European Future's Past: The Yugoslav Model

This CES conference invites to explore alternative models of social and political organisation that contradict current reductionist, hegemonistic, politically elitist, essentially class models of political representation amidst a severe crisis of liberal representational democracy in Europe in general, with well-developed Socialist welfare-state becoming one of the most tragic victims of the democratisation processes in Central and Eastern Europe in the last 25 years.

In this paper, I wish to explore the Socialist self-management system that had shaped Socialist Federal Yugoslavia during the second half of the 20th century. For some forty years the theory and practice of Socialist self-management had been steadily developed, becoming the subject of comprehensive research by Yugoslav and foreign academia. There is still abundance of literature on the subject obscured by the current regimes, and also an abundance of false assumptions and prejudice. Moreover, Yugoslavia remains alive through many a phenomenon related to the sense of solidarity and common welfare that could not be dissolved among the citizens of ex-Yugoslav republics despite intensive “de-indoctrination” by the new nation states that was but a new indoctrination. Despite having been destroyed to give way to liberal representative democracy, the Yugoslav model could offer important guidelines for repoliticization of the democratic multitude and political constitution of the commons today, especially considering all the important lessons learned on nationalism and separatism, which caused the Yugoslav model to be sacrificed to a “freedom” that at present none of the ex-Yugoslav citizens but the (old) new political “elites” can subsist on.