(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

Recently, the Peru People’s Movement (MPP), claiming to represent the Communist Party of Peru, also known as “Shining Path” in the bourgeois media, has been polemicizing against Afakean’s RCP(USA) and Prachanda’s Path. MPP states that they want to “drive forward the two-line struggle in the heart of the RIM.” (1) As part of this, the MPP seem to be organizing their own international conference opposed, on one level, to Afakean and Prachanda. Yet, on another level, MPP has not advanced to a unity based on revolutionary science, based on the fourth stage of Marxism: Maoism-Third Worldism. Advancing science is key, not building another opportunist RIM-type unity. 

The MPP states, “The comrades of the CoRIM and of the RCP avoid debate with the PCP because they do not want to assume their responsibility in the frontal struggle against the reactionary hoax of "peace accord" of the CIA-ROL in Peru. Just as they remain quiet and promote, today as well, in the case of the ‘peace accord’ in Nepal. There, just like in the case of the ROL in Peru, imperialism, reaction and revisionism collude in seeking to present a so-called tamed ‘Maoism’-a ‘Maoism’ without people's war, without new power, without the dictatorship of the proletariat.” (2)

Similar points are made in our own statements on the topic of the RIM. (3) The RIM is a vehicle to destroy Maoism, not advance it. From its outset, RIM was a revisionist organization. The Communist Party of Peru claimed it was the “red fraction” within the RIM. However, why would a “red fraction” choose to associate itself organization like the RCP (USA)? In the early 1980s, RCP(USA) had openly attacked the strategy of launching simultaneous people’s wars against U$ imperialism as “Lin Biaoism.” (4) In the early 1980s, they rejected Lin Biao’s strategy of global people’s war for the Trotskyist strategy of permanent revolution, as articulated in Afakean’s Conquer the World article. The RIM itself, as a CIA tool, sabotages people’s wars worldwide. Why would any real Maoist party unite with a party that openly opposed global people’s war and embraced Trotskyism in all but name? The unity of the RIM is an opportunist unity of the CIA and those who have a fan club approach to Mao. They are not united around the revolutionary science, they are united around the image of Mao. The RIM’s view of Maoism lacks all substance. The RIM’s theory might as well be that a Mao cap makes a Maoist. That MPP can still refer to Afakean and the Prachanda clique as “comrades” even though they have abandoned the core practices of Maoism is revealing. Why would any serious revolutionary group be “comrades” with those who seek to destroy the revolutionary movement? MPP doesn’t even know where the bourgeoisie is. The RIM itself is the bourgeoisie.

What the MPP says about the peace process in Nepal is, in the main, correct. It echoes what the IRTR, MSH and SM cells (5) have said. MPP states, “Together with its wars of aggression, imperialism, colluded with revisionism, especially with the new revisionism, wherever there is revolution, wherever there is people's war, where there are armed struggles, etc., impels its plan of ‘peace accords’, like in Peru with the rats of the revisionist and capitulationist ROL, like in Nepal, Palestine, Colombia, Iraq, etc. They do this to impose the ‘peace of the cemetery’, to unleash greater genocides, to try to drown the revolution, the combat and resistance of the peoples, in blood. We reject and condemn this sinister plan underway of imperialism, principally Yankee, to sow capitulation in the whole world in its desperate and impossible attempt to annihilate the world revolution...” (6)

The debate over whether people’s war, dual power, new democracy, cultural revolution, etc., are correct is a debate outside of the Maoist camp. To be a Maoist is to uphold these practices. There is no two-line struggle over these issues within the Maoist camp. The MPP embraces the typical, RIM interpretation of two-line struggle that all struggles are two-line struggles. Maoism-Third Worldism rejects this view. Maoism-Third Worldism does not have two-line struggles with the CIA and Trotskyists. One does not have a two-line struggle with Maoists over these core aspects of revolutionary science. 

The MPP raises the slogan, “May Maoism assume the command of the new great wave of the world revolution!” (7) Yet one wonders what they mean by “Maoism,” since they still allow CIA, revisionists, and Trotskyists into the fold. The way forward is not a new or revised RIM, which seems to be the direction MPP is headed with their international conference in October. If the science isn’t there, then the RIM is what inevitably what results. The way forward is the deepening of Maoist science, brining it to a higher level. This is what the Maoist-Third Worldist movement is doing. Maoism-Third Worldism places global people’s war at the heart of revolutionary science. Maoism-Third Worldism calls on the popular classes of the global countryside to rise up and crush the parasite classes of the global cities, these parasite classes include the Western so-called “working class.” There is no international communist movement without Maoism-Third Worldism.

Notes.

1.Peru People’s Movement. Let Us Drive Forward the Two-Line Struggle in the Heart of the RIM. September 2008http://www.redsun.org/mpp_doc/driveforward_200809_en.htm
2. Peru People’s Movement. Let Us Drive Forward the Two-Line Struggle in the Heart of the RIM. September 2008http://www.redsun.org/mpp_doc/driveforward_200809_en.htm
3. On Nepal (New) http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/on-nepal-recent-analysis/ and On Nepal (Old)http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/on-the-situation-in-nepal/
4.Avakian, Bob. For a Harvest of Dragons. RCP Publications. USA:1983. p 150-151. “ ….to cling to at least aspects of Lin Biao-ism. Lin Biao was a top leader of the communist Party of China in the 1960s and he is associated with the line of singling out U.S. imperialism for a common onslaught from the “third world,” with simultaneous national liberation wars defeating U.S. imperialism throughout the “third world,” and even possibly destroying it altogether. His line (as expressed in a 1965 pamphlet [written by Lin Biao], Long Live The Victory of People’s War) represented the absolutizing of what was then the principal contradiction in the world (between oppressed nations and imperialism) — raising it out of context of world relations and contradictions in which it actually exists and treating it as a thing unto itself and virtually the only significant contradiction in the world. While recognizing the existence of revolutionary situations and favorable revolutionary prospects in many countries in the “third world” it exaggerated this into a tendency to treat the “third world” as an undifferentiated whole, ripe everywhere for revolution. Related to this, in upholding the importance of armed struggle as a necessary means for replacing the old order with the new and insisting on the fact that in many places in the “third world” it was possible and necessary to make armed struggle the main and immediate form of struggle — in opposition to the Soviet revisionist line that attempted to make economic development the main task in the “third world” neo-colonies — Lin Biao’s line exaggerated this to a point of virtually insisting that everywhere in the “third world” revolutionary warfare could and must be launched right away (in Long Live the victory, whether one dares to wage a people’s war is made the touchstone of distinguishing Marxism-Leninism from revisionism). As part of this whole line, the objective fact that the proletarian revolution had been delayed in the imperialist countries and that there was as yet no proletarian revolutionary movement there was absolutized, so that the prospect of such revolution in the imperialist countries was all but dismissed…
…But to attempt to cling to Lin Biaoism in the world situation of today, with all its profound changes since the 1960s, including the principal contradiction, can only have very serious and disastrous consequences…”
5. On Nepal (New) http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/on-nepal-recent-analysis/ and On Nepal (Old)http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com/on-the-situation-in-nepal/
6. Peru People’s Movement. Let Us Drive Forward the Two-Line Struggle in the Heart of the RIM. September 2008http://www.redsun.org/mpp_doc/driveforward_200809_en.htm

7. Peru People’s Movement. Let Us Drive Forward the Two-Line Struggle in the Heart of the RIM. September 2008http://www.redsun.org/mpp_doc/driveforward_200809_en.htm

*

Also see: Prachanda wins. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is dead, Maoism-Third Worldism lives, Again on the “RIM” Renegades in Nepal, The sun rises in the East and sets in the West: On Maoism-Third Worldism, Get off the fence! Disband the RIM and smash revisionism! Put Maoism in command!, Interview with Ganapathy, General Secretary, CPI(Maoist); comments on the Islamic upsurge, David Horowitz, Bob Avakian wrangle over copyright?, On Bob Avakian’s New Synthesis, Our differences with Jose Maria Sison, Is people’s war universal?, How will socialism come to North America?, Shubel Morgan movie on Lin Biao’s theory of People’s War!, Fraternal Organization criteria, Indian movements won’t connect the dots…yet, A Maoist-Third Worldist Position on Unequal Exchange, Notes on Exploitation, Distribution, and Method, Dear Maoist Third Worldist…reproletarization, A rough estimate of the value of labor by Serve the People of IRTR, How will socialism come to North America, The form of the Dictatorship of Proletariat, Medical breakthrough cures one of the biggest problems facing the planet: Amerikan pet obesity, Simple questions by the numbers.. the majority in the United Snakes: revolutionary or not?, IRTR repost on capitalism and socialism, another reason to hate amerikkka, The High cost of living in the Third World

This is a cross-post from TD Blog with permission. I recommend going to this site and reading all of the comments there. These people are great researchers.

Dual Citizenship Makes Obama Ineligible Under Article II

By Judah Benjamin, Guest Author

So, at long last, Senator Obama admits that he was born with Dual Citizenship:

From “Fight the Smears”, courtesy of Annenberg-owned Factcheck.org (did they think they were helping?)

“When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.”

Now nice Anti-Pumas, please admit that the Senator has been selling snake oil and you have been buying it. I said he was probably born with Dual Citizenship under the 1948 Act at the outset, and I wasn’t wrong. Likewise, I wasn’t wrong about the Kenyan Constitution and his Kenyan Citizenship. Don’t take any bets that I’m wrong about Indonesia. Or the US Constitution and what it means.

Please note that I, once again, state that I, personally, believe Obama was born in Hawaii and that it doesn’t affect my opinion on his Eligibility for the Office of POTUS at all. In my understanding Article II Requires that one be a “Natural Born Citizen”, and in terms of the Law as understood by the Framers, anyone with Dual Citizenship could not be “Natural Born”. It does not matter that they no longer hold that Citizenship, they fall into the same bracket as a “Naturalized Citizen” because they have/had Divided Allegiance. That is my view and I haven’t moved an inch on it.

However, the Kenyan Citizenship Issue may not be the main point here, WAS HE, OR WAS HE NOT, an INDONESIAN CITIZEN? The Senator isn’t saying, isn’t mentioning it, is trying to avoid producing any Paperwork at all. Why? If he is/was an Indonesian Citizen, too, the Senator’s entire narrative is a fiction and he should be ashamed of himself.

He’s lied about Kenya, at least by omission, for months/years, so why should I assume he isn’t lying about Indonesia? Note Kenyan Citizenship automatically lapses if it isn’t renewed at age 21, Indonesian Citizenship doesn’t. If he was an Indonesian Citizen he would have to actively repudiate that Citizenship. Did he? Has he? Because if he hasn’t, Senator Obama is Dual National Indonesian at this moment, subject to the Laws of BOTH Countries, equally.

That is true under US Law, Indonesian Law and International Law and until LAST YEAR Indonesia DID NOT Recognize Dual Citizenship and the USA did not Recognize that one could be a Dual US/Indonesian Citizen. It does not matter that the Senator was not Responsible for the change of Citizenship because he was a child when it happened. Governor Schwarzenegger was not Responsible for the fact that he was born in Austria, or that under Austrian Law he is not a US Citizen, or under the US Law and Rules he is not a Citizen of Austria.

Senator Obama needs to produce his Paperwork, all of it, not just a Certification of Live Birth from the State of Hawaii, but all his other Paperwork too.

