Academic literature on the topic 'Yugoslavia – Economic policy – 1945-1992'

When Yugoslav strongman Josip Broz Tito secured power at the end of the Second World War, he had envisioned for himself a new Yugoslavia that would serve as the center of power for the Balkan Peninsula. First, he worked to ensure a Yugoslav presence in the Trieste region of Italy and southern Austria as a way to gain territory inhabited by Slovenes and Croats; meanwhile, his other foreign policy escapades sought to make Yugoslavia into a major European power. To that end, Yugoslav agents quickly worked to synchronize the Albanian socio-economic and political systems through their support of Albanian Partisans and only grew emboldened over time. As allies who proved themselves in the fight against fascism, Yugoslav policymakers felt able to act with impunity throughout the early post-Cold War period. The goal of this article is to highlight this early foreign policy by focusing on three case studies – Trieste, Carinthia, and Albania – as part of an effort to reinforce the established argument over Tito's quest for power in the early Cold War period.

The Italian Republic Toward Political Changes in the Western Balkans Region at the Turn of 20th and 21st Centuries (1991–2001). National Interests and Euro-Atlantic Policy The article aims to show the main circumstances influencing the evolution of the Italian diplomatic attitude towards the post-Yugoslav and Albanian area from 1991 through 2001. Both the international and internal contexts are included (the change of international order after the collapse of communist regimes, relations with NATO and the European Union, and the weakening of the international position of Italy as the result of its internal political crisis in 1992–1994). Two mutually supportive elements can be distinguished within the Italian policy toward the Balkans. Traditionally, Italian diplomats were focused on bilateral and multilateral activities aiming at the protection of territorial security and economic interests, primarily in the Adriatic region. They criticized all international military intervention in the post-Yugoslav area. This attitude was partially changed in 1999, when Italy decided to take part in NATO’s air operation Allied Force against Yugoslavia, although many controversies regarding this action arose on the Italian political scene. The article is based on published diplomatic documents, scientific publications and the press.

The article deals with the features of the socio-political system development in Serbia in the course of two decades after the collapse of Yugoslavia (SFRY). The period of investigation consists of three stages of managerial elites evolution (1992–2000, 2000–2012, since 2012), which differ from each other by the intensity of political transformations and social institutions establishment. The author considers key challenges for Serbian internal and external policy during the last two decades, as well as the changes of geopolitical codes of official Belgrade (on the example of relations with the European Union and Russia).

This paper covers the period from 1937 to 1945, the period of the establishment and works of the Serbian Cultural Club. The paper will discuss the political circumstances in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in wich Serbian Cultural Club was founded, as well as the program goals and its activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Special emphasis will be put on the period of the Second World War in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former common state and the activities of the Serbian Cultural Club in the Second World War. The work and achievement of the program goals of the Serbian Cultural Club in the Second World War will be presented through the work of the Exile Government in London and the activities of the Chetniks Movement in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and the former common state. The Serbian Cultural Club was formed as a form of political association and activity, which included politicians, public workers, scientists, members of various political organizations, representatives of state and parastate bodies and organizations, under the slogan "Serbs for Reunion". The club acted as a unique and homogeneous organization, regardless of the composition of the membership, with the goal of saving Serbia and Serbs. This most clearly expressed his overall activity, composition and degree of influence on state policy. The most important issues of state or Serbian nationalist policy for the interest of the Government were discussed in the Club, so the club had an extensive network of boards and several media. Professor and Rector of the University of Belgrade, Dr. Slobodan Jovanović, was elected the first president of the Serbian Cultural Club. He was the ideological creator of this organization (and he set out the basic tasks and goals of the Club). The vice presidents were Dr. Nikola Stojanović and Dr. Dragiša Vasić, and Dr. Vasa Čubrilović the secretary. Dr. Stevan Moljevic was the president of the board of the Serbian Cultural Club for the Bosnian Krajina, based in Banja Luka. According to Dinić, the initiative for the formation of the Serbian Cultural Club was given by Bosnian-Herzegovinian Serbs Dr. Nikola Stojanović, Dr. Vladimir Čorović, Dr. Vladimir Grčić and Dr. Slobodan Jovanović. The activities of the Serbian Cultural Club can be divided into two stages. The first from its founding in 1936 until the signing of the Cvetković-Maček agreement, and the second from 1939 to 1941. The program of the Serbian Cultural Club was a sum of Greater Serbia programs of all major political parties that operated in Serbia with the help of state institutions. The goals of the Serbian Cultural Club were mainly: expansionist policy of expanding Serbian rule to neighboring areas, denying the national identity of all other Yugoslav nations and exercising the right to self-determination. The program goals of the Serbian Cultural Club were to propagate Greater Serbian ideology. With its program about Greater Serbia and its activities, the Serbian Cultural Club has become the bearer of the most extreme Serbian nationalist aspirations. After the Cvetković-Maček agreement of August 1939, the Serbian Cultural Club demanded a revision of the agreement, calling for a Serbo-Croatian agreement based on ethnic, historical or economic-geographical principles. The adoption of one of these principles was to apply to the entire area inhabited by Serbs. The subcommittees of the Serbian Cultural Club in Bosnia and Herzegovina had the primary task of working to emphasize its Serbian character, and after the Cvetkovic-Macek agreement to form awareness that the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina should enter the Serbian territorial unit. With the prominent slogan "Wherever there are Serbs - there is Serbia", the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina were marked as the "vigilant guardian of the Serbian national consciousness". The leadership and most of the members of the Serbian Cultural Club joined the Chetnik movement as Draža Mihailović's national ideologues. The policy of the militant Greater Serbia program and Serbian nationalism of the Serbian Cultural Club was accepted as the program of Draža Mihailović's Chetnik movement. Some of Draža Mihailović's most important associates belonged to the Serbian Cultural Club. The main political goals of the Chetnik movement are formulated in several program documents. The starting point in them was the idea of a "Greater and Homogeneous Serbia", which was based on the idea that Serbs should be the leading nation in the Balkans.

