Word: yugoslavia
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Continental Europe has no more volatile and troublesome minority than the Croats of Yugoslavia. Dour and resentful, they have felt themselves second-class citizens in their own land for a thousand years, first under the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and more recently under Yugoslavia's more numerous Serbs.* As a result, says Balkan Historian Dennison I. Rusinov, the Croats "have a case of permanent national paranoia," which has made Croatia a center of conflict and division at home, and a source of violent agitation for nearly every European country that has imported Yugoslav workers...
...simmering political crisis. Croats are still paying heavily for an outburst of nationalist feeling that reached a climax last fall when 30,000 students went on strike in Zagreb. Seizing upon Tito's experimental program of decentralization, which offered a measure of political and fiscal autonomy to Yugoslavia's six republics, Croatian nationalists demanded their own army and airline, and separate membership in the United Nations. For a time, Tito, a Croat himself , tried to temporize with the nationalistic leaders of Croatia's Communist Party. But after the student strike, he cracked down hard...
...order to attract more capital, Yugoslavia now seems willing to open its economy wider to investment from other countries, including the U.S. Foreign investment in Yugoslavia has totaled only $62 million since 1967, mostly because the government has insisted that Yugoslav companies retain control of any joint project by owning at least 51 % of it. Two months ago, however, the government permitted the nation's largest copper and brass fabricator to form a fifty-fifty partnership with Bieler National Industries, a smallish U.S. marketing firm. Other equally owned ventures may be allowed in industries where Yugoslavia lacks...
...more radical way to raise capital would be to organize an internal money market-a sort of Communist Wall Street-yet Yugoslavia is moving in that direction also. Two firms, the Zastava auto concern and the Belgrade-Bar railroad, have been allowed to float issues of interest-bearing and resalable bonds. More such issues are likely to be permitted, and government leaders recognize that they eventually will have to set up a market in which the bonds can be regularly traded...
...Slovenia, has proposed that companies sell dividend-paying stocks too. "Instead of taking a vacation, someone could give his money to an enterprise, which in turn could give him interest and maybe even something else as well," Kavcic says. His proposal has horrified some Communist purists. Edvard Kardelj, Yugoslavia's chief ideologist and a close associate of Tito's, argues that stock ownership is anti-Marxist because it inevitably involves the "exploitation of other people's work." But the need for more capital may eventually overcome such inhibitions...