Suchergebnisse

The subject of this article are the events which took place in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, viewed primarily in terms of the scope and character of Montenegro's part in the process. It aims to point out some elements and moments as may help clarify, first, why that particular decade (1960-1970) is considered especially important in the history of the Yugoslav "socialist experiment" and why it is justified to refer to it as some sort of its "spring"; second, in what way -- i.e., through what ideas and political activities -- Montenegro participated therein; and, third, whether there is any substance to the assumption that the "communist discourse" of the time may have caused the events in the Montenegrin society and state to take the course which, several decades later, would bring forth a new "breath of spring". Adapted from the source document.

The author's starting point is the assumption that the idea of the Christian Republic, suppressed by the Enlightenment, entered the French 18th-century discourse through its two secularized versions: the "Great Plan" put forward by Duke of Sully in Royal Economies (1638) and the Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe by Charles-Irenee Castel, the abbot of Saint-Pierre (1717). While the "Great Plan" aimed at establishing a secularized European peace alliance under the hegemony of France, Saint-Pierre strove to remove all hegemonic facets of the plan and establish peace according to the principles of equality of sovereign states. In the second half of the 18th century, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in reaction to the Seven-Year War, assumed different standpoints regarding the heritage of Sully and Saint-Pierre: although both deemed useful to build upon Saint-Pierre's pacifist thought, they rejected his way of establishing a Christian Republic in Europe as essentially Utopian. The former saw the only way of pacifying Europe in federalization under the hegemony of a single federal republic. The latter however rejected this solution as too risky and too difficult to carry out, preferring a return to the old theory of balance of forces, which enables small, autarchic and belligerent republics, that must always take into account the certainty that they could be attacked at any time, to establish only temporary and loose connections with other (equally small) republics within the frameworks of defensive alliances. Adapted from the source document.

The text provides an overview and evaluation of the strategy and tactics of Croatian politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis focuses on the historical Tenth Session of CK SKH (Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia) held in 1970, which defined Croatian politics with regard to economic and social reform, as well as to centralist unitarism and Croatian nationalism. The Tenth Session was conceived and held on the initiative of Vladimir Bakaric, a great figure and a veteran of Croatian politics, who was the uncontested master of Croatia from the end of the war to 1969. With the fall of Rankovic (1966), the symbol of "neo-Stalinist centralism, bureaucratism and Great-Serbian hegemonism", one of the principal obstacles to modernization and democratization of Yugoslav communism was removed. The finest advocates of economic and political liberalization of the regime, of decentralization and of a stronger position of the republics were Bakaric and his disciples, an intelligent and well-educated generation of communists (Tripalo, Dabcevic-Kucar, Pirker). They are the ones who would eventually become symbols of the struggle against the Party's dogmatic conservatism and Stalinist voluntarism. The author puts forward a series of elements which make it possible to understand how the political career of this generation of dynamic and popular politicians, recognized and successful representatives of socialist democracy and national equality, came to a tragic end marked by accusations of flirting with chauvinism, of using "neo-Stalinist" methods against opponents and colleagues, and of attempting to establish a quasi-fascist state, in which the dictatorial rule of the clique of (former?) communists and nationalists, in alliance with the new middle class of managers and "technocrats", would be masked by socialist rhetoric and pseudo-mobilization of the masses deluded by nationalism into believing that members of some other nation are to blame for all problems. Adapted from the source document.