From Liberalism to Under-Development: The Yugoslav Elites Facing Western European Economic Integration in the “Long 1970s"

This chapter focuses on the Yugoslav elites’ views and predicaments towards the Western European economic integration process during the “long 1970s”. Drawing on a wide range of primary archival sources from former Yugoslav archives, it traces Yugoslavia’s fateful trajectory from its “liberal” opening towards the European Economic Community in the late 1960s to the deepening economic dependence on the latter at the beginning of the 1980s. The analysis shows the lack of a veritable federal foreign economic policy, due to ideological constraints, internal divisions within the federation and the emergence of republican agendas, which all led to the country’s uncontrolled spiral of commercial imports and financial credits from its Western European partners.