So, the Senator WAS a Dual National. That is now an admitted fact, admitted by his own Campaign and by Annenberg. The Senator is a Constitutional Lawyer which means that he knows, and has always known, that he is probably Ineligible to Hold the Office of POTUS, or that, at the very least, there is a strong Legal Argument that that is the case. In turn, that means that as he lied about his Kenyan and British Citizenships he is probably lying about his Indonesian Citizenship.

I do not suppose that it was ever his intention to give up his US Citizenship and it does not matter to me one bit. It doesn’t matter to Indonesia either. If Lolo Soetoro adopted him he ceased to be a US Citizen in the mid 1960s, BY INDONESIAN LAW. He also ceased to be a Kenyan Citizen, BY INDONESIAN LAW. By Kenyan and US Law he retained his Original Citizenships, until his 21st Birthday. By Indonesian Law he could have given up Indonesian Citizenship at age 18, but did he? If he didn’t he was, albeit accidentally, displaying a Legal Intention to void his US Citizenship, since he knew he could not Legally hold both Citizenships.

Please don’t tell me that the US doesn’t have to concern itself with the Laws of Indonesia because, in this case, the US does have to do so. By the way, under US Law of another time the Senator would not have been a US Citizen at all, and he knows that.

If a Naturalized Citizen cannot hold the Office of POTUS because they previously held another Citizenship it is egregious, so far as I am concerned, that a Dual Citizen/Former Dual Citizen should claim to have a Legal Right to do so. I refer the reader to my Articles on Dual Citizenship and ask you to read the quotes from Blackstone. [TD NOTE: I will be re-posting all of Judah's work shortly].

This new material at “Fight the Smears” displays arrogance, hubris and bad faith, in my opinion. It is the Senator’s reaction to Phillip Berg’s Law Suit, and, basically, it amounts to an open admission of mens rea. He is flaunting his bad faith and in so doing destroys his own case.

SEE THESE PREVIOUS ARTICLES:

Photo Documents Barry Soetoro: Indonesian Citizen, Muslim Religion by TexasDarlin (8/13/08)

Kenyan Citizenship Report Debunked by TexasDarlin (8/13/08)

Obama’s Dual Citizenship Disaster by TexasDarlin (8/10/08)

The Paper Trail: Obama’s Indonesian Background by Judah Benjamin (7/29/08)

Divided Loyalties: Obama’s Citizenship Problem, Part 2 by Judah Benjamin (7/25/08)

Divided Loyalties: Obama’s Citizenship Problem, Part 1 by Judah Benjamin (7/25/08)

COPYRIGHT REMINDER: Copyright laws protect everything published on this blog. Do not re-publish any article from this blog in whole or part with our express consent. To get consent, send a comment with your request.

POLICY ON UNITS OF MEASUREMENT

(monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com)

In accordance with Maoism-Third Worldism, we shall henceforth use only metric units, which are almost universal in the Third World. Imperial units convey an Anglo-Yankkkee perspective and are inconvenient for comrades in the Third World (and even in most of the First World). No longer shall we put Amerikkkan readers first by using their bizarre and unscientific mishmash of units left over from pre-feudal times.

When quoting sources that use non-metric units, we may retain those units if we supply a conversion (to the appropriate number of significant digits) for the convenience of our readers. But we will not convert anything to Imperial units. Anglo readers who don't like that should get off their lazy asses and learn the metric system. Our work serves the Third World, not a bunch of backward Anglo labor aristocrats.

sri lankan rebels, afghan refugees, thailand riots, markets, iran and the imaginary fighter jet, zee germanz, uk, diy judo, kosovo legitimized?, evolution

1. Pay off the national debt.

2. Stop government spending

3. Reduce the size of the government, cut each department by two thirds for starters.

4. Reduce taxes for everyone

5. Eliminate government intervention in  education, welfare, housing, and emergency management(FEMA)

6. Set real goals for the military to "win."

7. Repeal the law that caused the sub-prime loan meltdown.

8. Let us spend our money, instead of letting the government do it for us.

If he can do all of the above, we'd all have the money for health care and education.

 He won't do it because he doesn't have balls big enough.

He would rather sit on a throne and dole the riches earned by the hard working people of this country to the WORLD. He sounds like a "chip off the old block" to me.

Maybe these IEDC people haven't heard, but tree-planters are no longer welcome in our city! Chainsaw Shirley will save our hearts and minds from this nefarious arborist proletariat.

All men must die, but death can vary in its significance. The ancient Chinese writer Szuma Chien said, "Though death befalls all men alike, it may be weightier than Mount Tai or lighter than a feather." To die for the people is weightier than Mount Tai, but to work for the fascists and die for the exploiters and oppressors is lighter than a feather.  -Mao Zedong

5 March 2003, Volume  5, Number  5

NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA

By Richard Andrew Hall

Part 1: ETHNIC PRIMACY (1944-68) AND THE INVISIBILITY OF DIASPORA POLITICS

All communities are imagined; some are clearly more imagined than others. No one perhaps learned this lesson better -- or more bitterly --than communist rulers and ideologues in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Ethnic and national identities may indeed be artificial, constructed, and malleable, but not infinitely so. Moreover, in comparison to other identities they are remarkably enduring and particularly resistant to orchestrated efforts to eradicate them or diminish their relevance once they have become established -- even where a regime may have played a critical role in their formation and early formulation, as occurred with certain national identities in the former Soviet Union.

For all the works in the tidal wave of recent research educating us that ethnic and national identities are not, after all, organic -- a battle, one might argue, that has often been joined and won largely by taking on a journalistic and pop-culture straw man -- the reality remains that certain myths have historically proved more resilient and durable than others. In Eastern Europe, the most "fit" from a Darwinian standpoint has been the national myth -- even if the reason for its resilience has been a derivative of broader political, economic, social, and cultural conditions. (One can, for example, argue that religion in the Middle East, and class in Latin America, have been the most recurrent and galvanizing myths in those regions -- thereby suggesting the contingent and historically determined character of which myth emerges preeminent.)

Such generalizations, however valid in the comparison of different geo-historical regions, do not help much in the way of explaining variations within those regions, however. After all, there has rarely been an era in which there was such strong institutional and ideological similarity -- even if far from identicalness -- across a single region as during the communist era in Eastern Europe. And yet, as we well know, the role and impact of ethnicity and nationalism on politics varied sometimes greatly from place to place in communist Eastern Europe.

One puzzle that continues to intrigue is why Serbian politics became seized with and was eventually captured by nationalism in the late 1980s? One is tempted to ascribe this almost singularly to the personality and ruthlessness of Slobodan Milosevic -- and certainly many single-case studies analyzing Serbia, especially journalistic and popular accounts, do just that. Without Milosevic's advocacy and incitement of the nationalist cause -- especially after his famous "moment of truth" in Kosova* on 24 April 1987 -- clearly this outcome might not have happened. Yet such an argument presupposes -- as many longtime scholars of Yugoslavia have rejoined -- the existence of a nationalist sentiment that could be exploited. Hence, their focus in the analysis of causes tends to turn the clock further back, to the fall of 1986, and the publication of the famous SANU (Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts) Memorandum outlining Serb grievances and demands against the Federal Yugoslav state. Without Milosevic's willing scribes among the Serb intelligentsia, these scholars suggest, the opportunistic and ideologically colorless Milosevic might never have undergone his nationalist conversion, with its tragic repercussions for the future of Serbia and Yugoslavia as a whole.

Still, such explanations suffer somewhat from having been argued largely in a vacuum. Serbia was not the only place in Eastern Europe where the diaspora issue played an influential role during the late-communist era. The role of nationalism -- and "diaspora politics" specifically -- in the Hungarian transition is easily forgotten in the wake of the brutal wars of Yugoslav succession, Hungary's comparatively smooth postcommunist evolution, and the eventual postcommunist warming of relations between Hungary and Romania. Yet at the time -- as literature from the period indicates -- it was a significant issue.

In comparison to a country such as Romania, the communist regime's embrace of nationalism in Hungary and Serbia was belated, but it did emerge, particularly during the late-communist era. In both the Hungarian and Serb cases, the issue of ethnic diaspora -- for Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania), southern Slovakia (Czechoslovakia), Vojvodina (Yugoslavia), and Subcarpathian Ukraine (the Soviet Union), but particularly in Transylvania; for Serbs, in Kosova, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, but particularly in Kosova -- was a key catalyst in the resurgence of nationalism into the political arena. In both cases, a progressive loss of ethnic representation, power, and influence in these regions, and emigration to the homeland from a region considered to be THE primary cultural source of the nation -- but where that nation now constituted a "besieged" minority in the face of the policies of the political authorities who controlled the region -- forced this issue onto the agenda of dissidents and communist politicians alike. As in Serbia, diaspora politics in Hungary galvanized regime opposition and helped draw populist and liberal regime critics together as never before. And, as in Serbia, declining regime legitimacy and a process of leadership succession allowed for, and encouraged the mobilization of, nationalism in the political arena.

Yet, as is well known, the outcome of the nationalist resurgence was very different in Serbia from in Hungary. In Serbia, the question came to transfix the Serbian state and society, unleashing a politics of nationalism that played a central role in the destruction of the Yugoslav state and the horrendous loss of life in the wars of succession of the 1990s. In Hungary, by contrast, the fate of Transylvanian Hungarians that was such a fundamental feature of politics in the late 1980s receded from center-stage and became merely A characteristic -- rather than THE characteristic -- of the broader transition. What happened? I try to answer that question in this five-part article by comparing the differing role and impact of diaspora politics in late-communist Serbia and late-communist Hungary. I do so in the hopes of better highlighting, from a comparative standpoint, what it was specifically that contributed to and enabled the tragic outcome in Serbia.

A word on the comparability of the two cases before I embark on this comparison. Clearly, Serbia was not an internationally recognized "nation-state" during the period under investigation. Nevertheless, I treat it as comparable to one -- and thus comparable to Hungary -- for analytical purposes. As early as 1984, Ramet compared post-Tito Yugoslavia to something approximating a "balance of power" state system, with ethnic groups and their titular republics/provinces essentially assuming the role that states would in the international system (Ramet, 1992, pp. 3-18). Moreover, it is debatable, for example, whether the Serbian republican leadership under Tito had significantly more autonomy than the Hungarian leadership did vis-a-vis Moscow. Certainly, during the 1980s, it can be argued that Moscow's influence on the leadership and policies of the Hungarian party was at least equal to and perhaps greater than the Yugoslav Federation's on the leadership and policies of the Serbian party. Finally, it is clear that, particularly during the 1980s, knowing the relationship between the party-state and society for Yugoslavia as a whole, or in any (one) particular republic, was a weak predictor for understanding that relationship in any (other) particular republic.

A Theoretical Overview Of The Evolution Of Ethnic And National Identity In Communist Eastern Europe

Ethnic and national identities became politicized in communist Eastern Europe precisely because communist rulers tried to negate their influence and raise the profile and salience of competing class, institutional (the Party), and inter- or supra-national identities (especially loyalty to the Soviet Union). Because much of ethnic identity and nationalism is informally institutionalized -- and thus is not the exclusive province of any particular political party or societal organization -- these identities were able to survive the communist onslaught -- focused as it was primarily on destroying formal institutions that lay outside the control of the Party -- and became a natural rallying point and metaphor of opposition to the communist authorities who sought to diminish their influence.

