The Serbo-Croat relations in Yugoslavia

Abstract

The First Yugoslavia was founded as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on 1 December 1918, and its name was changed to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia by the Royal Coup in 1929. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was destroyed and occupied by the Axis armies in April 1941. After the communist Partisan victory, the Second Yugoslavia was founded as the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia on 29 November 1945, and its name was altered to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia by the 1963 Constitution. The Second (Socialist) Yugoslavia collapsed and disintegrated at the beginning of the 1990s.This study focuses on the Serbo-Croat relations in Yugoslavia with aim of explaining characteristics of the Serbo-Croat relations and their effects in the Yugoslav politics. This study maintains that the Serbo-Croat relations in Yugoslavia had two opposite characteristics: cooperation and conflict. The Serbo-Croat cooperation had constructive effects, while the Serbo-Croat conflict had destructive effects in the Yugoslav politics. Also, this study shows that the Srebo-Croat War in Croatia and the Bosnian War in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the first half of the 1990s were not clash of civilizations or return of ancestral hatreds among Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks (Yugoslav Muslims). This study argues and explains that the Serbo-Croat War and the Bosnian War were results of the reconstruction of capitalism in Yugoslavia and of the economic-political contradictions between the Serbian and Croatian bureaucratic-technocratic ruling classes whose ideological basis was nationalist liberalism. For this reason, this study inquires and explains development of bureaucratic-technocratic ruling class whose ideological basis was nationalist liberalism, reconstruction of capitalism in Yugoslavia, and economic-political conflict between Serbian and Croatian bureaucratic-technocratic ruling classes and its destructive effect in the Socialist Yugoslavia.