NAVIGATING THE POSTWAR LIBERAL ORDER: AUTONOMY, CREATIVITY AND MODERNISM IN SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA, 1949–1953

Abstract

Between the years 1949 and 1953 the leaders of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia embarked on a series of radical social and economic reforms that restructured state–society relations in line with a decentralized, participatory model of socialism. “Self-management socialism,” as this system became known, served to harmonize local revolutionary ambitions with the embedded liberalism of the postwar international order into which Yugoslavia sought to integrate. During the early reform period Yugoslav intellectuals reorganized socialist ideology around new understandings of autonomy and creativity in ways that resonated with liberal traditions and diverged sharply from the Soviet paradigm. These concepts informed Yugoslav ideas of social self-management and national self-determination and facilitated the country's orientation to the postcolonial world. They also underpinned the new realm of cultural production, where reformers such as Miroslav Krleža and Marko Ristić mobilized this new concern with autonomous creativity to revive previously discarded aesthetic theories of interwar modernism.