As seen in the previous four empirical chapters dealing with the Irish Republican and Basque national movements, it is the ability of movements to create a continuous state of mobilisation between state centre and periphery, and the subsequent polarisation that such a situation entails, that may aid them in the attainment of their goal of independence. The incorporation of NVDA, VDA and electoral formalisation must be measured so as to avoid a simultaneous consolidation of the struggle and state structural reform. The successful movement, as I will attempt to demonstrate, is the one which so polarises the system in the face of state engendered reform, that it forces the state to exclude the minority allowing for ethnic cleavages to emerge that will ensure a breakdown of the political system. Thus, it must be the movement, rather than the state, that completes the cycle. For this to occur it must force the state’s hand by ensuring that it expands far enough to provide political alternatives to that of the centre’s. It must ‘mimic’ the state’s actions and reactions to the extent of even ‘mimicking’ its own formation. It is the aim of these final chapters to demonstrate that the Croat movement was able to employ similar strategies as the Irish and Basque movements, but was able to achieve its goals via utilising lulls in the cycle to consolidate its position before acting. Hence, only by engaging the state in a full confrontational way at the very end of the collection of cycles could it achieve independence.

This chapter will chart the rise of the Croat movement, under the gaze of the League of Communists of Croatia (LCC), from the end of World War II until the death of Tito. Thus, this chapter will be divided into two sections. The first will deal with the emergence of the first wave of protest that manifested itself in the Croatian Spring movement of 1971 as a direct consequence of generational changes that emerged from the state centre’s own debate over the nature in which Yugoslav nation-state development should be addressed. I will examine how the separate development of competing movements was to manifest in the form of the Serbian unitarist oriented national movement at the centre, and the Croat decentralists on the periphery, of the Yugoslav Federation. This will commence with a look at the rise of the liberalist wing led by the LCC and Slovenian League of Communists (SLC), under the party wartime dialetician Edvard Kardelj. As well as the counter-movement it engendered led by the League of Communist Serbia’s Aleksandar Rankovic (Ribicic 1983: 3-4, 1989: 212; Banac 1990: 153). I will map the emergence and eventual decimation of the Croat periphery and its eventual decimation as a precursor of future continuations of the cycle of protest.

The second period will deal with the consolidation of the state centre in the aftermath of the Croatian Spring Movement’s collapse and the eventual restructuring of social movement strategy that was to become the backbone of future peripheral mobilisation (Bilic 1990; Tripalo 1990). It must be noted that the advantage that the Croat movement had over the Irish, and the Basques up until 1979, was that if possessed a constituent entity within the Yugoslav Federation that was ruled by a nationalist communist elite organised along the lines of a left wing ideational movement. This, unlike the Basques who faced a similar movement at the centre of state, enabled access to the halls of power. Thus, what I will search for here is an explanation of how the Croat movement was able to redefine itself continuously in the face of repression, and the role that the expansion of repertoire played in achieving independence, considering that VDA had not played a significant role until just before independence was attained. The answer, I believe, is found in the ability of the movement elite to take the initiative in the reform process; ensuring that reform would be viewed as detrimental to the centre. This subsequently would create such a polarisation of society at the end of consecutive cycles of protest that structures made available for reform of the political system would be minimal; leaving little option but for a complete break from a system that could not provide democratic options for future interest integration.

The Rise of Peripheral Discontent and the Relegitimation of Nationalism as a Doctrine of Revolutionary Reform.

The most significant move back towards the “politics of the masses” was to occur with the shift away from centralism by the head of the Slovenian League of Communists (SLC), and the official party dialectician, Edvard Kardelj (Dedijer 1953: 426; Johnson 1972: 41). The significance of Kardelj was that he would become the ideological lynchpin of the decentralist block consisting of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovinia that would be diametrically opposed to the Unitarists led by Serbia and Montenegro (Horowitz 1994: 36). Between 1945 and 1991 it was this divide between Yugoslav integrationists, Serbia, and federalists, Croatia, that was to define the dynamic nature of the state centre and periphery’s separate republican development that was at the core of competing, yet separate, paths to national state development (Seroka 1992: 251). Kardelj believed, as exemplified in his ‘Self-management’ laws, that the only way to avoid a return to the dogmatic doctrine of overt Serbian centralism, was through a liberalisation of the economic system. One that would allow for a devolution of economic power away from the centre, towards the factory and sub-republican levels (Friedman 1996: 152).

Kardelj’s plan was to attain economic decentralisation of the lower levels of management by redirecting economic responsibility of management to the factory floor (Ramet 1992b: 50-53). Away from the party organisation, the subsequent independence from bureaucratic centralism would foster an independence of thought in decision making processes throughout society, based on autonomy of action at the sub-federal republican level of political organisation (Lampe 1996: 279-281). The aim was to de-ethnicise the political structure of the centralist elite through advocating the development of the periphery (Bose 1995: 103). Yet, true reforms at the republican level would not fully appear until the official move away from Yugoslav integralism. In the 1963 constitutional reforms the path to political modernity was set out, and would be implemented through a restructuration of the state to accommodate a truly federalist structure (Shoop 1968: 205-213; Rusinow 1977: 62-64). Yugoslav integralism would become the ideological core of Serb bureaucratisation as espoused by Rankovic, the head of the Serb LC and Yugoslav state security, as well as the promulgator of post-war Serb unitarist doctrines of state (Banac 1990: 153).

What World War Two had taught both political elites was that a system without the legitimacy of a popular front, without a movement from below, would fail due to the innate fear of dictatorial policies and governments (Johnson 1972: 28). This was a result of the bitter experiences of foreign occupation and rule under the Habsburgs, for the Croats (Banac 1995: 108-112; Necak 1995: 22), and under the Ottomans and Nazis, in the case of the Serbs (Banac 1995: 108-113; Kitromilides 1996). In Serbia, whose capital Belgrade would become the administrative and military centre of Southern Slavic post-colonial state development, what developed was the politics of unitarism that saw a strong Serbian centre as the sole guarantee against future foreign encroachment on the fledgling southern Slavic state (Necak 1995: 23; Vojnic 1995: 93). Croatia, due to the more liberal nature of Habsburg occupation in comparison to Ottoman rule, had developed a nationalist ideology steeped in traditions of parliamentary decentralism as the guarantor of national autonomy (Lerotic 1989: 199; Anderson 1996: 3-4).

In Croatia, with its tradition of peripheral based oppositional mobilisation of the National Anti-Fascist Liberation front against Nazi Occupation founded by the Croat Tito (Lane 1996: 38), any move towards centralism was seen as an attempt by a Serb dominated state at minimising the significance of Croat nationalism within the greater context of Yugoslav state development. For most Croat political activists, Yugoslavia was a ‘security community’ whereby they could continue their distinct culturo-social path to political modernity without fearing foreign claims to their territory (Necak 1995: 15). Unitarism was, in their eyes, synonymous with Serbian culturo-political assimilation and state homogenisation (Banac 1990: 147). As such, it would be virulently fought against so as not to subvert Croatian national aspirations for the formation of a nation-state, be it within or without, the Yugoslav national paradigm (Cigar 1996: 53).

At its beginning, Communist Yugoslavia seemed to have found a solution to the national question through constitutional federalism. It soon became clear that the party ideologues and dialecticians mistakenly perceived the class principle as more central to the state doctrine than the national one; hoping that the competing national platforms would find a solution within the Federal Parliament (Banac 1990: 150; Malcolm 1994: 203). This federal solution was to prove to the periphery that Serb expansion into the realms of state was far from satisfied, and the only recourse left to the peripheries would be the mobilisation of the League of Communists (LC) backed mass movements against the centre as a method of expressing popular legitimacy for certain aspects of state reform (Johnson 1972: 74; Clissold 1983: 119). A movement away from class to nationalist rhetoric that Vlado Gotovac, a prominent Spring Movement activist claimed was planned:

It was realised that the communist working class was no longer a means to mobilisation. What engaged people was the desire for national freedom and individual freedom.1

The period between the end of the war and the 1963 constitutional reforms, that saw the constitutional ratification of Kardelj’s self-management reforms, brought a slow mobilisation of forces in preparation for the main engagement with the state (Lampe 1996: 278). This would commence with the rise of the Croat Spring Movement from 1967 to 1971, and the subsequent realignment of Republican elites behind anti-unitarist populist movements (Kesar et al. 1990; Tripalo 1990; Ercegovac 1992).

