History, Yugoslavia's Legacy

Both the Yugoslav kingdom and the Yugoslav republic that succeeded it were failed states. They disintegrated primarily because their leaders and political systems were unable to reconcile multiple and competing national ideologies and interests or to manage conflicts among them. The legacy of these two failures is contradictory.

The Yugoslav idea of a united South Slav state, twice discredited and buried in blood and bitterness, will almost certainly never enjoy a successful third coming. However, the brutal civil wars that followed both collapses again demonstrated that advocates of the Yugoslav idea were right in believing that creating separate states for Yugoslavia’s mostly intermingled nations was not a solution. Rather, that strategy caused widespread human misery and did not end territorial and other conflicts among these nations.

The immediate legacy of Yugoslavia’s second disintegration was negative. Its successor states (except Slovenia) experienced civil wars, ethnic cleansing, at least semiauthoritarian nationalist regimes, and other separatist movements. As a result, all except Slovenia lagged behind other countries of Eastern Europe in their transitions to democratic political systems and true market economies.

For Eastern Europe and the wider world, the legacies of Tito’s Yugoslavia are, on balance, more positive. From the 1950s to the 1980s Yugoslavia’s independence from the USSR and its liberalizing economic and political reforms created precedents for several Soviet-bloc Communist countries. Soviet military intervention cut short attempts at liberalization in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. However, Poland achieved partial or temporary reform (1956 and 1980-1981), and Romania achieved a significant degree of independence after 1962. These attempts at reform usually included the creation of workers’ councils and plans to free the economy from state-control, as took place in Yugoslavia. The legacy of these thwarted or temporary liberalizations and the people who sponsored or learned from them helped Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic lead the way in post-Communist transitions to democracy and market economies in the 1990s.

The worldwide nonaligned movement and Tito’s crucial role in its founding and leadership offered an ideologically respectable alternative to choosing sides in the Cold War. Many viewed nonalignment as basically pro-Soviet because of the movement’s frequent rhetoric against what its members branded Western imperialism. But Tito vigorously and successfully defended genuine nonalignment against political leaders such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who attempted to give the movement a clear pro-Soviet bias in the 1970s.