The 1956 Hungarian Revolution against a leadership that even by comparison with other communist leaderships in the region was particularly determined to make a definitive break with national tradition; the success of the East European communist regimes in destroying independent societal organizations and initiatives and in creating new institutions based on competing concepts of identity (the agricultural collective, for example); and the simultaneous, if somewhat paradoxical scaling back of expectations regarding the potential for remaking identity ("socialist man") -- all contributed as factors to the tacit and carefully measured recall or "return of the nation" in communist rhetoric and ideology, and, to some extent, policy in Eastern Europe in the 1960s (the era described by Ken Jowitt as the era of "Inclusion," see Jowitt, 1992, pp. 88-120). The move from being a "party of the working class" to being a "party of the whole people or nation" -- ostensibly in part because the goals of the "socialist revolution" had allegedly been fulfilled -- was intended to reflect the communist regime's changing view of, and relationship, to ethnic identity and nationalism.

But if the growing acceptance of and accommodation with nationalism in party ideology and policy represented a stage in -- a reflection of -- the delegitimation of communist rule in general, such insights remain generally unhelpful in explaining for us the wide variations in the degree to which communist regimes embraced nationalism in the middle (1964-76) and late (1977-89) stages of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Mobilizing ethnic and national identity was only one of several alternative "elite survival strategies" that East European leaderships pursued in order to indirectly address their widespread illegitimacy with their populations and to insulate themselves, however imperfectly -- the instability of the interregnum of 1953 to 1956 had been enough to convince them -- from the power struggles and policy shifts of the Kremlin. The other primary models included a generally un-reformist "consumerism" -- financed by loans from Western governments and institutions -- or a continued pursuit of Stalinist repression and breakneck development policies -- political reform outside (post-1956) or inside (post-1968) the party having been eliminated as a practical option because of the Soviet response. In fact, most regimes tended to combine elements from each of these "survival strategies" but in different measures.

Nor was the nationalist option equally attractive or feasible for every communist leadership in the region. The approach to nationalism during the middle and late stages of communist rule in Eastern Europe varied widely, with Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania and "normalized" Czechoslovakia perhaps forming the two opposing poles of this approach. Nationalism in Romania allowed the continuation of "Stalinism in one state" -- as it did in Albania -- even when the Soviet Union itself opted, as under Nikita Khrushchev, and later Mikhail Gorbachev, to engage in de-Stalinization. One can argue, however, that the nationalist option was chosen by the Romanian leadership -- first by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and then by Ceausescu -- not solely out of the need to protect the party's development prerogatives, but because the "colonial" history of the Romanian nation and state (particularly as regards Transylvania) meant that the nationalist discourse could be woven into the official ideology without triggering major contradiction and ideological delegitimation. (By contrast, arguing that nation and oppressed class had overlapped in Hungarian history was more ideologically challenging.) Opting for the nationalist palliative to popular illegitimacy was thus conditioned by both the manner in which elites perceived prerogatives and by structural circumstances deriving from a people and state's history.

Nevertheless, in the cases of Hungary and Serbia -- the two cases in which history (pre-Trianon Hungary and Serbia's primacy in interwar Yugoslavia) was in theory arguably the most problematic for and seemingly incompatible with communist ideology -- communist elites did end up embracing the nationalist cause. The sources for this lay in the communist era itself. The early- and middle-communist eras in Kosova and Transylvania saw a period of ethnic supremacy for Serbs and Hungarians -- though it lasted longer for the former than it did for the latter -- followed by a steady decline in influence. During the initial period of ethnic supremacy, the comparatively favorable conditions for Serbs in Kosova and Hungarians in Transylvania combined with the strongly "anti-national" content of communist ideology dominant in Belgrade and Budapest at the time to largely remove the issue of Kosova and Transylvania from the political agenda.

The shift in ethnic balance and power within Kosova and Transylvania changed things, however, both within these ethnic peripheries and within the kin state. The change in ethnic power spurred emigration where possible to the kin state -- although it was still relatively small at this point. The deteriorating ethnic balance and the nascent emigration it triggered inevitably began to bring "the problem" of Kosova and Transylvania home to the kin state -- "the problem" of which intellectuals there increasingly became aware and concerned.

Kosova, 1944-1968: Ethnic Domination Under The Auspices Of 'Yugoslavism'

In Kosova, the period from the origins of communist rule in 1944 until the removal from senior party and state posts in 1966 of Aleksandar Rankovic, the leading representative of Serbian hegemonism within the League of Yugoslav Communists, can be regarded as a period of Serb domination in the region. Significantly, as World War II drew to a close, and the Partisans extended their control over the territories of interwar Yugoslavia, Tito abandoned earlier pledges by the Yugoslav Communist Party to Kosova joining an independent Albania (1928, Fourth Congress) or gaining republican status (1940, Fifth Congress) when the communists came to power in Yugoslavia (Vickers, 1998, pp. 121-143). In late 1944 and early 1945, Tito and the Partisan leadership largely looked the other way as Serbs and Montenegrins settled scores with Kosovar Albanians and crushed an ethnic Albanian uprising in the region. Miranda Vickers characterizes this state of affairs as follows:

Because of their co-operation with Axis forces, the Kosovars were perceived as politically unreliable and thus a possible threat to the stability and territorial integrity of Yugoslavia. Tito realized that only by retaining Kosovo within Serbia's borders could he hope to win over the Serbs to communism (Vickers, 1998, pp. 141-142).

Yugoslavia's expulsion from the Cominform in 1948 put an end to the essentially open border policy between Kosova and Albania that had existed in the interregnum following the end of the war, when visions of an eventual Danubian confederation predicated upon the erasure of historic state boundaries in the region were still entertained. Enver Hoxha's decision to throw in his lot with Stalin and the Soviets in the Tito-Stalin dispute rather abruptly reinforced the perception that Yugoslavia's Albanian population was a security threat (Vickers, 1998, p. 149). The new 1953 Yugoslav constitutional law further codified this situation by amending the 1946 Federal Constitution's reference to autonomy as a federal matter -- the amendment therefore essentially made Vojvodina and Kosova ordinary districts of Serbia -- while simultaneously the Yugoslav government's Chamber of Nationalities was abolished (Vickers, 1998, p. 155).

During these first two decades of communist rule in Yugoslavia, Serbs and Montenegrins held a disproportionate amount of power and influence in Kosova in comparison to their numbers. According to Vickers, in 1958, Serbs and Montenegrins comprised 27.4 percent of the population of Kosova but constituted 49.7 percent of local Party membership (Vickers, 1998, p. 156). Party documents released after the purge of Aleksandar Rankovic revealed that within the security services in Vojvodina and Kosova, there had been a systemic policy of discrimination against Hungarians and Albanians respectively: Not a single Hungarian or Albanian was employed by the republican secretariat of Serbia for security affairs and only one Albanian could be found in the secretariat for Kosova (Burg, 1983, pp. 34-35). Ramet cites Branko Horvat's figures as showing that in 1956 Albanians were 64.9 percent of the population but accounted for only 13.3 percent of security police and 31.3 percent of the regular police, while by contrast the Serbs accounted for 23.5 percent but held 58.3 percent of positions in the security forces and 60.8 percent of all positions in the regular police (Ramet, 1992, p. 188).

Marina Blagojevic has noted that census data from 1948, 1953, and 1961 indicate that during this period the proportion of Serbs in Kosova was relatively constant, at 23.6 percent, 23.6 percent, and 23.5 percent, respectively, and that fertility rates for Serb and Albanian women in the region were not sharply different at the time (Blagojevic, 2000, pp. 215-216). Nevertheless, there were concerted efforts by Serb authorities to dilute the Albanian presence in Kosova. A policy of "Turkification" that had been advocated by some Serbs (for example, the infamous Cubrilovic) during the interwar period was revived in the post-1948 Cominform climate when Albanians increasingly came to be seen as a potential fifth column. The policy saw not only the introduction of Turkish language schools in Kosova and pressure for Albanians to declare themselves as ethnic "Turks" -- of which there was still a very small population in, for example, Prizren -- but a campaign to encourage Albanian emigration to Turkey (Vickers, 1998, p. 149; 171). Vickers maintains that between 1954 and 1957 as many as 195,000 Albanians emigrated to Turkey (Vickers, 1998, p. 157).

The fate of Serbs in Kosova was not a galvanizing issue in Belgrade as long as Serbs dominated the region. That all changed with the removal of Aleksandar Rankovic -- he was head of the federal security services and vice president at the time -- in July 1966 at the famous Brioni Plenum. Rankovic's fall was welcomed enthusiastically in Zagreb, Novi Sad, and Prishtina and was interpreted by Serbs and non-Serbs alike as a defeat for Serbs (Burg, 1983, p. 35; Vickers, 1998, p. 163; Ramet, 1992, p. 91). Rankovic's dismissal rather rapidly unleashed a process of indigenization of the communist party "nomenklatura" and security structures in Kosova -- to the extent that an immigrant from Albania was appointed chief of police (Vickers, 1998, p. 163). 1968 was the 500th anniversary of the death of the Albanian national hero, George Kastrioti Skanderbeg, and saw a series of ethnic Albanian demonstrations in Kosova and in neighboring Macedonia. Constitutional amendments in December 1968 gave the renamed Socialist Autonomous Province -- the additional term "Metohija," considered offensive and a symbol of Serb hegemony by Albanians, was dropped from official usage thereafter -- representation in the federal parliament, and legislative and judicial authority was passed to the provinces (Vickers, 1998, pp. 169-170).

In January and February 1969, Kosova was able to pass its own constitutional law, and its autonomy was further strengthened. 1969 also saw the creation of an independent University of Prishtina -- it had previously been merely a branch of the University of Belgrade -- and the rapid Albanianization of both faculty and student body (Ramet 1992, p. 191). The new Yugoslav constitution promulgated in February 1974 gave Kosova and Vojvodina substantial powers as autonomous provinces of Serbia: They were now full constitutive members of the federation; they were represented in the Federal Presidency (where they essentially could exercise veto power if they so chose), the Federal Assembly, and in the federal and constitutional courts; and the Republic of Serbia was forbidden from officially intervening in provincial affairs against the will of the provincial assemblies in Prishtina and Novi Sad (Vickers, 1998, pp. 178-179). The 1970s would see an intensification of this indigenization process and pressure -- both indirect and direct -- on Serbs that would lead many to abandon the province.

The Slow Marginalization Of Ethnic Hungarian Influence In Transylvania: 1944-68

Serb influence in Kosova during the first two decades of communist rule owed something to Tito's effort to mollify Serbs concerned that the concept of federal Yugoslavia was a conspiracy to dilute Serb power, and to fears of irredentist and hostile neighbors Albania and Bulgaria. By contrast, Hungarian political influence in Transylvania was widely regarded as the price Bucharest had to pay for having all of Transylvania returned at the end of the war and as a sop to communist leaders in Budapest who had to defend a deeply unpopular concession.

The Romanian Workers' Party did not deliver on its interwar promises of awarding parts of Transylvania to Hungary, but it also did not completely abrogate such commitments. Between 1952 and 1960 a Hungarian Autonomous Region (RAM) brought together three of the majority ethnic Hungarian counties -- according to one Hungarian populist scholar, thereby granting at least "some measure of symbolic self-government to the solidly Hungarian Szekely population" (Joo, 1994, p. 115). In 1960, the RAM was gerrymandered into the new Mures-Maghiar Autonomous Region, which diluted the proportion of ethnic Hungarians from 77 percent to 62 percent of the total population in the jurisdiction. Nevertheless, the majority Hungarian region existed until 1968 -- when, perhaps ironically, Nicolae Ceausescu's brief embrace of reformist policies and of overtures to the ethnic Hungarian community allowed him to argue that ethnic issues in socialist Romania had been superseded and the region's autonomous status was eradicated.

