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The Language of National-Communism. Discourse Constructions of Yugoslav Independece in Tito’S Speeches

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The Language of National-Communism. Discourse Constructions of Yugoslav Independece in Tito’S Speeches Iulian Boldea, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MULTICULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS. Literature and Discourse as Forms of Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2016 ISBN: 978-606-8624-16-7 71 Section: Communication, Journalism, Political Sciences and International Relations THE LANGUAGE OF NATIONAL-COMMUNISM. DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTIONS OF YUGOSLAV INDEPENDECE IN TITO’S SPEECHES Laura Herța Assist. Prof., PhD, ”Babeș-Bolyai” University of Cluj-Napoca Abstract: The paper tackles the aftermath of the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 through discourse constructions and the incipient language of national-communism. Basically, the main focus will centre on the way in which the Yugoslav Communist Party reorganized itself, both internally and in its relations with Moscow and the communist world. The concept of “independent paths towards socialism” represented the Yugoslav ideological discourse construction, which placed Yugoslavia in a unique position as a socialist state, but also placed it outside the Soviet camp. The re-evaluation of Marxist-Leninist precepts was based on the right to self-determination. The latter forged the Yugoslav ideological arguments and provided consistency and coherence to the Yugoslav discourse. Throughout this discursive construction, the Yugoslav socialist development was meant to be correlated with historical, cultural and economic local specificities. The main organizing research question in this paper revolves around the way in which the Yugoslav communists managed to create a discourse which would prove Stalin’s deviation from true Marxist-Leninism, but most importantly would justify the importance of local factors in applying Marxism (and hence the position of communist Yugoslavia outside the Soviet bloc). Keywords: Yugoslavia, communism, Tito, discourse construction, Marxism-Leninism The Yugoslav foreign policy after 1950 was fundamentally shaped by the split between Tito and Stalin. As Branko Lazitch showed, up until the Cominform1 resolution of 1948 (which marked the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Eastern communist bloc), Tito did exist, but Titoism did not: “it was Tito’s excommunication the one which gave birth to Titoism.”2 As far as Yugoslavia’s survival after the conflict with Moscow is concerned, the scholarly interpretations and explanations abounded. We emphasize three such interpretations. Stevan Pavlowitch argued that certain historical circumstances converged and gave way to the subsequent evolution of the Titoist regime. One main international event changed the attitude of Yugoslavia and of the West towards one another, namely the break-out of the war in Korea, which “increased the fears of the Yugoslavs in their isolation, and the determination of the Western powers to prevent a similar war elsewhere.” The domestic event which played a role was the severe drought in Yugoslavia that “diminished the harvest, caused agrarian unrest, threatened starvation, and precipitated the economic crisis.”3 Other interpretations focused on the dangers facing Yugoslavia immediately after the conflict with the Soviet Union. In 1948-1949 the Yugoslav communist leaders did not seem to realize the gravity of their isolation and the imminence of a Soviet military intervention. For example, Tito told the Third Congress of the People’s Front that the rumours about 1 The Communist Information or the Information Bureau of the Communist and Workers' Parties. 2 Branko Lazitch, Tito et la révolution yougoslave, Paris: Fasquelle Éditeurs, 1957, p. 205. Our emphasis 3 Stevan K. Pavlowitch, Yugoslavia, London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1971, p. 223. Iulian Boldea, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MULTICULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS. Literature and Discourse as Forms of Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2016 ISBN: 978-606-8624-16-7 72 Section: Communication, Journalism, Political Sciences and International Relations concentration of military troops at the frontier are merely a Western fabrication and that the aim for that was “to create a psychosis of war and distrust among the peoples of our country and the People’s Democracies and the USSR.”4 However, the communists from Belgrade later argued for a new path towards socialism which was discursively intertwined with the perceived and constant threat. According to George W. Hoffman and Fred Warner Neal, there are several possible explanations for the Yugoslavs’ denial of danger: “One is that it reflected the inability of the Yugoslav leaders for the year after the break to see their exposed position as it really was. Another is that it was a part of Tito’s