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Serbia's political status after the death of Josip Broz was determined by two kinds of efforts by the state. Firstly, the Serbian leaders aimed to change its unequal status in federal Yugoslavia. Secondly, they aimed to stop fragmentation within Serbia, which grew steadily after the 1974 Constitution. Political relations between Serbian leaders on the one hand, and some political circles and leaders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, and the autonomous provinces on the other, were strained. They worsened even more after several clashes in 1983. Despite the opposition of politicians in Bosnia, Croatia, and Vojvodina to Dragoslav Marković (who was described as a strong advocate of Serbian political unity), he was elected as chairman of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (CK SKJ) in 1983. Serbo-Croatian relationships were further damaged after the publication of the book Enigma Kopinič in Belgrade. The Croatian leaders were against this publication because it revealed – as far as the Party was concerned – undesirable information about the interwar years and the period during World War II. The major confrontation came over the interpretation of events that occurred at the funeral of Aleksandar Ranković (mainly over who was responsible for the mass gathering and the respectful attitude toward the deceased). Federal party units, as well as those from the Yugoslav republics and from Belgrade, jointly condemned those events as a political rally against the government. However, they disagreed over who was responsible for the incident and what had caused the public outcry. The CK SKJ chairmanship members from the autonomous provinces, Croatia, and Bosnia accused Serbia and the Serbian Communist Party for the display of nationalism. They also held the Belgrade City Party Committee responsible for letting the rally happen. Contrary to this, the Belgrade City Committee led by Ivan Stambolić, whom the Serbian leadership supported, felt that the uproar was caused by the overall political, economic, and social crisis, for which the Federal government was to blame.

The diplomacy of socialist Yugoslavia paid a lot of attention to the international reputation of the country in the sphere of culture, and thus literature. At the same time, Yugoslav writers in the Writer's Union of Yugoslavia, faithfully supported Yugoslav foreign policy, both individually and institutionally. The most impressive example of collaboration between literature and diplomacy was awarding Ivo Andrić a Nobel Prize. The Writers' Union of Yugoslavia nominated the writer in 1958, and Yugoslav diplomacy lobbied in favor of Andrić for several years. The efforts were successfully crowned in 1961. In socialist Yugoslavia, the existence of a special Macedonian nation and its culture and language was insisted on, so in that sense, the greatest challenge was denying the Macedonian identity that came from Bulgaria. The Yugoslav Writers' Union, consistently pursuing state policy, suspended official co-operation with the Bulgarian Writers' Union in the second half of the 1960s due to Bulgaria's refusal to recognize the Macedonian language. Yugoslav writers also adapted to the state policy of non-alignment. They did not reach the level of cooperation with those countries that existed in the field of politics, economics or science, but they maintained ties with writers from those parts of the world in various ways. Among other things, the twentieth anniversary of the Belgrade Conference of the Non-Aligned Nations in October 1981 was a meeting of writers of non-aligned countries in Belgrade.