The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Emergence of the ‘Nationalist’ Croatian Democratic Union: A Discourse Analytic Reading Vlatka Jakir A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Government University of Essex May 2016 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::: v CHAPTER I. Introduction .................................1 1.1 Problematization . .2 1.2 The Contributions and Outline of the Thesis . .8 II. The Existing Literature and the Theoretical and Methodological Framework of the Thesis .......................... 15 2.1 Introduction . 15 2.2 Current Approaches to the Emergence of the CDU Party (1989-1990) 16 2.2.1 The break-up of Yugoslavia . 16 2.2.2 The Croatian democratic transition . 26 2.2.3 Croatian national identity . 31 2.2.4 Reflections on the existing approaches . 40 2.3 The Emergence of the CDU Party in the Context of Yugoslavia’s Dissolution: a Discourse Analytic Reading . 42 2.3.1 Poststructuralist Discourse Theory as a research paradigm 42 2.3.2 Yugoslavian dissolution and the emergence of the CDU party: a discourse analytical reading . 59 III. The Frontiers of the Yugoslavian Imaginary: Self-management and Brotherhood and Unity ........................ 63 3.1 Introduction . 63 3.2 The Contours of the Yugoslavian Socio-Political Landscape . 65 3.3 The Differential System Instituted by Self-Management . 67 3.4 The Differential System Instituted by Brotherhood and Unity . 73 3.5 Conclusion . 78 IV. The Croatian Spring: Transforming Rules and Crossing Bound- aries ...................................... 80 4.1 Introduction . 80 iii 4.2 Dislocations and Antagonisms: the Context of the Croatian Spring Movement . 83 4.3 Disentangling the Croatian Spring Movement . 87 4.3.1 The Declaration: posing the ‘national’ problem in cul- tural terms . 87 4.3.2 The LCC: contesting rules and politicizing the republican working class identity . 88 4.3.3 Matica hrvatska: transgressing boundaries and antago- nising national identities . 95 4.3.4 The Student movement: linking demands to action and transgressing the boundaries of politics . 99 4.4 The Hegemonic Response: Excluding the Movement and Including the Logic . 101 4.5 Conclusion . 103 V. Decontesting Yugoslavian Identity: Unity, Hierarchy and Self- Management ................................. 105 5.1 Introduction . 105 5.2 The System of Rules of Mutual Constitution of the Identities . 107 5.3 The Principles, Values and Goods Constituting Yugoslavian Identity113 5.4 The Relations of Governance, Rules and Procedures for Practices . 117 5.5 Institutions for Discussion and Alternation of Rules and Relations 120 5.6 Conclusion . 126 VI. Hegemonic Crisis: the ‘Floating’ of Self-management ........ 128 6.1 Introduction . 128 6.2 Subtracting Tito and Kardelj: ‘Rotating’ the Hegemonic Centre . 131 6.3 The Economic Crisis: the Failures of the Emancipatory Project . 135 6.4 The Crisis of Federalism: Institutional Forms Fail to Decontest and Deliver . 144 6.5 The Crisis in the LCY: Disunity and the Inability to Redefine the Order . 153 6.6 Conclusion . 161 VII. Hegemonic Crisis: Politicizing National Identities in the Socialist Republic of Serbia and the LCS’s Transformist Project ...... 163 7.1 Introduction . 163 7.2 The Constitution of SR Serbia in the Yugoslavian Imaginary . 165 7.3 Contending Demands for Constitutional Change in AP Kosovo and the Emergence of the Serbian National Myth . 169 7.3.1 Kosovo Albanian protests and regime response . 169 7.3.2 Kosovo Serb/Montenegrin protests and regime response . 173 7.3.3 The Serbian intellectuals: the mythical dimension to the Kosovo problem . 182 iv 7.4 Slobodan Milošević’s Transformist Anti-bureaucratic Revolution and the New Constitutional Concept . 190 7.4.1 The rise of Slobodan Milošević and the absorption of so- cial demands . 190 7.4.2 The anti-bureaucratic revolution: deepening the LCS’s hegemony and the new constitutional concept . 193 7.5 Conclusion . 201 VIII. The Articulation of Democratic Identities in the Socialist Repub- lic of Croatia ................................. 203 8.1 Introduction . 203 8.2 The Hegemonic Crisis of the LCY and the Introduction of multi- partyism in SR Croatia . 206 8.3 The Myths and Subjectivities Articulated in the Electoral Campaign210 8.3.1 The Croatian Democratic Union . 210 8.3.2 The League of Communists of Croatia–The Party of Demo- cratic Changes . 217 8.3.3 The Serbian Democratic Party . 222 8.4 Conclusion . 228 IX. Conclusion .................................. 