Yugonostalgic against All Odds: Nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among Young Leftist Activists in Contemporary Serbia

Nadiya Chushak

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

August 2013

School of Social and Political Science

The University of Melbourne

Produced on archival quality paper

ii

Abstract

This thesis examines yugonostalgia – nostalgia for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) – in contemporary Serbia. Yugonostalgia often has a negative reputation – both in academia and in everyday life – as an ‘unhealthy’ or even debilitating fixation on the socialist past. However, this thesis argues that yugonostalgia tells us not only about nostalgic subjects’ attitude towards the past but also about their current concerns. Contemporary Serbia is permeated by discourses privileging nationalistic and neoliberal values. This thesis explores how young people can develop nostalgic attitudes towards the socialist past, even in such an unlikely context.

Yugonostalgia is an ambiguous phenomenon, and this ambiguity allows for positive dimensions and uses. To highlight the emancipatory potential of yugonostalgia, this thesis utilises ethnographic fieldwork among young leftist activists in Serbia’s capital, Belgrade. The focus on this milieu demonstrates how yugonostalgia is not simply reactionary but can overlap with and even energize a critical stance towards both nationalistic and neoliberal projects in contemporary Serbia. Additionally, this focus on young activists helps to counter popular negative stereotypes about Serbian youth as either passive victims of their situation or as a violent negative force. Finally, the thesis also adds to our understanding of how the meaning of the ‘left’ is negotiated in post-socialist conditions.

Drawing on concept of lieux de mémoire developed by the French historian Pierre Nora, I examine four broad clusters of recurring themes that appear in the yugonostalgic narratives of my Serbian informants. These four themes of national unity, international cooperation, economic prosperity and cultural achievements once constituted the ideological foundations of the Yugoslav state. Today, they take on new significance among young leftist activists. The state ideology of the brotherhood and unity of the Yugoslav nations and the anti-fascist struggle was relevant for my informants in the context of the rise of nationalism in contemporary Serbia. Yugoslav internationalism took on a new significance in the context of Serbia’s relative international isolation and the loss of mobility for its citizens. The ‘Yugoslav dream’, the socio-economic comfort that the citizens of SFRY enjoyed, was attractive in the context of the increased precariousness of life

iii in contemporary Serbia but for my leftist informants also provided a compelling example of a fairer and more prosperous economic model than what has resulted from current neoliberal reforms. Yugoslav culture was often portrayed as superior to the cultural life of contemporary Serbia, which has deteriorated under the influence of both nationalism and neoliberalism.

Yugonostalgia, then, represents not a retreat from the present, but a rich cultural repertoire for progressive re-engagement with current political questions. In the imagination of these Serbian activists, remembering Yugoslavia is a selective process that reconstructs alternatives to both parochial Serb nationalist identity- making and to the supposedly inevitable and universal logic of neoliberal economic restructuring.

iv

Declaration

This is to certify that:

 the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface,

 due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used,

 the thesis is fewer than 100 000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices OR the thesis is [number of words] as approved by the Research Higher Degrees Committee.

Signature:

Date:

v

Preface

In 2000 a Croatian director Vinko Brešan produced a comedy called Maršal (translated into English as ‘Marshal Tito’s Ghost’). Events in the film took place on one of the small Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea. During Socialist Yugoslav times, this island used to be a popular resort. At the time depicted in the film, though, the local economy is stagnating, as a result of dissolution of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), the war and the ensuing economic crisis. Maršal opens with a funeral scene of one of the locals – an elderly man and a member of the small but firm-in-its-beliefs branch of the Communist Party. The solemn performance of The International by his peers is interrupted by an uninvited guest – Josip Broz Tito, life-long President of SFRY, wearing one of his signature Marshal uniforms. Instead of rejoicing at the sight of their leader, elderly Communists stumble in fear (Fig. I) – and the reaction is quite predictable. After all, Josip Broz Tito passed away almost twenty years before.

Fig. I. Islander’s shocked reaction to the first apparition of spirit of Marshal Tito

(Maršal 2010). During the rest of the film the inhabitants of the island try to make sense of the sudden appearance of Tito’s ghost. Reactions vary. Elderly communist, after overcoming the initial shock and fear, regroup themselves and plan a revolution. Entrepreneurial mayor of the main town on the island jumps at the opportunity offered by the paranormal phenomenon and hopes to revitalise island’s economy,

vi attracting tourist from the outside. He enlists help from the locals – recruiting them to perform old partisan songs to the tourists and cater for their other needs. Eventually we realise that Tito’s ghost actually is just an escaped patient of the local mental asylum, who stole Marshal’s uniform from the local defunct Museum of the Revolution.

Brešan’s comedy offers us an interesting interpretation of the ways Yugoslav past can be present in the post-Yugoslav present, and how different contemporary agents react to, interact with and make use of it. Some are clearly invested in the interaction with this past. Some – the ones that could be ‘unproblematically’ called nostalgics, and in this movie they are mainly elderly people – truly see it as preferable to the present and are ready to do anything, including initiate an armed revolt, to make it happen again. Others, personified in the film by the mayor, are not personally ‘stranded’ in this Yugoslav communist past, but engage with it actively, adapting it to the capitalist present, trying to turn it into a sellable and profitable commodity. Meanwhile majority of the island’s inhabitants just go on with their usual everyday lives, where Tito’s ghost is just one of the factors that elicit people’s responses.

In other words, I take this film to depict what are considered to be the most typical responses to yugonostalgia, nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It is very symptomatic in its general treatment of the Yugoslav past as a spectre that haunts the present. For some people this ghost becomes a salient development, filling in their lives, occupying their concerns and plans for the future. For the others it is just a sporadic occurrence, sometimes delightful, sometimes annoying. And ultimately, the presence of the Yugoslav past is an effect of lunacy.

Was Brešan, through the usage of such metaphor, trying to dismiss the Yugoslav past and yugonostalgia in his film? Such explanation seems quite plausible. Disturbing past manifested as a ghost, which is also a product of the insanity, needs to be expelled and overcome, in order for the ‘normal’ life to continue. Ghosts, after all, are often seen as an unwelcome presence and therefore need to be exorcised. If they are not, they haunt the present, burdening the people who see them, stealing

vii their time, energy and resources. However, other interpretations are possible as well. Perhaps, the twist revealing that it is up to the patient of the psychiatric institution to stir the languished life on the island makes use of the traditional trope whereby people with ‘deviant’ rationality – children, lunatics, women – are the ones who can see, speak about and enact ‘truth’.

More than twenty years ago, on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall fell under the hands of the German citizens. This event led to the reunification of the Germany but also was treated as a sign of the wider transformations in so-called ‘Soviet Bloc’, culminating with the implosion of the Soviet Union and the bloody dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia. This historical momentum was interpreted as an undeniable proof of the flawed nature of the socialist experiment. The history, supposedly, has reached its logical ending: victory of the liberal ideology and capitalist system over their nemeses, socialism and planned economy (see Fukuyama 1992, for the best known, albeit too hasty, celebration of this victory).

But the stubborn spectre of communism, just like in Brešan’s film, refuses to disappear. Spectre of communism continues to haunt not only Croatia but also the main focus of this study, Serbia (see Fig. II), as well as other former Yugoslav countries, and broader post-socialist region. It is spray-painted on the walls and buildings. It lurks in the art galleries, pages of fictional and academic books, on theatre stages and tribunes of the public forums. It watches citizens watching it on the TV screens. It gathers under its flags protesters, some of them, seemingly paradoxically, wearing fashionable clothes by famous Western brands. It can be bought in a form of kitschy souvenirs from the museum shop or on the flea markets.

These diverse phenomena are often gathered under one umbrella term of yugonostalgia. So what is yugonostalgia? The simple answer is in the word itself: it is nostalgia for Yugoslavia. The correct answer is that it is almost impossible to explain yugonostalgia, at least not in few words. To begin with, what is nostalgia? Although in popular perception it is explained as a human proclivity for wistful or excessively sentimental yearning after the past (see, for instance, its definition in

viii

Merriam-Webster Dictionary), with initial scrutiny such simplistic explanation fails, leaving us to wonder what we talk about when we talk about nostalgia.

Fig. II. Portrait of Josip Broz Tito in a run-down picture framing shop in Belgrade. Picture by author.

Secondly, complications arise when we ask ourselves: nostalgia for which Yugoslavia? Three different countries that used that word in their name existed – Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.1 Although in its current dominant meaning yugonostalgia is used to refer to the Socialist Yugoslavia, it potentially could also refer to other two states using that name. Furthermore, if we acknowledge the lines of connection and points of rupture between three Yugoslavias, yugonostalgia’s possible point of reference becomes even more ambivalent.

Further and contrary to popular conception, yugonostalgia cannot be confined to one age group. Some yugonostalgics are quite old, some middle-aged and some, perhaps unexpectedly, are young. It also cannot be limited to only one sphere of

1 I am using here the official names of the countries that were in use for the longest period of their histories. As I will explain later, all of the countries in question also used to have other names.

ix human life. As I have already mentioned, one can find its manifestations in politics, in arts, in consumption, in sports, in Facebook groups, in political statements and in personal narratives. Also, yugonostalgia is not tied only to contemporary Serbia: it is evident in all of the states that a little more than twenty years ago belonged to SFRY, as well as among migrants from former Yugoslavia now in different parts of the world. Its traces can even be found in such unexpected places as Africa or Ukraine and its deterritorialisation is completed with the help of Web 2.0.

Consequently, this thesis does not aim to cope with the impossible task of explaining yugonostalgia. It begins, rather, with exploring yugonostalgia through a variety of its manifestations at a very specific time and in a very specific location. There is a reason why I do not want to end up offering a straightforward definition and clear illustration of yugonostalgia. As I will illustrate below, many of the studies that focus on nostalgia tend to essentialise this phenomenon, instead of examining how people make use of it. To avoid this pitfall, in this study I treat yugonostalgia not as a thing-in-itself, but as a symptom of situation in contemporary Serbia.

In this thesis I am addressing another important question: should we be afraid of and alarmed by yugonostalgia’s spectre of communism? Should we enter ‘the holy alliance’ of the regional and global powers exorcising it? Should we see it as the mayor from Brešan’s movie does, as just another potential slave labourer of the capitalist system? Or should we mock and ridicule it, dismiss it as the second coming of the history in its farcical form? Many observers seem to think so. As I will demonstrate in more detail below, there exist a broad variety of the negative responses to yugonostalgia, ranging from mild rebuttal to strong rejection, coming both from the right and left ends of the political spectrum. My intention is to show that exorcism or criticism is not the best way of treating this ghost. Instead of rejecting yugonostalgia on the grounds of its supposed negative characteristics and effects, it is better to subject it to the thorough and careful observation.

It is important to reclaim yugonostalgia from its negative image of the malignant ghost haunting the present. Despite the long-lasting tradition of approaching (yugo)nostalgia in a dismissive manner, I argue that it has a strong emancipatory

x potential. In order to see this in yugonostalgia, it is important to re-examine our traditional understanding of nostalgia in general as a phenomenon defined by its relation to the past. Nostalgia in general, and yugonostalgia included, is not so much about the past, but about people’s situation in the present and, also, their hopes for the future.

xi

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not be possible without contributions from many people. First of all, I need to thank people whom I met conducting my fieldwork in Serbia; without their generosity this project would never have come to fruition. My gratitude extends to all people whom I met in Serbia. I learned a lot from all of you, and this experience, I hope, will continue to guide me for the rest of my life. But in particular I need to thank Zoe Gudović, for her support, help and inspiration. Hvala ti draga!

My supervisors at The University of Melbourne, Professor Leslie Holmes and Doctor Monica Minnegal, have provided me with invaluable help. With exceptional level of commitment, they have offered me the guidance I needed to finish this work. Prof Holmes’ and Dr Minnegal’s intellectual, academic and pedagogic integrity remain a source of inspiration for me.

Last but not least, I am deeply grateful to my friends and colleagues - other PhD students at Department of Anthropology in University of Melbourne. All of you have made this turbulent journey bearable and oftentimes even enjoyable. I am deeply indebted to all of you for your support, understanding and assistance. In particular, I owe gratitude to Pamela Bruder, John Cox, Bryonny Goodwin- Hawkins, Morgan Harrington, Tracey Pahor, Dunja Rmandić, and Julia Sant-Mire.