These shifts were to manifest themselves with the dismissal of Rankovic from power in 1966, and the implementation of radical economic reforms that would threaten the monolithic power of the centralist LCY (Höpken 1994: 233; Dimitrijevic 1995: 50). Rankovic was seen as a key target, as he symbolised an era of neo-conservative bureaucratisation of the Serbian led Yugoslav state centre (Banac 1990: 152). What was shaping the battle between centre and periphery in Yugoslavia was the same political force that shaped a similar crisis in Spain. As in Spain, the peripheral movement faced the monolith of a unitarist state entity ruled by an ethnic elite maintaining a strict official centralist state doctrine based on the elite’s perception of how national integralism and national state formation should develop. A policy that would be seen by many Croatian activists as a threat to fledgling national elites on the periphery of the Yugoslav state (Ramet 1994: 118).

The subsequent interdependent development of the Croat Spring movement from the LCC was to be a sign not just of the continued significance of populism in Yugoslav state politics, but the importance of the national question in the attainment of full communal enfranchisement of peripheral national communities, and access to political structures offered by the state (Gagnon 1994: 119). For the state, what officially became know as the maspok (mass movement), as opposed to the Spring Movement favoured by the non-elite activists, the idea of utilising populist activism to influence cycles of reform by the state centre became important in engaging the centre (Bose 1995: 103; Vojnic 1995: 108). This was an accreditation of the agency of nationalism as a means to social transformation in times of cyclical change:

In Croatia it was shown, as it had already been uncovered in Czechoslovakia, and later it was unravelled in all other east European countries, that the only historical force that was still active, which could engage the entire community was in fact nationalism.2

The goal was to attempt to convince Belgrade of the necessity of placing regional, that is national, concerns to the centre of the federal political agenda in the same way the PNV attempted, throughout the 1960s, of challenging the Movimiento of Madrid (Bennett 1995: 73). Centred around the coalition of LCC and the Matica Hrvatska cultural organisation, these intellectuals sought to create a revised version of Titoist Yugoslav federalism that could guarantee greater access for Croats to state institutions of policy formation.

The immediate goals of these Croats was to further decentralise both the LCY and the rest of society through a greater devolution of power away from the central government and a relaxation of the principle of democratic centralism, according to which minority opinions were less readily acceptable. Greater participation by mobilised citizens in the distribution of enterprise earning and in direct and competitive elections would be encouraged, accompanied by a purge of the older and more resistant Communists (Friedman 1996: 157-158).

The removal of Rankovic was to create wider political space for liberal reforms and open debate as Rankovic was the main bulwark to autonomous peripheral political development (Plestina 1992: 72-83). The cultural freedom that was to emerge was to develop along populist anti-establishmentarian lines similar to the development of alternate youth cultures throughout the rest of Europe and North America during this period (Ramet 1992a, 1995: 219-276; Lalic 1993: 85-91). Where they differed was in the organised nature of this manipulation of structures created in the struggle between shifting centres and mobilising peripheries, by the LCC and academic elites who were organised along nationalist lines. Manifested in the Declaration on the Status of the Croatian Language (HR 1967: 15-18), this declaration of intent would soon become the focus of a campaign of cultural liberalisation that would form the base of extra-parliamentary oppositional mobilisation against the state centre (Singleton 1985: 256).

Signed by 140 intellectuals, what became known simply as the Declaration, was a doctrine that demanded the protection of the autonomous status of the Croatian language and the move away from the centre’s official push for the cultural homogenisation of Yugoslav culturo-political identity (Bennett 1995: 73). The LCC, which had been instrumental in ideologically debasing the Yugoslav integralists of Rankovic, with the assistance of the old guard of the non-Serb LCY elite of Bakaric, General Gosnjak and Tito of Croatia, as well as Kardelj of Slovenia, were now searching for a means of legitimising the decentralisation of state power to their advantage (Rusinow 1977: 255-268). Nationalism, and the release of peripheral movement activism in a bid to foster the development of a culturally distinctive civil society from the centre, as in the Northern Irish and Basque examples, were seen as the answer. As Puhovski (1995: 129) notes:

In order to legitimise their new circumstances, the republican parties gradually embraced the nationalist ideologies of the majority nation in their respective republics.

I believe that the Yugoslav federal system constitutionally allowed for this situation to arise. Realising their opportunity, the young elite of former Partisans had been searching for ways to separate themselves from the consolidationary tendencies of their older colleagues, and placed themselves at the centre of this activism (Seroka 1992: 153). Much in the same way Arias Navarro had attempted to separate himself from the ghost of Carrero Blanco in Spain. This new generational elite became known as the ‘Triumvirate’, due to the central role played by the three main figures of the LCC. The President of the Croatian Republic, Dr Savka Dabcevic-Kucar, secretary of the LCC, Miko Tripalo, and the former head of the youth wing, Dr Pero Pirker, were to be key actors in the orchestration of civil disobedience, mass demonstrations and strike action (Lampe 1996: 301). As the frustrations with the failure of the centre to observe their demands through parliamentary means grew, movement activism was seen as the sole means to prove to the Serbian dominated bureaucracy the significance that greater Yugoslav decentralisation held for the survival of the state (Banac 1995: 119). This point was emphasised by Tripalo in the spring of 1966 when he stated (Lendvai 1969: 140-141):

As to nationalism, the only solution is that our multinational Yugoslavia must be based on the full equality of each nation and not on some being more equal than others, on socialist self-government and not on bureaucratic centralism.

In Croatia much of the discontent with the misuse of funds stemmed from the launch of the 1957 “Five Year Plan” which ignored LCC suggestions of improving port and rail facilities for the enlargement of the unused port of Bar (Petricevic 1967: 379-381; Ercegovac 1992: 38). The fact that the whole project was running at a loss by 1966, and that the sole beneficiaries would be the Serb and Montenegrin workers employed in its construction, went far in convincing the North3 that they were funding projects that were not for the economic betterment of the whole Federation (Petricevic 1968: 379-381). They were rather projects designed to increase communication, transport links, and industrialisation within Serbia (Lendvai 1969: 145-146). In short, they were supplying Serbia vital infrastructure separate from the needs of the rest of the nation.

The resultant reshuffle in April 1967 of the political structure to appease the periphery, would lead for the first time to the decentralisation of the political system in favour of the periphery (Ignatieff 1993: 16). The Yugoslav Government would now consist of the Federal Executive Council composed of a President and two Vice-Presidents, with a further 27 members within this top administrative team (Lendvai 1969: 166). The two Presidium members within the government were the Premier Mika Spiljak and his Deputy Premier, Rudi Kolak, both Croats, though Kolak was from Bosnia-Herzegovinia (ibid.). The new Secretary was Mijalko Todorovic, a Serb, whilst the President of the Federal Parliament was to be Veljko Vlahovic, a Montenegrin (ibid.). Tito in one quick move declared his hand, recognising the inability of contemporary state structures to fully eliminate nationalist tensions through accepting a compromise that would see the two most powerful nations balance each other’s ambitions through creating power sharing structures (Tripalo 1990: 269-294; Ridley 1994: 393).

This act by Tito was to create a similar polarisation as in Northern Ireland, of two communities behind two exclusive and competing ideologies of state. Yet, as in the Sunningdale Agreement, this was to only further antagonise the state centre who saw it their right to hold a predominant position within the structures of state being threatened. Thus, solidifying one behind the state, as in the case of the Serbs and Protestants, and the other permanently on the periphery with no other option but to find recourse in alternative extra-parliamentary forms of political mobilisation, as in the case of the Irish Catholics.

