In socialist Yugoslavia, cultural elites were structurally related to the
communist ruling elite/s, but the relationship was not simple. Cultural
elites were always constituted at the national (republic) level, whereas the
political elite was initially a single Yugoslav one, but later, it fractured
along the same lines. National cultural elites soon ceased to be anything
like transmissions of the ruling one, nor were they unconditionally
subjugated to it/them. All cultural elites had a proclivity to view issues
as unfavourable towards their own nationhood. The Croat, Serb, and Slovene
viewed the Yugoslav arrangement as somehow suppressing, exploiting, or
restricting their respective nationhood. This sprang up in literary works,
in intellectual production, in the issue of whether Serbo-Croat was a single
language. These issues were brought about disputes, which grew from
intellectual ones into inter-ethnic ones. These disputes contributed
significantly to the disintegration of firstly, the weak Yugoslav cultural
nucleus, and secondly of trust among nationhoods and finally they brought
about a comprehension of an impossibility of a joint state. Most of these
actions could be designated as ethnic entrepreneurship.