The Later Years 397
which was his ideal, eight parties were created. Instead of a strong state, the
1974 constitution created a confederation of eight states. Instead of a common
economy, we had eight economies, all debt-ridden. The clever Slovene had no
doubt calculated the laws of nature, believing that he would survive Tito and
be able to manipulate the constitution in such a way as to oblige everybody to
obey him.”^23
Serbia was most stubborn about accepting the new charter, seeing in it a
further attack against its central role in the federation and an attempt on its
territorial integrity. “Under the mask of ‘democratization and decentralization,’
separatism and the destruction of Yugoslavia are legitimized,” noted Dobrica
Ćosić.^24 And one of his friends, a prominent scholar, added: “We understood
the constitution of 1974 as the necrology of the Partisan revolution, of the Par-
tisan Yugoslav bias, which meant the end of Yugoslavia.”^25 As Serbia was being
poorly represented at the top of the power structure, having lost its best politi-
cians after 1972, it had to accept the charter, although not without an animated
discussion in which Tito himself was involved. He refrained, however, from
supporting either those who wanted more autonomy for the two provinces,
Vojvodina and Kosovo, or their adversaries, leaving it to Kardelj to implement
his ideas.^26 Convinced by that time that it would be possible to save Yugoslavia
after Tito’s death only if its different ethnic components preserved a political
equilibrium among themselves, Kardelj hoped that the “nations and nationali-
ties” of the country would be mature and disciplined enough to guard against
the dangers of fragmentation of the existing state, even without the presence
of a charismatic personality at its center.^27 He formulated a text that posed a
grave threat to those supporting a Greater Serbia, since it abolished the fed-
eral state as it had been created by the Second AVNOJ, further weakening
Belgrade’s protection of the Serb population in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia,
and both provinces. Kardelj made the provinces practically equal to the repub-
lics, recognizing a series of rights for the “new” state entities that confirmed the
near confederal character of the whole. The members of the SFRY presidency
were not elected by the Federal Assembly but by local assemblies. They were
equipped with veto power, while the right to self-determination and secession
was reaffirmed for individual republics.^28
Kardelj was intelligent enough to have no illusions about the short-term
efficacy of his work, although he hoped for its eventual success. During a confi-
dential meeting in Ljubljana, he explained to friends the constitution’s innova-
tions, confessing that this was his last attempt to save Yugoslavia.^29 In spite of
his high-minded words, in the end the charter was nothing other than an exper-
iment, constructed in such a way as to untie the many political, social, eco-
nomic, and national knots of the country, through an articulated administrative