1. Ustavnost i sakonitost; see chapter 7 of the 1963 Yugoslav federal constitution.

2. “Movement” is common in both official and scholarly Yugoslav usage and is probably the best term available, but it may suggest more strength and inevitability in the development than Westerners would be willing to recognize.

3. Thus, though there has been some good journalism, there are few articles in the scholarly journals touching the matter in any depth. Representative of recent books is Skilling, H. Gordon's valuable The Governments of Communist East Europe (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, which gives the movement little treatment. George W. Hoffman and Neal, Fred Warner, Yugoslavia and the New Communism (New York, 1962)Google Scholar, though still basic, was published before the 1963 constitutions and numerous other important events affecting the movement. Mention must also be made of Phyllis Auty's admirable Yugoslavia (New York, 196S), but it is addressed to broader issues. Two recent books are Vucinich, Wayne S., ed, Contemporary Yugoslavia (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969)Google Scholar, and Zaninovich, M. George, The Development of Socialist Yugoslavia (Baltimore, 1968)Google Scholar.

4. Djordjević, Jovan, “Political Power in Yugoslavia,” Government and Opposition, 2, no. 2 (February 1967) : 207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. “Constitutionalism” is a slippery term, but it can be useful. See the clarifying recent discussions by Sartori, Morris-Jones, , and Giovanni Sartori, Vile, “Constitutionalism : A Preliminary Discussion,” American Political Science Review, 56 (1962) : 853–64Google Scholar; Morris-Jones, W. H., Communications, American Political Science Revieiv, 59 (1965) : 439–40Google Scholar; Vile, M. J. C., Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers (Oxford, 1967)Google Scholar.

6. Ionescu, Ghiţa, The Politics of the European Communist States (London and New York, 1967), p. 271.Google Scholar

7. Their most common explanations of their influence are (1) that they are respected because they were the first anti-Stalinists and the first to experiment with devices (e.g., the market) that everyone now agrees are promising and (2) that all the East European countries have some conditions and some problems in common.

8. The movement is of course affected by the whole of Yugoslavia's historical experience and present circumstances—e.g., the nationalities problem, the historical fact of self-liberation, the personalities of Tito and his associates, the country's status as a nonsatellite, and so forth. The three phenomena seem of most immediate causative political relevance, but certainly long and complex chains of causation lie behind them as well.

9. Bernard, Crick, In Defence of Politics, rev. ed. (Baltimore, 1964), p. 21.Google Scholar

10. Reservations must be made for basic and long-range policy, for certain policy areas (e.g., foreign relations), and for some emergency situations (e.g., the Rankovid affair), none of which are directly relevant here.

11. Several detailed legislative histories were done in the course of the present study.

12. See, for example, the symposium, “The Dead End of the Monolithic Parties, “ Government and Opposition, 2, no. 2 (February 1967).

13. See, for example, Riker, William H., Federalism : Origin, Operation, Significance (Boston, 1964).Google Scholar

14. One major intention, and probable consequence, of the December 1968 amendments to the federal constitution was to make the republics more independent by strengthening their position in the federal legislature.

15. The communes have been much examined by Yugoslav social scientists, but there is little on them in English. One study by an American scholar is Fisher, Jack C.'s Yugoslavia : A Multi-National State (San Francisco, 1968)Google Scholar.

16. Thus, under the federal constitution of 1963, the regime's central political as well as legal declaration, the commune is “the basic sociopolitical community” (article 96), “autonomously” passes regulations and determines its own revenues (article 99), and is the repository of all governmental powers not assigned by the constitution to the republics or the federation.

17. This is strengthened by the communes’ very considerable constitutional jurisdiction in the administration of federal and republic laws. See, for example, articles 96 and 101. The republics may be strengthened somewhat by the December 1968 amendments to the federal constitution.