The inability to solve problems that were symbols of national pride were seen as extensions of economic disempowerment happening at the centre (Petricevic 1968). For the average Croat citizen annoyed by the amount spent on visibly unprofitable ventures in the south, whilst the National Theatre in Zagreb, for example, was closed for months at a time because there was no money available to repair the concert hall, the nature of government spending on political and economic white elephants proved difficult to justify (Petricevic 1967: 379-381; Lydell 1984: 82-88). In 1965 Croatia and Slovenia, 30% of the population provided 40.4% of capital assets and 46.3% industrial input, but received only 30% of government investory funds (YCIS 1968: 630; Cicin-Sain & Nikic 1969: 20; YBSI 1972).

A time for change had emerged, as had the time for political action outside official political structures of state, as the Croat elite came to realise that only through engaging the state in times of reform could change be forced. This would either further isolate them from the state, or, force the state to open political opportunity structures. Either way, the desired polarisation of the two communities would force the general population to make a choice one way or the other.

The Rise of Matica Hrvatska to Prominence and the Escalation of Movement Mobilisation as a Means of Accruing a Reaction from the State.

If a doctrinal difference had to be found in order to justify a varying path to socialism, then independent institutions of political society that could guarantee this variance would have to be the backbone of the new ideology (Supek 1992: 247). For Yugoslav theoreticians the official alternative would be embodied in the return of political control to the “people” through programs of decentralisation (Jelavich 1996: 386). This held great significance in a state whereby the centralist elite, as well as peripheral ones, had justified much of the reasoning for its existence within the context of being the political manifestation of a populist ideology that emerged from the victorious autochthonous resistance movement during World War Two (Muzic 1969: 255-262; Clissold 1983: 119; West 1984: 125). It would also provide the necessary environment for political elites to engage in the dialectic of state consolidation versus popular legitimacy, without destabilising the process of integrating competing national ideologies that were at the heart of the escalation of the crisis between Croatia and Serbia during World War Two (Bose 1995: 107). The Federation of Nations was seen as the solution to the national question, whilst the formalisation of communist resistance movement was the raison d’être for the continuation of Yugoslav state legitimacy.

For existing elites, this meant that popular mobilisation would be considered a necessity in attaining political and ideological legitimacy as theoretically the power would move from the centre to the collective (Clissold 1983: 118-119; Banac 1990: 152). It gave these rising elites the justification they needed to politicise their population base behind the goals of their own republican elites rather than those of the centre (Puhovski 1995: 122-123). Yet, for this to occur an organisation that was officially autonomous from the LCC, but de facto under its direct control, was needed to counter any criticism that the readaption of the nationalist doctrine would engender.

In Zagreb in 1964 a new openness was to emerge with the birth of Praxis, a twice monthly journal which allowed orthodox Marxists to critique social conditions of the state (Conversi 1996: 254). This tepid attempt at liberalisation would not supply the vehicle for mass oppositional mobilisation in a political climate whereby Marxist ideology was given as the raison d’être of state, and national identification the sole visible means of deciphering various political communities from one another (Jelavich 1996: 394). Instead, it opened structures for debate that would openly question the need for a unitarist state. Matica Hrvatska (Croatian Queen Bee- from here on to be referred to as Matica) a cultural relic from the 1840s, was to prove to be the ideological backbone that the LCC was searching for (Ramet 1992b: 88-135). Matica, which was concerned specifically with the maintenance of separate Croat cultural identity, was to play a major role in ideologically countering centralist state integration as Matica’s board of directors saw this as an attempt at Serb hegemonisation (Lampe 1996: 299; Tanner 1997: 190). As such it threw its weight behind the Declaration (Tripalo 1990: 92-94). As Vlatko Pavletic, a director at Matica, told me:

The Declaration was the only place we could fight for Croatian autonomy. The economics was a no go zone. So we saw it as the first step in a wider movement towards independence.4

The rise of membership in Matica Hrvatska, which would come to rival that of the LCC, was seen by many centralists as proof of the nationalist orientation of the majority of Croatian oppositional political organisations (Djilas 1996: 90). Yet, more importantly it was a signal to the LCC, that popular opinion in Croatia now sought a more activist approach in engaging the state centre to react. This was similar to the choice by EGI in the Basque Country to utilise popular mobilisation as a means to challenging the state. The streets seemed more attractive than parliament, and the LCC began revising the populist nature of Yugoslav national ideology by questioning the benefits of silence when, as proven between 1941 and 1945, change could only emerge from peripheral movement and activism, not centralist consolidation (Bilic 1990: 61).

The Problems of Croat Nationalism as the Corner Stone of Reforming the Centre.

The dialectic of the Croatian resistance and the incorporation of the Croatian national idea into a revolutionary struggle was a problem that the leadership of the LCC would have to deal with. Especially considering the bitter memories of Ustasha rule held by many Serbian centralists (Clissold 1983:118). For this reason it was important to solidify national mythology behind a fledgling, but active, political movement. In fact, the merging of often bitter enemies such as the Croat Left and Right would prove difficult to achieve (Almond 1994: 25). This was proven in the explosive Parliamentary debate in 1967 that emerged, questioning the validity of such a strategy shift, considering that the last time overt Croatism was used in national mobilisation, the result was a reactionary fascist movement supported by the Axis powers (Covic 1975: 125-130). Especially as the Partisan elite feared greatly a convergence of the Left and Right into a consolidated movement on the periphery of state (Djilas 1996: 91).

Within the Yugoslav movement there was a realisation that the Croatian nationalist social movement of 1971’s power came from this convergence. It allowed the antagonism [between left and right] to be settled.5

Controversy was also sparked when Bakaric, the leader of the LCC and the last of the old Partisan generation, refused to fully comment on reports that the late Secretary of the LCC, Dr Andrija Hebrang, who had been executed under orders from Rankovic in 1948, had said under interrogation during World War Two to the leader of the Ustasha, Dr Ante Pavelic:

You are Fascist; I am a Communist. But I am no less a Croat patriot than you are. The difference between us is that you want a Fascist Croatia whilst I am fighting for a Communist Croat state (Pavlowitch 1994: 205).

This brought the ire of the centre when it was rehashed as moral justification for converging all wings of the national movement into a more fluid, republican controlled movement (Pavolwitch 1994: 205). It also signalled that, if Yugoslav communism was revolutionary in nature, then secondary ideologies of state, ie, the need for national assertion, could be considered as equally as revolutionary in terms of popular mobilisation. The insensitivity of the LCC, to the facts that most Serbs would view Croat revanchism as a primordial push was outweighed by the LCC’s own equating of socialism with nationalism as a tool to facilitating oppressed people to rebellion (Anderson 1996: 3-4). Up until then, many at the centre viewed the attainment of the federal structure as the end point of national consolidation of all Yugoslav peoples’ national aspirations (Necak 1995: 25).

The Croats, however, viewed the Yugoslav state not as an end point of history but as a means of providing political structures that would create the right environment for further national development (Vucic 1991: 60-76). Based on Otto Bauer’s (1996) dream of controlling national intent within a federal state to be used as a force for social development in times when populist mobilisation was a necessity, the LCC were always to see federal relations as dynamic (Brook-Shepherd 1996: 89-90 & 172). Croatian nationalism and socialism were not incompatible. In fact, historically speaking, they had converged from the times of Mazzinian national development, through Habsburg parliamentarianism, to the oppositional nature in Radic’s Croatian Peasant Party (HSS)6 throughout the Monarchist era (Boban 1974). The problem for the LCS was that the long term memory of this political marriage was superseded by the short time memory of Croat-Nazi collaboration.