Needless to say, that all of the errors, blunders and English grammar mistakes in this work are entirely my fault.

xii

Table of Contents

Abstract iii

Declaration v

Preface vi

Acknowledgements xii

Table of Contents xiii

Illustrations xvii

Chapter One. Introduction 1

1.1 . What we talk about when we talk about nostalgia 2

1.2 . In defence of nostalgia 7

1.3 . Genealogy of yugonostalgia 12

1.4 . Auto-ethnography of (yugo)nostalgic post-socialist subject 19

1.5 Explaining neoliberalism 22

1.6 . Methodology 25

1.7 . Outline of the thesis 37

Chapter Two. Introducing Yugonostalgic Youth in Serbia 45

2.1. Two visions of Serbian youth 46

2.2. Othering of contemporary Serbian youth 51

2.3. Youth in SFRY and Milošević’s Serbia 54

2.4. Image of young activists in contemporary Serbia 57

2.5. Precarious lives of Serbian youth 59

2.6. Finding the yugonostalgic youth 62

2.7. Ignoring other stories 68

xiii

Chapter Three. Being Yugonostalgic against the Odds 74

3.1. Politics of memory in post-socialist region and in Serbia 75

3.1.1. Overview of politics of memory in the post-socialist region 75

3.1.2. Overview of politics of memory in Serbia 79

3.2. Factors that can influence formation of yugonostalgia 83

3.2.1. Childhood experience and family upbringing as factors influencing yugonostalgia 84

3.2.2. Teaching history in contemporary Serbia 89

3.2.3. The role of socialisation 94

3.2.4. The role of popular culture and media 98

Chapter Four. Introducing Post-Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire 102

4.1. Continued presence of the Yugoslav past 102

4.2. Introducing concept of lieux de mémoire 105

4.2.1. Conditions for creation of lieux de mémoire 109

4.2.2. Agency and lieux de mémoire 111

4.2.3. Dynamic nature of lieux de mémoire 112

4.3. Applying the concept of lieux de mémoire to the Serbian context: Dan Mladosti (Day of the Youth) 112

Chapter Five. Political Legacy of SFRY as Post-Yugoslav Lieu de Mémoire 121

5.1. Bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire 122

5.1.1. Bratstvo i jedinstvo in the 1990s 123

5.1.2. History of Bratstvo i jedinstvo and related Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire 124

5.1.3. Questioning, neglecting, and destroying bratstvo i jedinstvo 130

xiv

5.1.4. Salience of bratstvo i jedinstvo and related post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire for young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia 133

5.2. Josip Broz Tito as a post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire 138

Chapter Six. Yugoslav Internationalism as the Post-Yugoslav Lieu de Mémoire 147

6.1. Longing for Yugoslavia as a ‘respected’ country 148

6.2. Nostalgic stories about Yugoslavia’s important role in international politics 150

6.3. Nostalgic stories about international mobility in Yugoslav times 153

6.4. Nostalgic stories about internal mobility in Yugoslav times 159

6.5. Going back… 165

6.6. Post script 170

Chapter Seven. The ‘Yugoslav Dream’ as Lieu de Mémoire 173

7.1. “One just could live honourably…” – imagining the ‘Yugoslav dream’ 174

7.2. Precariousness of life in Serbia 178

7.3. Economic prosperity, stability, and work as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire 182

7.4. Social security of the Yugoslav dream as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire 187

Chapter Eight. Common Yugoslav Culture as Post-Yugoslav Lieu de Mémoire 192

8.1. Introducing post- Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire 192

8.2. Methodological issues or how not to drown in the sea of (pop) culture 195

8.3. ‘Quantity’ of the Yugoslav cultural space or the common Yugoslav culture as post-Yugoslav Lieu de Memoire 199

8.4. How the imagined common Yugoslav cultural space became possible 203

xv

8.5. ‘Quality’ of the Yugoslav cultural space 207

Chapter Nine. Commodification and consumption of yugonostalgia 212

9.1. Criticism of commodification of yugonostalgia 213

9.2. Nostalgia goes to market: overview of the theoretical debate on commodification of nostalgia 216

9.3. Transformation of yugonostalgia. Case of ‘Leksikon Yu Mitologije’ 218

9.4. Selling Yugoslavia: how yugonostalgia is commodified in contemporary Serbia 220

9.5. Consuming yugonostalgia 232

10. Conclusions 238

References 245

xvi

Illustrations

Fig. I. Islanders’ shocked reaction to the first apparition of spirit of Marshal Tito (Maršal 2000). v Fig. II. Portrait of Josip Broz Tito in run-down picture framing shop in Belgrade. Picture by author. vii Fig. 1.1. Old and Young participants of the celebration of Tito’s birthday, May 2009, Belgrade. Picture by author. 35 Fig. 2.1. Youth rioting on the streets of Belgrade during Gay Pride on 10th of October 2010 (source: www.blic.rs). 49

Fig. 2.2. Young protagonist of Skinning after committing his first hate crime against Roma youth (Šišanje 2010). 61

Fig. 2.3. Young protagonist of Clip escapes herself and her reality in the alcohol-and drug-fuelled Turbo-folk dance party 61

Fig. 3.1. “Yes, I joined the WWW community!”, screenshot of Josip Broz Tito’s ‘personal’ website www.titoville.com, taken on 05th December 2012. 100 Fig. 4.1. Improvised stall selling Titoist memorabilia, 25th of May 2009, Kuća Cveća, Belgrade. Picture by author. 117 Fig. 5.1. Monument to Second World War Partisan hero Stjepan Filipović by famous sculptor Vojin Bakić near the Serbian city of Valjevo. Photo by author. 129 Fig. 5.2. “Comrade Tito, do you know that today they feed us only with lies?” Traditional embroidery methods were used by women from rural Serbia in 1990s to communicate their grievances to the deceased president of SFRY. Part of the ‘Tito and Us’ exhibition in Museum of History of Yugoslavia, May 2009. Photo by author. 141

Fig. 5.3. A detailed photograph of the embroidered piece from the same exhibition. The text says “Comrade Tito, dear friend, everything that was good went away together with you: security on the streets, employment, housing, international travel, interpersonal relationships, better life”. 142

xvii

Photo by author.

Fig 5.4. An example of demotivator meme with Tito’s picture and caption “Goddamn you, you screwed everything up!” Source: vukajlija.com. 143

Fig. 6.1. Part of the obelisk marking the first conference of Non-Aligned Movement, held in Belgrade in 1961. Situated in centre of Belgrade, it has turned, in Jay Winter’s terms, into ‘white noise’. Picture by author. 151 Fig. 6.2. “Feel Sarajevo”. This advertisement is a part of campaign organised by Ministry of Culture and Sport of Bosnia and Herzegovina to attract Serbian visitors. Picture by author. 166

Fig. 6.3 “Croatia… Spend your summer where your parents did”. One of the ads placed by the Croatian Ministry of Tourism to attract Serbian visitors.

Picture by author. 166 Fig. 6.4. “When the heart says summer, it says… Adriatic”. Another example of tourist advertisement sponsored by Croatian government. Here the ad’s text was ‘edited’ by someone. The phrase “Croatia. So beautiful, so close” was finished off by “so genocidal”. Source: www.glasssrpske.com. 166

Fig 7.1. “Goddamn you. How did you manage to screw everything up?” A Titostalgic internet meme. Here a picture of Tito’s visit to factory is electronically modified, so that Tito is surrounded by contemporary Serbian politicians. 178

Fig 7.2. Searching for a middle ground in face of capitalist adversary. Still from Old School of Capitalism (2009) by Želimir Žilnik. 185

Fig. 8.1. Chinese poster of the Walter Defends Sarajevo, used on the web- site of the Belgrade Museum of History of Yugoslavia to promote the short retrospective of the partisan action movies, organized there in December of 2009. Source: www.mij.rs. 196

Fig 9.1. A beauty parlour in centre of Belgrade called SFRY utilizes a number of visual symbols from Yugoslav times. Photo by author. 214

xviii

Fig 9.2. Yugoslav-themed souvenirs for sale in shop in Belgrade. Photo by author. 215

Fig. 9.3. Visitors of ‘Tito Effect’ exhibition watching a multi-media projection of Tito’s gifts from the museum’s collection. Photo by author. 223

Fig 9.4. Poster for Ženska Strana exhibition. Source: www.mij.rs. 225

Fig 9.5. Slovenian Female Choir Kombinat performs in the garden of MIJ at Radost Ludost event, summer 2010. Photo by author. 231

Fig 9.6. Ivan’s cell phone with Yugoslav coat of arms on display. Photo by author. 232

xix

Chapter One

Introduction

This thesis is about yugonostalgia - nostalgia for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). I examine yugonostalgia in the context of the leftist youth activism in urban Serbia at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. I use the analysis of the yugonostalgic discourses and practices found in these settings to discuss the politics of memory in contemporary Serbian society and to address a broader set of questions about the nature of current transformations and developments happening there.

Yugonostalgia, I argue, is a tricky phenomenon. It is not enough to conceptualise it as a yearning for or attachment to the past. As with any other nostalgia, it tells us much more about the present concerns of the people experiencing it than about the past. What it means to ‘experience’ (yugo)nostalgia in contemporary settings is another important question that I will consider in my thesis. Challenging the notion that nostalgia is a universal human emotion that can be expressed in certain typical ways, I show how yugonostalgia is both a result and an element of the political processes happening in the region of ex-Yugoslavia, and thus a symptom of the post-socialist transformation. As a symptom, though, it has a variety of manifestations. Here I set a task of showing how yugonostalgia in this variety is present in the lives of young political activists, how they conceptualise it, contest it or embrace it, how they use it as a resource in identity construction and in power games.

Finally, demonstrating the affirmative potential of such uses of ‘yugonostalgia’ is one of the most important motives of this thesis. By trying to establish a tentative link between yugonostalgic pre-dispositions of young leftist activists and their actions I contribute to already existing, albeit still relatively small, body of literature reclaiming yugonostalgia (and nostalgia for socialism more broadly) from its negative reputation of unhealthy and debilitating obsession with the supposedly flawed past (e.g. Biehl and Locke 2010; Palmberger 2008; Petrović 2012). I link yugonostalgia both to utopian modes of thinking and attempts to

1 reclaim the idea of socialism, and to specific actions aiming to criticise and change contemporary situation in Serbia.

1.1. What we talk about when we talk about nostalgia

There is no single theory of nostalgia, nor can there be. A number of different disciplines approach the subject and each offers its own take on it. Psychology’s approach is developed in Ritivoi (2002), Fred Davis’s monograph (1979) is one of the earliest sociological works about nostalgia, collection edited by Shaw and Chase (1989) offers but one example of historians’ attempts to deal with the subject, Svetlana Boym’s popular Future of Nostalgia (2001) is traditionally situated within cultural studies, while Fredric Jameson’s contributions to the discussion (e.g. Jameson 1989, 1991) can be placed within social theory, literary criticism or film studies. As Boym observes “The study of nostalgia does not belong to any specific discipline: it frustrates psychologists, sociologists, literary theorists and philosophers, even computer scientists” (Boym 2001: xvii).

Such variety of disciplinary approaches to nostalgia points to a number of processes. To begin with, it is both a sign and a product of recent growth of interest in the subject. The number of academic and popular publications on nostalgia has increased significantly over the last decade or so. All kinds of nostalgias are being studied, but nostalgia for socialism – or, more accurately, nostalgias for socialisms – does stand out as a particularly attractive subject (eds Saunders & Pinfold 2012; eds Todorova & Gille 2012).

On the other hand, this variety of the methodological and disciplinary approaches to nostalgia shows that nostalgia has turned into an empty sign that can stand for a number of different if not contradictory phenomena. It can be interpreted as an emotion and studied from psychological perspective, it can be seen as a part of political game, or it can be approached as a “lubricant in the process of consumption” (Appadurai 1996: 78). Finally – and this is an approach that I mostly adopt in this study – it can be viewed as a mode of relating to the past that, as any other mode of relating to the past, is deeply embedded in the present.

Such a plethora of scholarly approaches to nostalgia stands out against what we can speculatively call a popular perception of the phenomenon. During my

2 numerous conversations on the topic of nostalgia conducted both during the fieldwork and after it in Serbia, Ukraine and Australia, I have gained the impression that many people think of nostalgia as the longing for the good old days, an understanding that resembles very much definition from the dictionary I mentioned in the prologue.2 Contrary to this popular interpretation, however, nostalgia is far from being a natural occurrence for human psyche. Similarly to many other similar phenomena that we take for granted – like different emotions (love, hate, envy) or memory – nostalgia is a socially and culturally embedded construct.

This statement is not intended as a declaration of an extreme constructivist stance, denying the existence of certain pre-dispositions or tendencies in human behaviour. Rather it is an argument against essentialising and universalising such phenomena. They should instead be viewed, I argue, as situated in the specific socio-cultural context that influences the ways they are understood and experienced by people.

Nostalgia illustrates this point very well. There are some scholars who argue that “[n]ostalgia is a universal experience: It concerns all persons, regardless of age, gender, social class, ethnicity, or other social groupings” (Sedikides et al. 2004: 202). Such interpretation permeates both popular perception and the academic discussions. For instance, Raymond Williams reproduces it in The Country and the City when he proclaims nostalgia to be a universal and persistent phenomenon, which, furthermore, is quite negative (Williams 1973: 12). Based on such universalised perception, some scholars have located nostalgia in Confucius’s longing for the ‘golden age’ of the Chou dynasty (Smith 2000: 509), or in ancient Greek mythology, with myth of Odysseus being the paramount example of it (Ritivoi 2002). However, if we consider the genealogy of the term itself, with its

2 At the same time I do not want to diminish the complexity of the understandings and conceptualisations of this phenomenon that people can have. I was often surprised by insightful comments and observations my ‘lay’ interlocutors were making about nostalgia during our conversations. It is quite revealing of the snobbery that is cultivated within academia. It took me some time to learn to overcome the reaction of jealousy and learn instead to accept that these people not only had great first-hand knowledge of the phenomenon I am investigating, but that they also are absolutely capable of developing serious and critical conceptualisations of it without any ‘input’ from academics.

3 origins in the modern Western European medical discourse, such universalised understanding of nostalgia can be disputed.

Most recent studies on nostalgia (e.g. Boym 2001) include an acknowledgement of the history of the term. But the pioneering study on the modern origins of nostalgia was written in 1966 by a French historian of ideas and literary critic Jean Starobinski. He brought back to light the fact that the term itself was coined in the middle of the 18th century by a nineteen-year old Swiss medical doctor Johannes Hofer, in his thesis Dissertatio medica de nostalgia (Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia). Hofer made up his ‘pedantic neologism’ (Starobinski 1966: 85) out of two Greek words: νόστος (nóstos), meaning to return home and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning longing, sorrow.

