The Restoration of Capitalism in Slovenia and Croatia

This chapter is composed of three parts. The first outlines socio-historic processes of the “real existing socialism” in Yugoslavia and shows how the deadlocks of transition to socialism led to restoration of capitalism. The second and third parts analyze the restoration in Slovenia and Croatia respectively, and the first 30 years of capitalist development. The balance sheet of the analysis is two-fold. On the one hand, it shows that restoration could result in different varieties of capitalism both because of different starting points and of deliberation of social forces. On the other hand, it indicates that both societies converge in the direction of a markedly peripheral capitalism, which produces similar challenges for left-wing forces.