Parker 01 intro
1/29/04
12:32 PM
Page 17
YUGOSLAVIA – TO SLOVENIA
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management’ was predicated on the denationalisation of economic enterprises.16 That is, the use of the signifier ‘socialism’ rested on practices that required the absence of anything actually approaching socialism. The signifier was thus evacuated of the content that Western leftists usually summon up when they appeal to socialism. Self-management, as we shall see, was to have some fairly disastrous effects, with incitement to competition between enterprises accelerating into a wider centrifugal force that central state repression was eventually unable to contain. The break from Moscow did give the Tito regime some measure of free play in its handling of internal dissent, and this included a little less pressure from the West over the policing of political opposition in return for a little more obedience to the West over its own policing of spheres of influence in other parts of the world. Yugoslavia was admitted to the UN Security Council, and in 1950 backed imperialist intervention in Korea. What we should notice here is that Yugoslavia’s status as a ‘non-aligned’ country meant that it could play itself against the Soviet Union and the West, with the proviso that it kept its own populations in check so as not to disturb that delicate balancing act. The sixth party congress in 1952 changed the name of the Communist Party to the ‘League of Communists of Yugoslavia’, and there was some open discussion at the seventh congress in 1958 as to whether it would be possible to introduce a multi-party system in the federation. The answer was no, multi-party democracy would not be appropriate, and it was this congress that opted formally for ‘selfmanagement’ as an economic-political system. Yugoslavia operating in this buffer zone between the USSR and the West perfectly displays the characteristics of ‘civilisation’ described by Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents. Civilisation is able to manage an individual’s desire for aggression by ‘weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city’.17 One of the problems is that outsiders need to be constantly reassured that diplomatic relations with them will be maintained, and so any internal dissent, perceived as aggression, must be strictly contained. And this kind of state apparatus, which monitors its own population for fear that hostile messages and impulses might be sent into the outside world, requires a strict separation between the observing apparatus and its inhabitants. At the very least, it means that any ‘selfmanagement’ can only operate as a form of self-discipline, where the agency of the super-ego (which is what Freud is talking about here) is relayed into the interior of each particular subject so that they will each take responsibility for managing themselves. This then is exactly the setting for the management of disciplined, selfregulating individuals described by Michel Foucault.18 Perhaps it is not