The Croatian Spring (Croatian: Hrvatsko proljeće), or Maspok, was a political conflict that took place from 1967 to 1971 in the Socialist Republic of Croatia, at the time part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. As one of six republics comprising Yugoslavia at the time, Croatia was ruled by the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH), nominally independent from the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), led by President Josip Broz Tito. The 1960s in Yugoslavia were marked by a series of reforms aimed at improving the economic situation in the country and increasingly politicised efforts by the leadership of the republics to protect the economic interests of their respective republics. As part of this, political conflict occurred in Croatia when reformers within the SKH, generally aligned with the Croatian cultural society Matica hrvatska, came into conflict with conservatives.
In the late 1960s, a variety of grievances were aired through Matica hrvatska, which were adopted in the early 1970s by a reformist faction of the SKH led by Savka Dabčević-Kučar and Miko Tripalo. The complaints initially concerned economic nationalism. The reformists wished to reduce transfers of hard currency to the federal government by companies based in Croatia. They later included political demands for increased autonomy and opposition to real or perceived overrepresentation of the Serbs of Croatia in the security services, politics, and in other fields within Croatia. A particular point of contention was the question of whether the Croatian language was distinct from Serbo-Croatian.
The Croatian Spring increased the popularity of figures from Croatia's past, such as the 19th century Croat politician and senior Austrian military officer, Josip Jelačić, and the assassinated leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, Stjepan Radić, as well as an increase in patriotic songs, works of art, and other expressions of Croatian culture. Plans were made for increased representation of Croatia-related materials in the school curriculum, measures to address the overrepresentation of Serbs in key positions in Croatia and to amend the Constitution of Croatia to emphasise the nature of the republic as the national state of Croats. There were also demands for increased powers for the constituent republics at the expense of Yugoslavia's federal government. These issues increased tensions between Croats and the Serbs of Croatia, as well as between the reformist and conservative factions of the SKH.
While other republics, the SKJ, and Tito himself were not initially involved in the internal Croatian struggle, the increasing prominence of Croatian nationalism led Tito and the SKJ to intervene. Similar to reformers in other Yugoslav republics, the SKH leadership was compelled to resign. Nevertheless, their reforms were left intact and most demands of the ousted leadership were later adopted, ushering in a form of federalism that contributed to the subsequent breakup of Yugoslavia.
Background
Economic crisis
In the early 1960s, the Federal People's Republic of Yugoslavia was a federation according to its constitution (comprising the people's republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia), but de facto operated as a centralised state. The Yugoslav economy was in recession, prompting economic reforms, which were hastily implemented and proved ineffective. By 1962, the country's economic difficulties worsened, prompting debate on the foundations of the economic system. In March 1962, President Josip Broz Tito convened the extended central committee of the country's ruling party, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (SKJ), to discuss the role of the SKJ and the relationship between the central government and the constituent republics. The meeting exposed a clash between Serbs, openly supported by a Serb deputy prime minister Aleksandar Ranković, and Slovene members of the body, particularly Miha Marinko and Sergej Kraigher, cautiously supported by Slovene deputy prime minister Edvard Kardelj. The Slovene delegation advocated for devolving power and authority to the constituent republics. The Serb delegation sought to preserve the central government's monopoly on decision-making and the distribution of tax revenue to less-developed republics. As it was less developed than PR Slovenia and PR Croatia, PR Serbia would have benefited from such an arrangement. In 1963, a new constitution was adopted, granting additional powers to the republics, and the 8th Congress of the SKJ expanded the powers of the SKJ branches the following year.
Further economic reforms were adopted in 1964 and 1965, transferring considerable powers from the federation to the republics and individual companies. Some of the reform measures exacerbated conflict between the banks, insurers, and foreign trade organisations owned by the Yugoslav government versus those owned by the constituent republics, a conflict that became increasingly political and nationalist. Competing alliances were established. Ranković gained the support of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro, in addition to Serbia. Slovenia was supported by Croatia, based on the belief of Vladimir Bakarić—the Secretary of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Croatia (SKH)—that decentralisation would benefit others in Yugoslavia. Bakarić persuaded Krste Crvenkovski, the head of the League of Communists of Macedonia (SKM), to support the Slovene–Croatian reformist bloc, which managed to enact substantial legislation curbing federal powers in favour of the republics. The conflict was framed as a contest between Serbia's interests against those of Slovenia and Croatia.
In Croatia, positions adopted by Ranković's allies in the League of Communists of Serbia (SKS) and the League of Communists of Montenegro (SKCG) were interpreted as hegemonistic, which in turn increased the appeal of Croatian nationalism. By the mid-1960s, the United States consul in Zagreb, Helene Batjer, estimated that about half of SKH members and 80 percent of the population of Croatia held nationalist views.
By early 1966, it was clear that the reforms had not produced the desired results. The SKJ blamed the Serbian leadership for resistance to the reforms. In early 1966, Kardelj persuaded Tito to remove Ranković from the SKJ Central Committee and dismiss him as vice president of Yugoslavia. Ranković was accused of plotting to seize power, disregarding the decisions of the eighth congress of the SKJ (December 1964), abuse of the State Security Administration directly or through allies, and illegally wire-tapping the SKJ leadership, including Tito himself. Tito saw Ranković's removal as an opportunity to implement greater decentralisation. In devolving power to constituent units of the federation, Tito assumed the role of sole arbiter in inter-republican disputes.
