Socialist Republic of Croatia

Socijalistička Republika Hrvatska Socialist Republic of Croatia
A federal unit of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
← ← 1943 — 1991 →
Flag Coat of arms
Capital	Zagreb
Official language	Serbo-Croatian (western variant)
Established In the SFRY:  - Since  - Until	June 13, 1943 June 13, 1943 June 25, 1991
Area  - Total  - Water	Ranked 2nd in the SFRY 56,524 km² 0.227%
Population  - Total   - Density	Ranked 2nd in the SFRY 4,784,265 84.6/km²
Currency	Yugoslav dinar (dinar)
Time zone	UTC + 1

Socialist Republic of Croatia (often abbreviated SR Croatia; Serbo-Croatian: Socijalistička Republika Hrvatska, SR Hrvatska) was a sovereign constituent country of the second Yugoslavia. It came to existence during World War II, becoming a socialist state after the war, and was also renamed four times in its existence (see below). It was the second largest republic in Yugoslavia by territory and population, after SR Serbia. In 1990, the state adopted a new constitution, adopted a multi-party system and free market economy.^[1][2] In 1991 it formally seceded, contributing to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.

Names

Croatia was became part of the Yugoslav federation in 1943 after the Second Session of the AVNOJ and through the resolutions of the ZAVNOH, Croatia's wartime deliberative body. It was officially founded as the Federal State of Croatia (Croatian: Federalna Država Hrvatska, FD Hrvatska) on May 9, 1944 at the 3rd session of the ZAVNOH. Yugoslavia was then called the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia (Demokratska Federativna Jugoslavija, DFJ), it was not a constitutionally socialist state, or even a republic, in anticipation of the conclusion of the war, when these issues were settled. On November 29, 1945, the Democratic Federal Yugoslavia became the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (Federativna Narodna Republika Jugoslavia, FNRJ), a socialist People's Republic. Accordingly, the Federal State of Croatia became People's Republic of Croatia (Narodna Republika Hrvatska, NR Hrvatska).

On April 7, 1963, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY) was renamed into the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). Yugoslavia (and therefore Croatia) gradually abandoned Stalinism after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948. In 1963 the People's Republic of Croatia also accordingly became the Socialist Republic of Croatia.

In 1990, after the first free elections, the prefix "socialist" was dropped,^[2] so between 1990 and independence of Croatia in 1991, it was officially named Republic of Croatia, the name that it still bears.

Economy

In the People's Republic of Croatia, private property was nationalized. This caused the old landowners as well as the Catholic Church to lose large amounts of money and property. The republic underwent a major rebuilding process in order to recover from World War II. A notable phenomenon during this process were the major volunteer public works that rallied young people in the building of roads and other public facilities. In contrast to popular opinion, the vast majority of public works of the period (among others, the Adriatic coastline highway) were financed by the federal government.

The economy developed into a type of socialism called workers' self-management (radničko samoupravljanje), in which workers partially shared profit in state-run enterprises. This type of socialism was first introduced in Croatia, then in other parts of Yugoslavia. Croatia gave one of world's biggest, if not the world's biggest name in the field of workers' self-management in economic theory, Branko Horvat. This kind of market socialism created significantly better economic conditions than in the Eastern Bloc countries. Croatia went through intensive industrialization in the 1960s and 1970s with industrial output increasing several-fold, and with Zagreb surpassing the Yugoslav federal capital Belgrade in the amount of industry in the city (even though Belgrade is much larger than Zagreb).

Factories and other organizations were often named after Partisans who were declared People's Heroes. Before WWII Croatia's industry was not significant, with the vast majority of the people employed in agriculture. By 1989 the country was completely transformed into a modern industrialized state. At the same time, the Croatian Adriatic coast began to take shape as an internationally popular tourist destination, all coastal republics (but mostly SR Croatia) profited greatly from this. The government brought unprecedented economic and industrial growth, high levels of social security and a very low crime rate.^{[citation needed]} The country completely recovered from WW2 and achieved a very high GDP and economic growth rate.^{[citation needed]}

History

Post WWII period

In the post-war period, a camp for Croatian Germans was opened at Valpovo, where over 1000 inmates died between 1945 and 1946.^[3]

