The ‘June Events’: The 1968 Student Protests in Yugoslavia

Abstract

Though part of the broader wave of student protests that took place in Western, Central and Eastern Europe throughout the early summer of 1968, those in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were driven more by internal than external factors. As Morrison shows in this chapter, the grievances and demands of the students were framed in the context of Yugoslav social, economic and political developments of the 1960s. There was no real threat to the Yugoslav political system or its underlying values. The protestors were not seeking to overthrow the regime, but to provide a critique of their own material conditions. They also challenged what they deemed the flaws within Yugoslav socialist bureaucracy and what they regarded as a betrayal of the revolutionary ideas that underpinned it.