What is Titoism?
Titoism is the system and outlook of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito, who led the country from 1945 until he died in 1980. It began as a Soviet-style communist state. After a break with Stalin in 1948 it grew into something different. Yugoslav communists said that the Soviet Union had become a bureaucratic state. They set out a model of workers' self-management, in which firms were run by elected councils of employees. At the same time, the League of Communists kept its political monopoly. In foreign policy, Tito stayed outside both Cold War blocs.
Core beliefs
- Each country must find its own road to socialism and cannot take orders from Moscow.
- Workers should manage their firms through elected councils.
- Markets and competition between firms can serve a socialist economy.
- The state should slowly give way to social self-government.
- Yugoslavia's peoples should be united in a federation of equal republics.
- Poor and newly independent countries should stay nonaligned.
History
Tito led the Partisans against German occupation in the Second World War and took power in 1945. The new state followed the Soviet model closely, but Stalin wanted full control. In June 1948 the Cominform expelled Yugoslavia. Tito's government survived, jailed pro-Soviet communists on the island of Goli Otok and turned to the West for help. A law of 1950 introduced workers' councils. Economic reforms in the 1960s, especially in 1965, widened market freedoms. In 1961 Tito helped found the Non-Aligned Movement with leaders from India, Egypt, Ghana and Indonesia. The constitution of 1974 gave the republics much power. After Tito died in 1980, tensions rose, and Yugoslavia broke up in the wars of 1991 to 1995.
Variants
Edvard Kardelj was the main theorist of self-management. Milovan Djilas was a top communist who turned into a critic and was jailed for it. Some observers describe Titoism as national communism, since it asserted independence. Others see it as an early form of market socialism. Other states, such as Romania under Ceausescu, used independence from Moscow in different ways, without the same economic model.
Criticisms
Stalinists called Tito a traitor and revisionist. Liberal and democratic critics point out that Yugoslavia was a one-party state with secret police, censorship and prison camps. Goli Otok is the best-known case. Some economists say self-management weakened discipline, led to uneven investment and left a heavy debt, inflation and unemployment by the 1980s. Nationalist critics in several republics said the federation hid inequalities. Supporters say Yugoslavia gave its citizens more travel, consumer goods and cultural freedom than Eastern Europe did.
In practice
Yugoslavia was a middle path in Cold War Europe. Its citizens could travel abroad and many worked in Western Europe, and its firms traded with both East and West. Yet dissent was punished, as in the suppression of the Croatian Spring in 1971. On the 12 axes, Titoism scores strongly toward Public on Ownership and Shared on Welfare, and it leans Strong leader on Authority and Order on Security. Markets sit near the middle, since competition between self-managed firms was real. Structure is only slightly Local, as the party was centralized while the republics held formal power.