YUGOSLAVIA / CZECHO-SLOVAKIA
November 1989 and how they felt two years later.
December 9, 1991 • #218 International Viewpoint up of the ruling coalition, was aimed at taking property into state ownership in order to privatize it later, the immediate result being the suppression of any right to self-management. The question of the restoration of agricultural property to former owners is also being discussed. In Slovenia, these legal changes have not even gone as far as in Czechoslovakia. As elsewhere, private capital is a rarity here. The Yugoslav conflict is not an attractive background for potential investors, despite the efforts of the Slovene authorities to get banks to deal with them separately.
The instability of the new governments is a reflection of the social instability, despite the inability of a fragmented left to put forward credible answers. The demonstration of September 10 only brought out 5,000 people. On the other hand, this is not negligible in a country of less than 2 million people. Furthermore the demonstration was very spectacular, with chains of buses travelling around the city. And it was enough for the vote in parliament to be deferred. * * This article first appeared in the French trade union magazine, Collectif. 1. In June 1968 there was a wave of occupations in Yugoslavia's main universities, against a background of workers' strikes. In this moverent, which was hostile to the pro-market reforms and privatizations introduced in 1965, the critical intelligentsia expressed overwhelming support for a self-managed and pluralist socialism. The main slogans of the movement, apart from egalitarian and social demands, were "self-management from top to bottom" and "down with the red bourgeoisie."
W E all like to be told what we
want to hear. And the other way round. Nonetheless it remains true that even this rule has its exceptions. For example President Masaryk in the 1920s received [the social democrat] Ferdinand Peroutka precisely because they publicly disagreed. But there are of course not many people like Masaryk.
When in the spring of 1968 I visited my family in Ostrava our old neighbour, the father of my closest childhood friend, lay in wait for me and finally, by the door of the rabbit hutch, gruffly demanded: "This Sik [a pro-reform economist of 1968 vintage] wants to shut the pits. The miners will be out of work. And are you helping him, Olga?" And other co-workers of my dad - neighbours and fathers of my school-fellows — reproached me for supporting the reform current. They were against it. I recounted all this to my journalist colleagues in Prague
"I'm not surprised" the most experi-
Two years after the "Velvet Revolution"