Unlike Serbs in Kosova, ethnic Hungarians did not rule in the Autonomous Region as a clear minority that disproportionately occupied the seats of political, security, and administrative power. The 1956 census showed that the region had a population of 731,387, of whom 77 percent were Hungarian, while statistics from 1958 claimed that 80 percent of the deputies to the people's councils and 78 percent of civil servants were non-Romanians, mostly Hungarians (King, 1973, pp. 150-152). Hungarians in the RAM constituted only one-third of the Hungarian population in Romania as a whole, and outside the region they had substantially less representation and influence in the structures of power than they had inside it. Moreover, it can be argued that because of the relationship of religion and land to a dwindling ethnic minority, the state's moves against religious institutions -- especially the Catholic Church -- and collectivization were felt acutely by the Hungarian minority (Deletant, 1995, p. 109).

Nevertheless, as Robert King concludes: "the fact that most of the officials [in the RAM] were Hungarians was an important concession to the minority" (King, 1973, p. 150). Even Smaranda Enache, one of the leading proponents of interethnic harmony in Transylvania during the postcommunist era and hardly one who can be accused of being a Romanian nationalist, admits that in the RAM "it was a job to be a Romanian during that time" (Enache, 1991). As so often happens, ethnicity became intertwined with far-reaching social change -- in this case collectivization -- and in the minds of the Romanian peasant in the RAM, they were left with the bitter memory that "it was a Hungarian who came and took my land" (Enache, 1991).

However unsatisfying and fictional aspects of the RAM, totalitarian rule and elite commitment to notions of "socialist internationalism" largely removed the diaspora issue from the political agenda in Hungary. According to Kurti: "During the 1950s and 1960s, themes of Magyarness and Transylvania were rarely found in artistic or literary works" (Kurti, 2001, p. 103). Schopflin writes: "In effect, during the period up to the revolution the issue of ethnic Hungarians all but disappeared from Hungarian public life, although it evidently remained beneath the surface" (Schopflin, 1988, pp. 2-3). Joo highlighted in 1988 the absurd lengths to which Budapest's denial of its coethnics extended during the early communist era:

The basically unaltered official position was that Hungary had nothing to do with the Hungarians of neighboring countries. Accordingly, press and educational establishments also remained silent about the issue. Even the sports celebrities and artists who were ethnic Hungarians had their names printed in the Hungarian press according to the rule of Romanian spelling (e.g. Iolanda Balas, Stefan Ruha), and Budapest newspapers employed the Romanian designation for centuries-old Hungarian settlements and towns of Transylvania (Joo, 1994, p. 98).

Ludanyi maintains that the situation of ethnic Hungarians in Romania began to deteriorate with the crackdowns that followed the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution (Ludanyi, 1995, p. 315). Even if ethnic Hungarians in Romania had not protested in solidarity with the aims of the revolutionaries in Budapest as they did, they were bound to be viewed with suspicion by the Dej regime in Romania that so obediently backed the Soviet crushing of the uprising. The withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania in 1958 -- in part, interpreted as an acknowledgement of and reward for Romania's fealty to the Soviet Union -- gave the Romanian leadership wider latitude in dealing with the minority question as it saw fit (Ludanyi, 1995, p. 315).

Nevertheless, indicative of just how much removed from the political agenda in Budapest was the issue of the Hungarian minority in Romania was the response to the events of 22 February 1959, when -- with then CC Secretary Nicolae Ceausescu presiding -- the Hungarian Bolyai University of Cluj was merged with the Romanian Babes University and renamed Babes-Bolyai -- an event that initiated a process of Romanian schools absorbing Hungarian schools at all levels of education (Shafir, 1985, p. 160). Despite the subsequent suicide of the pro-rector of the Bolyai University, Laszlo Szabedi, Budapest was essentially silent over the event. Moreover, according to Joo, "when in 1962 a few Hungarian intellectuals protested at international forums against the merger of the Hungarian and Romanian universities of Cluj, the protesters were found guilty of violating state interests by a court of law in Budapest" (Joo, 1994, p. 98). As Joo describes, not even the comparatively more relaxed ideological atmosphere in 1960s Hungary had much impact:

The increased tourist traffic between countries of Eastern Europe in the early 1960s made it easier to strengthen family relations and friendship ties between Hungarians living in Romania and Hungary. Still, the existence of the more than two million strong Hungarian minority in Romania remained a taboo topic in Hungarian public discussions. Representatives of official (mainly cultural) policy manifest not only indifference but vehement opposition to any consideration of the problem (Joo, 1994, p. 98).

Those intellectuals who spoke up at this point on the diaspora question were few and far between -- essentially nationalist voices in what was then the political wilderness -- as we shall see.

*Author's Note: Spelling per editorial request.

(The author wishes to thank Indiana University's Russian East European Institute for a Mellon Grant-in-Aid that made possible the interview with Smaranda Enache cited above.)

(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)

SOURCES

Blagojevic, M., 2000, "The Migration of Serbs from Kosovo during the 1970s and 1980s: Trauma and/or Catharsis," in Popov, N. (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis, (Budapest: Central European University Press), pp. 212-227.

Burg, S., 1983, Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making Since 1966, (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press).

Deletant, D., 1995, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989, (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe).

Enache, S., 1991, Interview with author, (Targu-Mures, Romania, 27 May).

Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority's Situation in Ceausescu's Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).

Jowitt, K., 1992, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

King, R R., 1973, Minorities under Communism: Nationalities as a Source of Tension among Balkan Communist States, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).

Kurti, L., 2001, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination, (New York: State University Press).

Ludanyi, A., 1995, "Programmed Amnesia and Rude Awakening: Hungarian Minorities in International Politics, 1949-1989," in Romsics, I. (ed.), 20th Century Hungary and the Great Powers, (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 307-335.

Ramet, S. P., 1992. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press).

Schopflin, G., 1988, "The Role of Transylvania in Hungarian Politics," in "Radio Free Europe Research," RAD Background Report no. 236 (Hungary), pp. 1-6.

Shafir, M., 1985, Romania: Politics, Economics, and Society. Political Stagnation and Simulated Change, (Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers).

Vickers, M., 1998, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, (New York: Columbia University Press).

Compiled by Michael Shafir

2 April 2003, Volume  5, Number  7

NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA

By Richard Andrew Hall

Part 2: DIASPORA POLITICS EMERGES FROM THE PERIPHERY

From the late 1940s through the early 1960s, nationalism was a bad word in the official idiom of communist Eastern Europe. It was rarely voiced openly by regime opponents -- when it was, it was in the context of a brief window of political liberalization, as occurred in Poland and Hungary in 1956 -- and was even rarer within the regimes. The reasons for this were multiple in the cases of Hungary and Serbia: Ethnic power and influence in Transylvania and Kosova* muted diaspora politics in the homeland, the regimes remained highly repressive against any type of dissent, and nationalism was effectively denigrated by its association with the interwar and World War II disasters of the region; for young people and students, and particularly regime members themselves, the concept was too foreign and taboo in the existing ideological hegemony.

Nationalist Voices In The Political Wilderness
During the 1960s and 1970s, the place of nationalism in communist Eastern Europe gradually changed. For one thing, the positions of Serbs in Kosova and Hungarians in Transylvania began to change and change for the worse, if slowly at first. The fact that intellectuals attempted to push the envelope with such criticism, and the sometimes muted criticism of the authorities, was indicative of the delegitimation of the ruling ideology and of the transition to a less repressive "post-totalitarian" regime (to use the categories outlined by Linz and Stepan, 1996). It is important to note, however, that such criticism appealed to the statist and centralizing instincts of communist elites, calling for more, not less, party and state involvement in the protection of coethnics who were minorities caught outside the homeland. Still, for those who came to attach great importance to the diaspora issue, these muted efforts by communist elites to incorporate a diluted nationalism came across as half-hearted, cynical, opportunist, and ultimately unconvincing.

In Hungary, the standard-bearer of the diaspora cause was Gyula Illyes (born 1902), a by-then-already-famous populist poet and writer who had been a representative of the National Peasant Party in the first postwar National Assembly until withdrawing from politics in 1947 (Reisch, 1983). Despite the populists' rapprochement with the Kadar regime after 1957 -- especially after Kadar's declaration of his "alliance policy" in 1962 -- Illyes broke the taboo on the diaspora issue in a 9 January 1964 interview with the French magazine "L'Express" in which he criticized the closure of the Hungarian faculty at Babes-Bolyai University. Illyes was severely reprimanded for this criticism (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3). He continued, however, to raise the issue of the Hungarian minorities in his novels "Hajszalgyokerek" (Root Branches, 1971) and "Itt elned kell" (Here you must live, 1976) (Schopflin, 1979, p. 177).

According to an obituary by a Radio Free Europe analyst, although Illyes did address the plight of Hungarians in Czechoslovakia, he did it less frequently and never with the same force that he did in analyzing the situation of Hungarians in Romania (Reisch, 1983). Illyes's most direct comments on the diaspora issue, and particularly the issue of Transylvanian Hungarians, came in a two-part article that appeared in the state-run daily "Magyar Nemzet" on 22 December 1977 and 1 January 1978, even though, as Schopflin points out, he neither mentioned Romania nor Transylvania by name (Schopflin 1979, p. 178). Indicative, however, of the regime's confused and contradictory embrace of nationalism at this juncture, in January 1978 Illyes's "Szellem es eroszak" (Spirit and Violence) was banned because of its focus on the national question and ended up being published abroad (in Munich) in 1980 ("Kronologia," 1978; Reisch, 1983). Thirty-thousand copies of the work had been printed and bound in Hungary in 1978 but were not distributed, and the Kadar regime did not permit Illyes to respond personally to Romanian criticism of his "Magyar Nemzet" articles (Lendvai, 1988, p. 31).

Kurti summarizes the catalytic role played by Illyes in the expression of nationalist dissent as follows:

"[Among those who did not opt to emigrate] some, such as Illyes or [Laszlo] Nemeth, helped pave the way for the establishment of their youthful alter ego, the neopopulists. The neopopulists, most notably Ferenc Juhasz, Laszlo Nagy, Istvan Agh, and especially Sandor Csoori, demanded attention by opening up a more relaxed political climate that encouraged mild criticism, experimentation, and diversion from the officially favored 'urbanist' (bourgeois humanist) and 'socialist' literary forms. But with the emergence of this group, there was another equally if not more significant literary direction led by those writers whose family and regional backgrounds were located in the geopolitically sensitive region of Transylvania -- Istvan Csurka, Ferenc Santa, Zoltan Jekely, and Zoltan Zelk" (Kurti, 2001, p. 101).

Nick Miller identifies the speech of Serb intellectual Dobrica Cosic at the May 1968 plenum of the Serbian League of Communists (SKS) as "the birth of Serbian dissent" on the national question in communist Yugoslavia (Miller, 1997a, p. 298). Miller has termed Cosic "the herald of the original antibureaucratic revolution" and affirmed that Cosic's speech "established the foundation for Serbian complaints about the devolutionary tendencies of Yugoslav communism for the following two decades" (Miller 1997a, p. 304; 298). Cosic asserted that history, not demography, should determine the character of Kosova, and he displayed obvious disdain for Albanians and fear of Albanian nationalism in his speech:

"We can no longer fail to recognize how much the conviction spreads in Serbia regarding the intensification of relations between Siptars and Serbs, regarding the feeling of endangerment of the Serbs and Montenegrins, regarding the pressures for emigration, regarding the systematic removal of Serbs and Montenegrins from leading positions, regarding the desires of specialists to abandon Kosovo and Metohija, regarding inequalities before the courts and lack of respect for legality, regarding blackmail in the name of national identity" (cited in Miller 1997a, p. 298).

