Titoism - Outcome and Influence

Outcome and Influence

Although the Soviets revised their attitudes under Nikita Khrushchev, during the process of de-Stalinization, and sought to normalize relations with the Yugoslavs, while obtaining influence in the Non-Aligned Movement, the answer they got was never enthusiastic, and the Soviet Union never gained a proper outlet to the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, the Non-Aligned states failed to form a third Bloc, especially after the split at the outcome of the 1973 oil crisis.

Leonid Brezhnev's conservative attitudes yet again chilled relations between the two countries (although they never degenerated to the level of the conflict with Stalin). Yugoslavia backed Czechoslovakia's leader Alexander Dubček during the 1968 Prague Spring, and then cultivated a special (albeit incidental) relation with the maverick Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu. Titoism was similar to Dubček's Socialism with a human face, while Ceauşescu attracted sympathies for his refusal to condone (and take part in) the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which briefly seemed to constitute a casus belli between Romania and the Soviets. However, Ceauşescu was an unlikely member of the alliance, since he profited from the events in order to push his authoritarian agenda inside Romania.

After Brezhnev brought Czechoslovakia to heel in 1968, Romania and Yugoslavia maintained privileged connections up to the mid-1980s. Ceauşescu adapted the part of Titoism that made reference to the "conditions of a particular country", but merged them with Romanian nationalism and contrasting North Korean Juche beliefs, while embarking on a particular form of Cultural Revolution. The synthesis can be roughly compared with the parallel developments of Hoxhaism, and found Ceauşescu strong, perhaps unsought, supporters in National Bolshevism theorists such as the Belgian Jean-François Thiriart.

Tito's own ideology became less clear with the pressures of various nationalisms within Yugoslavia and the problems posed by the 1970s Croatian Spring. However, his economic views remained steady, amounting to the high standard of living enjoyed by the country - slowly, Yugoslavia became somewhat closer to a free-market, neatly separated from other Socialist regimes in Eastern Europe (and marked by a permissive attitude towards seasonal labor of Yugoslav citizens in Western Europe). At the same time, the leadership did put a stop to overt capitalist attempts (such as Stjepan Mesić's experiment with privatization in Orahovica), and crushed the dissidence of liberal thinkers such as former leader Milovan Đilas; it also clamped down on centrifugal attempts, promoting a Yugoslav patriotism.

Although still claimed as official dogma, virtually all aspects of Titoism went into rapid decline after Tito's death in 1980, being replaced by the rival policies of constituent republics. During the late 1980s, with nationalism on the rise, revised Titoism was arguably kept as a point of reference by political movements caught disadvantaged by the main trends, such as civic forums in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republic of Macedonia.

The socialist variant of workers' self-management was also adopted by the Spanish Carlist Party in the 1970s founded by Carlos Hugo, Duke of Parma, a rival claimant to the Spanish throne. However it did not attract many followers during the Spanish transition to democracy, and many Carlists preferred their centuries-old right-wing tendency.

American economist Steve Hanke writes that Mexico has mimicked Tito's strategy of exporting the labor force and "as a result, more than 27 percent of Mexico's labor force is now working in the U.S. and these workers are sending home $20 billion in remittances". Hanke elaborates "that equals one-third of the total wage earnings in the formal sector of the Mexican economy and 10 percent of Mexico's exports. To solve Yugoslavia's surplus labor problem, strongman Tito came up with a simple, but ingenious, economic strategy: open the borders — at least by communist standards —and export surplus labor. This plan worked like a charm. At its peak in the early 1970s, there were more than a million Yugoslavs, about 11 percent of the labor force, working in Western Europe. And the hard-money remittances (primarily German marks) that they sent back home amounted to as much as 30 percent of Yugoslavia's exports."