Forms of Peoples: Yugoslavia and the Politics of Socialist Transition

• In Event: Yugoslav (Re)Visions III: What is a People? Yugoslav Perspectives

Abstract

The vast transformations of socialist Yugoslavia’s social structure and political organization can be indexed with the shift in state rhetoric from the postwar “popular masses” to the 1980s “pluralism of self-management interests.” This paper examines both theoretical articulations and practical expressions of the “people” during the period of administrative self-management socialism (1951–65), with special emphasis on workers’ councils, agricultural cooperatives, and communal self-government as new organizational forms of participatory socialist democracy. The paper also considers the ambiguous relationship between the people and the nation alongside the class forces that mobilized nationalism in order to subsume the former into the latter.

Author

• Grega Ulen, Tsinghua U (China)