Hofer used this term to refer to what he thought was a potentially deadly disease afflicting Swiss mercenaries fighting in the armies of foreign European rulers. He noticed, supposedly, that young and agile Swiss men, once crossing the Alps, were becoming sick. Other European doctors of the time picked up on his idea and started to diagnose nostalgia and prescribe various treatments to it. Some treatment suggested was simple, such as return home; while other might come across as quite extravagant from our standpoint, such as application of leeches (Boym 2001). By the end of the 18th century the knowledge about the dangerous disease of nostalgia became quite commonplace. Its most common symptoms included loss of sleep and appetite, slow and weak pulse, exhaustion and fever, and the likes of Balzac and Baudelaire were afraid of its fatal outcomes (Starobinski 1966: 85–86).

In his original article Starobinski (1966) points out that Hofer was only trying to medicalise the feeling of homesickness or Heimweh. He did it with the purpose of scrutinising it ‘scientifically’ and, subsequently, finding the appropriate treatment for this disease. In other words, Starobinski’s point is that Hofer did not ‘invent’ nostalgia out of thin air, but started paying due attention to the phenomenon that has been around for some time. This invites us to think about two following questions. First, for how long has nostalgia as a term existed and for how long, consequently, our vocabulary for talking and thinking about it has been

4 constructed? And second question – for how long phenomenon that this vocabulary refers to has been a salient occurrence?

Starobinski (1966: 84) observes that the word Heimweh itself appeared in German language probably only a hundred years before Hofer tried to replace it in his dissertation with ‘nostalgia’, and the Oxford Dictionary of English language registers the first usage of homesick in the year 1756. Smith (2000), in her turn, concedes that this sort of evidence still should not lead us to conclude that pre- modern or non-Western people never felt homesick. If anything, they just did not think of their feelings the way we are trying to interpret them now. However, analytical attitude towards nostalgia acknowledging not too distant origins of the notion is more helpful than the oversimplified approaches interpreting nostalgia as a generalised phenomenon.

We can see that from the very beginning of theorising nostalgia thinkers – in this particular instance, medical doctors – were tying it to the rupture, unsettling of the known life-world by travel and/or migration. This experience of rupture seems to be one of the most important factors triggering nostalgia – regardless if it is understood as a medical condition or, closer to the way we know it, as the ‘malady of the soul’.

Starting with the 19th century, nostalgia became increasingly demedicalised (Davis 1979: 4). As Starobinski (1966: 99) wittingly observes, the development of medicine allowed doctors to see that many of the symptoms associated previously with nostalgia were the result of other diseases, such as tuberculosis. This process continued, and as Smith (2000) argues, by the middle of the 20th century, nostalgia stopped being of any interest to Western doctors altogether. After the Second World War, the American dictionary of medical and psychological conditions stopped listing nostalgia (yet, it continued to include homesickness, which was still treated by American psychologists, see Smith 2000).

While medics were paying less and less attention to this ‘malady’, it was becoming the object of fascination for philosophers, poets, and – eventually – historians, sociologists, anthropologists and other students of the human condition. Concurrently, it stopped being strictly scientific term and entered

5 everyday language. The meaning of the word ‘nostalgia’, however, underwent yet another important change. Over time it became associated not only with the spatial but also with the temporal rupture. German philosopher Immanuel Kant was among the first to conceptualise nostalgia as something different from Heimweh. As early as 1798:

Kant had noted that people who did return home were usually disappointed because, in fact, they did not want to return to a place, but to a time, a time of youth. Time, unlike space, cannot be returned to – ever; time is irreversible. And nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact (Hutcheon 1998, emphasis in the original).

By the mid-19th century, Fritzsche (2002) argues, nostalgia had found its place in the general vocabulary, referring to the vague collective longing for by-gone times rather than to the individual desire to return a specific place (cf. also Atia & Davies 2010). This change in the understanding of the main trigger of nostalgia – from spatial to temporal – should be analysed in the context of the rise of European modernity, with its concomitant tangible components – industrialisation, urbanisation, migration and destruction of the old life-worlds – as well as other, more subtle ones – the creation of the specific and interconnected concepts of time, history, progress and rationality (Berman 1982).

Although it is impossible to establish definitively when the cyclical time of the Medieval Europe, based on the Judeo-Christian ideals, was replaced with the more secular and linear time of modernity, French Revolution undeniably had a significant impact on re-organisation of the Western structures of temporality (Fritzsche 2002). Its impact, especially in context of our discussion of nostalgia, has been twofold. To begin with, it provided a clear-cut break between ancien régime and what came after, between past and present. Secondly, in general terms, it strengthened the belief in the progress of humanity, towards a better, rational future (Natali 2004).

These changes in European temporality, together with the rise of the modern Cartesian subject, I contend, had deep implications for the way nostalgia was understood. Firstly, as Chase and Shaw (1989a) state, the linear time is one of the crucial pre-conditions for proliferation of nostalgia. With this concept of time, the past is being cut off and turned into “another country” that can be re-visited in

6 nostalgic sojourns. Yet these visits acquire dubious character in the light of the future-oriented belief in the progress of humanity. Finally, an additional burden on nostalgia is laid by the idea that modern subjects should be rational in their thoughts and deeds, and should value their time. If time is money, it is just not good enough for anyone to spend this precious resource wallowing in pleasant thoughts of the days gone by.

This leads me to the final point I need to address in this section on nostalgia, the question of its valency or modality. The genealogy of the term outlined here so far helps us to understand the strength and pervasiveness of the negative stereotype against nostalgia. It is important to remember nostalgia’s specific origins in the medical discourse that saw it as very dangerous, even potentially deadly disease. This can explain, to a certain extent, the negative reputation nostalgia still has in contemporary world, and the fact that some contemporary authors continue to refer to it as ‘malady’, albeit malady of the soul or memory (Stewart 1984). On the other hand, more recent changes in the understanding of this phenomenon help us to contextualise its contemporary negative interpretations and become more attuned to the politics surrounding the usage of the term.

Finally, as I have stated above, nostalgia has become an empty sign. Therefore, its critics often choose to attack it for different reasons. It can be criticised as debilitating and not letting a person adapt to changes (see Hage 2010 for criticism of such view); it can be slammed as “memory with a feeling of guilt removed” (Boym 2001) and falsification of the past; and it can be criticised as a conservative political stance, that either resists any changes in name of perseverance of the status quo, or, worse, longs to return to the past (see Pickering & Keightley 2006). Most of these critical accounts of nostalgia, however, can be juxtaposed with the more positive, or at least neutral, evaluations of the phenomenon.

1.2. In Defence of Nostalgia

Negative reputation of nostalgia is unwarranted. I illustrate this point here by analysis of two critiques of nostalgia that are particularly relevant for the following discussion of yugonsotalgia. The first one is the sceptical assessment of nostalgia’s

7 relation to the past. The second one is the supposed ‘conservative’ nature of the nostalgic feelings.

Criticising nostalgia for its ‘untruthful’ depiction of the past is superfluous. If we think of nostalgia as a mode of relating to one’s own (personal or collective) past (Davis 1979), as I predominantly do in this work, then we should apply to it the same standards and criteria as we apply to other modes of relating to the past, such as history, myth and memory. For instance, in the case of history, an important shift has happened in Western thinking about its nature and its role. The famous dictum of the 19th century positivist historian Leopold von Ranke that “history should tell it like it was”, from a point of view of contemporary historiography seems to be naïve. Critical historians have acknowledged that they do not produce the objective ‘truth’ about the past but rather are telling us histories whose content, mode and detail are very much a product of a specific epoch when they have been created. They also result from their authors’ position, beliefs and persuasions. History, in other words, is very selective about what it chooses to tell us about the past and what it chooses to silence (eds Jenkins, Morgan & Munslow 2007; Megill 2007 provide good overview of the recent debates in historiography). As such, it is often a very powerful tool of ideological and political struggles. The control over the official version of history is considered to be a very crucial and important task, and we shall see this very clearly in case of (former) Yugoslavia and contemporary Serbia (Chapter Three).

The comparison of nostalgia with other mode of relating to the past, memory, has already become commonplace (eds Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi & Levy 2011). As a result, it comes as a surprise that different standards are applied to these two so often. Nowadays, it is widely acknowledged that memory is a social practice and a function of the present (eds Radstone & Schwarz 2010). Of course, just as in the case of ‘history’, such realisation was a result of decades of intense scholarly debates. Not everyone is willing to accept and celebrate the fluidity of memory, though. For instance French historian Pierre Nora (1996) famously argues that we live in the world where the real ‘lived’ memory is lost and what we have instead is the constructed simulacra of remembering. We do not have lived and embodied

8 memory, therefore we need to produce and re-produce lieux de mémoire (see Chapter Four).

Yet in general, there is a trend in academia to understand and conceptualise memory as a flexible and malleable phenomenon. It is our way of creating the past in the moment of present and according to its needs. Outside of academia, however, this is often not the case. Both in politics writ large and in the micro- politics of the everyday, memory is often reified and in such form it becomes a powerful tool in power games. It is used to make claims over the past, to claim authenticity and the truth. It is used to discredit one’s opponents and contest their memories and claims to past. Yet again, Serbia and (former) Yugoslavia provide ample material for study of these processes (ed. Todorova 2003).

A similar process is happening in relation to nostalgia as well. In academia, especially with the rise of interest in the subject, an increasing number of studies criticises the biased understanding of nostalgia as the ‘wrong’ attitude towards the past and emphasises its potential for the critical involvement with the past (cf. Horowitz 2010). Yet in everyday parlance it is still very often taken to court for “deliberately falsify[ing] authentic memory” (see Lowenthal 1989: 20).

How, then, does nostalgia foster critical involvement with the past? To begin with, precisely because of its selectiveness, positive bias towards certain aspects of the past at the expense of others, nostalgia highlights the constructed nature of any of our modes of relating to the past. And in doing so, it also makes us re-think once again the reasons for the distortions it creates. In other words, nostalgia powerfully forces us to re-consider the causal relationship of the past and present, and brings to the forefront the fact that it is not the past that constructs the present, but vice versa, the present influences our understanding of and relation to the past. As Sarah R. Horowitz (2010: 57) summarises “By respecting the complexity of nostalgia instead of dismissing it, by seeing it as both self-affirming and self-subverting, we can tap its potential for a serious and complex engagement with the past with loss, mourning, and with present”.

Another widespread negative bias against nostalgia is its supposed conservative character and the intrinsic link with reactionary politics. This stereotype has

9 become well entrenched, both in everyday parlance and in the academia. As David Lowenthal (1989: 20) comments “Diatribe upon diatribe denounce [nostalgia] as reactionary, regressive, ridiculous”. Politicians in many countries use the term and its derivatives to stigmatise their political opponents, building on the assumption that nostalgics with their investment in the past cannot build a future (Pickering & Keightley 2006; Radstone 2007). Such a wholesale dismissal of nostalgia ignores the complex history of the phenomenon and its multifaceted nature. Yet again, it is a product of modernity, but, as Andreas Husseyn (1995: 88) argues, we do not necessarily have to follow blindly the modernity’s othering of nostalgia. In remainder of this section I will suggest a number of important counter-arguments to the dismissive understanding of nostalgia as a reactionary political stance.

To begin with, as many scholars of nostalgia observe, it is important not to read nostalgia into any political evocation of the past (Fritzsche 2002; Nadkarni & Shevchenko 2004). Because nostalgia has become such a popular concept of late, it can be used quite indiscriminately. For instance, Svetlana Boym in her popular study uses the framework of nostalgia to analyse the American interest in dinosaurs and films like Jurassic Park (Boym 2001). Also, nostalgia as a concept sometimes can be imposed on an analysis of the political and socio-cultural processes that can be usefully studied using other theories and categories. For instance, in the case of general overview of nationalistic ideology in Russia that Boym (2001) offers, concept of nostalgia seems to be less useful than the good and tried concepts of ‘invention of tradition’ (eds Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983) or national myth.3

Another important distinction between nostalgia and some other political projects looking back towards the past, is the fact that nostalgics do not aspire to go back into the past and re-live the good old days. Nostalgia is rather an insatiable longing for a longing. And this, according to some scholars (Nadkarni & Shevchenko 2004; Pickering & Keightley 2006) differentiates it from the projects

3 At the same time, more context-specific and detailed studies of certain aspect of the nationalist ideology can benefit from the application of the concept. Two examples that come to my mind is Esra Özyürek’s (2005) study of the role of the nostalgia for Ataturk era in the secularists’ negotiation of notions of the Turkish national identity in contemporary Turkey as well as Pamela Ballinger’s (2003) insightful analysis of how nostalgia for Habsburg empire paradoxically plays into Croatian nationalistic project in the region of Trieste.

10 that try to re-build the past. It is precisely for this reason that nostalgia is often considered debilitating – no matter what nostalgics do in order to re-live the past, supposedly, their nostalgia still haunts them. But, as I will show in this thesis, this is also what makes nostalgia potentially productive – since nostalgics realise that they cannot go back in the past (and often do not want to go there), they channel their needs and desires into the present.