Tito did not react, as he had himself come to view the Croat nationalist ideology as a bulwark to the Yugoslav unitarism that the LCY’s centre was preparing to offer as an antidote (Pavlowitch 1994: 207). It seems Tito desired the communist individual, but, was willing to play the nationalist card in a bid to counter the growing power of the Belgrade bureaucracy and LCY apparatchiks (Banac 1990: 207; Cigar 1996: 54); just as Franco, a Galician, was willing to develop economic autonomy in the Basque Country whilst negating any moves to decentralise politically (Carr & Fusi 1993: 15-16). As Tripalo told me:

Though Tito was politically and, by nationality, a Yugoslav, he was still an ethnic Croat who could not allow the Yugoslav goal to be superseded by Serbian goals of hegemony. 7

The LCC, under the “Triumvirate”, sought to exploit this confusion in times of state transformation in order to ride cycles of action-reform-action (Bose 1995: 106). They knew that once the dynamic nature of Yugoslav state development ceased, the reason for their autonomous republican stature would be no more. The need for a new debate on the right for republican, ie: national, control over finances was to be the platform for a polarisation of the political system between centre and periphery (Prazauskas 1991: 581-183). “Stop the plunder of Croatia” and “Economic autonomy” were to become catch phrases of the new nationalist rhetoric of Kucar, Pirker and Tripalo’s decentralist campaign (Bose 1995: 105). Even Tito was willing to give tacit support to such nationalist outpourings, within limits, as his wartime experiences had taught him the importance of nationalism in mass mobilisation to rebellion could also be used by clever elites to destabilise consolidated state entities (Seroka 1992: 153).

The culmination of the doctrine would emerge with the promulgation of a proposed Croatian constitution in the nationalist newspaper, edited by the future leader of the Croatian Democratic Community (HDZ)8 Dr Franjo Tudjman, Hrvatski Tjednik (Croatian Weekly). A declaration that demanded the formation of a territorial army, the right to secession, tax collection and a seat at the UN (Stokes 1993: 227). This document would become the base for the formation of the HDZ movement some nineteen years later. The seeds were being sown for the intensification of the national debate and the future exploitation of the cycle of protest. As in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, the Croat political leadership came to realise that national feeling was central to a continuity of protest that other mobilised forms of action could not assure.

The Isolation of the Extremists and the Attempt to Create New Space for their Participation via the Implementation of a More Sophisticated Ideology behind VDA.

Abroad, the Croatian diaspora, with the decline of the Right after the death of Ante Pavelic in 1959, the leader of the Nazi-puppet Government (NDH) and the Ustasha movement, was to signify a re-evaluation of strategies of open rebellion and terrorism (Almond 1994: 143). The main ideological push away from the doctrine of overt fascism was led by Dr Branko Jelic, who had been the chief representative of the NDH to Nazi Germany until his capture by the British during World War Two, after returning from a recruiting campaign in Latin America (Clissold 1979: 6). Theoretically uncompromised concerning wartime atrocities, due to his wartime detention at the hands of the British, Jelic’s main concern was to steer the militant side of the movement away from any association with Nazism in order to provide a base for a constructive reassessment of the Croat situation within Yugoslavia. The realities in Croatia dictated that any escalation of VDA, as with the IRA or ETA, would provide a backlash as much of the Croat population recognised the legitimacy of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s (JNA)9 claim of being an autochthonous movement that sprung from a deeply resented foreign occupation (Novak 1970; Irvine 1993). As such, a new response was needed that would ‘mimic’ the legitimacy of the Federation as well as it’s strategies.

Jelic’s main rival was General Max Luburic, chief commandant of the concentration camps, who formed the Croat People’s Resistance (HNO)10 in Spain (Covic 1975: 320). Operating throughout Germany during the 1960s, and well after his assassination by the Yugoslav Internal Security Service (UDB)11 in 1969 (Covic et al.: 1969; Nikolic 1969) until it was outlawed by the German Federal Republic in 1976 (Clissold 1979: 6). Its spearhead was the Drina operational group that was designed to cause public awareness to the Croat cause through attacking prominent figures within the Yugoslav diplomatic community (Clissold 1979: 6). The LCC, in attempting to avoid direct conflict with the JNA, feared being equated with the descendants of the very Right wing movements they themselves resisted.

The continued success of Yugoslav authorities in infiltrating these movements caused new strategies to be formulated that would concentrate more upon propaganda, and an increased lobbying of Western powers, than VDA (Milivojevic 1988; 1992: 204-207). The problem with the new platform was that it utilised old nationalist rhetoric which was tinged with notions of cultural superiority, racial difference, and a negation of the role of the Croat Right in the occupational forces. For the West, that had been victors over a power that had used similar rhetoric, this was considered too close to the ideology of the defeated Axis powers, and only served to further associate Croat nationalist aspirations with the antiquated ideology of pre-war Germany (Jelic-Butic 1977; Krizman 1977). The fact that much of this push came from the revolutionary Right based in Rightist Argentina did not assist their cause.

Formed in 1956 under the name of the Croatian Liberation Movement (HOP),12 the revolutionary Right headed by former Ustasha ideologues such as Dr Stjepan Hefer, from Pavelic’s death until to 1976, and eventually the writer Ante Bonifacic after 1976 (Covic 1975: 40). The movement was too close to the Peronist regime to have been considered a base for a classic human and civil rights campaign. The LCC knew this, and often portrayed its own aspirations for national autonomy as a moderate voice to those of the extreme (Perovic 1975: 647-658; Vukelic 1975: 122). This slow move to the Left was also a realisation of the need to court Moscow through attempting to reform post-war contacts between the Ustasha insurgents and pre-World War Two communists in an anti-Titoist coalition (Clissold 1979: 6).

Creating a programme based on the original united front formed at the death of King Alexander in 1934, that had placed the division of the country at the heart of fermenting popular revolt against the Monarchy, this new movement now openly courted a Moscow frustrated with their inability to rein in Tito (Kovacic 1972). The removal and death of Andrija Hebrang in prison, in 1948, for Croatism highlighted to the Left that there were still significant numbers of members of the LCC that held to the nationalist objective of increased economic, social and political autonomy within a confederal framework (Clissold 1979: 6). The link was Dr Branko Jelic, who through his German published journal Hrvatska Drzava (Croatian State), was able to foster dialogue on the need to create allies within the communist world (Perovic 1972; Eterovic 1975: 360).

The main plan was for the “Findlandisation” of Croatia by the Soviet Union in return for the use of Adriatic naval bases in Pula and the Gulf of Kotor, as well as unlimited access to the Mostar air base (Lampe 1996: 302). The problem with this proposal was that it was interpreted by the LCS and LCY as an act of open aggression, as the Gulf of Kotor had been a part of Montenegro since 1943, whilst Mostar was the unofficial capital of the Herzegovinian region of the Bosnian Republic (Clissold 1979: 7). There is little doubt however, that this co-operation did a lot to convince Tito that if the Spring Movement was left untouched in its attempts to co-opt foreign assistance for its liberalisation campaign, then the Serbs would fully utilise the anti-Yugoslav Jelic connection in attempts at militarising the conflict (Djilas 1996: 90). A situation that could spiral out of control.

Human and civil rights had now, through the fostering of republican elites, become associated with a move towards more republican autonomy. In this way HOP and the fledgling Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (CRB) felt they could shape a space for themselves as protectors of the Spring Movement (West 1994: 291). This would be vehemently opposed by the activists grouped around the student unions and Matica in the same way that the SDLP sought to circumvent the IRA from Sunningdale (Sharrock & Devenport 1997: 285). The problem was that they failed continuously to gain support from the Spring Movement activists, whilst the LCC still viewed them as dangerous fanatics and political enemies (Clissold 1979: 7). What the LCC was seeking was a decentralisation of the state’s law enforcement, security and policy institutions so as to limit the state’s ability to respond to peripheral pressures, not war (Covic 1975: 383-385). As such they specifically passed on information of these radicals to the very UDB they themselves so feared (Nikolic 1969).

Any intensification of the cycle away from NVDA to VDA was seen as beneficial only to the unitarists in the Army. Thus, the Croats preferred to ‘mimic’ the state at a level in which they knew they could compete equally. In many ways, unlike Northern Ireland and the Basque Country, this enabled the LCC to survive in periods of mass repression as the LCY could never fully say that they were adversely anti-Yugoslav, as the Basques were anti-Spanish or the Irish anti-British. This enabled Croatia always to have representatives within Government that could in future be well placed to exploit further policy shifts to the advantage of the nation. Though the immediate reaction of the state was to dismantle any links between the LCC and autonomous popular disturbances through progressive reform (Ridley 1994: 377).

The Centre’s Response and the Solidification of the Divide between the State and the Croatian National Polity.

