A single point that everyone can agree upon is that during its existence Tito’s Yugoslavia represented many different things to many different people around the globe. For example, in 1999, Tito was classified by Time magazine, 19 years after his death, as one of the ‘100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century’. Titoism as a cultural phenomenon in Yugoslavia was already in motion during the 1950s. It was a cultural phenomenon well combined with the public Communist ideology that was systematically presented as ‘savior’ and therefore had a monopolistic position as official ideology and culture. In the beginning, this combination was necessary for the recovery of the newly born nation, as an ideological glue for patching up the rifle holes in common memory so that the country could be built from the ruins. As World War II and revolutionary totalitarianism increasingly became distant memories slowly fading away, the cult was only growing in size and intensity. Titoism as a cult was a complex issue. First, Tito was a leader of the anti-fascist movement that resulted in liberation of the country. After the war, he quickly became a symbol of an absolute authority (politically, military, and symbolically) by becoming general secretary of the Komunistička Partija Jugoslavije and the country’s lifelong president and army marshal/commandant. The symbolism employed in the development of the cult was clearly a result of a process (during and after the war, and many years after), rather than a marketing strategy.
On some levels the classical cult phenomenon resembled any other cult in North Korea or the USSR. Since 1957, Tito’s official birthday was celebrated as Youth Day. The relay race was organized for the first time in 1945 and many millions of people took part in it. The relay race took place every year, where a baton was carried with a birthday pledge to Josip Broz Tito, ostensibly from all the young people of Yugoslavia. Almost all the cities had his name on the main streets and squares and even some cities were named after him. Many of his residences were built around Yugoslavia, even though they were never his private property. In his birth town of Kumrovec a monument was raised and his house was turned into a museum, a place that became an obligatory destination for all followers of his personal cult.
On other levels, its development did not even have anything to do with Tito’s personal interference, an example being the Yugoslavian film industry 1 , which lived a life of its own and contributed primarily to the glorification of the revolutionary period and Tito only as a secondary motif. The glorification of the ‘revolutionary spirit’ and ‘new nation’ and the ‘way it supposedly came about’ was served in Hollywood style: a series of movies that the younger generations were exposed to on every front, at home, in schools, and so on. This was a part of an official ideology and culture. Even though Tito was fascinated by Hollywood films and stars, movies, and everything American, the films created as part of the Yugoslav filmography were not a part of the conscious political plan of building and supporting the personal cult.
The cult developed further during the 1960s and as the years went by and society’s needs changed, the cult also shifted its role. During the 1960s it was all about smoke and mirrors for the purpose of patching up the black holes once each nation started heading in its own direction as the crisis in 1962 had shown. Officially, the character of the state changed through the amendment to the constitution in 1971, where the union of state republics ‘discusses’ important issues. The leadership becomes a group affair, even though Tito kept his position (awaiting his natural departure). The whole transition was masked by the Titoism as a cult, as a strategy for ‘saving face’. 2
The ideological core of Titoism was not Tito. Only the conceptual base for the performance act of Titoism was Tito. The ideological core or the backbone of Titoism, which enabled him to recruit for his cause so many individuals across the social classes, ethnic groups, and nations, was built much earlier than when Tito’s Yugoslavia came into being. It was the idea of national self-determination (including succession). The idea that was taken over from Lenin and Stalin and developed and adapted for the making of Tito’s Yugoslavia was ‘revolutionary self-determination’ resembling heavily a ‘democratic political right’ of the individual and nation, followed on the ideological level by ‘Titoism’ as a historical phenomenon or an institution. 3 It was one of the revolutionary promises that Tito kept and delivered in a final edition of the constitution in 1974. This was nonetheless a concept that demonstrates the historical continuity of these collective human rights in the state-building aspirations of the Yugoslav and other nations and ethnic groups represented in this territory. Being the backbone of Yugoslavia, it was the same concept that played the key role for later breaking of Tito’s Yugoslavia as we knew it. It was nevertheless an ideological concept that very well reflected Tito’s personal conviction and faithfulness to the idea of national equality. The formula of federal organization was supposed to settle the national question and the survival of the Yugoslav state.
Tito’s authenticity as an ideological leader, his true belief in one nation, was obvious in every speech or public address, where he always had plans for the entire nation on equal grounds. This willingness to see everyone as equals was demonstrated in his decision in 1971, when for the first time Bosnian Muslims/Bošnjaks were allowed to declare themselves as a nation and not only a religious group. In addition, autonomy of Vojvodina and Kosovo, which existed from 1945, was finalized by 1973 through amendments to the constitution as an independence on the level of the republics.
One of the effects that such intense transformation or modernization of what Yugoslavia was before World War II to Tito’s Yugoslavia from 1945, had its price. Modernization demanded much flexibility and futuristic vision that not everyone around Tito was either able or willing to accept or follow. The reluctance was clearly stated in their support of the idea of a unitary and centralized socialist state as the only possible Yugoslavia, against the market economy and confederation format of Yugoslavia that was embodied in the constitution from 1974. 4 The approach was taken by individuals whose relationship toward communism was a substitute for their relationship towards religion: the ideals were clean but they were betrayed.
The source of disagreement was formulated in 1951 when the focus was turned to the mismatch between revolutionary ideals and post-revolutionary reality/developments that some define as the crisis of the (Serbian) nation.
