty-two prime ministers, and forty-seven foreign ministers. It was, by some measures, the largest state funeral of the Cold War. The international tributes were extraordinary, but the political problem they masked was equally extraordinary. Yugoslavia had been, for thirty-five years, a country in which the basic political question — how the six republics and two autonomous provinces would balance their interests against the federation — was managed personally by Tito. From the day of his funeral, it was no longer being managed.
The constitutional arrangement set up in advance of Tito's death was a rotating collective presidency: the eight republican and provincial heads of state, plus a federal Communist Party representative, would take turns chairing the federal presidency, with annual rotation. The federal government would be appointed by the rotating presidency, with the prime minister also subject to annual rotation. The system was designed to prevent any single individual or republic from accumulating Tito-level authority. It worked exactly as designed. By the late 1980s no one in Yugoslavia had Tito-level authority. Almost no one in the federal government had any authority at all.
The economic collapse
The economic situation, which had been worrying in 1980, was disastrous by 1985. Yugoslavia's foreign debt grew from $19 billion to $21 billion by 1989 (heavy for a country of 23 million). Inflation rose from around 30% in 1980 to 100% by 1985 to 2,000% by 1989. Unemployment, despite the safety valve of guest-worker emigration, reached 17%. The standard of living, which had risen continuously for thirty years, began to fall. Strikes — illegal under Yugoslav law but practically tolerated — spread through 1987 and 1988. Around 1,800 strikes were recorded in 1988 alone, involving perhaps half a million workers.
The federal government attempted, repeatedly and ineffectually, to implement structural reform. The IMF, in negotiations beginning in 1982, demanded austerity, privatisation, and a reduction in inter-republican subsidies. The republican governments — particularly the wealthier Slovenia and Croatia, which felt themselves bankrolling the southern republics — increasingly resisted federal economic policy. The political will to implement difficult reforms simply did not exist; each republican government preferred to blame the federal government and the other republics.
The Memorandum
The political disintegration of Yugoslavia began with a leaked document. In September 1986, the Belgrade newspaper Večernje Novosti printed extracts from a draft memorandum prepared by a commission of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. The Memorandum, written by a group of nationalist Serbian academics led by Dobrica Ćosić, argued that Serbia had been systematically discriminated against under the post-1974 constitutional arrangements: that Serbs in the autonomous province of Kosovo were being persecuted by the Albanian majority; that the Vojvodina autonomous province should be reintegrated into Serbia; and that the federal economic transfers from Serbia to the other republics had become a form of internal colonialism. The document was a piece of Serbian nationalist polemic, but it articulated grievances that had real political resonance.
The Memorandum became the founding text of a new Serbian nationalist politics. Its arguments were taken up, with increasing force, by a previously obscure Serbian Communist Party functionary named Slobodan Milošević. Milošević — a former banker, head of the Serbian Communist Party from 1986 — discovered, in the autumn of 1987 at a Communist Party meeting at Kosovo Polje, that Serbian nationalism could be a path to popular political power. He famously told a Serb crowd that "no one would beat them any more," to wild applause. He used the moment to manoeuvre out his moderate predecessor Ivan Stambolić within the Serbian Party.
The "anti-bureaucratic revolution"
Over the following two years, Milošević conducted what he called the "anti-bureaucratic revolution": a series of orchestrated mass demonstrations (organised by his party and trade union allies) that toppled the leaderships of Vojvodina (October 1988), Montenegro (January 1989), and Kosovo (March 1989). In each case the existing republican or provincial Communist leadership was replaced by Milošević loyalists. The result was that by the spring of 1989, Milošević controlled the votes of Serbia, Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Kosovo on the federal collective presidency — four of the eight votes. He had effectively constructed a Serbian bloc that could veto federal decisions.
The other republics' response was, predictably, to organise themselves against him. Slovenia, the wealthiest and most westward-oriented republic, was the first to move. In 1989 the Slovene Communist Party amended its republican constitution to allow multiparty elections; the elections were held in April 1990 and brought to power the centrist coalition DEMOS. Slovenia began, with increasing confidence, to talk about a "confederal" arrangement that would allow it to remove itself from Milošević's reach.
Croatia followed in April-May 1990, with elections that brought to power the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) of Franjo Tuđman, a former Partisan general turned nationalist historian. Bosnia-Herzegovina held elections in November 1990 that produced a coalition government of three nationalist parties (Bosniak, Serb, and Croat) that could not agree on much beyond the right to disagree. Macedonia held elections that produced a multi-party parliament but no clear majority.
By the end of 1990, every Yugoslav republic except Serbia and Montenegro had a non-Communist government that was, to varying degrees, ethnonationalist. The federal institutions could no longer make decisions. The country was approaching dissolution, and the question was no longer whether but how.
The 14th Party Congress
The symbolic moment of dissolution came at the 14th Extraordinary Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, held in Belgrade from the 20th to the 22nd of January 1990. The Slovenian delegation, led by Milan Kučan, walked out of the Congress on the second day after a series of motions to democratise the federal Party were blocked by the Serbian delegation under Milošević. The Croatian delegation followed. The Party — the federal institution that had held Yugoslavia together since 1945 — split along republican lines and effectively ceased to exist as a federal body.
From January 1990, Yugoslavia as a country had eighteen months left.
The wars that followed are the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VII