TEXT D
An extreme example of a federal system is the one adopted in the 1970s in Yugoslavia, known as workers’ self-management. Primary power was given to individual factories and other places of work, each managed by a board of directors that would establish policy for investments, prices, profits, wages, and so on. Each board of directors, elected by the workers, would answer to a workers’ council, consisting of all workers in the company.
Representatives selected from the community’s different workers’ councils would meet together in a local assembly. In this way, the fundamental decisions concerning the community would be made by local workers. The system also included a second branch of the local assembly comprising officials elected by all of the people. The local units of government, known as communes, were grouped into six republics.
An important purpose of this federal system was to. protect the rights of its different nationalities. There is a saying in Yugoslavia that roughly translates as follows; Yugoslavia has seven neighbors, six republics, five nationalities, four languages, three religions, two alphabets, and one dinar.
Yugoslavia’s political fragmentation has long been a source of problems. Nationalities other than the five officially recognized claim they are victims of discrimination. For example, 90 percent of the residents of the southern region of Kosovo are Albanians, but Yugoslavia does not recognize Albanian as a distinct nationality. Kosovo’s official status is an autonomous region administered by Serbia, but in recent years Serbia has taken over direct rule of the region, under the pretext that the Albanians were threatening to detach Kosovo from Yugoslavia and unite it with the neighboring state Of Albania. A similar situation has existed in Vojvodian, another autonomous region administered by Serbia, where ethnic Hungarians lack official recognition as one of Yugoslavia’ s nationalities.
Another problem for Yugoslavia has been competition among republics for resources, rather than cooperation to develop the country’s economy as a whole. For example, from the viewpoint of international competitiveness, Yugoslavia should concentrate its resources to modernize and expand one large port, but each republic has wanted its own port. Instead of one large port, Yugoslavia has had several medium-sized ones that are less successful at attracting foreign trade.
Regional cooperation has also been hurt by economic differences among the republics. Slovenia, which borders Austria and Italy and contains only about 8 percent of Yugoslavia’s population, has generally produced about 18 percent of the gross national product and 25 percent of the exports. With average incomes twice the national level, Slovenes have estimated that one-fourth of their production goes to subsidizing the economies of the poorer republics in the south.
As can be gathered from the passage, Kosovo ______.
A．is one of the six republics
B．is part of Serbia
C．is autonomous
D．borders on Serbia
