The question is simple: with a POD no earlier than Tito’s OTL death, how can the dissolution of Yugoslavia be prevented with the least amount of bloodshed? If a partial dissolution is unavoidable, how much of Yugoslavia can be retained?
I think that the biggest reason why Yugoslavia could not follow Spain, also a multinational dictatorship.in southern Europe with a thriving economy, is that Yugoslavia had to engage in political and economic reform simultaneously. By the time of the death of Tito, the old Yugoslav model was no longer working, but Yugoslavs had to confront not only the issue of a dysfunctional political system but an economy that was breaking down. Spain, in marked contrast, did have an economy that was sufficiently thriving before the transition to take the country through the transition and beyond. As things stood, the obvious alternative to a Communist Yugoslavia ended up becoming not a non-Communist Yugoslavia but rather a Yugoslavia divided between its components.
The big question is how you get Yugoslavia onto that trajectory. It might help if you did not fragment the Yugoslav economy, if you did not (say) have a national economy fragmented among the federal units. A different model of Yugoslav federalism, perhaps, one less centralized that makes Belgrade and the national arena more important?
Also Spain's ethno-national minorities were a lot smaller proportion of the population (and even then ETA was still a thing.
And the dictatorship had been unitary instead if nominally federal so any devolution of power could be viewed as a step forward.
And there was a transition to democracy within a few years rather than the old guard hanging on for a decade.
Honestly I'm not convinced there's actually that many similarities.
I'm a bit of a weird one as I tend to think countries are fairly strong entities and with the right breaks can survive pretty much anything. So Yugoslavia could probably keep going until the modern day if just enough people in the right places wanted it to. Don't know nearly enough about it for that to happen. Even mid collapse a lot of parts of it were acting as parts of Yugoslavia for quite a while before realizing that now meant Serbia.
Hmm. Is it possible to come up with some kind of policy that would promote economic convergence, that would let the poorer federal units start to catch up to the richer ones?
Milka Planinc managed to get Yugoslavia to pay off it's external debt and tried to bring more power back to the Central Government including trying to gain financial support from the USA and the USSR and try and have Yugoslavia join various international alliances. She also the leader behind arresting the main perpetrators of the Croatian Spring. I would say due to her minor success she's probably your best candidate but you would be having a fairly authoritarian president who happily impose Austerity measures on the populace to pay debtors etc.Alternatively, is there a potential successor to Tito that can reform and stabilise the state?
Milka Planinc managed to get Yugoslavia to pay off it's external debt and tried to bring more power back to the Central Government including trying to gain financial support from the USA and the USSR and try and have Yugoslavia join various international alliances. She also the leader behind arresting the main perpetrators of the Croatian Spring. I would say due to her minor success she's probably your best candidate but you would be having a fairly authoritarian president who happily impose Austerity measures on the populace to pay debtors etc.
I think the secession of Slovenia and Croatia may have been inevitable but the rest could have remained together.
She sounds like a good choice.. how do you think she could rise to become Yugoslavia’s “Paramount Leader”?
Those are the richest provinces though… I can’t imagine the rump state would have been terribly stable without them. Surely there must be a way to prevent the secession with a POD 10 years prior?
I think an earlier embrace of market reformism would help. Or quite simply not having Milošević. Milošević came to power through the anti-bureaucratic revolution where he replaced the soft-nationalist and/or reformist leadership of the Serbian Communist League and then proceeded to replace the Kosovo, Vojvodina, and Montenegro leaderships with loyalists (giving him a majority in the Federal Presidency).
He also deliberately undermined the deflationary policies of the Ante Marković government just when they were starting to work. It would help if Marković also had created his political party, the Reformist Union of Yugoslavia earlier - that way it would have created a Yugoslavist party that was not the post-Communist social democrats. If perhaps Marković was also able to convince the leaders of the federal republics to allow him to organize democratic elections at the federal level, that'd be of great help to legitimize him. Not sure how to do that, though.
Another angle is the Croatian electoral campaign going differently. For starters, the Communist leadership could be less sure of its chances and not implement a single-member two-round electoral system. If instead, they had introduced a PR system as the democratic opposition parties had demanded, Tuđman's victory would not have been anywhere as crushing (60+% of the seats with 41% of the vote). I think this very different electoral dynamic would have helped divided the anti-communist vote further between Tuđman's HDU and the soft-nationalist/liberal Coalition of People's Accord (KNS) led by Savka Dabčević-Kučar [1].
Another one is that the process of Serbianisation of the Yugoslav National Army could be avoided.
[1] She was actually the first female head of government of Europe as President of the Croat Socialist Republic's Executive Council from 1967 to 1969.
The other major post-Hapsburg region, the autonomous Serbian province of Vojvodina, did substantially close the gap separating it from Croatia during the Second Yugoslavia. The rest of Yugoslavia, however, saw no such closing of the gap, with Serbia proper only maintaining its relative position and the other federal units (Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, especially Kosovo) seeing relative declines of some sharpness. Zdravko Petak’s paper “The Political Economy Background of Yugoslav Dissolution” quotes the Slovenian scholar Neven Borak on the nature of these disparities in an international context: “Yugoslavia was at the level of Turkey in terms of per capita gross domestic product at purchasing power parity in 1985. Kosovo, the less-developed part of Yugoslavia, was at the level of Pakistan. The most developed part, Slovenia, was compared with Spain and New Zealand. Vojvodina and Croatia approached Greece and Portugal. Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia were compared with Thailand and Mexico, and Serbia with Turkey.” Yugoslavia’s regional policy, which involved the federal government transferring wealth from the wealthier federal units to poorer ones, with substantial investment in infrastructure and state-owned industry, did not see convergence occur.
Problem is that those two are the most economically developed republics; also Yugoslavia without them is basically Serbia – which can dominate the semi-autonomous provinces – with some extra bits as they were larger than both Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro combined, and had a population of half as many people again.I think the secession of Slovenia and Croatia may have been inevitable but the rest could have remained together.