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Yugoslavia: The Process of Disintegration, by Laslo Sekelj, translated by Vera Vukelic. Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1993. Distributed by Columbia University Press. 324 pp. $39.00 cloth. ISBN: 0-88033-256-5.
This timely book on the crisis in Yugoslavia is one of a series on the structure of East European societies. The author of the present volume is a distinguished sociologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory at the University of Belgrade.
In his introduction Sekelj argues that the current crisis in Yugoslavia is rooted in the Sovietization of Yugoslav society following World War II, the failure of modernization, and the rise of nationalism. Both socialism and Yugoslavism as ideologies have failed.
The first of four parts examines the ideology and social reality of self-management, the Yugoslav trademark for four decades. The author argues that despite egalitarian participation in management and nonoligarchical distribution of power, self-management functioned as an ideological legitimation of monopoly political power, inimical to the process of democratization.
The second part deals with how the Yugoslav Communist party, as the leading political power, operated. Empirical data...