Nostalgia is wrongly considered to be an exclusively conservative political stance because of the fact that ‘conservative’ political forces often have wistful references to the past as part of their ideological program (even though, as I have just argued, not all of those references should be interpreted as nostalgic). However, many of the ‘progressive’ ideologies also make use of the nostalgic references, a fact that is often overlooked or even denied by the adherents of those ideologies. From socialism, to environmentalism, feminism and situationism – many of the progressive ideological projects rely or have relied at a certain stage on the nostalgic evocations of the past. As a matter of fact, as Alastair Bonnet (2006) illustrates, in the case of situationism, precisely unacknowledged nature of nostalgia in the movement has introduced some of the incoherencies in its ideological project.

Yet another important question that we have to consider before hastily labelling nostalgia ‘conservative’, is what do we mean exactly by the terms ‘progressive’, ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’. There is no easy answer to that, and any theoretical musings and schemas can fail when applied to a specific historic setting. For instance, while communism as an ideology has traditionally identified itself with the utopian radical project of constructing a better world, in the 20th century, after it was ‘wedded’ to the specific states, with their problematic histories, its reputation was seriously tarnished (cf. Todorova 2010a: 10). Consequently, the 20th century saw communist ideas and ideals falling into disgrace, as a consequence of both the internal politics of the states with ‘real existing socialism’ and international dynamics during the Cold War era. Implosion of Soviet Union and dissolution of the Socialist Bloc in Eastern Europe at the end of that century were interpreted at a time as a proof of inadequacies of the Marxist ideology by writers from both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum

11

(Hörschelmann 2002). This has helped to establish neoliberal hegemony, which posits Marxist ideas as obsolete (eds Plehwe, Walpen & Neunhoffer 2006). Consequently, nostalgia for communism or socialism – even though in theory it is nostalgia for ‘progressive’ – nowadays is commonly considered to be ‘regressive’ (Ekman & Linde 2005).

Finally, in my opinion, the strongest counter-argument to the biased understanding of nostalgia as a reactionary phenomenon, is the emphasis on the contextual and situated reading of the manifestations of nostalgia and nostalgic practices. As Kathleen Stewart (1988: 227) contends, nostalgia is everywhere now, but its forms, meanings and effects shift depending on the context, on where the speaker stands in the landscape of the present. Essentialist understandings of nostalgia, according to Nadkarni and Shevchenko (2004), seek to define the inherent properties of nostalgia, instead of viewing them as products of different subject positions of those who encode and decode these nostalgic practices. Thus, a more nuanced approach towards nostalgia can elucidate that nostalgic subjects do not have a ‘reactionary’ attitude towards the present based on their ‘distorted’ understanding of the past. Quite to the contrary, as I will illustrate throughout this thesis, their approach towards the present circumstances sometimes can be characterised as constructively critical.

I have argued in this section that many of the negative biases against nostalgia are unjustified. However, they are really persistent, and nostalgia continues to retain, by and large, its negative image. In my opinion, this overarching negative stance can be explained to a large extent by the place of nostalgia in the project of modernity. Following Natali (2004), I argue that nostalgia has been constructed as modernity’s other. It is othered as an unhealthy fixation on the past, an excessively emotional disposition that hinders our progress towards a better future. Many of these threads run through the reflections on nostalgia for socialism. Yugonostalgia, however, has a rather more complex history.

1.3. Genealogy of Yugonostalgia

Pinning down the chronological origins of the word ‘yugonostalgia’ is relatively straightforward. It is considered that the term was coined by the Croatian weekly

12 tabloid Globus (The Globe) in 1992 (Kesić & Lyubimir 1993: 16; Simmons 2009: 458). This simple story conceals the complexity of the transformations that have started happening in the region of (former) Yugoslavia some time before. Origins of yugonostalgia and its consequent “social life”4 need to be situated within the context of the gradual unravelling of Yugoslavia over the previous decade, the rise of the nationalistic ideologies and parties, the dissolution of the state and the wars that followed. In this section I will outline the genealogy of yugonostalgia showing how the understanding of this phenomenon has changed over the two decades of its existence. Similarly, I will briefly explain some of the processes involved in the rise of yugonostalgia – like the rise of nationalism, the re-writing of history, post- socialist transition and the establishment of the neoliberal hegemony – reserving the more detailed discussion for the following chapters.

‘Yugonostalgia’ entered the languages and politics of the former Yugoslav states in the early 1990s. Back then it was not a neutral word at all. It is worth quoting here at length the passage from an essay by the writer Dubravka Ugrešić (1998: 23) describing the origins of the term:

The authorities in the new states of former Yugoslavia have coined the term Yugo-nostalgia and given it an unambiguous meaning. The term Yugo-nostalgic is used as political and moral disqualification, the Yugo- nostalgic is a suspicious person, a “public enemy”, a “traitor”, a person who regrets the collapse of Yugoslavia, a Yugo-nostalgic is an enemy of democracy. The term “Yugo-nostalgia” belongs to new terminology of war. In the first half of the 1990s, after the collapse of Yugoslavia and during the wars that followed, majority of the media in the newly independent states were either strictly controlled by the circles in power or were working within the framework of the dominant ideologies (see Čolović 2002; Gordy 1999; Žarkov 2007). Although it later changed its ideological disposition, Globus in the early 1990s was overwhelmingly nationalistically charged (Jansen 2005; Kesić & Lyubimir 1993) and could be seen at the time as a mouthpiece for voicing the dominant interpretation of the current events in former Yugoslavia. In December of 1992 Globus published an article “Croatian Feminists Rape Croatia” that launched the so- called case of “witches of Rio”: a campaign of public harassment against five female intellectuals from Croatia – Rada Iveković, Jelena Lovrić, Slavenka Drakulić,

4 I draw here on Arjun Appaduriai’s (1986) notion of “social life of things”.

13

Dubravka Ugrešić and Vesna Kesić. These women supposedly were involved in campaign against organising the 58th PEN-club Congress in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik, trying to alert the international community about Croatia’s involvement in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, including the mass rape of women. The article was exposing the un-patriotic stance of these women, which included their alleged connections to both Yugoslav communist elites and foreign countries and ‘dangerous’ feminist dispositions, calling them “Marxist feminists, communist and post-communist profiteers, daughters of communism and ‘Yugo- nostalgics’” (Kesić & Lyubimir 1993: 16, emphasis added). 5

Such context of the origins of the term ‘yugonostalgia’ is quite illuminating. It was initially coined to use against people who did not, at least at that stage, make any explicit positive references to the Yugoslav past. Quite to the contrary, Vesna Kesić in the text published in an English-speaking journal soon after the incident, denied any connections she could have had with the Yugoslav Communist Party and went on to relate quite bleak story of female, and especially feminists’, lives in Yugoslavia (Kesić & Lyubimir 1993).6 Similarly, Slavenka Drakulić became well- known for her autobiographical reflections on the harsh life under the ‘communist regime’ - How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) and also, partially, The Balkan Express (1993). Thus, the term ‘yugonostalgic’ was used at the beginning to target and discredit people who were simply unhappy with the situation in Croatia.

It is quite indicative as well that the term was coined in Croatia. While a lot of literature on the dissolution of Yugoslavia focuses – and rightly so – on Serbia’s role in this process, the importance of Croatian nationalism should not be overlooked.7 Franjo Tudjman – president of the independent Croatia – managed to manipulate Western opinion about his politics, portraying the country as the

5 This publication included a lot of personal information about the women – even their phone numbers – and triggered, in Obrad Kesić’s (1999: 199) words “an all-out witch hunt” against these female intellectuals in Croatian media and public sphere. 6 Dubravka Žarkov (2007) makes an interesting point that most of such texts appeared only in English language, in Western publications, and clearly were not targeting the ‘domestic’ audience. 7 Jasna Dragović-Soso (2008) also suggests that literature on Yugoslav dissolution tended to overly concentrate on Serbia, and, once the war began, on Bosnia and Kosovo, leaving gaps in our understanding of the developments in Slovenia and Croatia.

14 victim of Serbian aggression.8 While it is impossible to deny this – images of burning Vukovar, a Croatian town near the border with Serbia that became one of the first victims of the war, do not let us do so – it is important to also discuss the role of Croatian politicians, population, media, intellectuals, and the army in the unravelling of Yugoslavia.9

Dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia was happening in the context of the rise of the nationalistic sentiments among the Croatian population, which were fuelled and capitalised upon by the local political elites, especially Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), party led by Franjo Tudjman. According to this ideology, Socialist Yugoslavia was a prison of the nations, and its collapse was a chance for Croatia to become an independent democratic state (Jansen 2005). History of Yugoslav experience was re-written to fit the narrative about the victimised Croatian nation. According to this newly imagined trajectory of the history of Croatia, its independence was the culmination of a century-long progression and struggle. Therefore, any dissenting voices that were pointing out the drawbacks of the independent Croatia or, even worse, any wistful references to the socialist past, became a pathology known as ‘yugonostalgia’.

This illustrates that the term yugonostalgia was initially applied towards people who were dissatisfied with the present. Only some of them were framing this dissatisfaction through the comparison of the present with what they saw as a better past. Notably, out of the five witches of Rio, only Dubravka Ugrešić did this consistently, and was also one of the first to re-appropriate and reclaim the term “yugonostalgia”, trying to invest it with some positive meaning (see her essay ‘Confiscation of Memory’ in Ugrešic 1998).

8 The question of who is the aggressor and who the victim in the case of wars of Yugoslav succession is a very complicated one. Writing from the perspective of international relations Frankie Wilmer (2002: 162) notes: “If we wish to understand the war in structuralist terms, we need only decide whether the republican boundaries of Croatia were recognized or duly constituted as international boundaries, and if so, then the movement of troops or militias under a Belgrade command can be construed as a simple act of international aggression. Even the Hague Tribunal, created by the UN Security Council, is not authorized to address the question of aggression in relation to the Yugoslav war”. 9 This role includes participation in the war in Bosnia, as well as the infamous operation Oluja (Storm) that resulted in expulsion of ethnic Serbs from the Croatian region Krajina.

15

In the case of Serbia the history of the term is a little more blurred. Throughout the 1990s and up until 2003 Serbia, together with Montenegro, was still a part of a country called Yugoslavia, and Slobodan Milošević managed for a long time to successfully exploit the pro-Yugoslav sentiment among some Serbs, leading to a schizophrenic politics that was claiming at once to preserve Yugoslavia as well as pursue Serbian national interests (Gordy 1999; Jansen 2005). On the one hand, this regime claimed continuity with Tito’s Socialist Yugoslavia. On the other, there was a proliferation of the extreme nationalist ideology, which was othering this socialist past, and, similar to the developments in the rest of the post-socialist region, portrayed it as a detrimental stage in the history of the Serbian nation. From this Serbian nationalistic point of view, yugonostalgia and any positive references to the Socialist past were unwelcome. Yet, in general, the attitude towards nostalgia was quite ambiguous, and it was seen to co-exist in many people’s worldview together with nationalistic sentiments. Although it may come across as contradiction, many people continued to support Milošević on the grounds that life was better under Tito (Gordy 1999).

Yugonostalgia as a phenomenon was already quite widespread in the 1990s. Even so, at that stage it received rather little scholarly attention. Instead we have a number of texts produced by intellectuals from the region that can be interpreted as manifestations of yugonostalgia. Some of these elegiac, beautifully written texts by Aleš Debeljak (1994), Dubravka Ugrešić (1998), Miljenko Jergović (2004) and Aleksa Djilas (2003) have already been subjected to scholarly scrutiny (e.g. Simmons 2009). At the same time, we can say precious little about the way yugonostalgia was ‘lived and practised’ in the turbulent decade of the 1990s. As a result, a situation is strikingly similar to the situation in the literature on migrants and nostalgia, criticised by Ghassan Hage (2010), where a focus on the intellectuals’ experience of the exile and nostalgia comes at the expense of the stories of rank-and-file migrants. Recently, however, the lacuna in the study of yugonostalgia has started filling up. The published works illustrate the ambiguous meaning of the term in former Yugoslavia, with some commentators dismissing it, others celebrating it, and yet others showcasing its complex nature.

16

The phenomenon of yugonostalgia is one of the main topics of Steff Jansen’s (2005) book on the antinationalist resistance in Serbia and Croatia. With the research conducted throughout the 1990s, this study does provide us with some insights into how yugonostalgia was understood, felt and practised in that decade, albeit, again, in rather privileged circles of the anti-nationalist activists and intellectuals. Jansen adopts affirmative approach towards yugonostalgia, positing it as a counter-hegemonic project in the context of the strong nationalistic sentiments permeating the ex-Yugoslav region. Remembering the Yugoslav times in positive light, according to him, not only provided people with the vocabulary for criticism of the contemporary developments, but also helped them to create the sense of community with those “who stayed normal” (Jansen 2005: 250), and build the sense of longing for the better word (Jansen 2005: 254).

Work of anthropologist Tanja Petrović (2010a, 2010b, 2012) provides an invaluable contemporary contribution to the scholarship that highlights the positive dimensions of yugonostalgia. Drawing on the ethnographic work with dispossessed workers in Serbia, analysing cultural practices all over former Yugoslavia, or uncovering the supressed memories of service in Yugoslav Army, she provides us with rich empirical material about the emancipatory manifestation of this phenomenon in different contexts.

