Abstract

With the death of its president and founding father, Josip Broz Tito, this May, Yugoslavia faces a time of reckoning. But the perception of this period differs among Yugoslavs and among foreigners. Outside the country, anxiety focuses on a “succession crisis,” that is, the question of who will fill command power in Yugoslavia in the immediate future. This anxiety barely mutes an underlying hostility. East and West still view Yugoslavia in terms of an archetypal dual image — as both “good” communists and “bad" communists — and, understandably, neither East Europeans nor Americans and West Europeans find it easy to come to terms with the reflection of their own societies in this duality.