Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

It was succeeded by a new government led by Mr. Ante Marković who
eagerly continued economic reforms and launched a new stabilization
program. At that time, nobody could have presumed that his was to be
the last Yugoslav government.
The real prospects for the Yugoslav economy in the 1990s, however,
were not encouraging. An interesting question was whether poor economic
performance would help or hinder systemic transformation. The
social and political implications of slow growth could, above all, easily
result in a counter-reform. Administrative solutions might be favoured
for at least three reasons. First, because of fear that the reintroduction
of the market would increase social differences among individuals and
regions to unacceptable dimensions. Secondly, the energy of the population
was exhausted during the years of continuous economic crisis.
Thirdly, economic efficiency could only be increased by giving up many
unquestioned premises about social property, self-management, the
political monopoly of the Party, Marxian ideology and so on. A simple
tinkering with the ‘capitalization of socialism’ was not enough any more.
In principle, federalism, decentralization of political power and its
concentration at the local and republican levels, as well as the fact that
the Yugoslav League of Communists was less dominant and more
diverse in values and interests than other communist parties in Eastern
Europe, could have been both advantageous and disadvantageous for
radical reforms. Such pluralism could have eased the steps towards a
market economy, but it could have prevented the reforms from arriving
at any kind of solution too.
8.6 The collapse of the system and the
breakdown of the country
Jozae Mencinger 139
Economic reforms had enabled Yugoslavia to adapt to global structural
changes more rapidly than other socialist countries. Thus, an optimist
could have argued that the proven ability to change systems, re-evaluate
Marxism, and redefine socialism, could again push the trade-off
between ideology and economic efficiency in favour of the latter. But
the flexibility that the country had shown in the past was no longer
there. The problem was that, despite many reforms in the economic
sphere, the political sphere, dominated by the monopoly of the Party
and by the principle of democratic centralism, remained rather stable.
Numerous institutional changes had been adopted to preserve rather
than to weaken links between the economic and political system.
A radical economic reform would, on the other hand, require above all a