In 1967 and 1968, the Yugoslav constitution was amended once again, further reducing federal authority in favour of the constituent republics. The peak of the reformist coalition occurred at the 9th congress of the SKJ in March 1969, during which decentralisation of all aspects of the country was proposed. A World Bank loan for the construction of motorways caused a major rift in the reformist coalition after the federal government decided to shelve plans to develop a highway section in Slovenia and build one highway section in Croatia and one in Macedonia instead. For the first time, a constituent republic (Slovenia) protested a decision of the federal government, but Slovene demands were rejected. The situation became heated, prompting the Slovene authorities to publicly state that they had no plan to secede. In the aftermath of the affair, the Slovenian authorities withdrew their support for the reformist coalition. Regardless, the SKH and the SKM pressured the SKJ to adopt the principle of unanimity in decision-making, obtaining veto power for the republican branches of the SKJ in April 1970.
Student demonstrations erupted in Belgrade in June 1968 against authoritarian aspects of the Yugoslav regime, market reforms, and their impact on Yugoslav society. The students were inspired by the worldwide protests of 1968, and criticism of the reforms leveled by the Marxist humanist Praxis School. They opposed decentralisation and criticised nationalism in Yugoslavia through the Praxis journal. In November 1968, Petar Stambolić and other SKS leaders whose political views were a blend of communist dogmatism and Serbian nationalism, were removed on Tito's initiative. Tito specifically blamed Stambolić for not stopping the student demonstrations in a timely fashion. The replacements were Marko Nikezić, as the president, and Latinka Perović as the secretary of the SKS, respectively. Nikezić and Perović supported market-based reforms and a policy of non-interference in other republics' affairs except where officials from those republics denounced Serbian nationalism outside of Serbia.
National revival
Grievances
By the end of the 1960s, the economic reforms had not resulted in discernible improvement within Croatia. Belgrade-based federal banks still dominated the Yugoslav loan market and foreign trade. Croatia-based banks were pushed out from Dalmatia, a popular tourist region, and hotels there were gradually taken over by large companies based in Belgrade. Croatian media reported that favourable purchase agreements for Serbian companies were the result of political pressure and bribery, and the situation was framed as an ethnic rather than economic conflict.
Furthermore, the situation was worsened by a perception among Croatian nationalists of cultural and demographic threats to Croatia from the following policies: use of school textbooks to suppress Croatian national sentiment, a campaign to standardise the Serbo-Croatian language in a way favouring Serbian dialects, demographic displacement by Serbs, and encouragement of Dalmatian regionalism. Calls for the establishment of autonomous Serbian provinces in Dalmatia and elsewhere in Croatia, seen as a threat to Croatia's territorial integrity, added to these concerns. Many people in Croatia believed these to be substantive threats intended to weaken the republic, and rejected alternate explanations of them attributing the changes to economic phenomena or results of modernisation. Early in 1969, a number of grievances were listed in an article by the Croatian Writers' Association president, Petar Šegedin, in Kolo, a magazine published by Matica hrvatska. In the article, Šegedin accused the Yugoslav government of attempting cultural assimilation of Croatia.
Language question
In 1967, the first two volumes of the Dictionary of Serbo-Croatian Literary and Vernacular Language based on the 1954 Novi Sad Agreement were published, sparking controversy about whether Croatian was a separate language. Both volumes excluded common Croatian expressions or treated them as local dialect while Serbian variants were often presented as the standard. The unrelated 1966 Serbo-Croatian dictionary published by Miloš Moskovljević further inflamed the situation by omitting the term "Croat" from the vocabulary.
The Declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language was issued by 130 Croatian linguists, including 80 communists, on 17 March 1967. The declaration criticised the 1967 dictionary and called for official recognition of Croatian as a separate language and for a requirement for the government of Croatia to use the Croatian language in official business. This step would have disadvantaged the many Serb bureaucrats in Croatia. The declaration drew "A Proposal for Reflection" in response, drafted by 54 Serbian writers calling for TV Belgrade to use Cyrillic script and to provide education for the Serbs of Croatia in the Serbian language. There were also several denunciations of the declaration on the Name and Status of the Croatian Literary Language from the SKJ within days. The declaration was not universally supported in Croatia. The deputy speaker of the Sabor, Miloš Žanko, denounced Franjo Tuđman, the head of the Institute for the History of the Workers' Movement of Croatia, and Većeslav Holjevac, the head of the Croatian Heritage Foundation, for hiring known Croatian nationalists. The declaration marked the beginning of the four-year long period of increased Croatian nationalism commonly referred to as the Croatian Spring.
Matica hrvatska withdrew from the Novi Sad Agreement on 22 November 1970 because Matica srpska insisted that Croatian was only a dialect of Serbian. Matica hrvatska went on to publish a new Croatian dictionary and orthography manual by Stjepan Babić, Božidar Finka, and Milan Moguš, which was condemned by Serbia. The Croatian nationalists reacted by promoting linguistic purism and by revising school textbooks to increase coverage of Croatian history and culture. Matica hrvatska became the rallying point of the nationalist revival, and its economic secretary Šime Đodan was particularly popular. In 1970, Matica hrvatska's membership grew from about 2,000 to 40,000, increasing its political influence. It also enabled complaints to Yugoslav Railways, backed by the SKH, that Serbian Ekavian spelling ought to be supplemented with Croatian Ijekavian spelling in all official notices and schedules.
While multiple newspapers and magazines supported Matica hrvatska, the organisation also introduced its own organ, Hrvatski tjednik (Croatian Weekly), which enthusiastically promoted Croatian nationalism. Edited by Vlado Gotovac, it quickly surpassed the number of subscribers of all other newspapers including Vjesnik, the newspaper of record in Croatia.