Contradictions of Modernization between "West" and "East": Yugoslav Development Strategies for Integrating into World Markets, 1958-1972

The objective of my proposed project is to analyze how the leadership of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia debated development strategies for integrating the Yugoslav economy into the world market during the 1960s. The key junctures I want to focus on are the market reforms carried out during 1961-1962 and 1964-1966, but also the partial retraction and reformulation of these measures during 1971-1972.

In so doing, I intend to ask the following key questions: what role did these debates play in the fracturing of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia? And how did they lay the groundwork for conflicts that, through a long series of contingent historical processes, would later lead to the dissolution of Yugoslavia itself?

I will argue that conflicts within the leadership of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia arose over a choice of development strategy in the context of unfolding international political and economic pressures (especially the Cold War and growing internationalization of markets). More precisely, I shall propose that conflicts arose principally because the leadership was continually striving to adapt to changing international political-economic circumstances by balancing two contradictory development strategies: market-oriented reform ("liberal") policies, as advocated by members from urban centers of light industry, and developmental policies, as proposed by members from poorer regions and locations of heavy industry, military production, raw materials and strategic goods.

In attempting to achieve and sustain fragile compromise, leaders continually clashed over how to define an optimal model for the social organisation of economic life and for the construction of corresponding political institutions; over control of economic resources; and over required policy instruments (market incentives, administrative intervention, the role of decentralization) for achieving the aforementioned goals.

In my project, I wish to move away from the prevailing perspectives that interpret Yugoslav political struggles mainly or solely in terms of domestic nationalist conflicts and to instead focus on the economic factors and motives behind the debates. In this regard, my plan is to explore the Yugoslav socialist experience of modernization during the decade of "liberal" reforms and reframe its political challenges in terms of the global challenges facing other economies at the time, in both East and West. When we take this route, the lessons this analysis will offer us are not specifically Yugoslav but about global political-economic realities more generally.