Croatia in the second Yugoslavia

Under the new communist system, private property was nationalized. This caused the old landowners as well as the Catholic Church in Croatia to lose large amounts of wealth. The prosecution of the latter was largely due to the involvement of Croatian Catholic clergy with the Ustaša regime, but the Yugoslav government was nevertheless notably more leniant than other Eastern Bloc states. The republic underwent a major rebuilding process in order to recover from World War II. A notable phenomenon during this process were the major volunteer public works that rallied young people in the building of roads and other public facilities. In contrast to popular oppinion, the vast majority of public works of the period (among others, the Adriatic coastline highway) were financed by the federal government.

[edit] Economics

The economy developed into a type of socialism called "self-management" (samoupravljanje), where the workers partially shared profit in state-run enterprises. This kind of a market socialism allowed for significantly better economic conditions than in the Eastern Bloc countries. Croatia went through intensive industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s which saw it's industrial output increase several-fold and Zagreb surpassed Belgrade by the amount of industry located at the city. Factories and other organizations were often named after Partisans who were declared People's Heroes. Before WWII Croatia's industry was almost insignificant and a vast majority of the people were employed in agriculture, by 1991 the country was completely transformed into a modern industrialized state. At the same time, the Croatian Adriatic coast began to take shape once again as an increasingly popular tourist destination, indeed Croatia has yet to boast such high numbers of tourists. The country eventually completely recovered from the war and achieved an as yet unsurpassed GDP and economic growth rate, significantly higher than the present-day Republic.

[edit] Politics

On the political front, the Croats were still in a minority in Yugoslavia compared to the Serbs, but Tito, himself a Croat, adopted a carefully contrived policy to manage the conflicting national ambitions of the two nations: nationalism on either side was suppressed. The constitution of 1963, the one that introduced the country name Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRY, didn't allow Serbs to have all the political power in the country. Croatians participated in state politics at the highest levels: five out of the nine Prime Ministers of the SFRY were Croats. The Serbs dominated the secret services and the military, as most of the generals in the Yugoslav People's Army were either Serbian or Montenegrin.

Trends after 1965 led to the Croatian Spring of 1970-71, 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, much to the (eventual) satisfaction of the protesters.

[edit] Tito's death

In 1980, after Tito's death, political and economic difficulties started to mount and the federal government began to crumble. The economy was actually in a very good shape until the fall of communism, and Croatia was the second richest of the six republics, surpassed only by Slovenia. However, probably due to the imminent end of the Cold War and all the subtle benefits Yugoslavia received because of it, inflation soared. The last federal prime minister Ante Marković, who was from Croatia, spent two years implementing various economic and political reforms. His government's efforts were initially successful, but ultimately they failed due to the incurable political instability of the SFRY.

Ethnic tensions were on the increase and would result in the demise of Yugoslavia. The growing crisis in Kosovo, the nationalist memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the emergence of Slobodan Milošević as the leader of Serbia, and everything else that followed provoked a very negative reaction in Croatia. The fifty-year-old rift was starting to resurface, and the Croats increasingly began to show their own national feelings and express opposition towards the Belgrade regime.

On October 17, 1989, the rock group Prljavo Kazalište held a major concert before almost 250,000 people on the central Zagreb city square. In the light of the changing political circumstances, their song Mojoj majci ("To my mother"), where the songwriter hailed the mother in the song as "the last rose of Croatia", was taken to heart by the fans on the location and many more elsewhere because of the expressed patriotism.

[edit] New constitutional policy

In 1990, on the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the delegation of Serbia led by Milošević insisted on replacing the 1974 constitutional policy that empowered the republics with a policy of "one person, one vote", which would benefit the majority population, the Serbs. This caused the Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan, respectively) to leave the Congress in protest and marked a culmination in the rift of the ruling party.

Ethnic Serbs, who constituted 12% of the population of Croatia, rejected the notion of separation from Yugoslavia. Serb politicians feared the loss of influence they previously had through their membership of the League of Communists in Croatia (that the Croats claimed was disproportionate). Memories from the Second World War were manipulated and exploited by the increasingly militant Belgrade regime of Slobodan Milošević.

As Milošević and his clique rode the wave of Serbian nationalism across Yugoslavia, talking about battles to be fought for Serbdom, emerging Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman reciprocated with talk about making Croatia a nation state. The availability of mass media allowed for propaganda to be spread fast and spark jingoism and fear, creating a war climate.

In March 1990, the Yugoslav People's Army met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia (an eight member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces) in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. The representatives of Croatia (Stipe Mesić), Slovenia (Janez Drnovšek), Macedonia (Vasil Tupurkovski) and Bosnia (Bogić Bogićević) voted against it. The others were for the decision, and the tie somewhat delayed escalation of conflicts.

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Categories: History of Croatia | Second Yugoslavia