One way of looking at Yugoslavia's development of its separate road to socialism is through its efforts to develop an export economy. This has not been the methodology most commonly employed by Balkan and Cold War historians up to this point, and that is putting things mildly. Building a history of socialist Yugoslavia on the conceptual lens or jumping-off point of export economics would seem to be a tall order, recasting or overturning decades of historiography centered on political stimuli, the interaction of strong personalities, and ideological innovations in favor of analysis building on recognition of the fundamental economic ties to the west rather than the east of Yugoslavia under Josip Broz Tito. But this is the challenge that Vladimir Unkovski-Korica sets for himself in this substantial new volume. In the key chapter of the work, “Unravelling Self-management,” he writes that “the Yugoslav Communist hope to open up to and integrate more fully in the world market in the 1960s led to major domestic problems” (217). For this proposition to make sense, and for this assertion to be demonstrated, the author must consider the interplay of economic and political forces in Yugoslavia twenty years earlier, in the mid-1940s, even before the break with Stalin. At the level of policy-making, by using archival accounts of meetings and speeches and reports, the author achieves this goal. He also takes the time to track, wisely and lucidly, the role of individual movers and shakers on economic issues in the League of Communists, from Boris Kidrič and Svetozar Vukmanović-Tempo to Edvard Kardelj and Mijalko Todorović and, of course, Tito. What we have is a finely-grained policy analysis of the ever-evolving Yugoslav economy, and we come away with a thorough sense of the official debates and decisions behind programs, reactions, initiatives, and priorities.

Specialists in recent Yugoslav history, in particular, will likely appreciate a number of the finer points of Unkovski-Korica's work. First, and most fundamentally, its starting point is that politics alone were not determinant in the evolution of Yugoslav policies, both domestic and foreign. If this book did nothing else, its insistence on the importance of economic factors from before the early 1950s onward would be refreshing. It thereby opens a world of possibilities. Linked to this is another virtue: the intense interaction of the author with the arguments of Susan Woodward, in her ground-breaking study on unemployment in Yugoslavia from 1995. Unkovski-Korica is clearly intrigued by Woodward's approach, but takes the domestic logic of Yugoslavia in a new direction. A third instructive element of the book is its depiction of Tito as sometimes patently wrong and sometimes outmaneuvered behind the scenes of political life.

In fact, Tito's role in the government is a good place to start unpacking Unkovski-Korica's overarching argument. The Marshal, and later President-for-Life, was not just the “decider” at key junctures, he was also a compound of competing push-and-pull tendencies himself. Viscerally for markets and historically for federalism on national grounds, he nevertheless sometimes felt the tug of the need for greater centralization of political life. As the author takes us ably through the arguments and events in the executive committee and Central Committee of the SKJ, party congresses, the Federal Price Commission, labor unions, Federal Assembly, Socialist Alliance, and meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement, we see security concerns, regional developmental interests, and ideological tussles over state capitalism and collectivization of agriculture start to obstruct clear economic progress. The key seems to be “domestic contradictions and unevenness” (163), when political and economic goals collide. The author pays careful attention to postwar recovery aid from abroad, the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the dynamic of labor struggles of the 1950s in limiting the options for Yugoslavia's economic stability. Ultimately, what the author wants to demonstrate is that dependence upon exports and loans greatly weakened federal institutions and national unity and also undercut the party's relationship with the country's workers because of compromises on wages, standard of living, regional industrialization, socio-economic rights, and enterprise autonomy.

Unkovski-Korica's tone is in some places almost quixotically polemical, but the things he is presenting, the big picture and the supporting data and details, are clear and important. Nevertheless, the book deserves a better title, a pithier one that gives readers a more accurate understanding of its contents. In addition, the period after 1970 receives little coverage, but the main thing readers might miss is a more detailed exposition of what the author terms the “clash between international capital and the Yugoslav shop-floor” (230). Put simply, references to media reports, autobiographies, and studies of consumer behavior would breathe life into policy contours; our appreciation of the “shop-floor” would be fleshed out by knowing more, at least in digest form, about the specific domestic problems in play here, and also about the specific goods and processes involved in the export economy. These remarks are meant simply as constructive criticism of an illuminating and valuable study of the interplay between the economic and the political in the former Yugoslavia.