Nostalgia of the Desperate

On the twentieth anniversary of the death of Josip Broz, President of the Second Yugoslavia and leader of the Yugoslav Communists, some kind of concealed nostalgia for Tito's age seems to be emerging, while the idea of the Old time is currently being converted into a range of benevolent comedies throughout the former Yugoslav Federation - almost as an expression of intimacy with the communist saint, who used to propagate the secret but rather cruel power of modernisation in the freezing catacombs of the Comintern. People are rushing to see those films, even though the 'Marshal' came from Croatia, which is probably the sign that the story with the new national leaders and Tito's unsuccessful mutants is finally over. Without underrating a single hypothesis of imaginative political scientists, social psychologists and the so-called phenomenologists, the question 'why is the locksmith better?' (the famous Belgrade graffiti) should be answered with posing another question in a Marxist way - is there an economic basis of the nostalgia for Tito's time, which spreads among both old and new nationalists, and who used to blame this 'great Croat' for the alleged collapse and historical falling behind of Serbia. In relation to that, there seems to be a great historical irony in the fact that during the seven hundred year old history of Serbia, there is no longer era of prosperity that that during Tito's reign. We are talking about the historical irony because that Croat-Slovenian half-bread (by origin and education) is for Serbia and the Serbs a complete outsider from Zagorje's Kumrovec, but he seems to have done more for Serbia than all the Nemanjic's, Obrenovic's and Karadjordjevic's together, at least in terms of economic development.

LEGACY: During the four decades of Tito's absolute reign in Yugoslavia, Serbia had occupied a place in a state which recorded an almost unbroken forty-year rate of an average annual growth of the social product of 6.8% (the period considered is between 1946 and 1986, and although Tito died in 1980, it could be said that 'his age' stretched until 1987). After that long period of continuous, and sometimes even increasing prosperity (the average annual rate of growth between 1956 and 1965 was the fantastic 9.5%), when Serbia under Milosevic allegedly returned to its own tradition, to its national goals and to its leader, to its dignity and its wisdom, the social product in the following 13 years - had an average rate of reduction of about 5.5% (if the last year, marked by a catastrophic NATO bombing, would be taken into account, the average would be even lower). By the end of the previous millennium, the social product of FRY was 57% less than in 1986 - the culmination of post-Tito's prosperity, and 54% less than in 1980 - the year of Tito's death.

The period after the 'age of Broz' was much more difficult, especially for the desperate Serbian nationalists. Perhaps, as some say, it is Broz who should be blamed for that sudden collapse of the Serbian economy, but in that case, the one who is responsible for a long and dynamic development in Serbia during that period should also be recognised. The theory according to which Tito's reign is marked by an illusory, parasite economic system which prospered on the basis of presents and credits of the West - is probably true (it is about the help in the amount between 100 and 150 billion US dollars). It could be said that Tito has been managing the country like his private corporation, and looking from the outside, the facade of that almost always the same system of autocracy, at first demonstrated the inscription of 'national democracy', then the one of 'proletariat dictatorship', then the slogan 'factories to labourers', then the concept 'self-management in one country', then the 'agreed economy' and in the end 'permanent reforms' and 'market socialism'. Still, behind that Tito's 'political capitalism' (the privileges and the demand of the huge illegitimate political elite - the modern term defined by Josip Zupanov), i.e. after that illusory quasi planned-market and the so-called efficient and just economic system, the highways, railroads, airports, cities and apartments, millions of kilometres of sewerage system, hundreds of thousands of educated people, cultural infrastructure and a lot of aspirations of young people remained to this day. When something that happened to endure in one way or the other - lasts for five decades, history never asks you why you did something theoretically or conceptually wrong, but rather how you managed to improve the life of so many people from year to year. Therefore, in the period of five hundred years - the Serbian economic history will celebrate Tito's economic age, and children will learn in schools that after him came Milosevic - who wiped out everything.

