Review article
Dissidents, opposition and resistance - Croatia and Yugoslavia, 1945-1990
Katarina Spehnjak
Tihomir Cipek
Abstract
The analytical framework for this discussion of the opposition, dissidents, and activities of opponents of the communist regime in Yugoslavia is derived from the typologies of the historian and political theorist Erhart Neubert. Following the Second World War, the regime used repressive measures to prevent the functioning of older political parties and it liquidated all forms of violent resistance to the regime by the early 1950s, by which time the first dissident circles appeared within the ruling communist party. The relative economic liberation and political decentralization that took place in the following years created, however limited, a greater sphere for the public activity of politicians and the humanist intelligentsia. This development reached its limit in the 1970s, when party purges removed liberals and nationalists and brought older cadres back to the fore. The system of social privileges that the regime developed tended toward the integration of key social strata. Civil society began to develop only as the collapse of the system of social privileges was immanent. The role of representative of the interests of the politically dissatisfied classes, who were also less educated, was played throughout the period by the religious institutions. The framework of activity of the opposition and dissident circles varied among the individual Yugoslav republics, and it is clear that this activity as a whole differed from that of the countries of the “Eastern Bloc.” On the territory of Yugoslavia as a whole, it was in scope, due to its relative openness to the west, more or less focussed on the articulation of national aims. As far as opposition and dissidence in Croatia is concerned, the national question was at the core of its conflict with the regime, while liberal-democratic values, civil and human rights (unlike the case of Czechoslovakia or Hungary for example) were of secondary importance.
Keywords
Yugoslavia; Croatia; Dissidents; Communist System
Hrčak ID:
19012
URI
Publication date:
16.10.2007.
Visits: 11.440 *