Interesting borders in Yugoslavia, though I notice you've basically sliced up Bosnia already-the "Bosnian" (I assume Bosniak) part doesn't look enormasly larger than what the Bosniaks controlled at the end of the OTL war (though I notice they still have some of the east).
Well I based the autonomous provinces in Bosnia on the entities created during the war but before each of them went on an expansion craze. So I used all the Serbian autonomous oblasts as a basis for 2 Serbian autonomous provinces and used the Croat based "Herceg-Bosna" entity for 2 Croatian autonomous provinces (1 in the north and 1 in the south). As with Vojvodina, the provinces themselves don't necessarily have to be majority-inhabited by minorities of the republic in question but just have to have enough minorities that it could conceivably be like Vojvodina.
What sort of powers do you envision the "autonomous provinces" having in this scenario? Something like OTL Vojvodina and Kosovo-which were, de facto, Yugoslavia's seventh and eighth republics-or something less than that?
Something less but still with substantial autonomy. I'm not completely aware of the full details but I gather that Vojvodina and Kosovo could veto Serbian legislation. Others may disagree with me, but that makes no sense constitutionally. Autonomous regions of a unit that can veto unit legislation in effect makes the unit subject to the autonomous regions which is a recipe for ensuring that the residents of the unit outside of the autonomous regions come to resent the autonomous region.
Doing a bit more reading (
here,
here and
here) it would seem that the best way to avoid a breakup of Yugoslavia would be to not have the 1974 constitution adopted at all, but I don't see how a 1969 assassination of Brezhnev would bring that about unless we have Kosygin, Podgorny and Kulakov being adventurous and assassinating Tito. So failing that it seems the next best time for something to happen would be in the early 1980s (say 1982-1984). If the "Serbian Package" of reforms proposed in 1984 (only a few years after Tito's death) at the League of Communists meeting was met with less hostility and the other republics bargained with Serbia over it, then combined with University of Zagreb Professor Jovan Mirić's articles on the 1974 constitution being the source of all of Yugoslavia's problems there could have been the scope for a deal. I would imagine that there might have been less hostility (though certainly not an open embrace) of the "Serbian Package" in a better economic environment where Slovenia and Croatia did not generally feel resentment (or as much resentment) towards the other, poorer units. At that point in 1984 we have:
- Tito already dead (thus opening an opportunity for reforming the 1974 constitution)
- The 1981-82 riots in Kosovo are over and some amount of calm there after late 1982 along with the purging of the communist party in Kosovo (presumably removing those who allowed or encouraged the situation to get out of control in the 1970s and up to 1982) and a lot of the Albanian professors at the University of Pristina removed (a lot of who were actually from Albania, specifically from the University of Tirana, and who apparently espoused an anti-Serb ideology and stoked up nationalism among the Albanian student body).
- Slobodan Milošević is still not yet leader of League of Serbian Communists but is only leader of the Belgrade communists.
- Ibrahim Rugova is about to or has just received his doctorate at the University of Pristina and will likely become a moderate, well respected leader of the Albanians of Kosovo in a few years (at this point I would expect that he would support through his writing any compromise deal on a new constitution which would not drastically reduce Kosovo's autonomy but which would still prevent Kosovo from having a veto over Serbian legislation which is meant to apply to Serbia generally except within the bounds of Kosovo only)
- Professor Jovan Mirić publishing his articles on the problems of the 1974 constitution
- Jovan Djordjević (one of the authors of the 1974 constitution) admitting that the current system (for 1984) was not the intention of the drafters of the constitution.
1984 into 1985 seemed liked the ripe time for reform and if Yugoslavia got some external support (less IMF pressure, maybe some more loans from the USSR and the West (with the West concerned about Andropov so that they don't stop trying to win Yugoslavia over with money until 1988)) then perhaps a compromise could be reached. I would imagine that as long as the other republics kept their cherished autonomy and new autonomous republics included not just Serb areas but Croat ones to form a balance of sorts (and at the time the thinking of some politicians might have been that Serbia could still be outvoted on the federal level on some issues with 5 non-Serb republics and 4 "non-Serb" autonomous provinces (well, not in the case of Vojvodina, but its leaders tended not to vote with Serbia at the federal level until Milosevic managed to install pliant leaders in Montenegro, Vojvodina and Kosovo) versus Serbia-proper and 4 Serb autonomous provinces.
I would imagine that a reformed, better performing USSR would support this type of move because in essence Yugoslavia would be copying the Soviet system more fully (with republics and lower level autonomous entities in many of these republics, etc). A promise to investigate the possibility of even lower level autonomous units (oblasts, etc) with a view towards giving Bosniaks/Muslims some amount of autonomy in Sandžak and giving Albanians autonomy in northwestern Macedonia could probably also be enough to lessen or restrain Bosniak and Albanian opposition to the compromise (Macedonia of course would be on board having had the autonomy of the republics increased and with there being no autonomous units in that republic yet and probably there wouldn't be any without the expressed agreement of the republic in question first).
If this is done by say late 1985 there would still be tensions (especially in Kosovo), but a lot of tension (and the potential for tension) would have been removed. If future disputes are mainly confined to Kosovo and the Albanians and Serbs then Rugova's entry into politics in the late 1980s in the framework of a theoretical 1985 constitution and with the West still giving aid/not working against Yugoslavia up to 1988 might be enough to keep the problems manageable within the framework of a federal Yugoslavia (especially if Milosevic gets voted out early (perhaps being replaced by Dragoslav Marković) and other nationalists like Tudjman don't come to power). Eventually a 1985 constitution which restored the internal market for Yugoslavia and democratic reforms into the 1990s might ensure tensions are reduced to such a level that Yugoslavia becomes more like Spain or Canada in terms of the threat of it breaking up (so there would be separatists, there would be terrorists (like ETA), but separatism isn't necessarily mainstream nor is it necessarily supported by overwhelming majorities or even by majorities in the units). Throw in the collapse of Albania's economy in the 1990s after democracy is introduced (which I think would still happen as Albania had sufficiently isolated itself that I can't see how Brezhnev being assassinated in 1969, Andropov getting a kidney transplant in 1983, Gorbachev coming to power in 1988 and a delay in the end of communism in Europe by a few years would substantially change the trajectory of Albania's economic and political development except that Hoxha's successor Ramiz Alia would have been in a power for a few more years) and at least some Kosovo Albanians might look less favourably on uniting with Albania (at least during the late 1990s/early 2000s).