Cosic lost his position as a member of the Serbian League of Communists and resigned from the party three weeks later (Miller 2000, pp. 269-270 n. 7). A like-minded intellectual colleague, Jovan Marjanovic, also was excluded (Miller 1997a, p. 301). Significantly, however, Cosic's criticism lay outside the intellectual mainstream and was not taken up by reform Marxists or humanist intellectuals -- such as Mihailo Markovic and the scholars of the so-called Praxis group -- nor by the reformist wing of the SKS centered around Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic.

According to Miller, Cosic's speech in 1977 marking his admission to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts "heralded the opening of the second front, the non-party, intellectual uprising against Titoism" (Miller 1997a, p. 304). Cosic characterized Serbian history as filled with division and betrayal -- both internally and at the mercy of foreign powers -- and claimed that "in Europe there is not a small nation which in the past two centuries, and especially in the twentieth, that has expended so much in the name of history...as the Serbian nation" (Miller 2000, pp. 274-275; Miller 1997a, p. 304). But as Miller admits, the time was not yet ripe for Cosic's form of dissidence, and "Cosic had little influence in Serbia until Tito died and Kosovo's Albanian population revolted in 1981" (Miller 1997b, p. 152).

A Slow, Timid, And Unconvincing Effort By Regime Elites To Appropriate Nationalism
The party in both Hungary and Serbia was slow to integrate and/or voice populist concern for the diaspora raised by the likes of Illyes and Cosic. In the Hungarian case, one can speculate that the Kadar leadership's desire to pursue internal reform -- whether by pursuing a more tolerant political line with dissidents or in implementing the changes of the New Economic Mechanism -- led it to tread carefully on a foreign-policy issue where expression of a nationalist claim might attract greater Soviet interest in Hungary's internal developments. In Serbia, the Rankovic purge, the constitutional amendments of 1968, 1972, and 1974, and finally the post-1972 purge of liberals from among the leadership of the SKS, muted the defense of the Kosova issue by party leaders.

According to a Hungarian populist source, June 1971 was the first time when a leader of the Hungarian Socialist Worers' Party (MSZMP) -- Zoltan Komocsin -- publicly declared that Hungary was interested in the fate of the Hungarian national minority (Joo, 1994, p. 116). As George Schopflin writes:

"the existence of strong popular sentiments on [the Transylvanian question] could not be wholly ignored, and by the mid-1970s a gradual shift took place in official attitudes. [Thus, i]n a speech to the Helsinki summit in 1975 Kadar explictly endorsed a kind of political and cultural nationhood that had positive features" (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3).

In a 1977 agreement with Romania -- the year when Kadar and Ceausescu engaged in bilateral meetings in Debrecen and then Oradea -- reflecting growing sentiment on the diaspora question, Hungary incorporated the concept of national minorities as forming a bridge that unites different peoples (Joo, 1994, p. 99; Schopflin, 1988, p. 4). Nevertheless, as Joo writes, "during the 1970s and even into the 1980s, official Hungarian policy still reflected a great deal of hesitancy and uncertainty," while those "who demanded a more assertive policy were often regarded with suspicion" and "young people who regularly traveled to Transylvania faced the prospects of harassment by the [Hungarian, as well as Romanian] authorities" (Joo, 1994, p. 99). And, as Schopflin explains, "a communist leadership, especially one as professionally neutral on the subject as Kadar's, was hard put to portray itself convincingly as a credible spokesman for the nation" (Schopflin, 1988, p. 3).

If in Hungary the need to avoid alienating the Soviet patrons who had restored the Hungarian communists to power after November 1956 delayed and muted discourse on the Transylvanian issue, in Serbia the "normalization" of politics that followed the purge of the Serbian party leadership after 1972 delayed and muted discourse on the Kosova issue. Nick Miller claims, "Until the late 1970s, the Serbian party doctrinally ignored or persecuted those like Cosic who claimed anti-Serbianism was integral to post-1966 Titoism" (Miller 1997a, p. 303). Partly in an effort to balance his purge of nationalists from the Croatian leadership beginning in late 1971 (Miko Tripalo, Savka Dapcevic-Kucar, etc.), Tito struck against the reformist, although not necessarily nationalist, Serbian leadership in 1972, removing most notably the president and the secretary of the Serbian League of Communists, Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic, respectively (Benson, 2001, pp. 122-123). According to Benson, in the end the total number purged from the party in Serbia "very nearly matched that of Croatia" (Benson, 2001, p. 123). Pavkovic has estimated that approximately 6,000 of those deemed "supporters" of Nikezic and Perovic were purged from the Serbian party (Pavkovic, 2000, p. 68). The "normalized" Serbian party dutifully abided by Tito's constitutional changes giving Kosova the status of an autonomous province in 1974 -- a situation that would discredit the "normalized" party leadership in the eyes of many Serbs.

The trinity of events that many Serbs increasingly came to believe marked their collective humiliation -- especially as regards Kosova -- during these years (Rankovic's purge in 1966, the purge of the Serbian party in 1972, and the 1974 constitution formalizing Kosova's autonomy) demoralized party members and had important structural consequences. Cosic castigated the "survivors" as characterized by "mediocrity and political cowardice" (Miller, 2000, p. 280). Miller writes of the purges:

"The LCS had been purged of its most capable leaders in 1972. The LCS had continued to resist changes to the constitutional status of Serbia after the purges, but they had robbed the party of much of its intellectual capital.... Today, there is significant support for the thesis that Serbia lost its best and brightest in 1972, leaving the field open to talents like Milosevic in the 1980s" (Miller, 1997b, p. 152; Miller, 1997a, p. 302).

Indeed, as Miller demonstrates, after rising from 69 percent to 86 percent from the 1950s to the late 1960s, the number of Central Committee members with higher education fell back to 62 percent following the purges (Miller 1997b, p. 185n.10). The purge extended outside the party and eventually touched "Praxis" in 1975, when the journal was closed down and eight "Praxis" theorists -- including Mihajlo Markovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, and Ljubomir Tadic -- began being suspended from teaching at the University of Belgrade (Benson, 2001, p. 128; Grunewald, 1992, p. 178). According to Leonard Cohen, the "crudely managed repression of neo-Marxist dissidents and other political nonconformist Serbs in the mid and late 1970s" further weakened the republican leadership's political position (Cohen, 1997, pp. 319-320).

Slowly but fitfully, however, the Kosova issue worked its way into official discourse. In 1977, a party working commission under the guidance of Serbian President Dragoslav Markovic gathered arguments against the enhanced autonomy of Kosova since the 1974 constitutional changes, but the so-called Blue Book was too politically sensitive and thus was never publicly discussed. (Vickers suggests that the "Blue Book" was craftily modeled on the "Blue Book" printed for the 1899 Peace Conference in The Hague that detailed Albanian violence in Kosova [Vickers, 1998, p. 183 n. 29].) That such views remained officially proscribed was clear at the 15th Session of the SKS Central Committee in April 1978, when Mirko Popovic and other speakers inveighed against the Serbian chauvinism that Popovic maintained had become more serious "in the last year or two" and was tendentiously attempting to exploit every friction (Ramet, 1992, p. 199).

Grounds for Consensus and Activism: The Slide toward Second-Class Citizenry (1968-81)
The greater concern of the Hungarian intelligentsia for Hungarians in Transylvania reflected a response to the deteriorating situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania as the 1970s wore on -- an issue that became all the more galling and beckoned for attention as a result of the favored role of Romania in Western capitals because of Nicolae Ceausescu's sometimes anti-Soviet foreign policy decisions at a time when, at least in the foreign-policy arena, Hungary continued to toe a reliable Soviet line.

The Deteriorating Situation Of Transylvanian Hungarians
The decision in 1968 to gerrymander out of existence the Mures-Maghiar Autonomous Region merely formalized the process of the jurisdiction's dwindling significance as a distinct entity over the preceding years. However, even in the early 1970s, the Ceausescu regime was still careful to offer ethnic Hungarians piecemeal concessions -- in part because, in the immediate wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the Romanian regime seemed to interpret this as a way to deny the Soviets a vulnerability that they could potentially exploit to divide and weaken the regime. In 1969, the University of Bucharest reopened a department of Hungarian literature and philology and the Kriterion publishing house for minority languages, while in October 1970 the Hungarian weekly "A Het" (The Week) was allowed to begin publication in Bucharest (Joo, 1994, p. 116).

Matters began to change, however, as the 1970s progressed. An educational decree law in 1973 established a minimum number of students requirement for the teaching of minority languages, with no such minimum established for Romanians (Joo, 1994, p. 117). Also around this time, a decree reduced the size of newspapers and number of pages per publication -- ostensibly because of an emergency paper shortage. Although both Romanian and Hungarian-language papers were initially equally affected, while Romanian-language papers were eventually returned to their original sizes, Hungarian ones were not (Deletant, 1995, p. 125). On 9 December 1974, a law came into effect that prohibited Romanian citizens from hosting foreign visitors in their homes -- inevitably this was to have a disproportionate impact upon ethnic Hungarians in Transylvania hosting relatives from neighboring Hungary ("Kronologia," 1974).

As Dennis Deletant suggests, Helsinki changed the equation somewhat:

"By committing Romania to the Helsinki Agreement of 1975, Ceausescu opened the door to international scrutiny of the regime's treatment of the Hungarian and German minorities in Transylvania and the Banat and at the same time offered encouragement to those governments who wished to press the matter to do so.... A second development was the opportunity afforded by the Helsinki Agreement to the Hungarian minority to release its pent-up anger at what they regarded as discriminatory policies.... A string of protests began to be heard from Transylvanian Hungarians in the spring of 1977" (Deletant, 1995, p. 121).

For example, there was the 1975 case of Janos Torok, a textile worker from Cluj who complained at a factory meeting on behalf of worker and Hungarian minority rights and was detained while speaking, severely beaten by "Securitate" officers, and then interned at a psychiatric hospital, where he was injected with large doses of drugs (until his conditional release in 1978) (Deletant, 1995, pp. 121-122). Or the cases of Lajos Kuthy, a Hungarian teacher from Brasov who had been collecting signatures for a petition to set up Hungarian classes and was found shot dead in a forest near the city in 1976, and Jeno Szikszai, another Brasov teacher who was arrested by the "Securitate" in spring 1977 -- for allegedly encouraging parents to send their children to schools with Hungarian sections -- beaten, and then committed suicide upon his release (Deletant, 1995, p. 122).

1977 also saw a series of memorandums and letters from senior ethnic Hungarian officials of the Romanian Communist Party (PCR) criticizing the deterioration of the cultural and educational situation of the Hungarian minority. A memorandum from Lajos Takacs -- a former rector of Babes-Bolyai at the time of the 1959 merger -- detailed how decreasing opportunities in Hungarian-language instruction had led to a sharp decline in the number of ethnic Hungarians attending universities or with the possibility to do so (Deletant, 1995, pp. 122-126). Karoly Kiraly, who had resigned as a candidate member of the PCR Executive Committee and first secretary of Covasna county in 1972 -- officially for "personal" reasons but in actuality to protest discriminatory policies against ethnic Hungarians -- outlined in three letters to senior party officials how in leadership positions at major industrial plants and cultural institutions -- even in areas with significant Hungarian populations, such as Targu-Mures -- ethnic Hungarians were systematically being replaced with Romanians (Deletant, 1995, pp. 126-128). As Kiraly noted, the Hungarian State Theater in Targu-Mures had a Romanian director who did not speak Hungarian, the mayors of the largely Hungarian towns of Sovata and Targu-Mures had Romanian mayors, and bilingual signs and the designation of place names in Hungarian on maps were rapidly disappearing at this time. Kiraly was briefly arrested in early 1978, and the "Securitate," according to Deletant, turned "hundreds of homes belonging to members of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania" upside down in search of copies of Kiraly's letters (Deletant, 1995, p. 129).

