Why former Yugoslavia was such a prosperous country ?

Post Reply New Topic

Why former Yugoslavia was such a prosperous country by communist standards and why everything went so f****d up after Tito's death?

Yugoslavia had more independent policies, and was more open to trade with the West.

Tito was not as hardlined as many of the others (especially Romania‘s Ceaucescu and Albania’s Hoxha).

I can't speak to Yugoslavia's economic success, but it fell apart as bad as it did bc it was not being propped up by Tito's heavy-handed statesmanship and personality cult.
Without him unifying (read: suppressing) the south Slavs through fear or admiration, the internal nationalist grievances became too much to hold Yugoslavia together. Serbians clung to Yugoslavia as a means of maintaining their regional dominance, while the Slovenes, Bosnians, etc. resented Serbian hegemony over what was on paper meant to be a coequal union of south Slavic peoples.
The ensuing breakup and wars greatly damaged whatever prosperity a unified Yugoslavia may have had.

It wasn't.
According to my parents' accounts, in communist Yugoslavia, the party officials lived lives of new aristocracy and the rest suffered even worse poverty than in Poland.

What are "communist standards"?

A lot of Yugoslavians worked in Germany and I suppose they brought their earnings home to spend on houses, cars, etc.