Scholarship like this can help us to understand that yugonostalgia, just as well as other kinds of nostalgias, represents a powerful narrative about past, present and future. As Dennis Marlow (2010: 3) argues in his study of postcolonial nostalgia about: “the rosy, sentimental glow most commonly associated with nostalgia is only a part of the story, and … pursuing its manifestations with a proper sense of the complex of feelings and attitudes it engages, and the contexts upon which it draws, reveals its potential as a source of understanding and creativity”. Thus, yugonostalgia should be viewed for what it is - a creative narrative about the past, informed by the present. It performs important functions in the present, as I will illustrate throughout this thesis. Comparing yugonostalgic representations of the past with other genres of representations - academic, for instance – is not the aim of this work. While interesting and valuable literature on different aspects of Socialist Yugoslav experience exists (e.g. Duda 2010; Vučetić 2012; Woodward

17

1995), it is not my intention here to ‘verify’ yugonostalgic narratives against these works. I aim to detail here the yugonostalgic narratives, with their complexities and contrradictions, oftentimes fully acknowledged by my informants.

Zala Volčić (2007; 2011), on the other hand, has adopted quite a critical approach towards yugonostalgia. Although she admits a critical potential for yugonostalgia in the earlier years of its existence, nowadays, Volčić argues, yugonostalgia has turned into the by-product of the functioning of the capitalist economies that prevents the critical reckoning with the Yugoslav past.10 Similarly, Serbian historian Predrag Marković (2007) argues that yugonostalgia is actually a dangerous obstacle for transition of former Yugoslav states, and especially Serbia, towards the successful democracy. In his article Marković articulates the view of nostalgia for socialism as a regressive phenomenon that does not allow former socialist societies to move forward into the bright future of democracy and the free market (cf. Boym 2001 for similar argument regarding the whole of the post- socialist region). Finally, in the popular discourses circulating within the region one can find an outright dismissal of yugonostalgia as the ‘opium for the people’, which does not have any positive social role and, on the contrary, can have negative effects (Forić 2011).

Following from this, I argue that the concept of yugonostalgia has undergone a slight change to its meaning in the two decades of existence. Due to the efforts of intellectuals who have tried to reclaim it – either by writing yugonostalgic “manifestos” or by conducting research on it, letting the voice of their informants speak through their research in defence of yugonostalgia – the term has stopped being an obvious swearword as it was at the time of its inception. But it is impossible to say that the total recuperation of the term has happened. Instead, yugonostalgia remains a highly charged term that can be used in the political battles over the meaning of the past, strategies for the present and visions of the future. This reading of the context surrounding yugonostalgia motivated me to start my own project about this phenomenon. From the very beginning my project was deliberately partisan: I was intending to accentuate the positive dimensions of

10 I engage with Volčić’s criticism of yugonostalgia at length in the last chapter of my thesis, where I look into the commodification of yugonostalgia.

18 yugonostalgia. My intention to write such a predisposed study of yugonostalgia comes from the long-standing broad interest in the region of former Yugoslavia, a direct interest in yugonostalgia and, perhaps surprisingly, my own yugonostalgic position.

1.4. Auto-ethnography of (yugo)nostalgic post-socialist subject

‘Something happened to my mind really, I remember what never fell on me’ “For That Fellow”, Robert Rozhdestvensky

My own yugonostalgic position can come across to some as being both contradictory and problematic. Yet I argue that it is neither. Rather, it is quite illuminating of the processes happening in the broader post-socialist region.

Contradictory nature of my yugonostalgia comes from the fact that, at first glance, I have no right to claim this position. I am not from the region of former Yugoslavia. This, quite often, causes a certain degree of confusion among the fellow academics in the Anglophone sphere. In my opinion, this testifies to the trend, noted by Xiang Biao (2006), who has argued about the implicit division of labour in this sphere – while English-speaking students and academics are free to choose any topic of research, ‘non-native’ speakers are expected to write about their own ‘cultures’. Throughout my period of active study of yugonostalgia I have encountered this numerous times. During conferences, seminars or just in conversations with the fellow academics, I quite often am pigeonholed as hailing from former Yugoslavia, and my consequent refutations of this are triggering even more confusion and questions about “why then have you chosen to study yugonostalgia?”.

This is not to say that my choice of research subject did not cause any confusion where I came from, that is, Ukraine. The excerpt from the song, quoted at the beginning of this section, was recited to me by one of my university professors who was bemused to hear that I am interested in studying yugonostalgia.11 I

11 The song was quite well-known in the Soviet times, and it appeared in a number of popular films on the subject of Second World War, or, as it was officially called in Soviet Union, Great Patriotic

19 attribute her reaction partly to the methodological nationalism that was characteristic of Ukrainian academia.

I was born in 1981 in what was still a Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic. By the time I went to school in 1987, Soviet Union was undergoing a systemic crisis that resulted in its implosion in 1991. Most of my socialisation, consequently, was happening in the independent Ukraine, with its own attempts to come to terms with the socialist past. Importantly, I lived in the Western part of Ukraine, which was, and still is, considered to be the “Ukrainian Piedmont”, the epicentre of the nationalistic ideology (see Wanner 1998 for the overview of the Ukrainian post- independence projects of national identity). Coming from the ethnically Ukrainian background, I had a chance to experience firsthand the increasing instrumentalisation of ethnicities and increasing salience of being ‘Ukrainian’ while systematically othering the socialist ideologies and history.

I do not wish, however, to construct the picture of myself as an exceptional student ready to go against the grain. There is one important caveat to this story – I did my undergraduate degree in International Relations, and students in this discipline, obviously, were encouraged to look beyond Ukraine (although, the gaze was mainly focused in the Western – European – direction). It was in this context that I initially got interested in the former Yugoslavia.

Broader historical and academic context of my initial interest in former Yugoslavia is quite significant. In the 1990s former Yugoslavia, the wars of its dissolution, and by the end of the decade, Kosovo, were ‘in vogue’ in academic world. The number of scholarly works produced on these issues was enormous. Yet, the quantity did not necessarily translate into quality and academia was replete with hasty attempts to explain the Yugoslav events, ranging from the notorious theory of ‘ancient hatreds’ to the theories overemphasising the role of the political agency in recent times (see Dragović-Soso 2008; Kent 1997 for two examples of the critical overview of the literature on Yugoslav disintegration).

War. I was brought up without much exposure to the Soviet popular culture, therefore this quote left quite a strong impression on me, when I heard it for the first time from my professor.

20

A lot of literature, written on the subject of Yugoslav dissolution in 1990s, tended “to read history backwards” (Dragović-Soso 2008), making an implicit assumption that Socialist Yugoslavia disintegrated because it was inherently flawed. Importantly, such interpretation was part and parcel of the broader process of post-socialist ‘transition’, which, paradoxically, was at the same time constructing Socialist Yugoslavia and its collapse as its ‘other’.

I build this important argument on the work of American sociologist Michael D. Kennedy on the post-socialist transformation, and his concept of the “transition culture”, which is a:

…mobilizing culture organized around certain logical and normative oppositions, valuations of expertise, and interpretations of history that provides a basic framework through which actors undertake strategic action to realize their needs and wishes. … [it] emphasizes the fundamental opposition of socialism and capitalism, and the exhaustion of the former and normative superiority of the latter (Kennedy 2002: 9). I consider the transition culture to be a hegemonic discourse that, as Kennedy notes, is permeating elites in the post-socialist context. It both influences their actions and is influenced by them in turn. Crucially for my thesis, transition culture offers a theological sense of time, where “current developments are interpreted within a framework of their fit with a desirable future understood through the institutionalization of a market economy and democratic policy” (Kennedy 2002: 252–253). As Kennedy himself points out, this culture is far from being uniform. Yugoslavia with its wars of dissolution is one of the cases that was narrated as ‘outside’ of transition, its constitutive other. In other words, the developments within the region did not fit the triumphalist meta-narrative about the progress of the post-socialist countries to capitalism, and had to be explained away by nationalism, which served to re-confirm the hegemonic ideals of the transition culture. Former Yugoslavia served as an illustration of things going terribly wrong, against which ‘post-socialist transition’ could be beneficially situated. Furthermore, I argue that it also worked retrospectively: by implying the inevitability of Yugoslav collapse, it was also erasing the viability of the Yugoslav socialist experiment.

21

If pathologising the Yugoslav condition served to re-affirm the hegemony of transition culture and, ultimately, neoliberalism, the discovery of the yugonostalgic discourses offered me a glimpse of the counter-hegemonic discourses. Through yugonostalgic stories – mainly texts written by intellectuals from the region in the 1990s – I started questioning the inevitability of Yugoslav dissolution, the ‘ethnic hatred’ between its constituent nations and the importance of nationalism. Eventually, however, this also led me to question other, more profound assumptions of the transition culture, not only in post-Yugoslav context but in the broader post-socialist region and in my own country as well. Yugonostalgic stories offered me a powerful and moving narrative about the possibility of different kind of socio-economic order from the one I was experiencing in the 1990s in Ukraine. They also instigated my interest in recuperating the idea and practice of the leftist politics.

Such personal positive experience of yugonostalgia has strongly influenced my understanding of this phenomenon as potentially critical and emancipatory. In combination with the continued prevalence of the interpretations of nostalgias for socialism as debilitating and complacent, this motivated me to conduct a partisan study of yugonostalgia, with the aim of emphasising its positive dimensions. These dimensions, I argue, can help us to critically address our current neoliberal condition. But what exactly is ‘neoliberalism’? The next section of this chapter grapples with this complex question.

1.5. Explaining neoliberalism

Study of neoliberalism in its current manifestations Serbia was not the main priority of this research project. Nevertheless, through accounts of my informants, neoliberalism surfaced as an important theme. It emerged as a framework against which they often were constructing their thinking on the topic of Socialist Yugoslavia. Thus, in this particular case study of yugonostalgia among the young leftist activists in contemporary Belgrade, neoliberalism have come to occupy the role that nationalism played in earlier case study of yugonostalgia among anti- nationalist activists in former Yugoslavia (Jansen 2005). While in Jansen’s study all-pervasive nationalism was engendering dissenting responses, which sometimes

22 manifested themselves in yugonostalgic form, in my case this role was performed by neoliberalism. Thus, we need first to discuss briefly general tenets of neoliberalism, and then attempt to locate their specific manifestations in the concrete settings of Serbia.

Wacquant (2012) distinguishes two dominant ways of approaching the study of neoliberalism. The first ‘thin’ approach is predominantly economic-based conceptualizations of phenomenon. The second one is inspired by Foucualdian theories of governmentality.12

David Harvey’s concise introduction to the concept of neoliberalism (2005) is perhaps, the most well-known example of predominantly economic approach to the subject. In his work, Harvey (2005: 2) defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economic practices prioritizing advancement of individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within the institutional framework providing strong private property rights, free market and free trade. He argues that the doctrine has been on the rise since 1970s but has received an additional boost with the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, when newly independent states either embraced or were coerced into implementing principles of deregulation, privatization and withdrawal of the state from many spheres of life (Harvey 2005: 3). Scholars within this school of thought predominantly engage with neoliberalism as with the ‘empire of capital’ and attempt to capture social and cultural relations to market rule (cf. Wacquant 2012: 68-69).

Another school is mostly preoccupied with the strategies and technologies aimed at fashioning populations and people into neoliberal subjects, complying to the generalized normativity formulated around the principles of competition, efficiency and utility (Wacquant 2012: 69-70). Alertness to the multiplicity of neoliberalisms, depending on their specific locations, is one of the important contributions of this particular approach to the study of neoliberalism (cf. Ong 2007). Additionally, scholars working within this paradigm emphasize the role of the state in neoliberalism. Contrary to the classical self-declared neoliberal

12 To this he adds his own approach to studying neoliberalism. I read it, however, as an attempt to develop the middle ground between the two previously mentioned ones, avoiding their extremities and combining their positive sides (Wacquant 2012: 71-77). Thus, I will not discuss it here separately.

23 principle of state withdrawal, these scholars highlight the active and crucial role of the state in providing for the interests of the private sector (Stenning et al 2010). Finally, neoliberalism, this approach stresses, has profound implications on people’s agency and subjectivity (Greenhouse 2010). On the one hand, it encourages individualism and entrepreneurship, and posits a strong link between practices of consumption and citizenship. Yet, at the same time, since, as Greenhouse underscores (2010: 8), neoliberal forms of power are so eclectic and diffuse, they provide a broad scope for experimentation and improvisation when it comes to adapting to or resisting neoliberalism.

To my knowledge, at the moment there is still no comprehensive study of changes that happened in Serbia after the fall of Milošević in 2000 that would take as its main framework critical engagement with neoliberalism and its effects. One can find smaller contributions to the topic, mainly by local authors (e.g. ur. Mihailović 2011; ur. Stojiljković 2012). At the same time, I contend, foreign scholars of Serbia still overwhelmingly choose to focus on the issues relating to nationalism.

We can, nevertheless state, that despite the lack of agreement over the political course that Serbia should have adopt in the aftermath of Milošević, economic reforms took their shape rather quickly (Uvalić 2010). They followed the pattern of shock therapy, with extensive privatization, prioritization of the self-regulating market neglect and diminishing of the public sphere, and liquidation of any vestiges of the welfare state (Golubović 2012). Negative effects of these reforms for ordinary citizens of Serbia were a major source of concern for informants of this study. Consequently, following chapters will provide us with some understanding of both the nature of changes in questions and of some of the ways people can respond to them.