Finally, between 1981 and 1983, Hungarian intellectuals in Transylvania attempted to produce their own "samizdat," exposing the Romanian regime's treatment of the Hungarian minority. Nine issues of the publication "Ellenpontok" (Counterpoints) appeared between December 1981 and January 1983, when the editors were detained, beaten, and expelled to Hungary (Deletant, 1995, p. 131; Kurti, 2001, p. 109). A second samizdat publication "Erdelyi Magyar Hirugynokseg" (Transylvanian News Service) appeared first in May 1983 and then on an irregular basis thereafter.

The Deteriorating Situation Of Kosova Serbs
The deterioration of Serb influence in Kosova was arguably more dramatic and deeper than the corresponding situation of Hungarians in Transylvania. Ethnic Albanians in Kosova and many outsiders saw the Albanians as the victims -- and they undoubtedly were -- of the 1981 violence that seized the province and over time spilled into neighboring Macedonia and Montenegro (as in 1968). Serbs, on the other hand, saw these events as the last straw, as the clearest evidence that their cession of power and influence in the province was leading to the very demands -- Albanian autonomy -- that they feared most.

The impact upon Kosova of the founding of the Albanian-language university in Prishtina in 1969 was extraordinary. By the 1981/82 academic year, the university had over 20,000 students, or nearly one out of every 10 adults in the city (Mertus, 1999, p. 29). Kosova, thus as Mertus notes, "had the dubious honor of having the highest ration of both students and illiterates in Yugoslavia" (Mertus, 1999, p. 29). At university, many students would focus on the liberal arts -- especially Albanian language and literature -- rather than technical subjects, reinforcing their chances of unemployment upon graduation, particularly if they were to leave the republic (Mertus, 1999, p. 28). This intellectual proletariat -- now with heightened expectations and hopes, and with a more developed sense of self and national identity -- looked to the republican bureaucracy as essentially its sole outlet for employment. According to Fred Singleton, there were few jobs outside of "the inflated administrative machine and in the cultural institutions which had also been the recipients of [federal] funds which ought to have been spent on projects of greater economic relevance" (cited in Mertus, 1999, p. 28). Seventy percent of those unemployed were under the age of 25 (Poulton, 1991, p. 60). At the same time, the situation for non-Albanians at the university had become inhospitable: "at Pristina University and in high schools students boycotted non-Albanian classes, ostracized 'hostile' teachers, and refused to study Serbo-Croat" (Vickers, 1998, p. 188).

According to Vickers, the 1974 constitution "began the virtual Albanianization of public life in Kosovo." The constituion "caused 'positive discrimination' in favor of the Albanians in Kosovo: bilingualism became a condition for employment in public services; four-fifths of the available posts were reserved for Albanians on a parity basis; and national quotas were strictly applied when nominations were made for public functons" (Vickers, 1998, p. 180). Between the end of 1974 and 1980 alone, the proportion of Albanians employed in the so-called "social sector" increased from 58 percent to 92 percent, while that of Serbs declined from 31 percent to 5 percent -- far below the proportion of Serbs in Kosova's population as a whole (Ramet, 1992, pp. 192-193). By 1981, over two-thirds of party members in Kosova, and three-quarters of provincial police and security-service personnel, were ethnic Albanian (Malcolm, 1998, p. 326). Vickers concludes that "during the years 1971-1981, Kosovo's administration operated with minimal restraint from either the Federal or the Serbian Republic government" (Vickers, 1998, p. 183).

The apex for Kosova Albanians -- and in many ways, from the perspective of the Serbs, the corresponding nadir -- must have been the joint celebrations launched in 1978 between Yugoslavia and Albania to mark the centenary of the founding of the League of Prizren, the historic watershed of Albanian national revival in the 19th century (Magas, 1993, pp. 38, 11; Vickers, 1998, pp. 187-188).

On 24 September 1984, the Belgrade weekly "NIN" reported that between 1961 and 1981, 112,600 Serbs and Montenegrins left Kosova (Benson, 2001, p. 143). According to Malcolm, such numbers are generally confirmed by 1981 census statistics on the number of people in Serbia proper who declared themselves as having come from Kosova (110,675, of whom 85,636 had come between 1961 and 1981) (Malcolm, 1998, p. 330). The proportion of Serbs in Kosova, which had stayed relatively constant at about 23 percent between the late 1940s and early 1960s, fell to 18.3 percent in the 1971 census and 13.2 percent in the 1981 census. More alarming still from the Serb perspective was that, in absolute terms, the number of Serbs had dropped between 1971 and 1981 by over 18,000 (Ramet, 1992, p. 198). Indicative of the contingent and historical character of why particular diaspora issues become politically predominant instead of others is the fact that, according to Malcolm, Bosnia saw an outflow of 111,828 Serbs over this same period, one that was proportionately greater than the outflow of Serbs from Kosova (Malcolm, 1998, p. 330). Whereas in 1961, Serbs had made up 43 percent of Bosnia's population and Muslims 26 percent, by 1981 the figures were 32 percent and 40 percent, respectively (Benson, 2001, p. 144). Yet, as we know, the diaspora issue of greatest concern for Serbs during the 1980s was Kosova, not Bosnia.

Writing in the summer of 1983, RFE's Zdenko Antic identified the growing spread of Serbian nationalism and concluded, "If anything provoked this new wave of Serbian nationalism it was the Kosovo events [of 1981]" (Antic, 1983). What began as student demonstrations by ethnic Albanians in Prishtina in March 1981, turned into protests for republican status for Kosova, and then rapidly spread throughout the province in the weeks that followed, eventually spilling over to the ethnic Albanian populations of Macedonia and Montenegro (Ramet, 1992, pp. 195-197). The response of federal officials, spearheaded by Stane Dolanc (a Slovene), was a brutal crackdown -- administered by the federal arm of the state-security services and military counterintelligence -- and even by Dolanc's own account resulting in 1,500 arrests for serious crimes against public order and 4,500 for "lesser offenses" (Benson, 2001, p. 136). The climate between the remaining Serbs and Albanians inevitably worsened, and Serbs continued to stream out of the province primarily for economic reasons, but also because they felt increasingly the subject of indirect, and in some cases, direct, pressure (Malcolm, 1998, p. 331).

*Author's Note: Spelling per editorial request.

(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)

SOURCES

Antic, Z., 1983, "Serbian Nationalism Spreading," in "Radio Free Europe Research," RAD Background Report 159 (Yugoslavia), pp. 1-4.

Benson, L., 2001, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, (New York: Palgrave).

Cohen, L. J., 1997, "'Serpent in the Bosom': Slobodan Milosevic and Serbian Nationalism," in Bokovoy, M., Irvine, J., and Lilly, C. (eds.), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, (New York: St. Martin's Press), pp. 315-343.

Deletant, D., 1995, Ceausescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe).

Grunewald, O., 1992, "Praxis and Democratization in Yugoslavia: From Critical Marxism to Democratic Socialism?" in Taras, R. (ed.), The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), pp. 175-195.

Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority's Situation in Ceausescu's Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).

"Kronologia," 1974, http://www.artpool.hu/Kontextus/Kronologia.

"Kronologia," 1978, http://www.artpool.hu/Kontextus/Kronologia.

Kurti, L., 2001, The Remote Borderland: Transylvania in the Hungarian Imagination, (New York: State University Press).

Lendvai, P., 1988, Hungary: The Art of Survival, (London: IB Tauris & Co. Ltd.).

Linz, Juan J. and Alfred Stepan, 1996, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Magas, B., 1993, The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracing the Break-Up 1980-92, (New York: Verso).

Malcolm, Noel, 1998, Kosovo: A Short History, (New York: New York University Press).

Mertus, J., 1999, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).

Miller, N. J., 1997a, "Reconstituting Serbia: 1945-1991," in Bokovoy, M., Irvine, J., and Lilly, C. (eds.), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, (New York: St. Martin's Press), pp. 291-314.

Miller, N. J., 1997b, "A failed transition: the case of Serbia," in Dawisha K. and Parrott, B. (eds.) Politics, power, and the struggle for democracy in South-East Europe, Vol. 2., (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 146-188.

Miller, N. J., 2000, "The Children of Cain: Dobrica Cosic's Serbia," in "East European Politics and Societies," Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 268-287.

Pavkovic, A., 2000. The Fragmentation of Yugoslavia: Nationalism and War in the Balkans, (New York: St. Martin's Press).

Poulton, H., 1991, The Balkans: Minorities and States in Conflict, (London: Minority Rights Publications).

Ramet, S. P., 1992. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962-1991, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).

Reisch, A., 1983, "Gyula Illyes Dies," in "Radio Free Europe Research," Hungarian Situation Report no. 6, pp. 31-33.

Schopflin, G., 1979, "Opposition and Para-Opposition: Critical Currents in Hungary, 1968-1978," in Tokes, R. (ed.), Opposition in Eastern Europe, (London: Macmillan), pp. 142-186.

Schopflin, G., 1988, "The Role of Transylvania in Hungarian Politics," in "Radio Free Europe Research," RAD Background Report no. 236 (Hungary), pp. 1-6.

Vickers, M., 1998, Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo, (New York: Columbia University Press).

Compiled by Michael Shafir

30 April 2003, Volume  5, Number  9

NATIONALISM IN LATE COMMUNIST EASTERN EUROPE: COMPARING THE ROLE OF DIASPORA POLITICS IN HUNGARY AND SERBIA (Part 3)

By Richard Andrew Hall

A CRITICAL STAGE: REGIME OPPOSITION COALESCES

Just as the regime policy of differentiating and segregating opposition to the regime was critical to the success of the Hungarian and Serb communist parties in undermining opposition during the 1970s, so events or changes in regime behavior that brought together or enabled different parts of the opposition to coalesce proved significant in altering the regime-opposition dynamic in the 1980s. As is often the case, interaction and collaboration on one set of issues "spilled over" and set the stage for future interaction and collaboration -- even where there was little direct relation between the earlier and later issues and even where the earlier projects had been viewed as comparatively apolitical. In both Hungary and Serbia, the convergence of populist and liberal dissidents on the nationalist issue was an evolutionary and initially independent process, but it was given impetus and encouraged by unprecedented cooperation between the two camps on other issues.

The Hungarian Opposition Comes Together
Rudolf Tokes identifies the funeral of the legendary writer and historian Istvan Bibo -- and the 1,001-page tribute including the contributions of 76 different authors, "Bibo Emlekkonyv" (Bibo Memorial Book, 1980), that followed -- as a critical juncture for opposition to the communist regime: "The death of Istvan Bibo in April 1979 became the defining event that helped reshape the dissident movement from a loose intelligentsia network into a new coalition of democratic opposition in Hungary" (Tokes, 1996, p. 184). Indeed, a report prepared by the Central Committee's Department for Science, Education, and Culture recognized the volume's potential, stating, "[I]t is suitable for the building of a kind of consensus among various strata of the intelligentsia" (Tokes, 1996, p. 186). The "samizdat" publication brought together what the report identified as eight different types of regime opponents, ranging from populists such as Gyula Illyes to members of the "democratic opposition."

