ABSTRACT
Party and state - a perverse pluralism? 'Democracy can be loosely defined as the right at least to ask - why are we living so badly?' (,Usko grlo', 1987) Thus an EkonomskLl PolitikLl leader on the eve of the March 1987 Plenum of the Central Committee of the League of Communists. The economic crisis has, indeed, generated a whole series of challenges to the Yugoslav political establishment. At the most fundamental level, it has called into question the very basis of Marxist-Leninist ideology - the notion that under post-revolutionary conditions a ruling Communist Party would play the role of midwife to a law-given process of continuous expansion of productive forces, continuous betterment of the material conditions of life. By the same token it has called into question the legitimacy of one-party role, of the political monopoly of a party which has never won an open election in Yugoslavia. At a more mundane level, it has raised the most serious doubts about the fitness of the leading cadres of the League of Communists to hold high office, about the wisdom of entrusting the economic destiny of the country to men and women who have made so many mistakes. Lastly, it has generated pressure for more open government. The scandal of the international debt is not just that it was contracted, but that information about it was systematically withheld from the public. Thus it was revealed in 1988 that while the Federal Skupstina was adopting a plan in 1976 which envisaged no increase in indebtedness over the period 1976-80, a secret document from the same year talked of an ominous rise in the level of external indebtedness ('Javni i ... ' 1988). Whichever dimension we look at, then, the 1980s have witnessed the opening-up of a huge credibility gap between rulers and ruled in Yugoslavia.