Soon riots were occurring at football matches and many papers openly questioned the loyalty of the Croatian population to the Federation. In fact, a study by Drazen Lalic (1993: 25) on football hooliganism has shown that in periods of upswing in the cycle of protest, football fans had utilised matches to organise preplanned political rallies as an expression of support for specific politicians and reforms vis-à-vis the centre. The Army did not intervene however until the student leaders Drazen Budisa and Ante Paradzik decided to call a strike that sought, among other things, the formation of a separate currency (Bennett 1995: 73). What most scared the centre was that these mobilisations that had started as expressions of student, trade unionist and public discontent with centralist policies, had manifested into a vibrant nationalist movement that began to employ anti-Yugoslav rhetoric (Djilas 1996: 90). Similar to the way that the NICRA was, by 1968, becoming an organisational base for nationalist mobilisation against not just Stormont, but British rule as well.

In 1971 Mihailo Djuric, a major theorist in the ratification of the pro-Centralist doctrine, questioned the validity of a movement that would directly threaten, through its exclusivist demands, a significant number of the Serbian body polity (Stokes 1993: 223). The ability of such a movement to be representative of all Yugoslav communities was questioned due to the fact that much of its popular rhetoric was built around fledgling nationalist demands (Seroka 1992: 155). Dabcevic-Kucar realised this was a forewarning of future events, when she hinted that what she greatly feared was the usage of economic centralism as an ideological strategy to implement an ethnic state hegemony (Stokes 1993: 227).

By October 1971, under the leadership of Drazen Budisa, the students would lead a nation-wide strike action that would spread to the workers’ trade unions and factory floors (Tanner 1997: 198). The centre was simply not ready for such public demonstrations of peripheral defiance. In November the ideological war began as it became clear Dabcevic-Kucar would not backdown (Tripalo 1990: 161). The surviving Rankovic and unitarist conservative LCY elites, would view this as an attempt by the periphery to offer a competing nationalist ideology that would minimise Serb influence (Djilas 1996: 90). Fears that were apparently correct as the then student leader Budisa recounted:

We did not say we wanted an independent Croat state. But we did want it. The old regime was right in accusing us of what they did. We were always for independence.13

On December 1 the ‘Triumvirate’ were each individually called to Belgrade for talks with Tito (Ridley 1994: 397). The message was clear: the dynamics of Yugoslav parallel national movement development could not afford to be broken without a corresponding collapse of the Federation (Wilson 1979: 206). The ‘Triumvirate’ had ridden the wave of movement populism in order to engage the state and enforce reform from the periphery, but they had failed. The regime which, until now had respected the demands, felt the need to end the crisis through unleashing the Army (Milivojevic 1989: 22). Dabcevic-Kucar realising her predicament had little choice but to continue with her demands. If she relinquished them, then the faith of the population with the leadership would be lost. What was important was that the example of movement mobilisation was there for a future generation to exploit. The ‘Triumvirate’ had utilised the cycle to the maximum, to provide the opportunity structures for nationalist mobilisation within the cleavages that formed between the reciprocal development of state centre and periphery. They had paved the way for the next cycle which hopefully could be more readily exploited by the next nationalist oriented LCC elite. On December 11, Tito sent the Army in, and for now, the LCS was appeased (Lampe 1996: 304).

The Immediate Aftermath to the Spring’s Repression and the Initial Decline in Protest Activism.

What had developed in the decade preceding the formulation of the February 21 1974 Constitution was a generational shift that was to see the Partisan elite further isolated from an emergent younger elite based on republican lines throughout the Party (Dimitrijevic 1995:50). The resultant purge was to leave a dent in the makeup of both elites in 1972, yet it would be especially felt by the Croats who would have over 6 000 people dismissed from state run political, business, media, educational and cultural institutions (Djilas 1996: 90; Tanner 1997: 201-202). The core of the Spring Movement had been weeded out, yet, the ideological reasoning behind the initial mobilisation would not die so readily. As Ivan Aralica emphasised to me in our discussion over the cyclical nature of state repression and movement counter-mobilisation:

That year 1971 was nothing more than one chain in the whole relationship between Serbs and Croats from the beginning of the century till today.14

The core difficulties of Yugoslav state development were far from resolved. At the centre of the dispute between centre and periphery there still remained an ideological conflict over the future direction of Yugoslav state development. The subsequent centralist crackdown seemed to only enhance the separate development of Croatian and and Serbian national polities, as the Croats withdrew into themselves and the Serbs began to fear the power of movement populism on the periphery. In fact this mobilisation against the centre was derivative of the nature of state ideological development in the first place. What Djilas (1996: 91) noted was that much of the success of the initial mobilisation, and thus the reason why the state took it so seriously, lay in the innate analytical and objective histiographical nature of Yugoslav Marxist doctrine and the way it formed space for populist revision of the existing social order:

Tito judged that he could accommodate many nationalist demands because he believed that nationalist and communist authoritarianism were compatible. He was much more afraid of liberal reforms than of nationalism, since reforms directly challenged the communist monopoly of power and his personal rule. Indeed, nationalism, if supervised and channelled by the party, could even be an ally. Its mass appeal increased popular support multiplying offices (each republic, for example, had its own foreign office).

The government had to somehow demonstrate that they were not anti-Croat as much as they were anti-populist. Thus, a period of reintegration would occur which would punish the leadership of the Spring Movement, whilst addressing the demands for equality which were fundamental to Yugoslav federalism. Slowly though, the LCC would become viewed as the Trojan horse within the party (Brunner 1994: 205). This was the reason behind the extensive push of placing ‘ethnic’ Serbs into positions of power within the LCC after the systematic purges of December 1971 and January 1972 (Bennett 1995: 78). Nonetheless, this increased the resentment of many liberals towards the centre as many, according to Cicak,15 now began to equate the original suppression of the movement with Serbian political aspirations and, hence, unitarism with greater Serbian nationalism. Especially, considering that within Serbia the liberals were not as harshly dealt with (ibid.: 78-79). Thus the, attempt of limiting the role of LCC backed popular mobilisation was seen as a direct attempt to curtail the effectiveness of the Croatian national movement at attacking the state through more diverse political strategies (Debeljak 1994: 5).

A New Federation, or Croatia’s Sunningdale? The Centre’s Bid to Appease the Croat National Movement and the Isolation of the Serb Elite.

One of the key objects of the repromulgation of the 1974 Constitution was the dilution of Greater Serbian state nationalism through establishing greater autonomy for the six Constituent Republics (Ferrero 1995: 227-228). Rights were to be linked to territorial autonomy, whilst the consolidation of republican status was to guarantee national minorities a virtually unhindered path to social and cultural development (Brunner 1994: 193). What the protest movements of the late 1960s had taught peripheral communities was that nationalism, or rather national movements as a vehicle to social liberation, had been a ticket to political participation within Yugoslav political institutions similar to the post-Stormont Sunningdale period in Northern Ireland and the democratisation processes in Spain (ibid.: 203; see also Linz & Stepan 1992). The difference was that the Croat movement still had the LCC placed strategically within a limited position of power so as to exploit future political opportunity structures for an upswing of protest cycles.

The promulgation of the 1974 Constitution was designed to placate peripheral demands whilst securing the LCY’s predominant role at the centre of state security (Dimitrijevic 1995: 50). It also allowed the LCC access to legislative arms within their own Republic, separate from the centre (ibid.). In this way the LCC had a codified means of reacting, of ‘mimicking’, the centres policy shifts so as to instigate any future upswing in the cycle of protest. Prazauskas (1991: 581-583) believes it is the framework of multi-ethnic states that give individual ethnic communities a high potentiality for political mobilisation. Democratic multi-national states survive through a series of political bargaining and compromise, whilst authoritarian states survive through eliminating the possibility for mobilisation, through coercion.

When the process of democratisation sets in, the subsequent disintegration of coercive systems give way, as does the complexed system of checks and balances, leaving a vacuum to be filled by an elite, competitive enough to outplay the opposition (Lerotic 1989). This allows for the formation of a characteristically rigid and permanent fragmentation of the political system that was put in place to balance varying and competing peripheral nationalist aspirations (Dodan 1991: 253). The advantage that the Croats had over the Irish and the Basques up until the granting of autonomy in 1979, was that they never faced a flexible elite willing to use democracy as a means of enfranchising disparate ideological claims to state formalisation (Linz & Stepan 1992). This suggests that the Basques now at least have similar structures placed before them to achieve this necessary change. Perhaps the only way the Irish could resolve this problem is by similarly ‘mimicking’ the other and form their own autonomous councils within the framework made available in the Frameworks Documents joint rule recommendation.

