I read this on another website once and found it sufficiently interesting to copy. There's much in it I disagree with, but it's worth reading all the same.
I lived in Skopje, capital of the then Socialist Republic of Macedonia, one of the constituent republics of the Yugoslav federation, for a year (1981). This was the year after Tito died and the year when the Albanian student demonstrations took place in Pristina, Kosovo. I am not saying that a year of living in one very distinctive part of the country makes me an expert, either on Macedonia, or on Yugoslavia as a whole, as it was then. But I make the following comments, limited though they are, on the basis of what I experienced in 1981, and read before and since, and many an argument with comrades over the years.
I first became interested in Yugoslavia in the mid 1970s and read everything I could lay my hands on, which was not much, at the time. I studied SerboCroatian (as it was called then) and Macedonian for years before I went to Macedonia.
I was (and still am) a socialist; based on my experience of living in the country, and observations of what was happening in the economy and politically, and the views of the people I lived with and mixed with (mostly university students but also people who were undoubtedly LCY functionaries, some people from villages and regional centres etc), Yugoslavia was in crisis. I reckon it had been on its last legs for ages and when Tito died, well, it was all downhill from then on.
It seems to me that when the self-managed socialist state could not guarantee the consistent production, distribution and supply to the population of basic consumer goods and services e.g. electricity for light and heating, milk, bread, sugar, coffee, meat, vegetables and fruit during winter, toilet paper, electric light globes, soap, detergent, tampons, sanitary pads etc etc etc etc etc, and people could only get these (consumer) things by going to Greece or wherever, or through hoarding and the black market, or personal connections with influential people ("vrski"), then a regime is in trouble. This "ekonomska kriza" was rampant in Macedonia in 1981 and I know there were similar problems in other parts of Yugoslavia, as these matters were discussed in the various Yugoslav newspapers.
My experience was that racism and nationalist extremism were widespread. I felt sorry for the African students and those from the Middle East, Palestine etc who were there in numbers studying at the University. There were Nigerians in my Macedonian language classes and I often used to walk with them into the American Information Centre in the city centre where you could borrow English language books, papers etc. It was quite common to have to endure shouts of "monkey!" for my friends and "prostitute! cunt!" for me. And before posters on this site get their knickers in a knot over this comment, I am merely citing it as evidence of the social tensions evident at the time; I am not so silly to believe that racism is worse in Macedonia than anywhere else.
The Macedonians I mixed with, in the main, seemed to hate Albanians, Turks and Roma with a passion, aped Serbs (sometimes speaking Serbian in preference to Macedonian) but resented their power, influence and political dominance in Yugoslavia as a whole, and their increasing presence in Macedonia, and resented the other Yugoslav national groups and republics. The Turks and others I knew seemed to reciprocate, but more reservedly. Hardly surprising, really.
The "ethnic" stratification of the labour market was clear: broadly speaking, Macedonians and Serbs held the "good" jobs (white collar, shops, banks, administration, academia etc). The hard, dirty menial jobs that I saw people doing, like cleaning, labouring, road-building, grass-cutting, ditch-digging etc were being done by Albanians and Roma. I presume that factory work was mainly the preserve of Macedonians. Needless to say, these were my impressions; I am not saying that this was the absolute defining truth of the situation. The housing conditions of many people, particularly Roma, were an eye-opener.
Most people froze if I tried to talk to them about local politics or society, or became very defensive. If people sensed any kind of criticism of conditions in Yugoslavia, they would attack ("Has your country ever suffered war?"). I later decided that students wouldn't talk to me because they had worked out I was a leftist and therefore not to be trusted; I was probably a spy in their eyes. The functionaries wouldn't discuss anything because they probably thought the same thing, or were afraid. It's a very hard thing to describe or identify, but I reckon that political fear was ever-present, and there is plenty of evidence of political suppression at all stages of the Yugoslav republic, and not just of reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, either. I couldn't identify political engagement or interest on the part of the students I mixed with. Those students involved in the student LCY organisations were dismissed as opportunists on the few occasions when anyone was prepared to talk, or made an off-the-cuff remark. Only one or two people would talk at all, and they were very hostile to socialism, described it as "fascism" and wanted to emigrate. In fact, the one thing that people were prepared to talk about freely was money, how much of it I had, and how much of it they could get if they went to the West; a thoroughly understandable perspective. I'd estimate that the majority of people I met in the course of the year asked me to sponsor them to emigrate. I've never had so many marriage proposals in my life. People had madly idealised views of the West even though they were able to travel relatively freely (unlike others in the former Eastern bloc). I suppose, if they had relatives living overseas in wealthy countries, or if they could nick over the border to Austria or Italy or Greece and buy whatever they liked with their hoarded American dollars or German marks, or had the experience of working overseas in very developed, rich countries, who could blame them for making such a conclusion?
I think Yugoslavia died because the bulk of the people didn't believe in it any more. The economic problems I've described in Macedonia were common across the federation at various times but were naturally far less serious in the comparatively wealthy republics like Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Nonetheless, economic crises, really poor economic planning largely driven by the tensions between the federal system and the competition and resentments between the constutuent republics, political disengagement particularly by young people, rampant national chauvinism (and with at least 26 ethnic groups in the old Yugoslavia, there's plenty of potential there!)and inter-republic resentments and jealousies, obvious extremes of poverty and wealth, idealisation of the West, clashes between modernity and tradition, village and city, the rise of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s ......the influence of the Polish crisis and later, the final collapse of the old Soviet bloc, even though Yugoslavia wasn't part of it, and Western involvement...how could Yugoslavia survive?
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Lost on you, in your chiped-ness...
