Vladimir’s Bakarić’s Idea of a Socialist (Croatian) Nation: From Communist Historicism to Depoliticization

Abstract

This article examines how the long-serving Croatian communist leader Vladimir Bakarić conceptualized the Croatian self-managing nation from a set of ideas that involved decentralization, the depoliticization of national identity, and the forging of a classless self-managing nation. As the centralism of the 1950s, originally envisioned to serve the progress of socialism, eventually brought about the gradual rise of inter-national antagonisms between republics in Yugoslavia, Bakarić assumed that empowering the authorities of the republics and the autonomous provinces should serve as the necessary precondition to prevent national identity from being the source of any potential future conflicts. Subsequently, Bakarić conceptualized decentralization as a means that would eventually lead to the depoliticization of national identity, which was necessary to unleash the building of a classless self-management society accompanied by the withering away of state. This article will show how Bakarić’s concept of the nation suffered from two serious shortcomings. The first one stemmed from the 1960 purge of socialist Yugoslavism of any notion of ethnicity, since any idea of Yugoslav ethnic identity had been linked to the Greater-Serbian legacy of the pre-war Yugoslav Royal Dictatorship. The second one stemmed from the fact that ethnic nationalism was latently maintained by the deployment of historical narratives of the communists as the heirs of the true national traditions and the best guardians of the national interest.