The extensive monograph discusses the life and political career of the prewar communist, the leader of the resistance movement during World War II, and the postwar Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito in the context of European and global history of the 20th century. Besides the importance of his character within Yugoslav internal and foreign politics, the author defines the role of his comrades and key political figures Edvard Kardelj, Aleksandar Ranković and Milovan Đilas, and describes their complex relationships and the consequences of their political decisions that determined the history of Yugoslavia as well as the development of global socialist movement.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1540326852
The article deals with the theoretical aspects of forced secularisation through the apparatus of the school system in socialist Slovenia, which took place from the beginning of the fifties, but became most strained in the 1970s. Officially, this requirement was defined as learning through a “scientific worldview” and as a precondition for full participation in a self-management socialist society. For the first time in post-war history, discussion about religious rights was held in public, especially among young Marxist sociologists and theologians, acting on behalf of League of Communists and Catholic Church. While the latter accepted so-called methodological atheism or even called for a true atheist school, they rejected forced atheisation through implanting materialist worldview into the religious children. The second problematic aspect of schools’ engagement with religion was the controversial representation of religion transmitted to the pupils through the school subject of “socio-moral education”. Although, a consensus was somehow established between Marxist humanist scholars and progressive oriented theologians on the interpretation of Marxism as the theory and practice of class struggle rather than a worldview, both controversies revealed one of the most striking deficits of Yugoslav self-management democracy. In this situation, genuine proposals made by tolerant intellectuals, who were not bound to any side, remained largely overlooked.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1538740164
The article deals with Milovan Djilas’ political transformation presented through an analysis of his connections with the British Labourites, and with the reaction of the Labour Party to the Djilas Affair. After the dispute with the Cominform, Yugoslav leaders tried to initiate alternative international contacts through Western socialist and social democratic parties, considering the most suitable partner the British Labour Party. Official contacts with the latter were established in 1950, the key role in the dialogue with the British Labourites played by the head of the Commission for International Relations, Milovan Djilas. In the aftermath of the Djilas Affair, the once warm relations between the British Labourites and Yugoslav Communists grew rather cool but did not diminish. Although Yugoslavia remained an authoritarian state under the leadership of the Communist Party, in the eyes of the West it continued to represent a significant factor in the destabilisation of the Eastern Bloc, and the friendly relationship between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav Communists were primarily based on foreign policy interests of the two parties. In the second half of the 1950s, the relationship between the Labour Party and the Yugoslav Communists rested, even more than before, on pragmatic geopolitical consideration and not on ideological affinity; the interest of the British Labourites in the Yugoslav self-management experiment decreased significantly, as did the Yugoslav interest in democratic socialism, the idea that Djilas was so passionate about.
COBISS.SI-ID: 3898228
The article is focused on the role of the Catholic thinker Andrej Gosar in the context of ideological divisions among leading figures of Slovenian Political Catholicism in the 1930s. The author presents Gosar’s concept of self-management, which denied both, Marxist ideology and authoritarian Corporativism. Analysing his main works, Pelikan discusses his affirmative stance towards private ownership, market mechanisms and parliamentarian system. Because of that pro-democratic orientation Gosar was strongly rejected by both opposing sides, right-oriented group, which followed Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno and left-oriented Catholic Socialists, associated with Communists. Consequently, he was isolated in the Slovenian public sphere before and during the World War II, while his oeuvre is selectively read still today.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1537844932
The article sheds light on social criticism that emerged in the late period of the student movement in Slovenia (1971–1974), in a phase when it had became pronouncedly political in nature, thus turning into a target of the negative Communist Party campaign. It presents the ideological background of radical student criticism ranging from the ideas of pre-war Marxist humanists and the “Praxis” philosophical school active in Zagreb and Belgrade to the Frankfurt School and French Maoism. Just like in Western Europe and the USA, student criticism was first spurred by global issues, such as neocolonialism and the Vietnam War, and then addressed the unprincipled nature of Tito’s foreign policy in order to finally put the practical exercise of Yugoslav self-management under the microscope. The Slovenian student movement combined principles of neo-Marxist criticism of market mechanisms on the one hand and the opposition to Party authoritarianism, which makes it impossible to place it in the realm of split between Party “liberals” and “conservatives” during the early 1970s.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1539616196