18. See, however, section 2 of amendment 16 of the December 1968 amendments.

19. This Marxist humanism is usually associated with the advanced and supposedly rather heretical Praxis group, but it is actually more widespread than that and is to be found in virtually all circles of Yugoslav thought except the most conservative, which are becoming more and more isolated.

20. This is true despite the still somewhat ambiguous position of the enterprise director, who is in some measure a representative of the governmental units or agencies that founded or regulate the enterprise.

21. Major studies have been carried out by the Institute of Social Sciences of Belgrade and by several of the government institutes for public administration.

22. This has been fostered by the catastrophic failure of the political factories (uneconomic factories established by political influence and for political reasons) and by quiet foreign pressures in connection with international loans and grants.

23. Some proposals are a little bizarre, yet are seriously intended and may well be tried. One, for example, is that sections of highway, when built, would be handed over to nongovernmental enterprises to operate and maintain, with revenues coming from tolls.

24. The principle appears throughout the 1963 constitutions; see, for example, articles 163 and 225 of the federal constitution.

25. The trend was recently reconfirmed by the public debates on the December 1968 amendments to the federal constitution and at the ninth congress of the party in March

26. One must not be too sanguine; the assembly has a long way to go before it achieves the assured power and expert skill of a Commons or a Senate, and it may fall prey to Western legislative ills (e.g., obstructive committee empires, democratic face versus oligarchic core, and the rest). And of course it always will be profoundly different from them—built on and serving profoundly different social and political orders. But it is developing, and in interesting ways. For example, if and when some form of effective opposition develops in Yugoslavia (and there are a few small signs, emerging out of the constitutionalism movement), its center may well be in the legislature and its shape and functions influenced by that setting.

27. Sartori, “Constitutionalism,” pp. 853-64.

28. See Winston M. Fisk and Alvin Z. Rubinstein, “Yugoslavia's Constitutional Court,” East Europe, July 1966, pp. 24-28, at p. 24.

29. This and much of what follows is largely based on interviews with court members and others beginning in 1965.

30. The Russian procuracy, for example, is an internal administrative control and a tool of the state, not a system of judicial control of administrative action as the Yugoslav judicature is. See Morgan, Glenn G., Soviet Administrative Legality (Stanford, 1962).Google Scholar

31. It is significant that one is often told in Yugoslavia that many of the present leading administrative law scholars and judges got their training in the interwar Council of State.

32. This asserts that the 1963 constitutions are important and are, so to speak, genuine—not mere propaganda or misleading façades. However, these documents need to be read with some care. They are political and social pronouncements. As the Yugoslavs say, they are constitutions of a society as well as of a legal order. As such pronouncements, they appear to the casual observer to be suspiciously full of windy political rhetoric. But they are intended to be legal instruments as well, and when they are read in this light the political rhetoric falls into its proper place and one sees the sharply reasoned and precisely drafted legal framework. To this framework the Yugoslav regime has committed itself, beyond possibility of withdrawal except at a heavy price.

33. Deutsch, Karl W., The Nerves of Government (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

34. We will be more sure of this if the 1968 amendments to the penal code, giving Yugoslavia one of the most enlightened systems of criminal procedure in Europe, are fully applied in political cases.

35. See, for example, the convenient summaries of their basic work in Berman, Harold J., Justice in the U.S.S.R., rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Hazard, John N., Shapiro, Isaac, and Maggs, Peter B., The Soviet Legal System, 2nd ed. (Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., 1969)Google Scholar. See also Hazard, , Law and Social Change in the USSR (London, 1953)Google Scholar.

36. George L., Yaney, “Law, Society and the Domestic Regime in Russia, in Historical Perspective,” American Political Science Review, 59 (1965) : 380 and 383Google Scholar, emphasis added.

37. Some sense of this can be obtained even from the dryly precise bibliographical entries in Gjupanovich, Fran and Adamovitch, Alexander, Legal Sources and Bibliography of Yugoslavia (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, and the latest of these entries are for 1961, when the current renaissance in the creation, and study, of Yugoslav law was just beginning.