Introduction

Abstract

The dramatic end to communism in South-East Europe at the end of the 1980s led many to conclude that facilitating incremental systemic change was never a realistic proposition. After all, those countries attempting to introduce partial reforms or some notion of a “third way” between communism and capitalism — most consistently in the former Yugoslavia, with its pioneering system of self-management — ultimately failed to achieve either political or economic stability. Instead, it was thought that only a whole-scale conversion to a free market economy would ensure sustained economic progress and material gains. Moreover, the sooner the old inefficient system was dismantled, the sooner a free market economy system would be up and running, and making good on the many heady promises of its most ardent supporters. In reality, however, the collapse of communism throughout South-East Europe dashed most of these early hopes and aspirations. In fact, with the exception of Slovenia, it ushered in a period of drastic economic decline, political extremism, falling living standards, venal levels of inequality, and, largely as a result of this noxious combination (see for example, Woodward, 1995), a series of conflicts in the former Yugoslavia that were to become the worst seen in Europe since 1945.