This article aims to shed light on how the Yugoslav motor industry in the first post-war years sought to overcome the difficulties of mastering the technology of motor vehicle production on a modern industrial basis. During this period, gigantic efforts were made to get the country out of economic backwardness in the shortest possible time. The motor industry had one of the key roles on the path of modernization of the economy, and the state accordingly paid special attention to the construction of factories in this branch of industry. Reliance on pre-war pioneering moves of truck fabrication based on a license purchased in Czechoslovakia was the main capital with which began the process of emancipation of the domestic motor industry. Due to the impossibility to independently solve the issue of construction of all types of motor vehicles, help was sought abroad. Negotiations with the USSR and Hungary were started first, but even before the severance of all relations caused by the conflict between the Yugoslav and Soviet leadership, this attempt to establish cooperation failed. In the following years, after the failure in the East, the state concentrated all its efforts on establishing strong economic ties with the West. Thanks to favorable foreign policy circumstances, the reorientation of state policy had achieved great economic benefits for the further construction of the motor industry. Licenses for the fabrication of the “Ansaldo TCA/60” tractor were purchased, thus resolving the production of all heavy types of vehicles, as well as the production of oil-powered engines. By the early 1950s, cooperation had been established with several renowned companies from Germany, Italy and Switzerland, which provided opportunities for the Yugoslav engine industry to keep pace with the latest technological solutions. However, despite the transfer of technology that played a dominant role in raising the national car and tractor industry, domestic forces played a significant role in the production of the first air-cooled engine, a light wheeled tractor with a gasoline engine and the “Prvenac” truck. The Yugoslav example has shown that reliance on one’s own strength and international cooperation are two inextricably important factors in overcoming all the difficulties that come with the forced industrialization.

Many Bosnians I talked to were skeptical about my plan to do research among local police in the central Bosnian town of Zenica. They told me that no one would talk to me there. “They're too scared of foreigners,” they said, meaning especially Westerners who might be connected to the powerful international institutions that have acted as de facto protectorate to the fragmented and unstable state after the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia and the devastating 1992–1995 war. In their efforts to neutralize the police as enforcer of ethnonational separatism and to promote the new democratic values of rule of law, respect for human rights, and ethnic and gender equality, the “international community” had sacked hundreds of officers, restricted police powers, and introduced quotas for ethnic minorities and women. There was thus a sense that “foreigners” posed a threat to the masculinized coercive power of the state as embodied in the police. As it happened, the police did talk to me, though always in reference to this context of shifting relations of state and state-like power, as well as the economic and social instability that characterizes postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (hereafter Bosnia).

German unification is both a cause and an effect of the restructuring of alliances now taking place with the end of the long postwar era. An enlarged Germany finds itself in a new geostrategic position at the centre of a henceforth unified continent and its vocation is pan-European. The underpinnings of its external policy and its security have been modified. In this context, the German government has opted not only for keeping a renewed NATO but also for deepening and widening Europe's economic and political institutions. It does not want to disappoint either the Americans or its European Community partners and those wishing to join the EC. Nor does it want to disappoint the East Europeans, including those-of the former Soviet Union. Nevertheless, the traditional policy of seeking non-isolation, at times not without ambivalence, is destined to change and could become more assertive. Two items testify to this change in direction : the "debate over normalization', which has brought down taboos in Germany, and the leadership role that Bonn has openly taken, for the first time since 1945, on the issue of recognition without further delay of Slovenia and Croatia by the European Community as of January 15 1992.

