This study, based on the author's doctoral dissertation at UCLA, examines Yugoslav economic policy from 1918 to 1929, how it was made, and how it was affected by political developments of the time. It studies the activities of Yugoslavia's regional political and business elites, political groups, and corporations, their reactions to Yugoslav economic policy and their efforts to influence it. The study contains a detailed analysis of party politics and the manner in which the political process affected economic policy. The study uncovers and explains relationships between state, elite, class, national-confessional groups, and territorial regions in the determination of social and economic policy in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia, and the relationship between these groups and the Yugoslav state.

For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia’s Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency. Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers’ money from “non-economic” activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture. What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.

Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.

This book examines secessionism, separatism, and calls for independence in the European Union in recent history and within an economic context. It contributes to the deeper understanding of factors influencing the individual decision-making processes around secession, using economic analysis to answer a set of simple questions about who the secessionists are, what they really want, what their incentives are, and why it is easier to declare their secessionist tendencies than to vote for secession. This a highly topical theme, given the secessionist referenda in Catalonia, Scotland, Ukraine, Kosovo, and the United Kingdom, and this book offers a unique contribution to the debate. It is based on an exclusive survey carried out among members of the pro-independence parties and movements across 17 European countries and 56 European regions. It uses the instruments of the Political Economy of Conflict to reveal the importance of romantic and economic factors influencing the drive towards secession. Secessions have been regarded as a purely romantic phenomenon that cannot be rationalised, whereas this book connects the sensibility of romantic factors such as language, religion or ethnicity with the sense of economic factors through its rational, economic approach. Furthermore, it applies the standard methodology of microeconomic analysis to discover the impact of individual pro-secessionist factors. An integral part of the text presents a brief historic overview, uncovering the lesser-known path dependency. The book will find an audience among researchers, scholars, and students of economics and political science, as well as policy-makers and professionals engaged with a secessionist agenda.

First published in 1997, this volume aims to present a new perspective on the history of the Serbs in the twentieth century, viewing this period through the lives of its most significant Serb participants. Its contributors represent a diverse variety of backgrounds, coming from different countries, academic disciplines, intellectual traditions and generations. The aim of this book is to present a new perspective on the history of the Serbs in the twentieth century through the lives of its most significant Serb participants. Nikola Pasic, Dragutin Dimitirjevic-Apis, Radomir Putnik, King Peter, King Aleksandar, Prince Pavle, Dragoljub-Draza Mihailovic and Slobodan Milosevic whose lives are profiled in the books were, in the opinion of the editors, in position significantly to shape the destiny of the Serbs. In reviewing their life and achievements, the dilemmas facing the Serbs and their leaders in the twentieth century should hopefully become clearer as well. As each of the eight leaders exercised power and influence at critical times, each of them is in many ways still a controversial figure. In order to provide the necessary historical background, in the first chapter Peter Radan offers a brief overview and assessment of the course of the history of the Serbs during the twentieth century.