THE USES AND ABUSES OF PARTICIPATORY IDEOLOGIES IN THE SOCIALIST FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA

Abstract

After the formation of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
(SFRY), the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) has organized large
work and youth actions aimed at rebuilding the country after the Second
World War. The main hypothesis of this paper is that in Yugoslavia there
was no participation in the true sense, but that there were mechanisms
which represented the ideology of participation. Work actions had huge impact
on rebuilding the land, but they were not voluntary - which is a basic
requirement of modern theory of participation. Likewise, the term participation
is further explained in this paper, in order to further explain the thesis
of formal participation in the former Yugoslavia. Student protests in
1968 were not an isolated case of revolt against the system, the basic characteristics
of popular revolt that had its roots back in the early sixties. The
aim of this paper is theoretical analysis of the theory of participation and
the basic characteristics of Yugoslavia, in order to show that the participation
of the people in the exercise of power was just an illusion, ie. formal.
Case Study about films of the sixties and seventies in Yugoslavia illustrates
the processes of censorship and imposition of ideology of participation.