Robert Niebuhr
Department of History
Boston College
The end of the Cold War in 1991 brought with it profound changes throughout the world. Not only did communism wither away in Europe, but the political integrity of several states—including Yugoslavia—was shaken by brutal civil war. In part because of the overwhelming speed of communism’s general collapse in the early 1990s, and partly from the brutal nature of ethnic cleansing, scholars have hotly debated the nature of the events in Yugoslavia. This paper will argue that Yugoslavia—while a communist country—cannot be grouped together with the broader collapse stemming from the Kremlin. Communism’s death was an integral force securing Yugoslavia’s fate, but Yugoslav elites possessed a unique ideological worldview that also failed against the West.
Ejection from the Cominform in 1948, forced Yugoslav elites to search for an ideological justification for an independent Communist system, which became marked by a Yugoslav supra-nationalism alongside the decentralization of state power and a policy that became known as socialist self-management. These policies represented a pragmatism imbued with a unique Yugoslav ideology and by the 1960s, the country stood firmly wedged between the two competing systems—the democratic-capitalist West and the communist East—and could not fully identify with either.