Croats were less numerous in Yugoslavia compared to the Serbs, but Tito, whose father was Croatian, adopted a carefully contrived policy to manage the conflicting national ambitions of the two nations: nationalism on either side was suppressed. The constitution of 1963, the one that introduced the country name Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, SFRY, didn't allow Serbs to have all the political power in the country.^{[citation needed]} Indeed, this was true to such an extent that the Serbs grew increasingly more disgruntled.^{[citation needed]} Croatians participated in state politics at the highest levels: five out of the nine Prime Ministers of the SFRY were Croats. The Serbs, however, in the same way that happened in the old Kingdom of Yugoslavia, dominated the military and the secret services^[4][5], as most of the generals in the Yugoslav People's Army were either Serbian or Montenegrin.

Trends after 1965 (like the fall of OZNA and UDBA chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966^[6]) led to the Croatian Spring of 1970–1971, when students in Zagreb organized demonstrations for greater civil liberties and greater Croatian autonomy. The regime stifled the public protest and incarcerated the leaders (making them political prisoners), but many key Croatian representatives in the Party silently supported this cause, so a new Constitution was ratified in 1974 that gave more rights to the individual republics, much to the (eventual) satisfaction of the protesters.

After Tito's death

History of Croatia
This article is part of a series
Early history
Prehistoric Croatia
Origins of the Croats
White Croatia
Medieval history
Littoral Croatia · Pannonian Croatia · Pagania · Zachlumia · Travunia
Kingdom of Croatia
March of Istria
Republic of Poljica
Republic of Dubrovnik
Kingdom of Bosnia
Habsburg Empire
Kingdom of Croatia
Croatian Military Frontier
Illyrian Provinces · Kingdom of Illyria
Kingdom of Slavonia
Kingdom of Dalmatia
Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia
State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs
Yugoslavia
Kingdom of Yugoslavia (Banovina of Croatia)
World War II Independent State of Croatia Federal State of Croatia
Socialist Republic of Croatia
Contemporary Croatia
War of independence
Republic of Croatia
Croatia Portal v · d · e

In 1980 Josip Broz Tito died, and political and economic difficulties started to mount and the federal government began to crumble. The economy was actually in a very good shape until the fall of communism, and Croatia was the most prosperous of the six republics. However, probably due to the imminent end of the Cold War and all the subtle benefits Yugoslavia received because of it, inflation soared. The last federal prime minister Ante Marković, who was Bosnian Croat, spent two years implementing various economic and political reforms. His government's efforts were initially successful, but ultimately they failed due to the incurable political instability of the SFRY.

Ethnic tensions were on the increase and would result in the demise of Yugoslavia. The growing crisis in Kosovo, the nationalist memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the emergence of Slobodan Milošević as the leader of Serbia, and everything else that followed provoked a very negative reaction in Croatia. The fifty-year-old rift was starting to resurface, and the Croats increasingly began to show their own national feelings and express opposition towards the Belgrade regime.

On October 17, 1989, the rock group Prljavo kazalište held a major concert before almost 250,000 people on the central Zagreb city square. In the light of the changing political circumstances, their song "Mojoj majci" ("To my mother"), where the songwriter hailed the mother in the song as "the last rose of Croatia", was taken to heart by the fans on the location and many more elsewhere because of the expressed patriotism. On October 26, parliament declared All Saints Day (November 1) a public holiday.

In January 1990, during the 14th Congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the delegation of Serbia led by Milošević insisted on replacing the 1974 constitutional policy that empowered the republics with a policy of "one person, one vote", which would benefit the majority Serb population. This caused the Slovenian and Croatian delegations (led by Milan Kučan and Ivica Račan, respectively) to leave the Congress in protest and marked a culmination in the rift of the ruling party.

Ethnic Serbs, who constituted 12% of the population of Croatia, rejected the notion of separation from Yugoslavia. Serb politicians feared the loss of influence they previously had through their membership of the League of Communists in Croatia (that some Croats claimed was disproportionate). Memories from the Second World War were the rhetoric coming from the Belgrade administration. As Milošević and his clique rode the wave of Serbian nationalism across Yugoslavia, talking about battles to be fought for Serbdom, emerging Croatian leader Franjo Tuđman reciprocated with talk about making Croatia a nation state. The availability of mass media allowed for propaganda to be spread fast and spark jingoism and fear, creating a war climate.

