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The Decrayal Consequences Of The Republics And Constitutional Reforms

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The institutions listed in the above section incentivized a multitude of behavioral consequences. The first is almost comprehensive gridlock. Under the 1974 constitution each of the republics, including the areas, namely Kosovo and Vojvodina, which were normally considered peripheral, were given veto power. Beyond causing an upset with Serbia, the veto power that each republic now had, made any substitutive state reform virtually impossible. This is because the republics had differing demographic and economic makeups, which influenced the individual republics to have vastly different idealized versions of what a Yugoslavian federation or confederation should look like. Over and over constitutional reforms were proposed only to run into …show more content…

V. P Gagnon Jr argues in a 2010 article that this circular nationalism was very purposeful on behalf of the conservative elites (25). Feeling like their positions were at risk, these elites pushed hard to stir up historical grievances and ethnic ultra-nationalism to demobilize Yugoslav wide democratic reformist movements. Even if the elites were not calculating their strategy so explicitly, the insecurity created by the dual factors of elites feeling that the system was heavily in flux and the presence of violent nationalist rhetoric, pushed republics to strongly advocate for new state configurations that they considered to be most beneficial for their position in the balance of power (Antonic, 470). The presence of institutional gridlock however, created a situation where republics were incentivized to participate in extra institutional reform, changing their own republican constitution to reflect their own republic based wants and needs, regardless of the republic’s constitutions compliance or contradictions of the federal constitution. This is what happened in the Slovenian constitution that was published in the late 80s, in which Slovenia distanced themselves farther and farther from federal Yugoslavia until in 1990 Slovenia clearly asserted the supremacy of Slovenian republic law over federal authority (Fink-Hafner 2010, 238). Besides

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