Titoism is a variant of Marxism–Leninism named after Josip Broz Tito, leader of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, primarily used to describe the specific socialist system built in Yugoslavia after its refusal of the 1948 Resolution of the Cominform, when the Communist Party of Yugoslavia refused to take further dictates from the Soviet Union.

Shape

The term was originally meant as a pejorative, and was labeled by Moscow as a heresy during the period of tensions between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia known as the Informbiro period from 1948 to 1955.

The rest of Eastern Europe had fallen under the influence of the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin after World War II. Yugoslavia escaped Soviet domination because of the strong leadership of Marshal Tito, and because the Yugoslav Partisans liberated Yugoslavia with only limited help from the Red Army. It became the only country in the Balkans to resist pressure from Moscow to join the Warsaw Pact and remained "socialist, but independent" right up until the collapse of Soviet socialism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout his time in office, Tito prided himself on Yugoslavia's independence from the Soviet Union, with Yugoslavia never accepting full membership of the Comecon and Tito's open rejection of many aspects of Stalinism as the most obvious manifestations of this.

The Soviets and their satellite states usually accused Yugoslavia of Trotskyism and fascism, charges loosely based on Tito's samoupravljanje (self-management) and the theory of associated labor (profit sharing policies and worker-owned industries initiated by him, Milovan Đilas, and Edvard Kardelj in 1950). In these, the Soviet leadership saw the seeds of Council Communism or even corporatism.

The propaganda attacks centered on the caricature of Tito the Butcher [of the Working Class], aimed to pinpoint him as a covert agent of Western "imperialism". Tito was in fact welcomed by Western powers as an ally, but he never lost his communist credentials. The period was, however, marked by severe repression of opponents, people who expressed admiration for the Soviet state. Most notably, many dissidents were sent to the penal camp on Goli otok.

Background

Tito angered Stalin by agreeing with the projects of Bulgarian leader Georgi Dimitrov, which meant to merge the two Balkan countries into a Balkan Federative Republic according to the projects of Balkan Communist Federation. This led to the 1947 cooperation agreement signed in Bled (Dimitrov also pressured Romania to join such a federation, expressing his beliefs during a visit to Bucharest in early 1948). The Bled agreement (also referred to as the "Tito-Dimitrov treaty") was signed 1 August 1947, in Bled, Slovenia. It foresaw also unification between Vardar Macedonia and Pirin Macedonia and return of Western Outlands to Bulgaria. The policies resulting from the agreement were reversed after the Tito-Stalin split in June 1948, when Bulgaria, being subordinated to the interests of the Soviet Union, took a stance against Yugoslavia.

The policy of regional blocs had been the norm in Comintern policies, displaying Soviet resentment of the nation-state in Eastern Europe and of the consequences of Paris Peace Conference. With the 1943 dissolution of Comintern and the subsequent advent of the Cominform came Stalin's dismissal of the previous ideology, and adaptation to the conditions created for Soviet hegemony during the Cold War.

Outcome and influence

Leonid Brezhnev's conservative attitudes yet again chilled relations between the two countries (although they never degenerated to the level of the conflict with Stalin). Yugoslavia backed Czechoslovakia's leader Alexander Dubček during the 1968 Prague Spring, and then cultivated a special (albeit incidental) relation with the maverick Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu. Titoism was similar to Dubček's Socialism with a human face, while Ceauşescu attracted sympathies for his refusal to condone (and take part in) the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which briefly seemed to constitute a casus belli between Romania and the Soviets. However, Ceauşescu was an unlikely member of the alliance, since he profited from the events in order to push his authoritarian agenda inside Romania.

After Brezhnev brought Czechoslovakia to heel in 1968, Romania and Yugoslavia maintained privileged connections up to the mid-1980s. Ceauşescu adapted the part of Titoism that made reference to the "conditions of a particular country", but merged them with Romanian nationalism and contrasting North Korean Juche beliefs, while embarking on a particular form of Cultural Revolution. The synthesis can be roughly compared with the parallel developments of Hoxhaism, and found Ceauşescu strong, perhaps unsought, supporters in National Bolshevism theorists such as the Belgian Jean-François Thiriart.

Tito's own ideology became less clear with the pressures of various nationalisms within Yugoslavia and the problems posed by the 1970s Croatian Spring. However, his economic views remained steady, amounting to the high standard of living enjoyed by the country - slowly, Yugoslavia became a virtual free market, neatly separated from other Socialist regimes in Eastern Europe (and marked by a permissive attitude towards seasonal labor of Yugoslav citizens in Western Europe). At the same time, the leadership did put a stop to overt capitalist attempts (such as Stjepan Mesić's experiment with privatization in Orahovica), and crushed the dissidence of liberal thinkers such as former leader Milovan Đilas; it also clamped down on centrifugal attempts, promoting a Yugoslav patriotism.

Although still claimed as official dogma, virtually all aspects of Titoism went into rapid decline after Tito's death in 1980, being replaced by the rival policies of constituent republics. During the late 1980s, with nationalism on the rise, revised Titoism was arguably kept as a point of reference by political movements caught disadvantaged by the main trends, such as civic forums in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Macedonia.

The socialist variant of workers' self-management was also adopted by the Spanish Carlist Party in the 1970s founded by Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma, a rival claimant to the Spanish throne. However it did not attract many followers during the Spanish transition to democracy, and many Carlists preferred their centuries-old right-wing tendency.

American economist Steve Hanke writes that Mexico has mimicked Tito's strategy of exporting the labor force and "as a result, more than 27 percent of Mexico's labor force is now working in the U.S. and these workers are sending home $20 billion in remittances". Hanke elaborates "that equals one-third of the total wage earnings in the formal sector of the Mexican economy and 10 percent of Mexico's exports. To solve Yugoslavia's surplus labor problem, strongman Tito came up with a simple, but ingenious, economic strategy: open the borders — at least by communist standards —and export surplus labor. This plan worked like a charm. At its peak in the early 1970s, there were more than a million Yugoslavs, about 11 percent of the labor force, working in Western Europe. And the hard-money remittances (primarily German marks) that they sent back home amounted to as much as 30 percent of Yugoslavia's exports."

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Category:Socialism Category:Communism Category:Second Yugoslavia Category:Political philosophy by politician