AVNOJ IN THE REVOLUTION: ESTABLISHING THE FEDERATIVE YUGOSLAVIA DURING WORLD WAR II 1941-1945.

Abstract

The paper starts from the centralist position of monarchist Yugoslavia and its destruction as the zero point in the construction of the newly established federalist paradigm. The central part of the work refers to the construction of new foundations of the federal system during the anti-fascist struggle and the socialist revolution led by the partisan movement with the dominant role of the CPY, whose organizational structure previously determined the character of the state system. Starting from the first People's Liberation Committees and the process of constitution of wartime provinces, the centralist model was gradually dismantled from below and the federative principle was introduced in the liberated territories. The paper pays special attention to the state-founding meeting of AVNOJ in Jajce in 1943, at which the national-emancipatory concept of a state under construction was adopted - five, i.e. six nations and their six federal states as constituents of the new federal Yugoslavia. While Bosnia and Herzegovina was constituted on a historical and not a ethnic basis, Vojvodina, as a province constituted fully during the war, did not become a federal unit. After the constitutional Second Session of AVNOJ, the federal states, members of the new federation rapidly completed the processes of their own institutional construction in their highest representative bodies. The most complex process took place in Serbia, which had to incorporate Vojvodina as a fully established war province, Sanjak as the province that was not fully established during the war, as well as Kosovo with its complex ethnic structure. The process of building a federal Yugoslavia, started with the construction of the first NOOs (People’s Liberation Committees) and the formation of wartime provinces (1941), at the First (1942) and Second (1943) sessions of the AVNOJ, was completed at its Third Session in 1945.