Naturally, the notion of sharing power, especially after the Spring Movement had been suppressed, was difficult for many leading Serb intellectuals to accept (Stokes 1993: 222), as it had proved equally difficult for Protestant elites during the Sunningdale period (Fisk 1973). This was due to their ability to identify themselves within the ideological continuum of Yugoslav centralism (Seroka 1992; Necak 1995; Vojnic 1995). In Serbia, such discontent was to mobilise in the form of literary criticism and an ideological debate that was to circle around Dragoslav Markovic’s Blue Book, which suggested that Serbia’s role was that of forming a unitarist polity, that was to have a wide distribution amongst the elite of the LCS (Stokes 1993: 222). In Croatia, this solution was seen as an attempt from without of creating a homogeneous political will and imposing it on the periphery, in order to limit any future expression of national will autonomous from that of the centre’s (Alter 1994: 79).

The state was to be the battle ground for two competing national goals, and two differing perspectives of the role of the state. The new constitution that would place the Management of State Economic Enterprises and Higher Economic Associations Act as the official ideology of state would exemplify these differences (Jelavich 1996: 386). Tito was a Croat and Kardelj a Slovene. Many Serbs felt that any relinquishing of their predominant place within the state would lead to a diminishment of Serbian control (Bose 1995: 106). This was seemingly justified when the 1974 reforms saw the granting of federal status to Serbia’s two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina. It was seen as a direct attack on Serbian plans for a unitarist state (Cviic 1995: 61-62). At the core was the interpretation of what form of ideological role the Yugoslav state would take. In the immediate post Spring environment, it was a debate that would polarise both communities over the vexed nature of state integration:

It is, then, apparent that the powerful ideology of the nation-state, even if related to the concept of the political nation, can only temporarily contain internal social fissures that result partly from historical coincidence and the deliberate, forcible integration which characterised the birth of that state (Alter 1994: 81-82).

Initially, the decentralisation of decision making processes was to buy time for the centre to reorganise, whilst appeasing the periphery sufficiently enough so as not to effectively pressure the population towards more popular revolts (Jelavich 1996: 386). In effect, Croats had more power within their parliamentary system before the change then they did after it. Yet, the new freedoms of autonomous republican governmental policy formation stated in the constitution gave Croatia wider recourse, legally speaking, within the new constitution (Vojnic 1995: 100).

There would now be three tiers of government with the Chamber of Republics and Provinces, and the Assemblies of the Communes representing the lower tiers and the Federal Executive the very pinnacle of power. The Chamber of Republics and Provinces, as the second tier, consisted of 12 delegates per republic and 8 per province; whilst the Assemblies of Communes were allowed 30 delegates from each Republic and 20 from each province (Lampe 1996: 306-307). The Executive would attain their members from the Socialist Federal Republic Yugoslav Assembly (Singleton 1985: 263). More importantly the JNA would gain, at the all important 1974 Tenth Congress of the LCY, 15 seats in the new 166 member Central Committee (ibid.: 265).

The prohibition of doctrinal factionalism in the old system was to lead the regional elites down the path to localised reform that was answerable to noone except their own bodies, so long as they would not infringe upon the economic and political development in neighbouring Republics (Kardelj 1980: 121). As Denitch (1994 55) points out, even before 1974, the nature of republican structures had allowed for the elite to utilise national sentiment to leverage change from the centre. The ratification of the right of secession in Article 3 of the 1974 Constitution would legitimise the threat of national awakening as a viable movement for addressing political disparity between the competing Republics (Dimitrijevic 1996: 57):

The principle message was that, in spite of class rhetoric, the federal state was based on a national arrangement where even nations originally considered to be the “titular nations” of Yugoslavia came to play a full role.

Article 327, in conjunction with the Rules of Procedure of the Presidency of 1975, was to further recognise that the greatest question yet to be resolved was the national one. The solution to the succession of Tito lay in the creation of a revolving Presidency that would ensure the balance of power was to be held by all competing constituent national republican entities (Dimitrijevic 1995: 64). This new national policy was based on Lenin’s theory of nationalities, later developed by Stalin, that would see the right to self-determination, territorial autonomy and national equality become the essential gauge of the success of the centre in appeasing peripheral demands (Friedman 1996: 146). The essence of Act 327 was an attempt to diminish the periphery’s need to mobilise whilst reconstituting the legitimacy of the centre’s unitarists ideological movement.

The reintroduction of Kardelj’s self-management reforms to education, health, social welfare, childcare, employment, sport and information sectors would also redraw the nature of movement activism up until Tito’s death which would see the national movement respond in kind to the centre’s attempts at liberalisation by concentrating on social issues for the majority of their activism (Ribicic 1989: 212-218; Tomac 1989: 127-129; Ramet 1992: 9). The national movement was now facing a redefinition of strategic positions they held amongst their constituent communities. The LCC had already sought to ‘mimic’ the centre in terms of parliamentarism. Yet, this also weakened their ability to respond in times of crisis as they now, more than ever, lacked the responsiveness of a social movement.

What was to emerge was the political incorporation of the Croat and Slovene peripheries’ national aspirations into a viable decentralist bloc that would link reforms with a bid to use social action to dilute Serbian elite control of the political centre (Dimitrov 1988: 15; Jelavich 1996: 386). I concur with Hardin (1995: 29) who felt that it was this radicalisation of regional politics that was to lead to the equating of co-ordinated civil disobedience and republican aspirations with public fear of external exploitation. Where I differ is in my belief that this was done in order to ride the waves of mobilised popular discontent, ie, mass movement activism, through a widening of protest repertoire. One that would incorporate the rhetoric of the Spring Movement’s constitutional goals with the ideological movement shift within a reconstituting government movement. The key was to resolve the fissures through appeasing basic demands so as to avoid a return to the mass movement demonstrations embodied in the mobilisation of the Spring Movement between 1965 and 1971.

The First Signs of the Convergence of Civic Social Movements with the National Ideology.

The problem was that too much of civic society had been organised essentially from clerical circles, who had embodied bourgeois conservative values within Croat society (Alexander 1979; Sklevicky 1987; Pavlowitch 1994: 205). The direct result was that non-nationalist mobilisation in many ways was considered of inconsequential importance, as the national question was deemed the way to independence (Ramet 1995: 233). It was from here that a convergence of political platforms between social and national issues occurred. Like the Basques, the Croats, never rejected the validity of the national question, since they were sponsored financially, since 1974, from Zagreb (Dodan 1990: 103; Crawford 1996: 133). This perhaps explained their rise in media and protest terms to levels of popular representation that the overall national movement in the Basque Country could never achieve.

What the LCC was able to offer was an avenue for the public expression of discontent in an otherwise controlled civic environment. Ost (1993: 456) found that this was where national movements were able to go one step further in providing the necessary communal base that could, once mobilised, provide structures that the state would fail to produce in the very action of taking on the state. The peripheral national identity was more than an alternative to the system, it was a movement through which the system could be taken on. This fits in nicely with Clissold’s argument (1979: 1) that much of contemporary Croat nationalism was formulated in response to the slow emergence of Serbian unitarist ideas into political ascendancy. In fact, many Croat activists began to view the Serbian centre in terms of a national class that utilised communist class ideology as a means to ethnic national ascendancy:

The structure of all civil servants from ambassadors to state servants to police were 70% Serbs and Montenegrins that were placed there to exploit the other Republics for the advantage of their own. The rise from World war Two to now was a classic Marxist example of a class ascendancy and that is how they survived everything.16

As such this upward mobility could only be countered by a similar mobilisation from the periphery. Thus questioning any notion of Yugoslav unity. The Croats were utilising the down swing in the cycle of action-reaction-action to not only polarise Yugoslav political society, but also ‘mimic’ the state by providing an alternative to formalised state inspired social organisation within the activism of the underground movement. The role of the LCC would confuse this issue. In Croatia and Slovenia, this meant that national movements had the double role of playing at being the voice of the people’s movement as well as the legitimiser of the very state structure that the people disapproved of via entering into opportunities offered them through the threatened state elite’s constitutional reforms of 1974 (Dodan 1990: 104-105; Tanner 1997: 204). In both scenarios, however, that of Ost’s (1993) study of the “Velvet Revolution” and Ercegovac (1996) on the democratisation of the LCY, the movements had to transform themselves into electoral parties that could contest elections so as to ascertain the true popularity of their policies. A position of institutional frameworking that was denied the Irish in the wake of the failure of the Sunningdale Agreement.