The Bibo "samizdat" project undoubtedly set the stage for the collaboration of the populist and democratic opposition camps that occurred with the publication of Hungary's first regular "samizdat" journal, "Beszelo" (Speaker), beginning in December 1981. According to Tokes: "From 1983 on, every issue of the journal gave prominent coverage to matters of Populist interest and paid substantial attention to regional concerns... [C]overage of the Transylvanian scene w[as] [a] major confidence-building step toward the forging of a political alliance between the Hungarian urban and rural critical intelligentsia" (Tokes, 1996, p. 189). Of course, although both sides were defined by a change in their willingness to work more closely with one another, the change in interest in the diaspora issue was primarily one of the liberal intelligentsia.

Prior to the signature by 34 Hungarian intellectuals of the Charter 77 manifesto in January 1977, Janos Kenedi, one of the most active organizers of "samizdat" projects at the time, maintains that "the dissidents had struck outsiders as a clannish lot intent on recruiting people to support noble causes abroad but oddly disinterested in social problems at home and in Hungarian ethnic minority rights in Romania and Slovakia" (cited in Tokes, 1996, p. 184). The Helsinki accords, with their stated commitment to the defense of minority rights, and the increasing recognition by members of the liberal opposition that commitment to the preservation of individual rights necessitates that they take an increasing interest in the fate of the Hungarian minority -- particularly in Romania, where those rights appeared to be diminishing -- clearly contributed to this turnabout in the focus and interest of the liberal opposition in the diaspora issue. According to George Schopflin, populists and liberals came to the diaspora cause from different philosophical perspectives, but they were nevertheless drawn together: The liberal approach focused on "human rights and the democratization of communist political systems as the means of ending national oppression"; the more emotive populist worldview on "the Hungarian nation's right to define its identity and objectives" (Schopflin, 1988, p. 4).

One might add here, however, that the appearance and rising prominence of representatives in the liberal opposition who had come from or had deep roots in Transylvania also played a role -- most notably, perhaps, the case of Gaspar Miklos Tamas, who had come to Hungary from Romania in 1978. In the 1980s, Tamas would be joined by other Transylvanian intellectuals, who were expelled by the Romanian authorities and consequently sought to publicize the situation of the Hungarian minority in Romania upon arriving in Hungary -- including Attila Ara-Kovacs (1983) and Geza Szocs (1985) (Kurti, 2001, p. 109; Joo, 1994, p. 118).

In the wake of the disappointing 13th Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP) in March 1985 -- at which the aging and increasingly intransigent Janos Kadar retained the top party post -- and the first parliamentary elections with two or more (party-nominated) candidates per district on 8 June 1985 -- which saw 154 "spontaneously nominated" candidates and 35 of them end up in parliament -- the "democratic opposition" gathered together 45 intellectuals from across the political spectrum, including populists and reform socialists, at a three-day conference at a campsite in the Budapest suburb of Monor from 14-16 June 1985 (Tokes, 1996, pp. 273; 238; 189-190; Ash, 1985, pp. 149-150). The conference convener, Ferenc Donath, suggested that fear of a political crisis because of declining living standards and intractable economic problems -- read, in part, Kadar's continued stewardship of the party and intransigence -- had instigated the conference (Tokes, 1996, p. 190). One of the organizers told Timothy Garton Ash in 1985 that "the idea [behind the conference] was [to bring together] a kind of popular front" (Ash, 1985, p. 150). Among the populists, Sandor Csoori and Istvan Csurka spoke and focused on the need for moral renewal, the preservation of the national cultural identity, and heightened awareness of the sufferings of ethnic Hungarians beyond the national boundaries. Csoori argued that the latter question had not yet surfaced because "the vocabulary of socialism seems to lack the words" for doing so (Koppany, 1986). Janos Kis, the de facto editor of "Beszelo" and a chief representative of the liberals criticized the populists for their seeming tunnel vision on these issues and lack of attention to broader issues of social welfare and human rights, but admitted the political crisis necessitated cooperation and bridge-building (Tokes, 1996, p. 190).

Writing in late 1985, Timothy Garton Ash concluded: "What emerged from Monor is not -- or not yet -- something one could call a united, let alone a popular, front.... But there was at least common debate" (Ash, 1985, p. 150). Ash recognized, however, how central the diaspora question -- and specifically Transylvania -- was to the coalescing -- even if fitful and imperfect -- of the Hungarian opposition:

"Perhaps more than anything else it is the direct persecution of Hungarians in Romania that has catalyzed this convergence: the kind of persecution that, as it were, "evades" the Hungarians in Hungary. Nicolae Ceausescu as the godfather of Hungarian intellectual life -- what an irony! Deeply unreliable rumor in Budapest has it that when Kadar went to see Gorbachev in September, the Soviet leader asked him: 'What's this I hear about your intellectuals gathering together at Monor?'" (Ash, 1985, p. 150)

The European Cultural Forum held in Budapest in the fall of 1985 -- the first Helsinki follow-up meeting held in a Soviet-bloc country -- gave a boost to further opposition cooperation but also served as something of a watershed in the degree to which representatives of the Hungarian regime voiced the issue of the Hungarian minority in Transylvania. Opposition cooperation gained a boost in large part because the regime ensured that they were barred from the official forum (Tokes, 1996, p. 188). Once again, populists and liberals came together, and much of their attention at their parallel unofficial symposium focused on the situation in Transylvania (Ash, 1985, pp. 152-156).

A secret 1 July 1986 MSZMP Politburo report on regime opposition that was leaked abroad gives evidence that the regime itself recognized and believed that the opposition was coalescing and broadening (J.R., 1987). The document observed that although the core of people in opposition had not grown since 1982, the opposition's "influence has broadened and the volume of illegal publications increased." As of 1986, political dissidence in Hungary had ceased to be merely "oppositional" but now was considered a "hostile" antiregime movement (Tokes, 1996, p. 195). The report differentiated what it called the "nationalist radical tendency" (i.e. populist) from the "bourgeois radical group" (i.e. "democratic opposition"), with the former focusing "on problems of the Hungarian minorities and accusing Hungarian authorities of 'criminal neglect.'" The report acknowledged how during the early and mid 1980s the various strands of opposition opinion in Hungary had coalesced, how the question of the Hungarian diaspora was THE issue fueling populist dissent, and how regime opposition as a whole was allegedly taking advantage of the "worsening situation of the Hungarian minority in neighboring states."

The 30th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution in October 1986 led to a joint statement signed by 54 Hungarian dissidents, including members of the populist and liberal oppositions, some of whom had participated at Monor. Alfred Reisch concluded at the time that the joint statement was evidence that "the Monor initiative does, indeed, now seem to have been followed up" and that "the recent and remarkable coalition of the various Hungarian oppositionist groups and individuals that began at Monor has held together, despite the variety of concerns and interests involved" (Reisch, 1986). The appeal significantly included "a statement to respect the rights of all minorities," a clear bow to the importance and unifying character of the diaspora issue within the Hungarian opposition.

Serbia's Path to Opposition Symbiosis
If in Hungary the coalescing of populist and liberal oppositions to the regime derived largely from events such as the Bibo memorial or an increasing convergence of concern (on the issue of Hungarian diaspora), in Yugoslavia regime actions played a much greater role. Specifically, an ill-fated crackdown in 1984 brought populist and liberal branches of the Serb opposition together. In January 1986, they would collaborate on a groundbreaking Kosova* petition. In March 1986 -- therefore before Milosevic's ascendency to the helm of the Serbian party and prior to the release of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) memorandum -- Ramet noted how "the mood in Yugoslavia today is increasingly reminiscent of that of 1970-1971," only that the Serbs were now playing the role of the Croats then and the impediments to nationalist excess were weaker than in 1971 (Ramet, 1986). By early 1986, the Kosova issue had been percolating in Serbia for at least half a decade. Nick Miller writes:

"In the course of the period from 1981 to 1986, an opposition to the way the Serbian party dealt with Albanian nationalism would coalesce around several specific points: the fact of Serbo-Montenegrin outmigration; the immense economic drain that Kosovo represented; and the alleged revisitation of ancient crimes (rape, murder, and even impalement) against Serbs perpetrated earlier by Turks, now by Albanians" (Miller, 1997, p. 305).

The growing popular appeal and potential of Serb nationalism -- and of the centrality of Kosova in its renaissance -- was on display at the funeral of Aleksandar Rankovic in 1983. As many as 100,000 people may have witnessed Rankovic's burial -- clearly the largest societal action in communist Serbia to that point in time. Leslie Benson, who was there to witness the event, memorably describes it as follows:

"Rankovic became the posthumous champion of the Serbs, who had kept the Kosovar Albanians in their place. Although Rankovic's death was given little coverage in the media at the time, the bush telegraph brought out thousands of mourners to follow him to his grave (20 August 1983), many sporting the traditional Serbian peasant cap and singing patriotic songs, interspersed with shouts of 'Kardelj stitched him up' (Kardelj ga namestio).... Rankovic's obituary notice in 'Politika' was relegated to second place on a page which also reported, more prominently, the death of Milos Minic, the organizer of the Seventh Congress. It was still too soon for a Serbian nationalist rehabilitation of Rankovic in public" (Benson, 2001, p. 143; p. 188 n.10).

Indeed, the soon-to-be head of the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) and Belgrade city chief at the time of the event, Ivan Stambolic, was defensive on the subject: "All across Yugoslavia they criticized me for not controlling it -- should I have put tanks round the cemetery?" (quoted in Silber and Little, 1996, p. 36n8). Dobrica Cosic himself identified Rankovic's funeral as "above all a nationalist demonstration. It was a true, widely effective gesture, a real nationalist uprising [of] solidarity with a noted Serbian communist who was the victim of a great injustice" (quoted in Miller, 2000, p. 281). At this point, however, one can say, many intellectuals continued to lag the crowd, and it would only be in later years that Serb popular sentiment, particularly over Kosova, became more strongly articulated by the broader Serb intelligentsia.

Robert Thomas writes that "the 1980s saw increasing moves towards collective organization among Serbian intellectuals" (Thomas, 1999, p. 40). In what Leslie Benson colorfully describes as "the dying roar of senescent Titoism, which for all its quasi-democratic trappings abhorred all talk of 'bourgeois rights,'" the League of Communists of Yugoslavia led by the Croatian Titoist ideologue Stipe Suvar launched one last-gasp effort to slow the progression of the federation's burgeoning centrifugalism and save what was left of the now-threadbare doctrine of "Yugoslavism" (Benson, 2001, p. 145). The Sarajevo Winter Olympics (February 1984) now firmly behind them -- and thus the international spotlight turned away, too -- in May 1984 the Commission for Ideological Questions and Information met in Zagreb with Suvar leading the ideological charge against the growing trend in the country toward "abuse of freedom of creativity" (Grunewald, 1987, p. 524).

