Free Milosevic by Adam LeBor Page B

national bank, judicial system and so on. Kosovo and Voivodina essentially became republics in all but name. The republics were given the power of veto over any piece of federal – that is, nationwide – legislation of which they did not approve. Yugoslav citizens were even required to choose citizenship of one republic, as well as being a citizen of Yugoslavia itself. The
kljuc
, or key, system was supposed to prevent the domination of any one republic within the federation. It was based on representatives of the different republics filling federal posts on a rotating quota basis. This was similar in principle to the positive discrimination policies of universities in the United States, which favour minority students and set aside a number of places for students of different ethnicities.
    But by setting quotas for each republic, and forcing Yugoslavs to define their own national identity, the key system bolstered the very nationalism it was supposed to counter. Each republic increasingly began to consider its own interests rather than those of Yugoslavia as a whole. Here again was the classic contradiction of the Yugoslav ideal, in fact the age-old problem of running an empire of ethnically diverse provinces. A strong centralised state that suppressed the six republics’ political power would eventually trigger a resentful nationalist backlash. But a weak, decentralised state that offered the republics greater autonomy would encourage them to press for more, until ultimately they demanded independence.
    The answer to this contradiction was the emergence of a strong Yugoslav identity and loyalty that could counter nationalism. To some extent this did begin to happen. Mixed marriages were increasingly common. What could the child of a Serb father and Croat mother be except a Yugoslav? By 1981 over three million people out of the total population of twenty-two million were either in a mixed marriage, or the children of such a union. A distinct Yugoslav culture was also emerging that reflected the complexity and cultural sophistication of the new state. A post-war generation of writers such as the Nobel laureate Ivo Andric, or the Serbian-Jewish author Danilo Kis were widely read from Slovenia to Macedonia. Rock groups such as Sarajevo’s Blue Orchestra and Belgrade’s Fish Soup toured the whole country to a rapturous reception, sometimes selling half a million copies of their latest release. Daring and avant-garde theatre companies led by directors such as Ljubisa Ristic began to gain an international reputation.
    Serbs bought holiday homes on Croatia’s Adriatic coast. Slovenes wentwhite-water rafting in Montenegro. But the question of the viability of the Yugoslavia idea will be debated for decades. Certainly its roots were deeper in sophisticated cities such as Belgrade, than in the villages and mountains. But Belgrade was not just the capital of Federal Yugoslavia, it was also the capital of Serbia. Serbian nationalists became increasingly angry at how their republic was being steadily weakened. Tito had constructed post-war Federal Yugoslavia’s system of republics to prevent the country being dominated by Serbia, as pre-war Royal Yugoslavia had been. There was particular resentment in Serbia over the quasi-republic status of Kosovo and Voivodina, which were physically part of Serbia but were outside Serbia’s political control with their own seats in the Federal presidency. Kosovo and Voivodina had a say in the government of Serbia, but Serbia had no control over them. Not only Federal Yugoslavia, but Serbia itself was being steadily weakened.
    Tito’s experiment in constitutional decentralisation was certainly brave and innovative. But even a state that was reasonably ethnically homogenous, with its own cohesive national identity, would have had problems governing in such a complex system. Yugoslavia was neither homogenous nor cohesive. Nationalism – once deliberately re-animated