Finally, I argue that one of the main reasons why neoliberalism in Serbia has remained understudied so far, is in its successful cross-over with the nationalistic ideology and practices. Just as in Milošević’s times nationalism went hand in hand with the deformed versions of the socialist populism, nowadays it coexists with neoliberalism. This should not be interpreted as a sign of resilience and primacy of

24 nationalism in Serbia (see consequent chapters, in particular, Chapter Three). On the contrary, this phenomenon, in my opinion, invites us to examine more closely nationalism’s ‘partners in crime’. Maybe if we understand why they benefit so much from coexistence with nationalism, this will provide us with better insight into nature of the current Serbian version of neoliberalism and the nature of Milošević’s regime.

1.6. Methodology

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on History This inter-disciplinary thesis draws on theories and methodologies from a number of different academic fields. Their selection was motivated mainly by my attempt to move away from the generalised and superficial discussions of (yugo)nostalgia towards a more nuanced understanding of it, towards a Benjamin- inspired attempt to capture its multiple manifestations as they flash up before they disappear into unrecognisability.

This declared aim might seem to be at odds with another key intention of my thesis – to focus on and uncover mainly the positive understandings and uses of yugonostalgia, in order to dispel the negative stereotype against it. Although this contradiction remains ultimately unresolved in this thesis, it is not as problematic as it may seem. To begin with, as I have already demonstrated, there is no lack of the disparaging criticisms of yugonostalgia.13 Consequently, my project continues to draw inspiration from Benjamin in its attempt to demonstrate the invisible side of the story, the story produced not by the victors, but by the losers, in this case – underdogs or misfits of the post-socialist transformations.

Secondly, the process of my research brought to the fore, even to me, the contextual nature of yugonostalgia and demonstrated how its valency can change from situation to situation. To explain this point better, I will describe here one of the biggest challenges of my fieldwork, namely the fact that some of my

13 Though, at least to my knowledge, the study demonstrating the negative effects of this phenomenon using the qualitative methods rather than glib generalisations, is yet to be produced (see Todorova 2010a for a similar point).

25 informants, although professing a positive attitude towards Socialist Yugoslavia, held quite negative views of yugonostalgia as a phenomenon.

I had to face this challenge early on in my fieldwork. People who considered Yugoslav times to be better compared to the current situation in Serbia, or who were even indulging in the consumption of yugonostalgic artefacts – in other words, doing everything I would imagine ‘yugonostalgics’ do – sometimes would distance themselves from the yugonostalgia and present a scathing criticism of the phenomenon. I explain this by the highly contested and divisive reputation that yugonostalgia has in contemporary Serbian society. As I have argued before, the popular negative stereotypes about yugonostalgia, as a regressive, debilitating, uncritical attitude towards the past, permeate not only academic writing on the subject, but also popular culture and everyday language. Furthermore, for my informants, who mainly belonged to a very specific circle – leftist activists – overcoming their own and criticising other people’s yugonostalgia was an important part of the project of building a new Serbian left, a left that would critically deal with the mistakes of the Yugoslav socialist project and, importantly, distance itself from the pseudo-leftist politics of the Milošević times (see also Chapter Two). As one of my informants claimed, “yugonostalgia is some sort of romantic attitude towards that [socialist] past, while I try to develop a more critical understanding of it” (Milena).

Such characterisation is quite indicative: it others yugonostalgia as an emotionally distorted picture of the past, dangerous for the modern rational subject. I often found myself debating this understanding of yugonostalgia with the people I thought to be yugonostalgics. And as I frequently learned during these conversations, they were eventually eager to admit that the nature of yugonostalgia is ambiguous enough to allow for its positive potential as well. One of my friends, for instance, confessed that it was precisely the emotional nature of yugonostalgia, its uncanny power to move, that provided inspiration for him in some of the challenging moments of his life. A different, less impassionate but nevertheless revealing conversation with another informant emphasised the fluctuating nature of yugonostalgia and how attitudes towards it can change, depending on the circumstances. After debating with me about the nature of

26 yugonostalgia, my interlocutor admitted that, even though in general he considered it to be a largely negative phenomenon he did not wish to be associated with; in a context of a conversation with Serbian nationalists, he would both embrace such an attitude and be happy to be characterised by the other as yugonostalgic.

These brief vignettes are just a few examples from my fieldwork experience that demonstrate the fleeting and fluctuating nature of yugonostalgia which, I argue, provides for its potentiality for becoming a positive phenomenon. I will illustrate this point on a number of occasions in the following chapters and will come back to formulating the thesis about the positive potential of yugonostalgia in the conclusions of the work. In the remainder of this section, I will explain what methods I used in order to achieve the aim of capturing the positive aspects of yugonostalgia.

A lot of insights that have influenced both my understanding of yugonostalgia and the shape of this project come from Memory Studies. Relatively new and vigorously developing, Memory Studies are an interdisciplinary field, relying on a broad range of concepts and methods from across numerous other disciplines. As a result, Memory Studies at the same time boast terminological richness and are plagued by a certain disjointedness (eds Erll et al. 2008: 3), as well as a lack of clear focus and methodological predictability (Confino 1997). Recently several attempts have been made at ‘codification’ of the field, with a number of books published to that end – either collected works of different authors, representing the overview of various aspects of memory studies (eds Erll et al. 2008; eds Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi & Levy 2011; eds Radstone & Schwarz 2010) or single-authored attempts at a synthesis of the discipline (Erll 2011; Radstone 2007). These and numerous other publications, in my opinion, still do not provide a clear-cut and easy answer to the question of how to do memory studies.

I agree with Peter Burke (1989: 108), who states that one of the main preoccupations of memory studies should be the question who wants whom to remember what, and why. This question, importantly, invites us to re-consider the nature of memory and recognise that it is always socially and culturally

27 constructed, a point I have already discussed in this chapter.14 To provide a meaningful answer to that question we can employ a number of different methods, depending on the aim of a particular research project. In my opinion, however, in producing this answer, we should prioritise the focus on cultural practices over the cultural representations, in order to avoid the creation of a flat and de-sanitised interpretation of the processes of cultural remembering and forgetting (cf. Erll 2011; I will return to this theoretical point throughout the thesis and discuss it at length in Chapter Four). Furthermore, these practices should be viewed in their broader socio-cultural and political context. Precisely for these reasons, ethnography, ‘the science of contextualisation’ (Greenhouse 2010: 2) seemed to be the most efficient mode of inquiry for this study.

Broader context of the particular aspects of memory games provides really useful and necessary information. One can write a good and interesting study of memory drawing just on the representations of the past in literature or cinema (Iordanova 2001; Miller 2002), or, for instance, looking at the changes in school curricula (Stojanović 2004). However, pairing these debates with the description of everyday lives and situations produces a much more nuanced picture of the complex processes of construction of the past. To heed David Sutton’s (1998: 3) warning that “without the context-dependent richness of different cultural accounts of historical practice, we will continue to reproduce sterile theoretical dichotomies”, I attempt to do precisely this throughout my thesis. For instance, while I draw on numerous popular culture representations of Yugoslav history, I try to complement them with discussions of the everyday understandings and relations to the past. In the Chapter Three I complement the discussion of the schools’ history curricula with the insights I gained from conversations with people working in educational sphere and school students. Similarly, in the Chapter Nine I discuss the museum representations of the Yugoslav past in the

14 Alan Confino (1997) reads this question as an invitation to focus just on the political, and criticises it, consequently, for reductionism. I, in turn, find his understanding of the political to be too one-sided and confined to the traditional spheres of the power struggle. If building, for instance, on the insights offered by Foucault and numerous feminist thinkers, we decentralise the location of power and learn to see it in the micro-levels of the everyday, the concept of the political will also overlap with cultural and social spheres, thus pre-empting Confino’s concerns.

28 context of commodification of socialist past happening not only in Serbia but in broader post-socialist region.

The decision to adopt an ethnographic micro-focus is also partially inspired by literature on the resistance to dominant ideologies, in particular, James Scott’s writing on resistance and the weapons of the weak (Scott 1985; 1990) and Michel de Certeau’s work on the practice of the everyday (1984). Scott’s work was instrumental in pointing out that resistance is not restricted to the traditional spheres of organised political protest. de Certeau’s writing helped to keep looking for the additional spheres of the protest by stipulating that it is not enough to examine just representations and modes of behaviour available in any given society; we have also to inspect what an ordinary person ‘does’ with them (de Certeau 1984: xii). Combination of these insights helps us develop counter- arguments against interpretation of power and dominant ideologies as all- permeating and ruling the lives of the ordinary citizens, and allows for an understanding of how counter-hegemonic discourses and practices are possible and how ordinary people can escape the dominant order without leaving it, as de Certeau’s has notably said (1984: xiii). Within the context of my study, these theorists help us to understand why and how, contrary to the dominant scathing view of the socialist past produced and circulated through the Serbian institutions of power (education system, mass media and to a certain extent the NGO sector), yugonostalgic interpretations of the same past are possible.

At the same time, in attempting to give voice to losers of transition, we should not fall prey to “romance of resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990). This debate is not new – back in early 1990s anthropology saw a peak of critical reflections on the limits of the concept of resistance (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1990; Brown 1996; Ortner 1995). These texts provide us with many reasons why we should try to avoid uncritical and romanticised celebration of resistance. But for the purpose of my own argument, I think that scholars studying the subjects of the post-socialist transition should be careful not to start exalting them too much. This can result in dangerous construction of yet another exotic ‘other’.

29

Anthropologists of post-socialist Europe have already made an important contribution to dispelling a traditional for transitology view of the subjects of post- socialist transformation as passive relics of the ‘old system’ who suffer only because they are personally incapable of adapting to the systemic changes, and not because of the nature of these changes. This has helped to debunk orientalist myth about the post-socialist subject, criticised, for instance, by Polish anthropologist Michał Buchowski (2006). But at the same time, as Andrew Gilbert (2010: 341) warns us, sometimes such writing can come dangerously close to the “romance of salvage and salvation”.

One can form this impression even from the subjects of investigation of some ethnographies coming out of post-socialism – be it the Romani performances in Russia (Lemon 2000), ritual cross-dressing masquerades in rural Bulgaria (Creed 2011), or the survival strategies of the dispossessed Polish workers and peasants (Rakowski 2009). Focus on the marginalised groups and practices is laudable, beyond doubt, and it brings to light the disenfranchised subjects and marginalised aspects of the post-socialist life, with a potential of re-affirming the agency of post- socialist subjects. Yet, at the same time, this runs dangerously close to sensationalism, especially depending on the sensibilities of separate scholars. As one of the participants in the online discussion of Rakowski’s book has ironically noted:

It turns out that to prove that people from former collective farms … are not camels; one has to sacrifice a lot of time and research effort. Sensitive ethnographer descends to the people, observes, listens and proclaims loudly – from the legitimate position, reinforced by the scientific methodology – to the supporters of the dominant discourse: they are not passive, they are very capable and even, in their own ways, creative (Święćkowska 2011). In an attempt to move away from such problematic academic engagement with the subject of post-socialism and post-socialist subjects, some scholars have started contesting the relevance of the concept itself. How long will it take for the former Eastern Bloc to stop being ‘post-socialist’ and become the part of the ‘normal’ world? Some actors from the region, especially from the states that have been ‘successful’ in their transition – and having reached certain standards of economic development, joined the EU and NATO – are especially articulate in

30 announcing the end of the post-socialist era. They claim to have dealt successfully with the legacy of socialism and the problems of transition (cf. Gilbert et al. 2008). Life there, in other words, has been ‘normalised’. Anthropologists of the region, however, drawing on the long-term ethnographic research, seem to be less enthusiastic (e. g. Dunn & Verdery 2011).

I concur with the idea that it is too soon to jettison the notion of ‘post-socialism’ – it can still provide us with the theoretical framework for analysis of what is happening on the ground, as well as with the fruitful metaphor for thinking about the future, a point I will return to in more detail in the conclusion of my thesis. Post-socialist subjects still provide us with a multiplicity of relevant stories; the other question is how we should approach them. In order to avoid the problematic exoticising approach I have criticised above, I decided to focus on the more positive and creative aspects of the everyday life in Serbia, positive and confirmative approaches towards the Yugoslav past, which, explicitly or indirectly, also feed into the activities aiming at the changing of the situation for the better.

This focus on the more positive aspects of the life in Serbia and the broader region of former Yugoslavia may seem like an unnecessary bias. I argue, however, that it is not, and, furthermore, several other scholars of the region seem to support similar ideas. Such focus will simply provide another, additional aspect to the story of the region, an aspect which has been ignored to a large extent by academia. As Gilbert et al. (2008) note, the study of former Yugoslavia has been dominated by the focus on the ethnic conflict, nationalism and the concept of “failed states” (see also Dragović-Soso 2008). Bringing other aspects of life in the region back into the spotlight is, therefore, an important task. Some of the people whom I met during my stay in Serbia shared this sentiment. Quite often, my interlocutors were expressing fatigue at being the ‘objects’ of studies focusing on nationalism, ethnic hatreds, construction of the exclusivist identities and violence. My interest in memory was also interpreted sometimes as problematic – people were tired of the endless conversations about the memories of negative and traumatic events (as I will illustrate in one of the following chapters, these negative events were an important part of the construction of the hegemonic version of

31

Serbian identity).15 Instead, my friends told me, scholars like me should focus on something positive, which can also be useful. Gilbert et al. (2008) and to a certain extent Biehl and Locke (2010) echo this sentiment in their work by calling for the study of hope and possibilities within the region.

My desire to look at the way yugonostalgia can be connected not only to people’s understanding of the present but also to their hopes for the future, motivated me to focus on the young people in my study. While I describe how I eventually honed down my research focus to look on the young left activists in the next chapter, ‘Finding Yugonostalgic Youth’, here I want to address some of the methodological issues connected to conducting fieldwork in such an environment.

