Overview
Jugoslavija kao nedovršena država (Yugoslavia as an Unfinished State) is Zoran Đinđić’s book-length study, written from the standpoint of political and legal philosophy, of the Yugoslav state and its constitutional order. Its organising idea is stated in the title: Yugoslavia is treated not as a state that had resolved its constitutional and national questions, but as an unfinished state — a political community whose constitutional form remained, in the book’s phrase, an “open option” with an uncertain outcome, and which therefore never became a completed constitutional state in the full sense.
The central object of the book’s criticism is the constitutional settlement of 1974. Đinđić reads that constitution not as a technical arrangement but as a normative conception of the state, and he argues that it rested on a contradiction. It proclaimed the “working people” — and behind them the working class — as the bearer of sovereignty. In Đinđić’s analysis this was at once a political fallacy and a mythological construction: the working class had no autonomous role in decision-making, and the party exercised authority in its name. The consequence, as the book presents it, was that sovereignty was emptied of its modern content. The modern state, Đinđić argues, rests on the sovereignty of the people, on subjective rights, and on parliamentary control of power; the Yugoslav constitution, by locating sovereignty in an abstract class mediated by the party, dissolved that conception while retaining the vocabulary of self-management.
From this follows the book’s second major theme, federalism. Đinđić criticises the federal organisation of Yugoslavia as a structure that dispersed sovereignty without creating a coherent centre. The strengthening of the republics, and within them of the separate republican party organisations, produced a situation in which the federation possessed the formal attributes of a state while the real levers of power lay elsewhere. This is the “unfinished” character of the state: it was neither a genuine federation nor a confederation, but a hybrid whose constitutional identity remained unresolved — a facade creation, in the book’s terms, without a constitutional state behind it. Đinđić ties this directly to the national question. The republicanisation of party and state encouraged the growth of nationalism, and the book treats nationalism as a symptom of the unresolved relationship between nation and state rather than as an external or merely ideological threat. The crisis of sovereignty is thus also a crisis of identity.
The book is not a narrative history. It proceeds as an analytical and normative argument, drawing on the tradition of modern political and legal thought — the theory of sovereignty, the social-contract tradition, the idea of the rule of law — in order to measure the Yugoslav case against the standards of the constitutional state. Đinđić contrasts a politics grounded in legality and legitimacy with a politics grounded in ideology and what he calls political metaphysics, and he argues that Yugoslavia’s constitutional order belonged to the latter. His concern is with the conceptual foundations of the state: what it means for a state to be constituted, where sovereignty legitimately resides, and what institutional conditions make power accountable.
Running through the book is the normative claim that a state is “completed” only when it constitutes itself as a legal state — when the constitution limits power, guarantees subjective rights, and makes government answerable to citizens through representative institutions. Yugoslavia, in Đinđić’s account, never reached that point. Its constitution supplied the forms of sovereignty without the substance, left the citizen only nominally sovereign, and deferred the fundamental questions of the state’s identity and organisation. The unfinished state is therefore not simply an incomplete project but a structurally precarious one, whose unresolved contradictions — the party monopoly, the national question, the absence of a genuine constitutional centre — exposed it to crisis.
The work is abstract and theoretical in register, addressed to questions of constitutional and political philosophy rather than to day-to-day politics. Its lasting argument is that the legitimacy of a state depends on its constitution being real: on law binding power rather than power using law, and on citizens being genuine bearers of sovereignty rather than the objects of a sovereignty exercised in their name.
A further analytical strand is the book’s treatment of self-management and social ownership as constitutional categories. Đinđić does not read them simply as institutional experiments; he treats them as ideological substitutes for clear constitutional concepts. In his account, the language of self-management and social ownership obscures the question of where power actually resides and by what right it is exercised. The result is a constitutional order that speaks in the name of the working people while leaving the real machinery of power diffuse, unlocatable, and therefore difficult to limit or hold accountable. The critique is not that self-management was insufficiently socialist, but that it functioned as a vocabulary that displaced constitutional reasoning.
Closely related is the book’s insistence on the difference between a constitution as a symbolic proclamation and a constitution as a binding norm. Đinđić reads the Yugoslav constitutional order as one that promised sovereignty to citizens and working people but arranged institutions so that no body could be held responsible for the whole. This gives the argument a sharper edge than a simple complaint about over-centralisation or over-decentralisation: the problem is the absence of a principle of constitutional responsibility. Power was exercised, but it was not clearly authorised, limited, or answerable. The “unfinished” state is therefore also an unaccountable state, because its constitutional forms did not connect sovereignty to responsibility.
The book’s significance lies partly in this reversal of priority between ideology and law. Rather than deriving legal order from socialist ideology, Đinđić measures the socialist state against the standards of constitutionalism and the rule of law. He treats legality not as a bourgeois formality external to the project of emancipation, but as a condition of any legitimate state whatsoever. This makes the book an internal critique of Yugoslav constitutional theory: it takes the official promises of sovereignty, self-management, and federal equality seriously and shows that the institutional order could not redeem them.
Another distinctive feature is the book’s refusal to treat nationalism as the primary cause of the crisis. Nationalism appears instead as an effect of the state’s unresolved constitution. Where the state is not constituted as a legal order, nationality becomes a substitute for citizenship, and the republics come to function as containers of national sovereignty rather than as units of a constitutional federation. The national question is thus folded back into the question of legality: the failure to constitute a coherent sovereign authority leaves nationality as the most available language of political identity.
The book’s normative conclusion is accordingly procedural rather than substantive. It does not offer a detailed institutional blueprint for a particular territorial arrangement; its contribution is to specify the conditions any legitimate solution would have to satisfy. A state can be “completed” only through a genuinely constituent act that limits power, guarantees rights, and makes government answerable to citizens. Administrative adjustments, ideological declarations, or rhetorical appeals to unity cannot substitute for constitution-making. The lasting significance of the book is that it treats the Yugoslav crisis as a crisis of constitutionalism — a failure to constitute a state in which law binds power and citizens are genuine bearers of sovereignty — and it insists that this failure cannot be resolved without confronting the conceptual foundations of the state itself.