In March 1990, the Yugoslav People's Army met with the Presidency of Yugoslavia (an eight member council composed of representatives from six republics and two autonomous provinces) in an attempt to get them to declare a state of emergency which would allow for the army to take control of the country. Serbian and Serb-dominated representatives (Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosovo) already in consent with the army, voted for the proposal, but as representatives of Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Bosnia voted against, the plot failed. The dying country had yet to see few more Serb leadership's attempts to push the plan for centralizing the power in Belgrade, but because of resistance in all other republics, the crisis only deteriorated.

The Croatian parliamentary election, 1990 was held on on April 22 and May 6, 1990. After the first multi-party elections, the creation of a constituent republic based on democratic institutions occurred.

Franjo Tuđman was elected resident and promised independence if reforms were not introduced. While generally heading towards independence, the government attempted final negotiations with the Serbian government to create a confederal Yugoslavia in which Croatia and other republics would be autonomous and powers would be decentralized. This was not accepted.

Independence

On July 2, 1990, Croatia declared its sovereignty. On July 25, 1990, Croatia made more constitutional amendments effecting this sovereignty – the "Socialist" prefix was dropped from the country's name, the President of Croatia replaced the President of the Presidency, in addition to other changes.^[2]

Croatia faced political crisis within Yugoslavia as Serb-populated areas attempted to form an enclave called Serbian Krajina which intended to separate from Croatia if Croatia itself attempted to separate. The Serb leadership in Krajina refused to recognize the government of the Republic of Croatia as having sovereignty over them. The crisis began in August 1990 with the Log Revolution as Croatian Serbs cut down trees which they used to block roads. This hampered Croatian tourism and caused alarm in the province of Dalmatia as Croatia was hosting the 1990 European Athletics Championships in Split.

On December 21, 1990, a new Constitution was passed. On February 21, 1991, Croatia declared its Constitution and laws supreme to that of the SFRY. On May 19, 1991, a referendum was held on independence, where a majority of Croatians endorsed independence from Yugoslavia (93% of the total number of votes). On June 25, 1991, it declared its independence from the SFRY, in an effort to end its status as a constituent republic. By mid-1991, the Croatian War of Independence had started. Serb-controlled areas of Croatia became part of the unrecognized Republic of Serbian Krajina, which would not be under Croatian control until 1995/1998. With the end of 1991, the second Yugoslavia effectively ceased to exist as a state, with no leadership representing it in the beginning of 1992.

Symbols

Flag used during World War II (1943–45)   Coat of arms used during World War II (1943–47)   Flag used June 27, – December 21, 1990[7]   Coat of arms used June 27, – December 21, 1990   Flag used from December 21, 1990   Coat of arms used from December 21, 1990

See also

Croatia portal

• Croatia
• History of Croatia
• Timeline of Croatian history

References

1. ^ "Odluka o proglašenju Amandmana LIV. do LXIII. na Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske" (in Croatian literary language). Narodne novine. February 14, 1990. http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/1990_02_7_71.html. Retrieved May 9, 2009. 
2. ^ ^{a b c} "Odluka o proglašenju Amandmana LXIV. do LXXV. na Ustav Socijalističke Republike Hrvatske" (in Croatian language). Narodne novine. July 25, 1990. http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/1990_07_31_610.html. Retrieved April 27, 2009. 
3. ^ Geiger, Vladimir, Udio djece među stradalim Folksdojčerima u jugoslavenskim logorima (1944.-1948.), Croatian Institute of History
4. ^ Balkanized Election, TIME Magazine, Jan. 19, 1925
5. ^ The Opposition, TIME Magazine, April 6, 1925
6. ^ The Specter of Separatism, TIME Magazine, February 7, 1972
7. ^ "[Socialist Republic of Croatia is renamed to Republic of Croatia]" SRH preimenovana u RH (Motion picture). Zagreb, Croatia: Croatian Radiotelevision. 1990-06-20. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8ath2k53vo.