My focus on the activists places my project within the subfield of anthropology of knowledge and experts. Young activists that I met in the field, as well as some other of my interlocutors, were indeed not only very knowledgeable about the topics that interested me, but were also capable of presenting a critical and insightful analysis of yugonostalgia, politics of memory and wider socio-political situation in Serbia. During our long conversations, I indeed sometimes wondered, to use Dominic Boyer’s (2008: 43) words: “With such informed informants … who needs analysts?” This important fieldwork experience helped me to experientially perceive and, because of that, even better internalise one of the most important – in my opinion – developments in anthropology, that sees “traditional informants of ethnography … as counterparts rather than ‘others’ – as both subjects and intellectual partners in inquiry” (Holmes & Marcus 2005: 236).

Its other important implication was the “possibility of systematically profaning this cult of theoretical genius which has retained its habitual integrity in social- scientific discourse and practice despite other more recent modes of reflexive and confessional intervention” (Boyer 2001: 210). This led me to question the unique position of the ‘anthropologist’ in the field in relation to knowledge production, as

15 It is necessary to clarify here that this fatigue was triggered among my informants only by discussions of the traumatic events relating to hegemonic version of Serbian national memory (like Kosovo myth or persecution of the Chetnik movement by Partisans). In the milieu where I conducted my fieldwork I have never observed reluctance to talk about traumatic events where Serbs were perpetrators, like wars of Yugoslav dissolution. On the contrary, there was a discernible acknowledgement there of the need for more of public critical engagement with these issues.

32 well as seeking to develop a stance that would acknowledge a need for publicly engaged anthropology.

Doing this particular kind of anthropology also has its challenges, which I will also explore in more detail in the following chapter. To begin with, as Boyer points out, such groups are able to restrict ethnographic access, monitor the acquisition and subsequent circulation of their expert knowledge and even to police ethnographic and theoretical content (Boyer 2008: 43). While I do not think that I have experienced significant ‘policing’ of the content on behalf of my interlocutors, sometimes the information that was handed to me was handled in very cautious manner, especially when our conversations were leaving the realm of history of Yugoslavia or yugonostalgia itself and were moving more to the current events. Likewise, in my fieldwork experience, ‘gatekeepers’ have played a very important role in shaping the group that I was conducting my research with.

In my research, as is often the case with anthropology of knowledge, I have relied heavily on recorded in-depth semi-structured interviews. My reliance on the recorded interviews might strike some as being at odds with the otherwise declared ethnographic mode of this study. As Martin G. Forsey (2010) argues, anthropologists still operate under the spell of a myth that equates the ethnography with an imagined idealised practice of the observation of the participant. My study indeed draws mainly on what he calls “engaged listening” (Forsey 2010: 71) and, more specifically, a range of recorded interviews. I have chosen this approach for a number of reasons. To begin with, from the very outset of my project I realised how difficult it would be for me to choose a community or a group of people to ‘observe’. Importantly, however, very early on in the research I fell for intellectual enjoyment of having extended conversation with interesting people on topics that were of mutual interest.

I do not approach the data I have gained using interviews as ‘objective’ information but rather acknowledge the multiplicity of factors that could have influenced the process. I recognise that my own subject position had an influence on the process, but also the fact that the interviews can become a thing of their own, shaping the eventual outcome (here I draw on Pole 2010 and his application

33 of actor-network theory to the life history interviews conducted). In conducting these interviews, I have engaged in the collaborative projects, wherein I have invited my interlocutors to discuss with me their views on a range of issues that we both considered relevant.

I have recruited informants for my interviews using the snowballing methodology, where people whom I met recommended to me potential future interlocutors. One of the obvious consequences of this technique is the way the research ‘pool’ is shaped by the previous participants of the study. In my case, some of the informants I have met earlier on in my fieldwork performed the role of the ‘gatekeepers’, influencing the direction of my research in ways that I describe in much more detail in the next chapter. Majority of my interviews were conducted with young people born after 1980, but I also have several interviews recorded with various ‘experts’ belonging to older generations – artists, historians and writers.

I was beginning these semi-structured interviews usually with invitation to talk about the childhood and any existing memories of the Socialist Yugoslavia and proceeded with a number of questions about Socialist Yugoslavia, contemporary Serbia and yugonostalgia. The duration of interviews varied from forty minutes to three hours. Usually, I had conversations with people with whom I have recorded interviews both before the recording sessions and after. In many cases I met these people later during my stay in Serbia and have developed a relationship that, I hope, can be described as a friendship.

I have been able to maintain some of these relationships even after I left Serbia through the use of new media and social networking sites, in particular Facebook. Both during my fieldwork and after it, Facebook has also been quite useful in allowing me to follow broader developments in Serbia via commentaries my friends were posting as well as their specific activities – or at least those activities they were talking about or advertising on-line.

Beside interviews that I have recorded and extensive conversations I have had with different people during my fieldwork, I also relied on participant observation. However, there was not much to observe when it came to the explicit

34

‘yugonostalgic’ practices of my informants, and, vice versa. Explicitly yugonostalgic events that I attended during my fieldwork were not often attended by my informants. For instance, the celebrations of the former Yugoslav public holiday at Tito’s burial place in Belgrade, which I will describe in Chapter Four, in general are shunned by some of my informants, even though they consider themselves yugonostalgics.

Figure 1.1. Old and young participants at the celebration of Tito’s birthday, May 2009, Belgrade. Picture by author. This is not to say that there are no young people present at these celebrations. Contrary to popular stereotypes claiming that only the older generation is active in this regard, there are also younger people, and that’s not counting the journalists who are covering the events (see Fig 1.1). I met there, for instance, a seventeen- year old Milan, who told me that he had been coming here since his childhood days together with his grandfather and, after his grandfather passed away, he started coming on his own. The reason why some of my informants were avoiding this event was its explicitly yugonostalgic character in the eyes of everyone in Serbian society, as well as its connection to Josip Broz Tito and the official history of Socialist Yugoslavia. As I have already indicated, and will explain in more detail in the rest of this thesis, some of my informants were distancing themselves from

35 events like this because of their attempts to create the Serbian New Left, which will not be connected to what they perceived as mistakes of the Yugoslav past.

I also conducted participant observation in some of the events that ostensibly are not connected to the subject of my study. Throughout my stay in Serbia, I attended numerous events (co)organised or attended by my activist friends – ranging from the evenings of feminist poetry and academic seminars to organised protests and strikes. While some of those events were at least somewhat connected to Yugoslavia, most of them were rather dealing with the challenges that Serbian society has to face in the present. Being there still contributed on a number of important levels both to my understanding of the contemporary situation in Serbia and to the intricate relations people can have to yugonostalgia and the Yugoslav past.

Ethnography that I have produced as a result of my stay in Serbia is quite far from the adulated disciplinary ideal of ‘thick description’. However, as George E. Marcus (2010: 77–78) contends, researchers working in similar contexts do not strive to describe a ‘group’ but work with the already known, thus main goal is not description, but interpretation that researchers develop in collaboration with their subjects. This important point definitely holds relevance for my study and has influenced the process and results of my research. At the same time, I agree with Boyer that “even the most elaborate and technically precise modes of rationality possess a halo of sentiments, affects, intentions and aspirations, none of which should be reduced to secondary status in expert knowledge-making” (2008: 43), and it is our task as researchers to rediscover these dimensions. This is particularly pertinent in my case study. After all, as I have already illustrated, yugonostalgia is at the same time a way of relating to the past and constructing a certain version of it, as well as a complex emotion. Following my interlocutors ‘home’ – a metaphor and specific practice that Boyer suggests in order to overcome the exclusive focus on the logico-rational – for me remained impossible in most cases, and our exchanges were mainly restricted to the format of the interview, as well as pre- and post- interview conversations. Still, because of the nature of our conversations, I did gain insight into the emotions and desires of many of my informants.

36

Finally, I want to address here the implications of my own yugonostalgic position for this study. As I have already noted, some may see it as quite problematic. For instance, Nadkarni and Shewchenko (2004) are quite critical of the (mainly Western) foreign scholars of nostalgia for socialism, who, in their opinion, are too enchanted by the phenomenon and celebrate it quite uncritically. Although I might have started from such an uncritical position, over the years of intellectual engagement with the subject I have come to occupy a more nuanced attitude towards yugonostalgia that acknowledges first and foremost its ambiguity. However, because of both the intellectual environment and, more generally, the political and socio-economic situation in Serbia, the former Yugoslav region, Europe and the world, I find it necessary to emphasise first and foremost the positive dimensions of yugonostalgia.

1.7. Outline of the thesis

The following, Second Chapter of thesis introduces the subjects of this research – informants, friends and occasional interlocutors – young people who have contributed to this study in a multiplicity of ways. I begin by exploring the ambiguous position of youth in Serbian society. Young people here, just as in many other societies, are seen at once as the cause of many problems haunting Serbia and potential saviours from them. At the same time, I have encountered a certain tendency on behalf of older generation to portray their younger counterparts in rather negative terms, as passive and apathetic successors of the generations that managed to bring Milošević down. This othering of the contemporary young generation in Serbia is in part a complex legacy of the socialist period, the period under Milošević rule and, importantly, a function of the transition. Failing to fulfil quickly its own promises, it produced the masses of supposedly passive and ambivalent youth – youth, ‘lost in transition’, as one local sociological study has called them (Nikolić & Mihailović 2004).

The serendipity of the fieldwork, eventually, helped me to discover the yugonostalgic youth that I was looking for. Furthermore, early on in my research I realised that not only many of my informants are yugonostalgic, but also that many of them belong to the leftist activist scene in Belgrade. As a result, I made a

37 decision to limit my focus group mainly to the activists, since this would help to develop my argument about the positive dimensions of yugonostalgia. This decision, however, had certain pitfalls. Therefore, in the last section of this chapter, I explain the absence of certain voices of Serbian youth from my research project, and discuss its consequences for my study.

The Third Chapter, ‘Being Yugonostalgic Against the Odds’, provides the answer to the seemingly challenging question of how young people without much lived experience of Socialist Yugoslavia can have yugonostalgic attitudes. Drawing on the argument that we can treat (yugo)nostalgia as a mode of relating to the past, closely related to memory, in this chapter I look at a few main mechanisms of formation and transmission of yugonostalgia.

Before looking at the possible ways yugonostalgia is formed, I examine in detail the politics of memory in the post-socialist region generally and in Serbia specifically. I argue that we cannot understand reasons for and content of yugonostalgia without situating it in the context of anti-communist historical revisionism. This trend had begun sometime before the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, and eventually was one of the reasons for it. In the first half of the chapter I describe the main features of this process.

In the second part of the chapter I examine the possible factors influencing yugonostalgia among young people. I begin by looking at the family context. Stories that I have heard from my informants complicate both the conventional understanding of the unproblematic linear transmission of memories in families and the stereotypical explanations of popular loyalties to the Socialist Yugoslavia. Some of the yugonostalgics that I have met indeed have come from families devoted to the ideals of the Socialist Yugoslavia. At the same time, in a few instances, I met people who came from – as they themselves have admitted – rather nationalistic families.

Yet a focus only on families does not explain the formation of young people’s attitude towards Yugoslavia, therefore I shift my analysis to a broader socio- cultural processes related to the evaluation of Yugoslav history in Serbian society. To begin with, I discuss the way history of Yugoslavia is (not) being taught in

38

Serbian schools. I look at the way the failure of the Serbian contemporary state to come up with definite and clear position on Yugoslav past is mirrored in the history textbooks, teachers’ confusion and, ultimately, pupils’ ambivalent attitudes.

Since my research has provided me with the impression that schooling cannot provide young people in Serbia with ready and easy answers to the questions about what was Socialist Yugoslavia, I decided to take into consideration also other sites of production and dissemination of knowledge. I discuss, in turns, the role of socialisation in peer milieu, and popular culture.

The Fourth Chapter, ‘Introducing Post-Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire’, serves as a theoretical opening to the nexus of the following four chapters dealing with the recurring tropes of yugonostalgic narratives. It has been pointed out previously (Jansen 2005), that most of yugonostalgic stories keep referring to a similar set of objects – be it material things or ideas – from the past. In order to analyse them I have chosen to use the popular concept of the lieux de mémoire developed by the French historian Pierre Nora.

Critical analysis of the origins of the concept and its subsequent uses demonstrates its somewhat flawed and problematic nature. Nevertheless, some other aspects of the lieux de mémoire make them particularly suitable for the analysis of yugonostalgic narratives. Importantly, lieux de mémoire point to characteristic for our times fragmentation of the singular version of the past. Thus they turn our attention to the role of agency in the creation of the past, and emphasise the dynamic and performative nature of the past. In other words, in contrast to our previous understandings of the past and its representations as something fixed and written from above, the concept of lieux de mémoire helps us to understand better how yugonostalgia comes into being. I finish the chapter by illustrating the concept through analyses of the continuing celebrations of Dan Mladosti (Day of the Youth) – an official holiday of Socialist Yugoslavia, synonymous with Josip Broz Tito – in Belgrade.

