456 Tito’s Death and His Political Legacy, 1980
and Mussolini, which assured to Yugoslavia the victory over Fascism, will never
be forgotten. Nor will the fact that in the early fifties he was able to resist the
siren song of the West, instead putting himself at the head of the “humiliated”
and “offended” of the Third World. In the international field, Yugoslavia moved
from the frightening isolation of 1948 to a multilateral policy that, within the
framework of the Non-Aligned Movement, gave it an influence and prestige
utterly disproportionate to its economic and military weight. As bearer of a
special form of socialism, and mediator between West and East, North and
South, it acquired vast influence in the international context.
Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the initial hardships of Tito’s dic-
tatorship, the postwar massacres, the appalling Goli Otok concentration camp,
and the failure of his regime to carry on without his cohesive presence and to
develop the self-managing experiment into a modern and pluralist democracy.
The economic crisis of the seventies brought a series of problems that the sys-
tem was unable to manage: a median inflation of 17 percent, a large trade im-
balance with other countries, and more and more evident differences between
the “developed” and the “undeveloped” republics and autonomous provinces of
the federation, which nourished ethnic conflicts. “The early 1980s,” wrote CIA
experts in September 1979, in a paper entitled “Prospects for Post-Tito Yugo-
slavia,” “will probably be a time of troubles in Yugoslavia. The precipitant will
be the incapacitation or death of President Josip Broz Tito, whose role in the
creation and preservation of contemporary Yugoslavia has been so large that
one cannot be confident it will prove dispensable.”^136 They were right. Only
ten years after his death, Yugoslavia collapsed like a house of cards, and many
of its people experienced a bloody fate. What then should be said about Tito’s
life? Perhaps it could be summarized with a popular saying that he preferred
above all others: “Although I was in the mosque, I never bowed down.”^137