The Later Years 395
hindered in their work because Tito suspected all of them, seeing in everybody
a possible rival. I was under this pressure, as was Dolanc and Ljubičić. Jovanka
nourished such suspicions and assumptions with her fantasies.”^14
Tito announced the new constitution on 23 April 1973 with a solemn speech
at the Federal Assembly. On that occasion, the British ambassador wrote that
he was looking all right, but that it was difficult to avoid the impression that he
was reading, without enthusiasm, words written by somebody else. His speech
was limited in time, lasting just one hour. Then the Assembly remained in ses-
sion for five minutes, probably on the orders of Tito’s doctors.^15
The brevity of the session was not only due to medical considerations. Tito
was not at all enthused about the constitution, because he believed that giving
too much autonomy to republics and provinces undermined Yugoslavia. He con-
sidered the right granted to every republic to secede from the federation with-
out the assent of the others and without a national referendum to be the most
dangerous, and accepted it only because he found himself in the minority in the
constitutional commission and because his age rendered him unable to fight
harder. He considered it his duty to emphasize that in three, or at most four
years, it would be evident that his doubts were well-founded. To show his dis-
appointment, he refused to sign the con stitutional charter when it was voted in
on 21 February 1974. With the excuse of being ill, he delegated the task to Mika
Špiljak, the president of the Nationality Chamber in the Federal Assembly.^16
Kardelj began formulating the ideas for this fourth constitution in the sixties,
when he presented a report entitled “Critical Analysis of the Functioning of
the Self-Managed Political System.” When distributed, it provoked a lively dis-
cussion in the party organs, since it touched on basic problems, most of them
addressed during the following years in the constitutional amendments of 1971.
After the fall of the liberals in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Ljubljana, the “party theo-
logian,” as he was called scornfully, did not cease his ideological research,^17
believing that his efforts would be an important step toward the realization of
Marx’s vision of the “republic of associated labor,” where the working people
would exercise power without mediators (i.e., without party bureaucracy). He
aimed to create a society “where the individual will be increasingly less a citi-
zen, which means subject to the state, and more an equal member of a self-
managed society.” To this end, self-management should also be introduced into
activities that were not linked directly to production, becoming a global system
able to oppose every attempt to resurrect the “bureaucratic monopoly” typical
of the Soviet Union, while the state would become a “simple instrument of
power for the working class.”^18
According to Kardelj, to reach this goal “basic organizations of associated
labor” should be established, able to function autonomously and to collaborate