Necessitated the "Yugoslav Model" in International Relations. the Ending

necessitated the "Yugoslav model" in international relations. The ending of the Cold War brought the many external factors into disarray, and nullified Yugoslavia's raison d'etre as well. In the turmoil of the ensuing civil war, where irrational passions took over, the external players (that is, the United States and the European Union) aban- doned the "Yugoslav nation" and instead adopted the successive "nations" as legiti- mate political units. The politicians of both the successor states and the foreign powers believed that all the regional problems and grievances would disappear as soon as each ethnic group achieved its own nationhood. Yet, in the euphoria of having the last communist state in Eastern Europe disintegrate, virtually everyone was decrying the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Muslims, the Croats, the Serbs and others. No one, however, noticed or cared for the "genocide" and extinction of the Yugoslavs. The "Yugoslav nation" was silently cleansed, though the Yugoslavs were more numerous than Macedo- nians or Montenegrans. Hardly anyone noticed that the very idea of a Yugoslav nation - born in the nineteenth century - paralleled that of the European Union both on a ra- tional basis and practical necessity. That same idea, however, was violently laid to rest by the twentieth-century politicians (p. 239). There are several serious weaknesses in Isakovic's work. The first, and most ele- mentary, is the need for a thorough editing of the text. English readers will have a dif- ficult time understanding the content due to poor English and writing. The editors have done a great disservice to Isakovic's work. This reader, who speaks Serbo- Croatian fluently, often had to resort to literally translating the author's English back into Serbo-Croatian in order to understand the intended meaning of the text. Isakovic's second mistake is that he exclusively relied on the secondary sources. The numerous and long quotations and repetitious citing of encyclopedias is tiresome and, frankly, intellectually insulting to an academic audience. Also, frequent and abrupt shifts from one theme to another make for confusing and frustrating reading. John Jovan Markovic Andrews University Raoul Granqvist. Revolution's Urban Landscape: Bucharest's Culture and Postmod- ernist Change. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. 230 pp. $37.95 (paper). Making sense of the first few years after 1989 in Romania is a project fraught with the dangers of slipping into either the myopia of the "transition" or the obfuscation of post-modernity. While many studies of Romanian culture have taken advantage of the freedoms and openness of the post-1989 period, most have remained bound to themes that hearken back to Cold War era questions. It is to Raoul Granqvist's credit, then, that he has labored to avoid these pitfalls while addressing the changing face of Bu- charest, 1989 to 1995. Rather than relying heavily on imported theoretical models - the market, capitalism, democratization, and so on - he strives to carve oft concep- - tual approach to "Bucharest culture" that will spring almost organically from the cityscape. He describes this by saying that his "writing of Bucharest is positioned in the interlude of the modernist and the various 'post' (-communist, -modern, -colonial) discourses - not 'in-between,' but 'of-each'" (p. 109). This is .an ambitious project that succeeds (surprisingly) and fails (predictably) in many ways. Revolution's Urban Landscape is divided into several general themes. The first two chapters give an overview - in language both traditionally historical and punctu- ated with the rhetoric of cultural studies - of some of the high points of Bucharest's communist legacy and the stormy events of 1989-91: the bloody°overthrow of the Ceau�escus, the tense days of Student "hooligan" protest against Iliescu and other "neocommunists," and the coming of the Jiu Valley coal miners (in 1990 and 1991). The third and fourth chapters consider the narratives that have emerged in texts about Bucharest in the years since 1989. The voices of Western observers, Romanian elites, and Romanian ex-patriots mingle in making sense of the "return" to Bucharest after the fall of its communist "authors." These texts are seen to function as the .discourses that frame, ca,pture, and re-write the meaning of post-communist changes. The fifth and sixth chapters seem oddly out of place but are probably the most satisfying in the book. Here Granqvist considers the nature of post-1989 publishing in Bucharest. I will save my comments on these chapters for the end of this review. Granqvist succeeds in capturing the struggle over meaning in post-1989 Bucharest. He avoids predictable explanations - the "legacy" of communism versus the "transition" - and rather moves tenuously over the broken terrain of post-communist Bucha- rest's cityscape: beginning with a history of the upheaval that gripped the city from 1989-91 and reading the public culture markers that made Bucharest pregnant with meaning - the graffiti, the specter of the razed old city center, the semiotic playground of the "Civic Centre" project, and the curious struggle over that monstrous symbol of Ceausescu's megalomania, "Casa Poporului". And it is here where Granqvist is at bis best: in describing the moments of distance and "otherness" that swept through the observers of shattered norms and hopes, both dreamed and betrayed. He discusses the Orientalizing narratives that run through the disparate discourses of foreign observers as well as those of the Romanian expatriates and the more "organic" intellectuals such as the poet Mircea Dinescu (whose role in the events of 1989 takes on a new valence in Granqvist's work). Here one sees the blurring of expected boundaries - East and West, Outsider and Insider, Heroism and Complicity, Authenticity and Duplicity - in the life of the streets of Bucharest, in the interviewees with whom Granqvist spoke, among politicians and writers and publishers and architects and people on the street (though there seems to be a paucity of "regular" Romanians' voices throughout the book). n The contradictory and emergent nature of Bucharest in Granqvist's account comes out as clearly as can be expected. Unfortunately, he works to weave the richness of these observations together with a singular concept - Revolution - that is poorly ar- ticulated, loosely defined, and inconsistently called upon to do theoretical work that remains as spectral as any other attempt to unify the observations that Granqvist makes of Bucharest culture. Revolution is meant to stand-in for other explanations - history, memory, and so on - that might give what the author sees as an. artificial unity to an understanding of the "carnivalesque" nature of the post-communist city. Like ' most attempts to stress both discontinuity/disruption/multiplicity and a unifying theo- ° retical model, Granqvist's leaves one dissatisfied with the conceptual sleight of hand .

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