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Croatia and Slovenia in the north developed essentially as part of Europe under the Habsburg empire. To the south, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina for centuries stagnated under Turkish rule. The expansionist Serbs, who dominate the country numerically, want a truly unified nation of Yugoslavs. The Croatians dream of an independent—or at least vastly more autonomous—Croatia. The southern republics suffer from rural poverty, alleviated somewhat by the central government's distribution of wealth from the resentful northern republics. Only the Communist Party and Tito's leadership have been capable of holding the disparate parts together.
Firm Decisions. The new amendments aim to unify the country by granting greater autonomy to those parts. The federal regime will retain supreme authority only over foreign affairs, defense, internal security, monetary affairs, free trade within Yugoslavia, and some development loans to poorer regions. Control of such things as education, health and housing will be exercised entirely by the governments of the republics and the autonomous provinces. In a parallel development, the Yugoslavs are decentralizing their economic system and phasing out government subsidies.
Will it work? The standard Yugoslav reply is that Tito himself does not know. One danger, however, is that Tito may have gone too far in decentralizing the system; in the new setup, as in any loose federal arrangement, it would still take a strong leader to make firm decisions or resolve regional disputes. Early betting in Belgrade is that in the event of a crisis after Tito's death, the person most likely to provide that powerful influence would be Macedonian Party Leader Krste Crvenkovski, 50, who was elected last week to the post of deputy to Tito in the collective presidency.
Intimidating Exercise. The trouble is that the changes are coming at a time when the country is under severe internal and external economic and political pressures. Most of the outside pressure comes from Moscow. Fearful of a Sino-American deal in Asia, the Soviets are eager to consolidate their position in Eastern Europe. Their concern has been manifesting itself in a number of ways. Late last month, Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev sent a personal letter to Tito angling for an invitation to visit Yugoslavia soon. With Tito scheduled to jet off to Washington for a state visit probably in October, and with Chou En-lai's having "gratefully accepted" an invitation to go to Belgrade in the autumn, Brezhnev is seemingly determined to warn Tito: don't get too chummy with the Americans and the Chinese at Russia's expense.
In an obvious exercise in intimidation, the Soviets staged massive maneuvers in Hungary last month and named them Yug, which means south in Slavic languages but has a special connotation in the present circumstances. For more than a year, agitprop teams have been spreading the message through Eastern Europe that Yugoslavia is on the verge of disintegration and that counter-revolutionary forces are poised to take over. That is precisely the pretext under which the Soviet Union intervened in Czechoslovakia. In recent weeks, high-ranking Soviet officials have bluntly told Yugoslav diplomats that the situation in their country bears all the earmarks of Czechoslovakia before the invasion.