Balkan Idols: Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States

Self-Management and Nonalignment
In the 1950s, the Tito regime abandoned the communist “command economy.”
The party denounced economic statism (in the official jargon: etatism),
and the economy was restructured, based on enterprises that were more or
less autonomous from the state and party. These enterprises were managed
by “workers’ councils” and autonomous (often too independent and uncontrollable)
executive directors. Many Yugoslav firms, but not all, of course,
became profitable and intentionally successful. This “Yugoslav experiment,”
that is, businesses run as cooperatives in which employees shared profit and
took part in the management, was not, again, the invention of Marxism-
Leninism. After Western democratic socialists such as Robert Owen and
Charles Fourier, this economic model was advocated by the liberal John
Stuart Mill. 51
Furthermore, after getting rid of the Soviets, Tito quickly moved from
being a survivor to being a world statesman. Having been luckily expelled
from the Soviet camp, Yugoslavia was among the founders of the world
movement of nonaligned countries. In the 1950s, Tito built personal friendship
with independent nationalist leaders such as Nasser of Egypt and India’s
premier, Jawarharlal Nehru. The “big three” of the Third World, soon
joined by independent leaders of Africa and Asia (while most of the South
American opposition still preferred the Soviets as role models), organized an
efficient lobby in the United Nations General Assembly. The nonaligned
movement, as Henry Kissinger called it, took advantage of the Cold War
rivalry between the superpowers and learned how to play them off against
one another. 52 Egypt’s Anwar el-Sadat testified that Tito, for whom Third
World leaders felt “gratitude and loyalty” (as a senior and most experienced
leader who was willing to give counsel and support even in for him risky
situations), was acknowledged as first among equals in the organization of
nonaligned countries. 53
For Yugoslavia, nonalignment was not only an efficient foreign policy but
also had a strong reinforcement of the new national identity and a boost to
Yugoslav pride. Nonalignment and “socialist self-management,” along with
the civil religion of brotherhood and unity, became pillars of the new nation.
These three pillars facilitated one of the crucial components of every nationalism:
the nation’s sense of “exceptionalism.” In contrast to both local
ethnic myths and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe that could not
restore national pride despite communist efforts to appropriate rich
traditions, Yugoslav pride in the Tito era was real and was recognized by
other nations.
The Myth of Brotherhood and Unity
The main tenet of the new patriotic ideology was the idea of “brotherhood
and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo). This idea bound together Serbs, Croats, Slo-
united we stand, divided we fall 99