Due to either inability or unwillingness to follow the speed of developments of Tito’s Yugoslavia and its tremendous social, political, and economic transition within a relatively short time, a parallel political dimension was slowly developing: a remedy for a crisis, a form of existential security, was searched for in the past. A remedy or a new definition of what progress should have been and an interpretation of the crisis of (Serbian) nation represented was spread through literature as one of many effective methods. Soon after, the project became a collective project, an institution, a networking system, where nationalism became the key notion. The redefinition included the new understanding of Tito’s Yugoslavia, which in the new interpretation was seen as a negative episode of the history of Serbia, an era of demise of the great Serbian nation. Soon after Tito’s death, a speech made at the Kosovo celebration in 1981, confirmed that with Tito’s demise, the Titoism had left the premises as well. The ‘de-titoisation’ that followed envisioned Tito as the greatest enemy of the Serbian people. With the demise of Brionic Tito, Brionic Yugoslavia, and Brionic socialism, according to them the war was inevitable for the purpose of re-establishing the old/new order of things. 5
Was the demise of Tito’s Yugoslavia the result of the Serbian nationalists program only?
Not quite. First, in 1990 Slovenia declared its return to Kardelj’s interpretation of self-determination in its constitution, including the right to succession, as an enduring, integral, and inalienable right, reasserting the Slovenian national project. 6 That same year, Franjo Tudjman, the newly elected president of Croatia, used the principal of national self-determination for doubting Tito’s most important accomplishment: the Yugoslavian federation. Tudjman stressed the fact that the Croats never abandoned the principles of Antifašističo vijeće narodnog oslobođenja Jugoslavije and that Croats are only reaffirming the right of the nation to self-determination, resurrecting also their own national project. Soon after the Serb minority in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina followed their example and demanded their right to self-determination by expelling all non-Serb population from their occupied areas and proclaiming their ‘National Assembly of the Serb Republic’ a state. The international community on the other hand decided to ignore the principle of self-determination as the concept underlying the state independence of Croatia and Slovenia. Instead it concluded that the Yugoslav state collapsed and that the disassociation of its federal units was thus possible.
Even though Tito’s Yugoslavia did not stand its final test of time, the recent findings prove that one cannot say the same when it comes to Titoism as a culture.
Just when everyone thought that Tito’s Yugoslavia at best was all over and long forgotten and only remembered as the worst thing that ever happened to any of the nations, nostalgia kicked in.
The amnesia and selective memory enforced by the contemporary nation (successor) states is increasingly challenged by a new form of fashion statement based on clothes that previously were a part of compulsory apparel (i.e. pioneer and military uniforms); a new form of cultural nostalgia for Tito’s Yugoslavia as a form of criticism of the current state of affairs. 7 Nonetheless, Tito as a cult 8 figure is experiencing a second renaissance through fashion choices; an increasing use of memorabilia and sales of souvenirs such as t-shirts with the message, ‘Tito come back, we forgive you everything’. This post-socialist nostalgia in its sentimental and emancipatory aspect, and global retro-aesthetics are the ‘untold stories’ from those times as they appear and develop here and now, in post-Yugoslav and post-socialist transition: a past in contemporary political discourses is actually worn. The current political and economic situation in the successor states and the new rise of the right wing extremism within them leads the people to make association to the revolutionary period of Tito’s Yugoslavia.
Kumrovec, as the birthplace of Tito, was a part of the Titoist ideological message communicated as a complex yet very direct message that had become an annual pilgrimage for all those who are mourning its demise. The groups of individuals who visit Kumrovec are only growing in numbers each year. It used to be a must destination for all Titoists during the existence of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Kumrovec was one of the important carriers of Tito’s legitimacy: it highlighted that he was one of the people, that he was of peasant origin. In the 1990s Kumrovec was the forbidden socialist anti-national symbol with all the stigma attached to it 9 moved underground throughout Croatia, became terra incognita: memories were stored deep down in the freezer of history, never to be released in public again. 10
Today, even though Kumrovec to a certain extent still bears the stigma of the symbolic ‘cradle’ of the former socialist ideology, its reputation seems to be on a rebound. In May 2014 the latest celebration of Tito’s birthday climaxed to a whole new level. The organization, choreography, and the structure of the event, as well as diverse practices of the participants, largely resembled the previous celebrations. Several thousands of visitors from various parts of Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, Macedonia, and so on, came together to reminisce together over ‘the good old times’. The mainstream politicians, the representatives of local and county government climbed the stage in Kumrovec and in front of the sign ‘The Day of Youth—the Day of Joy’, they addressed the participants by highlighting Tito’s merits and the need to look up to his anti-fascist ideals in times of hardship. For the first time the local authorities officially acknowledged that people keep coming to Kumrovec, whether the political elites regard it as a forbidden place or not. They come to Kumrovec to express their nostalgia, to create continuity between their past and their present, to criticize their current circumstances and the power relations, or just to have fun with their old comrades and enjoy the picturesque scenery. In Kumrovec they tell and re-enact the stories rarely told in the public spheres of today’s Croatia.
But if we are to speak of aspects of Tito’s ideology that were invented ‘before their time’, there is no better candidate than ‘brotherhood and unity’, 11 despite the fact that it never was either completely true or existing on all levels of the Yugoslav nation.
This concept is the only one that outlived its purpose within the borders of fo...