This process of compromise would in fact threaten the integrity and what these organisations in transition stood for, that is the consolidation of this movement in permanent opposition to the state (Bugajski 1987: 17; see also Giddens 1994; Melucci 1996). Of course, this perception would change as emerging elites would soon realise that without control over the processes of reform, through parliamentary participation, no guarantee could be attained that conservatives would not again assume control of the state. It is more than coincidental that the Basque movement consolidated their position as a constituent nation when they similarly chose to engage the state, via ratifying autonomy in 1980, through electoral participation whilst leaving social movement options open for further responses in case of a neo-conservative backlash from the centre (Ercegovac 1996: 19-20).

The Need for a Re-Invention of State Ideology in the Face of the Federation’s Failure to Address the Parallel Development.

Socialism as a doctrine of change was now under review, as it was felt to have lost much of its potency due to the national plurality in interpreting Yugoslav communism (Burg 1983; Cohen 1989). Chauvinism and national exclusion had become a means of achieving entitlement in a system that was built on excluding those who dissented from the centre by claiming they possessed anti-social behaviour (Sher 1977; Ramet 1992b; Denitch 1994). This was the same type of state exclusion that was embedded within Loyalism and Francoism of Northern Ireland and Spain respectively. This is where, I feel, that the Croatian movement differed from the Irish and Basque movements in that the convergence between state ideology and national identification reached its peak in the Spring Movement’s successful reform of the political system, which was the means by which independence would be attained in the very next cycle of reform.

What both the LCS and LCC realised was that this convergence would subsequently place the notions of justice and citizenship into the same communal paradigm, whilst allowing for nationalist expression to be the key gauge of organised political intent of the mobilised movement (Supek 1992: 218). Something that the Irish could not ratify until the Downing Street Declaration; and which was negated by the Spanish centre with the enforced ratification of the Autonomy Bill, in an effort to take the initiative away from the floundering Basque National Movement between 1976 and 1977. It is not coincidental that this emerged in a time of a downswing in ETA activism. I agree with Denitch (1994: 81) who sees the nation’s emergence as a tool for the expression of social discontent, within the Yugoslav scenario, as a natural consequence of the search by movements in action for new means of engaging the ever shifting state.

Once again, with the diminished role of elite sponsored state protest, it was the dialectic of letters that would again provide the arena for the testing of future strategies of protest (Beker 1981; Valentic 1991; Grdesic 1996). For many neo-communist intellectuals, publications such as Praxis would become an integral focal point in expressing the ideological nature of the Federation and the direction which state development should head (Sher 1977: 239). The problem for many Croat political dissidents was that the publication’s insistence of reviewing the debate from a classic Yugoslav Marxist paradigm seemingly downplayed any solution that would address the Croat national question in the interests of a more “user friendly” unitarist option (Tanner 1997: 203-204). A perception of anti-Croat pro-centralist bias that was widely felt within the Croat opposition:

Praxis no matter what anyone says held the Stalinist and Greater Serbian line. They were the ideological link of the Bolshevik Serbian centralist state.17

This was borne out by 1985 when one of the founders, Mihailo Markovic, would become a prominent architect of the Serbian Memorandum (Conversi 1996: 254). Croatian political dissidents pointed to the fact that the failure to suppress Praxis, especially in the wake of the crushing of Matica Hrvatska in 1972, could have been taken as a sign of the predisposition of the state centre to more readily accept the Serb view of unitarism as a necessary precursor to future state development (Jelavich 1996: 395). As such it was feared, as I have shown in the Basque example, that with the intensive push by the centre to force the Autonomy Bill upon the periphery, even in the face of nationalist opposition, that the centre was utilising the decline in the cycle of protest of the movement to take the initiative in an attempt to redefine the nature of any future engagement of state and periphery. The reason the communist doctrine proved so appealing to the state elite, was its ability to negate any democratic expression of nationalist intent in a country where political plurality was feared (Cigar 1996: 53).

The whole point of Communist repression had been to prevent the ties of minimal social solidarity and mutual confidence from developing, for those ties foster democratic opposition (Denitch 1994: 87).

The necessity of incorporating nationalist rhetoric in the media debate was seen as imperative for the ideological mobilisation of people who had to take on the state that was hindered by the very nature of its federal structure (Grdesic 1996: 407; Letica 1996a). Nationalist debate was traditionally embraced by professional and amateur linguists, historians and ethnographs who sought a revitalisation of Yugoslav political history in order to foster a more open environment for non-communist dominated doctrinal polemics (Babic 1990; Horvat 1991: 181-284; Denitch.1994: 106). However, from an elite perspective, the placing of national aspirations at the centre of state ideological reform was seen as the means of defining republican aspirations with the organic will of the people (Clissold 1983: 119). The fact that it could be placed within the doctrine of Yugoslav national communism was seen as a bonus for peripheries, and greeted with great trepidation from a centre not fully steeped in democratic legitimacy (Jelavich 1996: 387).

Yet, within Serbia itself, there were signs of the acknowledgement of the failures of the Federation in resolving questions of national equality; though they came from a decidedly different arena (Cigar 1996: 54; Djilas 1996: 90). Discontent with the monist approach of the state monolith would emerge in Vojislav Kostunica and Kosta Cavoski’s Party Pluralism and Monism (1985: 41-131). Based around a collection of intellectuals, the Belgrade Institute for Social Studies this group questioned the validity of the party’s claim to being an extension of the original movement that aimed at liberalising the national question through the advent of state democracy (Singleton 1985: 280). But the People’s Front held little legitimacy when the definition of who the people were, and for whom the state was created, still permeated much of the political debate in the country (Singleton 1985: 280).

What was feared was a united front that would opt for the unthinkable, direct confrontation, which up till now had been cleverly skirted by the LCC. Except for the ‘Triumvirate’s’ demand in 1971 for separate territorial defence forces from the JNA (Wilson 1979: 216-219). The incorporation of VDA would have led to a Belfast situation which the Croat, without the benefits of a territory outside the Federation that the Irish had in Southern Ireland and the Basques in France, could have hardly controlled. The LCC had long ago acknowledged the necessity of ‘mimicking’ the centre in all avenues but one, the military (Ridley 1994: 393).

The Shift from Reactionary Violent Direct Action towards Non-Violent Direct Action in the Wake of the Collapse of the Spring Movement & Constitutional Reform.

The eventual crackdown and the relaxation of freedom of movement laws was to lead to a massive exodus of Yugoslav workers, with 640 000 employed in Germany alone (Clissold 1979: 8). The vast majority were Croats which was to exert a lasting effect in five ways: it increased the size of the diaspora; it increased the number of competing secessionist groups; increased the fluidity of movement of propaganda between Croatia and abroad; increased the counter-insurgency strategies of UDB, the internal security forces, which led to a further radicalisation of the Croat community abroad; and finally, this led to increased protest activity that served only to further highlight the illegitimacy of the regime for a sizable number of the Croat population (Bilic 1990; Tripalo 1990: 237-251; Djilas 1996). If they thought this was a way of ridding the region of resistance, then they were wrong, as the decimation of the demographic heart of the opposition would only allow for the emergence of more sophisticated resistance that was now to be found within the structures of state itself.

