Yugoslavia: A State That Withered Away

The disintegration of Yugoslavia was the result of many factors, not of a single one, but the primary one - the author argues - was commitment of the Yugoslav political elite to the Marxist ideology of ""withering away of the state."" Ideology had a central place in Yugoslav politics. The trend of decentralization of Yugoslavia was not primarily motivated by reasons of ethnic politics, but by Marxist beliefs that the state should be decentralized and weakened until it was finally replaced by a self-managing society, especially the case during the extended period of the last 15 years before the actual breakdown of Yugoslav socialist federation.Yugoslavia: A State that Withered Away examines the emergence, implementation, crisis and the breakdown of the fourth (Kardelj's) constitutive concept of Yugoslavia (1974-1990), and relations between anti-statist ideology of self-management and the actual collapse of state institutions. Based on interviews with key members of former Yugoslavia's political elite, documents and other primary sources, the book reconstructs the elite's motives and reasons for the actions that led to state collapse. Contrary to the dominant explanation of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the book argues that Yugoslavia did not collapse primarily because of the complexity of its ethnic structure, of changes in the international environment, or of a deep economic crisis. Although these factors provided the context in which the elite operated, it was the elite's perception of these problems that decisively influenced their decisions