Some of our economists (Aleksandar Bajt, Marjan Korosic, Ljubomir Madzar and others) proved, though futilely, that in Tito's time the country could have developed much faster, pointing to the examples of Greece, Portugal and Turkey - in Serbia it will always be remembered that the country enjoyed a much stormier development under Broz than ever before. Neither the fact that today emerge various information which show that the relative liaison between our economy and our standard towards the most developed countries was somewhat less improved (between 1939 and 1980) than it seemed to us today - until everything was spoiled with Milosevic. For example, according to some data quoted by Dragomir S. Zlatanovic (The Forming of Economic Prices and Disparities in the Yugoslav Economy, 1939-1996, Belgrade, 1999), in 1939 the USA enjoyed the social product of 480 (then) dollars per capita, and in the same year the same product was 68 dollars in Greece, whereas in Yugoslavia it was 76 dollars. Hence, the Yugoslavs were richer and more hard-working than the Greeks, and 6.3 times poorer than the Americans. In the year of Tito's death, 1980, the Yugoslavs had 3,670 dollars of purchasing capacity of the social product, while the Greeks were richer with 4,567 dollars. According to the Americans and their 11,804 dollars, that year the Yugoslavs only halved their falling behind, so they produced and spent 3.2 times less goods per capita. Nowadays, we are hopelessly behind in comparison with the developed world - we have thirty times lower social product per capita than the USA and eleven times lower than that of Greece. Is it possible - that during the last ten years, the great but obviously not sufficient economic result achieved during Tito's reign in Serbia happened to be reduced to such a miserable state.

THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: The easiest thing is to offer an explanation why is the nostalgia for Tito's time most widespread in grown-up towns in Serbia. He actually, well understood the Marx's ode to capitalism from the Manifesto of the Communist party (1848) where Marx said that capitalism has done a great service to the millions of people taken away from the idiotism of living on the farms. When Tito came to rule in 1944, he found 75% of the population in the country. When he died, fifty years later, almost 75% of population were in the cities. That process of dynamical 'urbanisation' was tied to other aspects of 'socialist modernisation' and 'democratisation of luxury', easily explains why our towns are ruralised today and why nobody, in the greatest poverty, wants to go to the field and work. All those fresh 'towners' various collonists, partisan's relatives, fighters for new social relations, sufferers from various taxes, exploitation and fascism, and fast-qualified, honourable intellectuals, activists and reserve army officers - and all together renters of plebiscite loyalty to Tito's reign and ability to find money somewhere in the world - now are in great fear from the 'American (capitalistic) hegemony' and utilitarian 'economical (NATO) globalisation' do not put back into the wild landscape of our much-singed 'natural beauties', where the hunger was a domestic animal for centuries. Now, when it is clear that Milosevic failed, Tito and the time of his 'independent triumphalism' seem like repeatable fairy-tale. With Tito they were 'absolutely sovereign', 'territorially integrated', 'respected by the leading world states' and now they should be put back to the level of the world's 'poor people'.

There are many of those who express their nostalgia for Tito too, because all of them know that (despite Cosic's and other nationalists' ideas) that he was really for the Yugoslavia which should 'grow more powerful'. The fact that he federalised the state which was in the beginning only nominally federal, meant that he was the politician who knew what can be done by force, and what has to be done by means of politeness. And how fragile is the scale on which the multinational relations are measured in this community of various nations and faiths, that all wish affirmation, freedom and Balkan's hegemony. But, for the national frustrations Tito did not have the efficient solution because his political habits and the regime he created were absolutely against the liberalisation and competition of 'individual work'. Tito took care for 'labourers and citizens', 'working class and peasants' for 'nations and nationalities' - everyone was organised, everybody was taken care of, nobody was alone, with his two hands. And when you take care of everyone you do not need the democracy, and republican bureaucracies take care about the national interests.

Playing the game of 'patriarchal collectivism', fraternity and equality of nations and not individuals, not even Tito could have made harder Yugoslav connection based on the ideas of the individual interests, civil rights, open market, capital and competition because in this 'inhuman' but 'just efficient' system not only that everyone wins, but sometime someone even looses, specially if he does not run fast enough. Since he was the apostle of the system in which, after the removal of bourgeoisie, all was supposed to win, by some honour, even better then those who were luckier before with personal political biography or the national history. Of course, all this that we said here, as possible reasons for resurrection of nostalgia for the Tito's time in Serbia, has the greatest connection with the break of the Milosevics concept of 'continuity' (After Tito - Tito). But, it is not the point to create another 'eternal president' but to leave the used ideas and to dismiss the chiefs of bankrupted enterprises.