Amongst the original post-World War Two diaspora, as well as the pro-Spring Movement diaspora, the immediate reaction to the dismantling of the Spring Movement was one that tended to embrace more violent revolutionary response (West 1994: 302). Ever responsive to the nature of state repression, it was in the CRB where one could see, even more so than in the Basque Country and Northern Ireland, the nature of state repression being specifically geared to the ridding of the presence of the periphery from the entire political spectrum (Perovic 1972; Krizman 1977, 1986). In the Basque Country the reformist Falangists and the oppositional Left alike never sought isolation from the PNV, just ETA. Similarly the British Government, if not the UUP, always attempted to allow for the development of the SDLP as the moderate alternative to the IRA. This led to a controlled de-escalation of movement activism in both countries which in the long run led to the consolidation of the centre’s role in any future resolution of the crises. Ironically, in Croatia it would lead to what I call a ‘polarisation of intent’ that would ‘mimic’ the state’s exclusiveness, and some twenty years later lead to the exclusion of Serbia’s role in any resolution of the Croatian crisis (Banac 1990: 147). When the centre listened, they remained silent. When the centre reacted, they went into action.

In June 1972 there was an attempt at armed incursion from abroad when 19 guerrillas from the CRB commandeered a truck at the Austrian border and penetrated into Bugojno in Bosnia-Herzegovinia (Coxsedge et al. 1982). After six weeks of fighting 15 CRB activists were killed outright, whilst another 3 were executed at a later stage, the fourth received 20 years imprisonment due to his youth (Clissold 1979: 10-11). It was later recognised by a Czechoslovak Major-General Jan Sejna that it had been part of the Soviet Polarka plan that was designed for “loyal” Yugoslavs to call upon Soviet assistance (ibid.). The Bugojno insurrection was reactionary, as activists sought the use of VDA as a direct reaction to the enforced emigration of some 10 000 political activists and the execution of several members of the university elite.18 Yet, what was more interesting was how Tito would respond to such action by his compatriots by initiating reforms, as he knew popular support for this action could spur on further street demonstrations, thus challenging the legitimacy of the 1974 constitutional reform process as a way to reconciliation (Bennett 1995: 74). As Tripalo intimated:

Tito realised at Bugojno that the last thing he could afford was open rebellion, as the Serbs would demand a unitarist solution. So he pushed a liberal constitution to simultaneously halt mass discontent and weaken Belgrade. That is why the Army was sent in.19

For LCC, the role of the JNA neutrality was called into question as it became more and more associated with being the military wing of an ever centralising LCY that was moving against the constitutional decentralisation of the state (Gow 1992: 95-111). Tito had to balance this ever politicised Army with the demands of the periphery for greater social, economic and political liberalisation. Thus, the reformulation of the Security Forces into five regional military districts that would place an entire Army corpus in Zagreb, in order to control the North, was seen as pointing towards who were the internal enemies and friends of the centralist state (Bennett 1995: 76). Much the same way that the British Army consolidated behind the RUC and UDA. As Singleton (1985: 262) stated:

The coming together of the army and the LCY reflects a realisation, born of the experiences of 1971, that, in the event of a crisis threatening the stability of the country, these two centralising agencies, with an all-Yugoslav rather than a republican character, provide a strong defence against separatist tendencies.

Between 1975 and 1976 the Yugoslav Ministry of the Interior reported some 17 attacks on public figures, with the most popular tactic being the installation of time-bombs on transportation vehicles (Clissold 1979: 10). The culmination of the campaign came in a series of attacks on the Yugoslav Military Mission, Trade Mission and Consulates throughout Germany in 1975, which ended with the death of Vice-Consul Zdovc in Frankfurt (ibid.). This scared the Yugoslav Government into taking new initiatives when in 1978 they clandestinely exchanged four German terrorists in Zagreb for eight from Germany, six of whom were prominent Croat emigres (ibid.). The German Courts refused extradition for all but one, Stjepan Bilandzic. The LCS was slowly regaining lost ground, as they commenced putting the disappointment of the 1974 constitutional reforms behind them. The LCC was still weak, and as such their national ideology was in no way ready to challenge the state’s own ideology; yet the radicals were still proving a nuisance.

The ability of the terrorists to intensify state responses to their actions, lead to increased repression on the nationalist community in Croatia itself, as well as abroad. The increased diplomatic pressure, surveillance of the diaspora and local communities, and counter intelligence operations, served its purpose of highlighting to Croats within the Federation that even when they were not personally involved in such anti-state activity, they were to be viewed by the organs of state as potential enemies within. In short, it allowed for Croats to realise that under such conditions their national aspirations could never fully be realised within the existing Yugoslav framework (Clissold 1979: 12). More significantly for the survival of the national movement, the upswing of state repression would force the LCC to reevaluate the nature of LCS perceptions about the future course of Yugoslav state integration.

The arrest and sentencing to 12 years of the renowned chemist Dr Nikola Novakovic for visiting the former pre-war Vice-Premier and HSS President Dr Krnjevic on a trip to London in 1978 only served to highlight this point. Under Article 143 Croats were not permitted to visit declared anti-state activists at home or abroad. The stringent interpretation of this law by the UDB was a signal that aggression would be met by like cause (Ridley 1994: 414; Tanner 1997: 314). When the journalist Branko Busic was murdered in Paris in October 1978 by the UDB, then it became clear that the Yugoslav government equated even non-violent oppositional emigre political thinkers as anti-statist activists equal to terrorists.

Yugoslavia was shaping up like Spain, and this is perhaps a reason why in 1991 the HDZ, was able to more readily mobilise the population behind the resistance campaign compared to the IRA, who nevertheless, was more obvious in the choice of target and their desire to taunt the state to respond in a similar manner. This was not the case with the LCC, and the fledgling Croat underground by 1978. The elimination in Johannesburg in December 1977 of CRB committee member Joso Orec was one thing, the callous elimination of public intellectuals was another. (Clissold 1979: 13). More importantly, the fanaticism in branding all Croat activism as anti-Yugoslav did much in diminishing the legitimacy of the Security Forces, UDB and SUP, in Croatia as a whole.

This however does not deny the fact that the CRB existed. They seemed to be under the direct control of the HOP’s military branch who mainly concentrated their recruitment and training as a support base in case of the emergence of a popular rebellion from within the Republic. Each seemed to be based within a specific country whereever the diaspora found themselves. In Germany they congregated under the United Croats of West Germany, with a speciality in targeting diplomatic staff. In Australia the CRB seemed to train for insurgency and providing support for rebellion within Yugoslavia. When this failed to eventuate, it became clearer to most political activists that the only way to survive would be through a realignment with the LCC and the cessation of arms until the achievement of statehood had been attained. The extremist diaspora quietened, and the scene was set for the formation of a movement that once again would be coordinated by the LCC.

Conclusion.

Croatia was now placed in a position whereby they could successfully exploit the cleavages left by Tito’s legacy. The difference between the centralist elites of Northern Ireland and Spain, from Yugoslavia, was that the core of the Serbian state centre had come to identify their continued existence exclusively in terms of Yugoslav state unitarism. In Northern Ireland the very concept of Union with the Crown had created an elite that for a long while would follow the British example; thus, placing Ulsterism, until recently, in a secondary position. By the time this had changed the British government itself had initiated a process of change that would dramatically curtail the influence of the Ulster Protestant elite and redefine the role of Catholic participation in the existing political order. In Spain democratisation, as full enfranchisement had done to a lesser extent in Northern Ireland, subtly changed the centre’s stance whereby its desired ideology of state unitarism would exist correspondingly to the autonomous organisation of the periphery. This ceding of power effectively created a greater room for state consolidation as now the newly defined Spanish parliamentary state centre would become the repository of democratic sentiment and hence a filter of peripheral demands.

The mistake of the Yugoslav elite was the desire to punish. This would fuel future generations, as the national question would never be fully resolved. The subsequent consolidation of the Serb aspirations behind the state centre would destroy any hope of reconciliation within the structures of the federation. In the long run, the historic lack of convergence between the centralist Serb and peripheral Croat national movements was to polarise both entities in direct opposition to one another, without reforming the state suitability in order to bring them together, at least on paper. The refusal of the Serbs to relinquish any trace of power would lead in the 1980s to a showdown that was to be neatly exploited by opposing national movements in a bid to ride the cycle of collective activism one more time.