cautious tactics of deliberately playing down the nature of the conflict. A third is that the danger of Soviet military intervention did not exist until after 1950, when Yugoslavia had established ties with the West, and then it appeared, in retrospect, that it had always existed. Still another possibility is that no real danger of invasion existed but that later it seemed in Tito’s interest to assert that there was one.”5 On the other hand, William Zimmerman identified five factors which explain the survival of the Titoist regime. The first one is related to the nature of the post-war international structure which was based on bipolarity and whose primary beneficiary was in fact Yugoslavia. Basically, bipolarity allowed the Yugoslavs to benefit from the British- American interest and the latter’s encouragement of Yugoslav independence. The second factor (stemming from the same bipolar structure) refers to the economic blockade imposed by the Soviet Union, since Yugoslavia found it easy to just substitute trading with the USSR with trading activities with other states. Therefore, the Soviet blockade itself facilitated Tito’s negations with the West, simply because some resources were no longer committed to the export sales in USSR. A third reason is discussed by Zimmerman within the framework of “an asymmetry in values” which represented the bulk of the dispute. The structure of Tito- Stalin conflict exhibited not only an asymmetry of power (the small Yugoslav nation versus the Soviet nuclear superpower), but also an asymmetry of the intensity of values: for the Yugoslavs the conflict revolved around fundamental values which were at stake while for the Soviets the dispute was a form of disobedience which had to be punished. A forth factor is connected to recent events in Yugoslav history, meaning the partisans’ military victory during the Second World War. According to Zimmerman, the Yugoslavs were able to defy Stalin because they had successfully fought against the Germans, the Italians, the Chetniks, and the Ustaše, therefore they were self-confident and Yugocentrism was high. Finally, Tito managed to face Moscow’s challenge because of the nature and basis of communist power in Yugoslavia, hence managing to emulate the Soviet model of power takeover.6 Yugoslavia’s evolution after 1950 is centred on a process of revisiting the Leninist model of political organization, on conceiving “new paths towards socialism”, and on certain domestic innovations. Phyllis Auty argued that “’ the new road to socialism’ was a unique and highly original Yugoslav product, but many of its characteristic features were fertilized by Yugoslavia’s contacts with the world outside Communism after the break with the Cominform”; the measures pertaining to economic and political decentralization, incentives in 4 Third Congress of the People’s Front of Yugoslavia: Political Report Delivered by Marchal Tito, apud George W. Hoffman; Fred Warner Neal, Yugoslavia and the New Communism, New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1962, p. 146. 5 Ibidem, loc. cit. 6 William Zimmerman, “Yugoslav Strategies of Survival: 1948-1980”, in Vucinich, Wayne S. (ed.), War and Society in East Central Europe. At the Brink of War and Peace: The Tito-Stalin Split in a Historic Perspective, New York: Brooklyn College Studies, 1982, pp. 14-16. Iulian Boldea, Cornel Sigmirean (Editors) MULTICULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS. Literature and Discourse as Forms of Dialogue Arhipelag XXI Press, Tîrgu Mureș, 2016 ISBN: 978-606-8624-16-7 73 Section: Communication, Journalism, Political Sciences and International Relations all filed o production, the participation in workers’ councils, they all “owed much to an eclectic study of Western thought and experience which was transposed into the Yugoslav experiment.”7 As far as ideological re-evaluations were concerned, the Yugoslav communist leaders (especially Moša Pijade, Edvard Kardelj and Milovan Djilas) conceived a new form of theorising which was meant to justify the position of communist Yugoslavia outside the communist bloc led by the USSR. Hoffman and Warner Neal showed that the essence of the new ideological perspective was built on the idea that communism was based on Marxism- Leninism and the Soviet Union under Stalin had deviated from “true” Marxist-Leninist teachings. The Yugoslav interpretation argued that the proof for the latter was the USSR’s “imperialist denial of equality between Socialist States” and “equality meant above all the right of any state to pursue its own path to socialism.”8 According to the Yugoslav re-thinking of Marxism (often presented in the newspapers Borba and Kommunist), “what had happened in the USSR [...] was that Stalin had established in his own interest an ‘independent bureaucracy’, centred in the Soviet Politburo, which transformed the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship over the proletariat. Thus, Stalin, not the Yugoslavs, was guilty of ‘revisionism’ and ‘deviation’.”9 In other words, Stalin was wrongly
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