231 v ABSTRACT The Dissolution of Yugoslavia and the Emergence of the ‘Nationalist’ Croatian Democratic Union: A Discourse Analytic Reading The thesis addresses the question of how the essentialist and exclusivist representation of the Croatian nation that underlies the post-socialist democratic order came into being. It does so by examining the emergence of the Croatian Democratic Union’s nationalist discourse in the context of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, revealing its historical specificity. The analysis covers the form of social division instituted by the Yugoslavian regime, the politicizations of the Croatian nation during the Croatian Spring movement (1968-1971), the identitary logics that underpinned Yugoslavia’s constitutional order, their contesta- tions and the emergence of the League of Communist of Serbia’s transformist project in the 1980s, the disarticulation of the form of social division instituted by the Yugoslavian regime, and the contending democratic discourses that emerged in the Socialist Republic Croatia during the first democratic elections (1990). Drawing on a combination of Poststructuralist Discourse Theory and James Tully’s work on constitutional development, the analysis develops a critical account of the ‘nation- alist’ CDU’s emergence without reproducing the party’s own representations of its origins, social unity, division and Croatian nationhood. Central to this analysis is the broader movement from the Yugoslavian imaginary horizon to the ‘new’ myths that emerged in the process of its dissolution and the discursive constructions of the nation in this process. The thesis seeks to expose the limitations of CDU’s nationalist discourse and the complex process of political identity formation and dissolution that made the party’s emergence possible and that continues to shape Croatian politics today. Keywords: political practices of nationhood, self-management, the break-up of Yu- goslavia, the Croatian Democratic Union, nationalism, myth, imaginary, Croatian na- tional identity 1 CHAPTER I Introduction The first democratic elections in Croatia, held between April and May 1990, brought the ‘nationalist’ Croatian Democratic Union (CDU) to power in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. The party won the elections on a nationalist platform, one permeated with the language of national self-determination and historical determinism. It claimed to express the centuries old desire of the Croatian people to constitute themselves as an independent nation within its own presumed historical borders. In the context of the emergence of nationalist politics on the eve of the Yugoslavian dissolution, the party also declared that it would protect the Croatian nation and its state from ‘great-Serbian expansionism’ and that it would defend the nation’s ‘historical-geopolitical interests’. Although the party received only 41,9% of the overall vote, due to the absolute majority electoral system, it claimed 205 out of 356 seats in the Constitutive Assembly and it thus shaped the terms under which the new democratic order was constituted.1 The party has governed uninterrupted between 1990 and 2000 while its leader Franjo Tuđman became Croatia’s first democratically elected president and remained in that position until his death in 1999. Under CDU’s rule Croatia ceased to be socialist, it seceded from Yugoslavia and it fought the so-called ‘Homeland War’ (1991-1995) that broke out as part and parcel of the secession process. The specific historical conjecture that was characterised by the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe and the electoral victory, placed the party in the position of shaping the trajectory of Croatia’s transition from a socialist republic in a 1For details about the electoral outcome see: Mirjana Kasapović. “Electoral Politics in Croatia 1990- 2000”. In: Politička misao 37.5 (2000). 2 federal state to an independent market-oriented, multi-party democracy. The CDU has remained one of the central players in Croatian politics until the present day, a position it shares with the successor of the League of Communists of Croatia, the Social Democratic Party of Croatia. The present study seeks to investigate the emergence of the CDU as well as the broad reception of its nationalist program, in the context of Yugoslavia’s dissolution and the pluralization of politics in the Socialist Republic of Croatia. It does so by examining the discursive constructions of the nation in Yugoslavia (1958-1990), accounting for the CDU’s emergence from within this particular historical context and by drawing out the limitations of its nationalist programme. I believe that this examination is important because the party shaped the first democratic constitution of the Republic of Croatia promulgated in 1990, whose (historical) foundations have remained unchanged until the present day, and because the violent events of Yugoslavia’s dissolution normalized its nationalist perspective to such an extent that it is very difficult to criticize its positions in a systematic manner. In fact, as