Main goal of Serbian ideology, policy, practice, starting from the late XVIII until the beginning of XIX century is creation of a clean, pure and ethnic Serbian country so called Great Serbia. In such country idealists also included the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Meanwhile that is achievable only by committing heinous crimes including the Bosnian Genocide. Because of the Visegrads Geostrategic position the city is crucial for Serbian plans, aggressors and criminals tried by any means to form ethnically clean territory, not choosing the means or tools in the attempt of achieving that goal. Highest point of those crimes happened during the second world war 1941-1945, also in the time of aggression on Republic Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1995. Numerous mass and individual killings, extermination, enslavement, deportations and / or forcible transfer of the Bosniak population, imprisonment and other forms of deprivation of liberty committed in violation of basic rules of international law constitute a long and sad list of criminal and genocidal acts committed against Bosniaks in the Drina Valley, and in the name of the so-called project Great Serbia. In this cycle and history of chetnik misery and inhumanity, the culmination of human malice, evil blood and moral dishonor was against the Bosniaks of Eastern Bosnia. Thanks to the hard work of the community and people of the country this evil plan and evil intentions of Serbs ideologists did not come through. Yet they do not give up, furthermore they use new means and methods. In that contest targeting wider area of Visegrad, as a starting point for commencing Great Serbian goals and ideas. That gave birth to the idea that Visegrad is continuously in focus to the leaders and actors of the ideology of Great Serbia, therefore creation of ethnically clean Serbian areas. All this, for a consequence, had a permanent acts of numerous crimes against humanity and international human rights among Bosnians in wider area of Visegrad, from the period of World war 2 and in the time of aggression on Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this area number of heinous crimes were committed. One of the consequences of the horrific crimes committed against Bosniaks is a radical change in the ethnic structure of the population in the Visegrad area during the 1992-1995 aggression. In relation to the 1991 Census, when there were 13,471 Bosniaks, according to the 2013 census, 1,043 Bosniaks have registered residence in Visegrad. Still, the area wasn’t ethnically cleansed as in accordance to Serbian ideologists, so this shameful project that’s grounded on crime, continued by new means and methods. Analysis confirmed key marks of aggressive attempts of ideology and policy in creating ethnic clean Serbian territory within area of Visegrad. Research is focused and timely determined on three periods: First during the Second world war 1941-1945, Second, Aggression on Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, third period after signing of Dayton’s 1995. still this day. For the purpose of proving the general hypothesis of the research, the methods of analysis and synthesis, the hypothetical-deductive method and the comparative method will be used, and for the purposes of obtaining data, the method of analysis (content) of documents and the case study method. Serbian ideologist still tries to remove all Bosnians from the wider area of Visegrad and by doing so make that town the starting point for the next phases of ethical cleansing of non-Serbian population from walleyes of Drina Conclusion would be under any price secure at first economic conditions for survival of Bosnians on those areas, take a set of measures on economically strengthening Gorazde, as a center of gathering non-Serb population in the walleye of Drina.

Defence date: 12 December 1988
Examining Board: Prof. Mario Nuti (E.U.I., Supervisor) ; Prof. Wlodzimierz Brus, Wolfson College, Oxford ; Prof. Benedetto Gui, University of Trieste ; Prof. Marie Lavigne, University of Paris I ; Prof. Ales Vahcic, ICPE. Llubjana and University of Llubjana
First made available online 8 July 2015

Defence date: 14 July 2017
Examining Board: Prof Federico Romero, European University Institute (Supervisor); Prof Pavel Kolář, European University Institute; Prof Josip Glaurdić, University of Luxembourg; Prof Tvrtko Jakovina, University of Zagreb
This thesis examines the origins and evolution of Yugoslav policy towards Western European integration from the early 1950s until the signing of the first Yugoslav–EEC Trade Agreement in 1970. It examines the emerging role of Western Europe in the Yugoslav foreign and internal politics within the larger context of the Cold War and development of European integration. Increased trade relations with the EEC and the domestic introduction of the 1965 Economic Reform proved vital in persuading Belgrade to become the first socialist country to establish diplomatic and trade relations with the Community in 1968. The thesis argues that these relations became of increasing relevance to the economic and, ultimately, political stability of Yugoslavia. Besides the basic foreign (trade) policy concepts towards the EEC, this study focuses on the perceptions of the Western European integration process among the political elite by addressing the following research questions: How did Yugoslav policymakers react to the Western European integration process? What impact did the success of the EEC have on Yugoslav foreign policy and internal differences among the political elite? In what way did the League of Communists of Yugoslavia rationalize their cooperation with the EEC? What did it mean for the internal coherence of the LCY and for Yugoslavia’s pronounced cooperation with the developing countries? The overarching question is how and why already in the 1960s the EEC became such an important external factor, crucial for the economic development and stability of Yugoslavia. By analysing the complex interaction between the external factors and internal dynamics of Yugoslavia and their impact on Belgrade´s policy towards the EEC, this study provides an explanation of the underlying long-term structural problems of the economy that determined the Yugoslav diplomatic and economic responses to the creation and evolution of the EEC until the breakup of the country.
Chapter ‘Conclusion' of the PhD thesis draws upon an earlier version published as an article 'A troubled relationship : Yugoslavia and the European economic community in détente' (2014) in the journal ‘European review of history’

The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny. Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation. When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world.