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.In effect this meanta refusal to acquiesce in any loss of power for the League of Communists.11 Like Tito, Kardelj sensed that the tensions among the Yugoslav nation-alities would fracture the federation if the party relinquished too muchcontrol.It is also possible, as some interviewees suggest, that Kardelj schief concern was for his own power.At any rate, he died before hissystem collapsed.His country had, indeed, changed radically during hislifetime, but Kardelj s incessant theorizing and experimentation eventu-ally helped to choke the creativity out of the Yugoslav experiment and to111 produce the sea of bureaucracy which considerably worsened the economicconditions in the country.The final aspect of Kardelj s legacy is also negative.A tension betweenliberal socialism and Leninist centralism resided in Kardelj.This tensionwas, unfortunately for Yugoslavia but perhaps fortunately for Slovenia,never fully resolved.Where Kardelj attempted to liberalize the systempartially he usually left as much confusion as progress.Nonetheless,wavering somewhere between social democracy and communist ortho-doxy, Kardelj left behind a Slovenia which today has become independentand has embraced most of the principles of a market economy but retains111 a high percentage of population in favor of a broad social safety net andcaps on maximum income.At first appearances his work might seem, on balance, to be positive.He tinkered constantly with the legal apparatus of the country, urged thatYugoslavia move in a more  liberal 33 direction, and he contributed tothe republics (and especially Slovenia s) self-confidence by investing themwith a mission34 and providing for economic differentiation.Ultimately,though, Kardelj s ideas proved incapable of keeping the country together.Furthermore, one can easily argue that some of his policies made thebreakup of Yugoslavia bloodier and added oil to the flames of the civil111 wars that raged in the Balkans in the 1990s.For instance, the cluttered and eccentric economic system of workersself-management, which he had the guiding hand in designing, was largelyresponsible for ensuring that Yugoslavia would not recover from the oil-price shocks of the 1970s.Furthermore, Kardelj s concern with national111 party units and then with increasingly small sub-national economic units98 The breakup of Yugoslavia1 helped fragment the country s sense of common identity.His support ofTito s purges of reform forces who were more liberal  and in all likeli-hood more capable  than he, sidelined dozens of young, intelligent, lessideologically hidebound politicians, economists, and publicists who couldhave influenced the eventual dissolution of the country in a positive way.The creation of the Territorial Defense Forces in the late 1960s, anothermove that Kardelj supported strongly, formed the basis for today s armiesin Bosnia Hercegovina, Slovenia, and Croatia.Kardelj supported aYugoslavia that was in every way highly militarized and had an enormous1 military bureaucracy.This enormous officer corps feared that a breakupof the country would deprive them of their raison d �tre as well as theirpensions and social status.Thus, in the early 1990s they agitated  by1 force in the final instance  against a breakup of the country, somethingthat had become virtually inevitable due to a loss of faith in the federalleadership.These observations implicate Kardelj in the dissolution of Yugoslavia.One can also point to Kardelj s life-long defense of the value of nationsas a contributing factor in a more positive event: Slovenia s secession fromYugoslavia in 1991.His defense of Slovene nationhood, which began with11 the publication of The Development of the Slovene National Question before WorldWar II, and his propagation of Slovenia s relatively privileged economicposition within the Yugoslav federation kept the possibility alive thatSlovenia could successfully secede from the rest of the country.Also, thefact that Kardelj was not a Stalinist  at least, not after the 1940s  interms of domestic policy meant that some sort of critical political dialogdid stay alive in the country.The issue of secession, however, reminds us once again of one of thesalient failures in Kardelj s life and work: his inability to foster durablefaith in a federal, socialist Yugoslavia.Even if his interest in the progres-11 sive possibilities of nationhood and his support for a relative degree ofdecentralization ended up benefiting Slovenia in its drive to gain inde-pendence, these very principles contain the seeds of what is perhaps agreater tragedy.Kardelj went half-way in fulfilling two fundamental humandesires: economic independence and national self-determination.His needto maintain order in and around the LCY prevented him from lettingeither of these trends develop fully [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]