The regime actions that followed were heavy-handed, vindictive, and seemingly arbitrary, however. Twenty-eight participants at a meeting of the so-called "Free" or "Flying" university in a private apartment -- ironically, to discuss the national question in Yugoslavia -- were arrested in Belgrade on 20 April 1984 (Magas, 1993, pp. 89-91). Four of them were physically assaulted while in police custody, and one of them -- a 33-year-old worker, Radomir Radovic -- disappeared after a second arrest and release and was found dead on 30 April. In May, the authorities swooped down and arrested a series of intellectuals, including Vojislav Seselj (who had participated in the 20 April meeting) in Sarajevo and three former leaders of the 1968 student movement in Belgrade (Magas, 1993, pp. 102-103). The show trial of the "Belgrade Six" from August to November 1984 backfired and succeeded in bringing together the divergent strands of the Yugoslav -- but primarily, the Serb -- opposition. Led by Dobrica Cosic, a Committee for the Defense of Freedom of Thought and Expression (CDFTE) was founded on 10 November 1984. The CDFTE, which was founded explicitly to defend the rights of those who had been unjustly imprisoned and offer support to their families, echoed similar-type organizations that had preceded it in Poland (Workers' Defense Committee, KOR, founded in 1976) and in Czechoslovakia (Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted, VONS, founded in 1978). Helsinki, in a manner of speaking, had finally come to Yugoslavia.

The CDFTE became a template for future opposition collaboration in that it brought together nationalists like Cosic but also the critical marxist "liberals" of "Praxis," such as Mihailo Markovic. According to Thomas, "despite dealing with such 'heroic' national material and his split with the League of Communists, Cosic continued to consider himself to be a man of the 'left' maintaining close links with members of the 'Praxis' group" (Thomas, 1999, p. 40). Markovic termed the founding of the CDFTE "the first successful breakthrough of civil society in Yugoslavia since the war" (cited in Grunewald, 1992, p. 182). Oskar Grunewald recognized the significance of the founding of the CDFTE for the Praxis group and regime opposition as whole as follows:

"But it is only following the death of Radomir Radovic that Mihailo Markovic ignored his own advice concerning permissible 'limits' for a critically minded intellectual and signed the first ever petition in postwar Yugoslavia calling on the interior minister to account for an unexplained death or accept responsibility for it and resign from office" (Grunewald 1992, p. 182).

Next, in May 1985, an event occurred that was to inflame Serb passions on the Kosova question and contribute to the further convergence of opposition in Serbia. Ivo Banac summarizes the incident and issues it raised as follows:

"And then in 1985 came the bizarre case of Djordje Martinovic [a 56-year-old Serb peasant], who was (or was not) impaled (or abused himself) with a broken bottle (or a bottle that broke in his anus) by two Albanians (or by Albanians of his own invention). At stake was the veracity of Kosovar authorities (who argued that Martinovic was in effect a pervert) and the Serbian authorities and public opinion (who were convinced that Martinovic was a victim of violence and a crude cover-up). At stake, too, was the autonomy of Kosova, since it appeared that even the purged ranks of Albanian communists were [following the riots and crackdown of 1981] were unreliable, while the Serbian investigatory agencies were constitutionally prevented from acting in the province" (Banac, 1992, p. 176).

The impact of the Martinovic affair on Serb consciousness as a symbol of Serb suffering in Kosova could be seen in Mica Popovic's 1986 painting "1 maj 1985," which depicts the fictional crucifixion of Martinovic. According to Nick Miller:

"Popovic chose, not only to render the scene, but to render it as the martyrdom of the Serbian peasant, standing in for the nation as a whole. All of the elements of Serbian subjugation in Yugoslavia are present -- white-capped Albanians hoist Martinovic onto the cross; the bottle waits; the blue-uniformed policeman, the ubiquitous watchman of the Titoist regime, stand guard over the ceremony" (Miller, 1999, p. 530 -- see photo of painting on p. 532).

Julie Mertus writes that "[t]aking advantage of the public uproar caused by the Martinovic case, Kosovo Serbs created a petition to the assemblies of Serbia and Yugoslavia in October 1985" (Mertus, 1999, p. 108). This was the second petition of Kosovar Serbs and contained the signatures of 2,011 Serbs and Montenegrins. The first petition had been circulated in early 1982 and carried the names of 79 Serbs. In the wake of the 1981 events in Kosova, Kosovar Serbs who had left the province began to tell their stories to the Belgrade press -- encouraged to do so by Dobrica Cosic and like-minded intellectuals and prompted by their perception of the unreceptivity of Kosova's predominantly Albanian authorities to their plight (Silber and Little, 1996, pp. 34-35; Mertus, 1999 pp. 97-98; Thomas, 1999, p. 35). Kosovar Serb activists Miroslav Solevic, Kosta Bulatovic, and Bosko Budimirovic proclaimed in the first petition what was to become the slogan of their movement: "This is our land. If Kosovo and Metohija are not Serbian then we don't have any land of our own" (Silber and Little, 1996, pp. 34-35). According to Silber and Little, Cosic has admitted a role in encouraging the movement -- "they complained about their position and I advised them to write a petition and to put forward their demands," they quote him as saying (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 35).

Just as in Hungary it was more a case of the "democratic opposition" coming to the nationalist cause, so it was with Serbia's "liberals" -- the critical marxists of the "Praxis" group -- though perhaps even more belatedly. In January 1986, 212 Belgrade intellectuals -- many of them prominent and including 52 professors and 34 members of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts -- sent a petition to the Yugoslav and Serbian national assemblies decrying the treatment of Serbs in Kosova (Stankovic, 1986a). According to Mertus, the petition echoed the October 1985 petition in blasting Serbian and Yugoslav leaders for failing to take action in defense of Kosovar Serbs faced with a looming Albanian-administered "genocide" (Mertus, 1999, pp. 135-136). Its language was emotive and highly charged, speaking of "old women and nuns being raped, youngsters beaten up, cattle blinded, stables built from gravestones, churches and old shrines desecrated" and warning that "no nation will give up its right to exist, and the Serb people are not and do not want to be an exception.... [If Kosova were to become] ethnically pure, this would inevitably lead to fresh national and international conflicts" (Mertus, 1999, pp. 135-136).

Branka Magas, writing in late 1986 in the "New Left Review" under the pseudonym of "Michelle Lee," recognized the groundbreaking nature of the January 1986 Kosova petition -- and its implications for the character of opposition to the communist regime in Serbia -- as follows:

"Particularly surprising was the fact that the January petition was signed by three former editors of 'Praxis': Zaga Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic and Ljuba Tadic -- joined subsequently by Milan Kangrga, another well-known former 'Praxis' editor, who gave an interview to the Belgrade literary and oppositional journal 'Knjizevne novine,' once again overtly anti-Albanian in message. This unexpected, indeed astonishing, alignment of 'Praxis' editors with nationalism has aroused considerable dismay among their friends and sympathizers, for it delineates a complete break with the political and philosophical tradition represented by the journal.... The appearance of 'Praxis' signatures on the Kosova petition, signaling a de facto absorption into the nationalist bloc, thus represents not only the final denouement of the 'Praxis' venture but also a generational rupture with Yugoslav Marxism" (Magas, 1993, pp. 52-53).

Nick Miller characterizes it this way:

"The other half of the non-party opposition consisted of members of the Praxis group. Their position outside of the party had been long-established. Yet their opposition to the party had always been essentially Marxist. The fact that they now joined a nationalist consensus is thus intriguing and somewhat shocking. Four members of the group, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic, Mihailo Markovic, and Milan Kangrga had signed the January 1986 petition that first labeled Albanian behavior in Kosovo as genocidal. Their gravitation from Marxism to nationalism was abrupt. Their anti-Titoism was of long pedigree, and their democratic inclinations were well-publicized. Their transition can be explained in two ways: their democracy, like that of other Serbs (and Croats, as well as others) was not rooted in a belief in individual liberties, rather it was founded on a collective conception of society and rights; and they found it easy to move from one homogenizing, collective ideology (class-based Marxism) to another (cultural-based nationalism). By the early 1990s, Markovic was Milosevic's intellectual alter-ego" (Miller, 1997, p. 308).

In the months that followed the groundbreaking January 1986 Kosova petition, here again opposition convergence on the Kosova question was accompanied by continued collaboration in defending intellectual victims of the regime's wrath. From February to early April 1986, the Serbian Writers' Union held weekly literary protests with lectures on repression and creativity in support of Dragolub Petrovic, who had been sentenced on 3 December 1985 to 60 days' imprisonment for questioning official historiography (Grunewald, 1987, p. 518). Attendance began at 200 people on 10 February and had grown to over 1,000 by 3 March. Cosic called openly at these meetings for civil disobedience, strikes, and petitions as legitimate means to protest the authorities (Grunewald, 1987, p. 518). Similarly, the firing of Dusan Bogovac as chief editor of "Komunist" for having invited Seselj to publish in the pages of his journal, and for his own writings on Serb migration from Kosova, led 91 journalists to start a so-called Solidarity Fund on May Day 1986 (Grunewald, 1987, pp. 525-526). Journalists themselves had held a protest on 13 March 1986 against a ban on coverage of Yugoslav National Assembly President Ilijaz Kurteshi -- an ethnic Albanian (Stankovic, 1986b).

Meanwhile, the protests by Kosovar Serbs were gathering steam. In February 1986, 95 Kosovar Serbs representing 42 towns and villages in the province braved bitter cold and marched to the Federal Assembly in Belgrade (Vladisavljevic, 2002, p. 772). The arrest of one of the organizers in early April led to a vigil of several thousand outside his home, a futile effort of then Serbian party leader Ivan Stambolic to quell the crowd's spirits at Kosova Polje, and another march -- this time by 550 Kosovar Serbs, led by an 80-year-old farmer -- to Belgrade (Vladisavljevic, 2002, pp. 772-773). In what Silber and Little maintain was a "key moment" after which "no longer would the movement be confined underground," the leaders of this group were met by the dissident nationalist writer, Vuk Draskovic, who in turn brought them to an emotional Cosic (Silber and Little, 1996, p. 35). Cosic reportedly phoned Dusan Ckrebic, the then Serbian president, who supposedly advised the protesters the next morning: "This is where you should be. Not where you were last night." With help from a self-proclaimed "Committee of Serbs and Montenegrins" from Kosova, a petition in the latter's defense would garner over 50,000 signatures during 1986.

*Author's Note: Spelling per editorial request.

(Richard Andrew Hall holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University and a B.A. from the University of Virginia. He currently works and lives in northern Virginia. Comments or questions can be sent to him at hallria@msn.com.)

SOURCES

Ash, T. G., 1989, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, (New York: Random House).

Banac, I., 1992, "Post-Communism as Post-Yugoslavism: The Yugoslav Non-Revolutions of 1989-1990," in Banac, I. (ed.), Eastern Europe in Revolution, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), pp. 168-187.

Benson, L., 2001, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, (New York: Palgrave).

Grunewald, O., 1987, "Yugoslav Camp Literature: Rediscovering the Ghost of a Nation's Past-Present-Future," in "Slavic Review," Vol. 46, Nos. 3-4, pp. 513-528.

Grunewald, O., 1992, "Praxis and Democratization in Yugoslavia: From Critical Marxism to Democratic Socialism?" in Taras, R. (ed.), The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Postcommunism in Eastern Europe, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), pp. 175-195.

Joo, R. (ed.), Ludanyi, A. (rev. ed.), Tennant, C. (trans.), 1994, The Hungarian Minority's Situation in Ceausescu's Romania, (New York: Columbia University Press).

J. R., 1987, "Secret Politburo Report on Opposition Published," in "Radio Free Europe Research," Hungarian Situation Report No. 7, pp. 25-28.

Koppany, S., 1986, "Hungarian Opposition Groups Hold Meeting to Discuss Nation's Future," in "Radio Free Eur