Postface

The book was completed on 9 November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, commonly taken as the date of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, when its citizens at last conquered freedom, after 40 years behind the Iron Curtain and the dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Two years later the USSR disintegrated and began its own transition. For Serbia/Yugoslavia the fall of the Berlin Wall had a somewhat different meaning, although it did pave the way for the first multiparty elections that soon took place in all the Yugoslav republics. Before the fall, Serbia/Yugoslavia was not behind the Iron Curtain but right in front of it, somewhere in between the two parts of Europe. Until then, Yugoslavia was still a communist country, but it was not a member of the CMEA or of the Warsaw Pact, it was a non-aligned country with privileged relations with the West. Despite remaining communist, Yugoslavia departed from the traditional East European model in many ways: it had economic democracy due to the system of workers’ self-management, more political liberties, and more personal freedoms, as its citizens could freely travel abroad. It had experienced 40 years of economic reforms that had gradually introduced elements of the market economy to replace administrative allocation of resources, it had increasing trade with the European Community to replace trade with members of the CMEA, it had open instead of repressed inflation, and many of its workers could escape unemployment by emigrating abroad.