The Fifth Chapter, ‘Political Legacy of SFRY as Post-Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire’, explores the first cluster of these lieux referring to the political aspects of Yugoslav ideology. First, I focus on the Yugoslav ‘solution’ of the nationalist question – the

39 ideological slogan and the supposed lived reality of the brotherly co-existence of the numerous Yugoslav national and ethnic entities. This lieu was quite popular in the first wave of yugonostalgic texts that appeared in the 1990s. Back then it was articulated in the context of the ethnic intolerance and violence, pointing out that the possibility of a peaceful common life was an important act negating nationalistic ideologies stating otherwise. In this context, two other Yugoslav myths were salient as well – the myth about common anti-fascist partisan struggle from the Second World War, and the concept of Yugoslavism, an identity that was meant to surpass and supplant the separate national identities. In this chapter I illustrate how and why these lieux remain relevant for my informants.

In second part of the chapter I discuss the figure of Josip Broz Tito as post- Yugoslav lieu de mémoire. Life-long leader of Socialist Yugoslavia, considered sometimes a lynchpin that held all of a country together (Bringa 2004), he has become a controversial figure in contemporary Serbia. I illustrate here the attitudes of my informants towards Tito. This discussion helps to understand how young leftists attempt to critically re-evaluate some aspects of the Yugoslav legacy.

The Sixth Chapter discusses the lieux de mémoire connected to the Yugoslav internationalism, meaning mainly the international position Yugoslavia held and its consequences for the everyday lives of its citizens. Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia indeed managed to retain a unique position in the Cold War era – although socialist, after the rift between Stalin and Tito, it slid out of the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union and was one of the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement. “The country was respected in the world”, my informants often told me, proceeding to either further mystify the unique Yugoslav position, or to criticise it.

One of the consequences of the unique Yugoslav position in the world was the relative freedom of travel that its citizens could enjoy. This comes as a stark contrast to contemporary situation in Serbia. At the time when I was conducting my fieldwork, Serbia still waited to be included on so-called “white Schengen” list, which would allow its citizens to travel without visas to the countries of the Schengen zone. This limited travel options and was frustrating many of my

40 informants, who nostalgically were talking about the legendary Yugoslav “red passport”, granting its owners freedom of travel.

The frustration with contemporary (im)possibility of travel was even stronger in the light of the new borders between the former Yugoslav republics. Here, however, yugonostalgia can come dangerously close to overlapping with nationalism. At least according to some critics, yugonostalgia in Serbia can be just a case of Serbian nation losing their privileged position in the Socialist Republic. Many of my informants were quite aware of this criticism and were trying to distance themselves from such nationalistic position.

The Seventh Chapter discusses the broad cluster of socio-economic lieux de mémoire we can refer to as ‘Yugoslav dream’. To set out the background for understanding the relevance and importance of these lieux in Serbia, I discuss briefly the dire current economic situation in Serbia. In this context, socio- economic lieux de mémoire become quite prominent and people keep referring to the Yugoslav times as times of better economic situation, stability and prospects for the future. These themes re-emerged quite often during my everyday encounters in Belgrade, when random people were nostalgically remembering “Tito’s times” as times of economic prosperity.

While most of my informants did not have the memories of this economic prosperity, some still recounted the stories about the better lives their families had back in those times. But even the ones without such memories were still making references to how people could live pošteno (respectfully). While there is a lot of academic debate about the economy of the Socialist Yugoslavia, whether it can be considered successful, and if yes, what were the reasons for that ‘success’, it is obvious, that in contemporary Serbia the economic situation both on macro level and in terms of everyday experience is so appalling that people generally keep referring to the Yugoslav times nostalgically, evoking different economic lieux de mémoire.

At the same time, the salience of other ‘social’ lieux, such as security, point out to increased precariousness of life in contemporary Serbia. I illustrate the situation by providing an account of the 2010 Belgrade Gay Pride, which, although heralded

41 as ‘successful’, did not end in bloodshed only because of the strong efforts on behalf of the Serbian state to secure the event. This event can be seen as a heightened demonstration of the hatred towards the unwanted Other. Yet at the same time, on a smaller-scale – and therefore less televised and discussed in the media – outbursts of violence happen in Serbia continuously against the Roma population and against women, contributing to the feeling of insecurity in people’s lives. Yugoslav times, again, provide a strong contrast to this situation. As my informants narrate, those were the times when people felt safe and secure in their day-to-day lives.

The last chapter in this thematic cluster, Chapter Eight, is about common Yugoslav culture as the post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire. In the beginning I deal with the methodological problem of what exactly I discuss in this chapter. I limit my focus here only to the cultural products and phenomena produced in Yugoslav times, leaving the discussion of the countless cultural products referring to Yugoslavia to the next chapter.

Cultural lieux de mémoire that were mentioned to me by my informants were quite overwhelming in their quantity. Therefore, instead of discussing separate lieu, I decided to organise the discussion in this chapter around three themes that my informants considered important to point out to me about Yugoslav culture: the mere existence of this culture; the reasons for its existence; and its qualitative characteristics.

The need to reaffirm the existence of the common Yugoslav culture stems from the fact that, similarly to the situation in 1990s, it is often denied by the proponents of the nationalistic ideology. Longing for the larger Yugoslav culture is often phrased also in very specific terms. The shrinking of cultural space only to the borders of one’s nation limits the possibilities for the local cultural actors. They have to rely on smaller audiences, especially in the context of the strengthening of border control between Serbia and other former Yugoslav nations.

Cultural producers also have other reasons to long for the Yugoslav days, when culture was not subsumed entirely into the logic of the free market economy. Socialist Yugoslavia differed from other socialist states in Europe because of its

42 relative lack of ideological control over culture. Many of my informants were nostalgically remembering those times, as the times when artists not only were free from the market but also received support from the state.

Finally, there was, one may say, very nostalgic opinion voiced by many of my informants, that Yugoslav culture was simply ‘better’ than the contemporary Serbian culture. This comparison very often served as a criticism of the broader socio-cultural situation in Serbia, a perceived ‘lack of culture’ among the broader population and Serbia’s cultural politics. Sometimes Yugoslav culture was also compared favourably against the contemporary ‘Western’ culture. In eyes of my informants it was better due to its freedom from the market, as well as unique features resulting from specificity of Yugoslav experiment, offering an international example of creative cultural hybridity.

My final chapter of the thesis, Chapter Nine, addresses the question of commodification of yugonostalgia. Here I address the criticism voiced by Zala Volčić that yugonostalgia has become a product of the free market. I trace the origins of such views on (yugo)nostalgia back to thinkers like Fredric Jameson and Arjun Appadurai. This criticism cannot be easily dismissed in my case, because it was also quite often voiced by my informants as well.

I illustrate how yugonostalgia became commodified using the example of Leksikon Yu Mitologije (Andrić et al. 2005) – an encyclopaedia of popular Yugoslav mythology. While the project was begun even before SFRY fell apart, the book was published only in the early 2000s and immediately became a commercial success. It can be interpreted as a sign of the commodification of what used to be an intellectual endeavour. However, I argue that the book still has a potential to instigate critical engagement with the past.

I discuss how ambiguous commodification of the Yugoslav past is in contemporary Serbia using the case of the Museum of History of Yugoslavia. While some of the practices of the museum indeed represent problematic trends in representation of the socialist past, it also still remains an institution ready to offer critical insights into that past, which is of high importance in the context of contemporary Serbia.

43

I finish my discussion of the ambiguity of the processes of commodification of yugonostalgia with an overview of consumption practices of my friends and informants. I illustrate their conscious consumption. However, this does not turn my thesis into yet another celebration of ‘creative consumerism’. On the contrary, I follow some of my informants to critically analyse the commodification of yugonostalgia and the limits of its critical consumption.

In Conclusions of my thesis I emphasise my commitment to illustrating the positive dimensions of yugonostalgia. To this end, I briefly summarise some of the most important findings of my research. First, this thesis illustrates that young people in contemporary Serbia differ significantly from the popular bias depicting them as either dangerously violent or ambiguous and passive. I have focused on the small leftist activist scene in Belgrade. This attention highlights the pro-active attitude of some young people in Serbia towards their situation. Additionally, it helps us to understand better negotiations of the meaning of the Left in post- socialist Serbia.

Detailed analysis of the yugonostalgic narratives is an important contribution of this work to the study of the phenomenon. I also argue in the Conclusions that we can situate the specific yugonostalgia that I have investigated in this thesis in the context of the recent global attempts to critically engage with the neoliberal order through re-invigoration of the leftist ideas and ideals. I finish conclusions - and thesis – by arguing that yugonostalgia can powerfully force us to critically engage with the present.

44

Chapter Two

Introducing Yugonostalgic Youth in Serbia

“Young people in Eastern Europe have been the most pro-reform age group … It is mainly older people who are nostalgic and sensitive to what has been lost during the reforms” argues Roberts (2009: 166) in his study of young people in transition. This chapter introduces the group of young people who contradict such problematic claims naturalising neoliberal hegemony. These young people, the main protagonists and storytellers of the consequent chapters, can be characterised as ‘nostalgic’ for Socialist Yugoslavia, yet, at the same time, they support radical changes, albeit not the changes welcomed and heralded in by the transition culture.

To begin with, I sketch out the ambiguity of the concept of youth in general, and demonstrate how these ambiguities manifest themselves in contemporary Serbia. A number of contradictory discourses circulate in the public sphere here, presenting different evaluations of the place and role of youth in Serbia. At the same time, the negative understanding of youth seems to be prevailing. This understanding is an outcome of negative comparison of contemporary youth to previous generations. This comparison glorifies preceding generations of young people, without taking into consideration the changes in material, social, and political conditions in Serbia. Resulting unenthusiastic perception of youth explains why at the beginning of my fieldwork I was often discouraged by members of older generations from conducting research on yugonostalgia among the youth, who, supposedly, are passive and inert, trapped in the crisis of Serbian society, or actively nationalistic (and hence, anti-Yugoslav).

I describe, how through the serendipity of fieldwork, I discovered young people defying such popular negative stereotypes. Very early into my fieldwork I realised that a majority of these young people also belonged to what can be loosely describes as a “New Left” scene in Serbia. Consequently, I decided to adjust the focus of my study and examine yugonostalgia specifically in the leftist activist milieu. This methodological decision helped bring to the fore the often overlooked role of young people as active agents of political, cultural, and social life in

45 contemporary Serbia. In the conclusion of this chapter I discuss some of the consequences of leaving out of the research possible yugonostalgic subjects from the other youth groups, as well as argue against the deterministic and naturalising attribution of yugonostalgia to all leftists in contemporary Serbia.

2.1. Two visions of Serbian youth16

My decision to study yugonostalgia among young people in an attempt to curb the negative understanding of the yugonostalgia as debilitating fixation on the past, is informed by a specific reading of youth as a proactive, future-oriented and capacitated category of the population. This reading, however, co-exists in contemporary global and Serbian ideascapes with alternative interpretations of youth. These alternative images represent youth as a passive and confused mass or as a destructive force. They are a result of the traditional othering of the young generations by older ones, who also happen to be more powerful and hence have the capacity to produce and popularise such images.

At the same time, these negative images of youth are also products of specific neoliberal discourses, which often do not recognise that precisely global neoliberal and regional post-socialist transformations contribute significantly to the problems young people are faced with. Furthermore, dominant interpretations of youth as a category in contemporary Serbia are often constructed under the influence of some recent events where youth played a prominent role, yet without taking into account the reality of young people’s lives in Serbia and the broader socio-political context.

How do we define “youth”? The first Serbian Law on Youth, adopted only in 2011, controversially stretches the definition to include people between 15 and 30 years of age in this category (Vlada Republike Srbije 2011). According to recent statistics, approximately 20 % of Serbian population belongs to this group (Tanjug & Beta 2011). If we rely only on such legislative and statistical data, however, we will not

16 I use “Serbian” here and throughout the thesis as a traditional, but rather inconvenient, shorthand. I am aware that such usage contributes to reification of the notion of “Serbian-ness” and oftentimes obscures the much more complex reality. For instance, in the case of “Serbian youth”, this phrase privileges the dimension of being “Serbian” and obscures the reality of multiplicity of other factors that may be more relevant for young people living in contemporary Serbia – like other ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class, regional belonging, religion, and so on.

46 learn much about lives of the young people in contemporary Serbia, about their problems and needs, strategies and desires, imaginations and the wider public image that they have. Such facts also obscure the constructed nature of the category of youth in general. Far from being natural, this concept, as we know and use it, is deeply rooted in the history of Western modernity (Ariès 1962).

Further, such simplified definition of the category of ‘youth’ covers up the very complex and contradictory nature of the phenomenon. This concept can stand for different - if not clashing - things at different times. As Jean and John Comaroff (2006: 268) observe:

Youth, in other words, are complex signifiers, the stuff of mythic extremes … simultaneously idealizations and monstrosities, pathologies and panaceas. … In short, youth stands for many things at once: for the terrors of the present, the errors of the past, the prospect of a future. For old hopes and new frontiers. Discourses on youth that circulate in contemporary Serbian politics, popular culture and academia illustrate this observation very well. One recent policy report notices the existence of a “schizophrenic” (sic) vision of youth held by policymakers and media, whereby:

…young people fall into one of two categories: the worst or the best of society. For many, young people are perceived in either purely negative terms - according to which young people are destructive, passive, demotivated, unreliable, reactionary, and even spoiled - or in exclusively positive terms - according to which young people are perceived as the future or tomorrow’s leaders (Azanjac et al. 2012: 48-49, italics in the original). An optimistic attitude towards youth is especially discernible in official discourses. Slogans like “youth are Serbia’s future” sprinkle the statements of Serbian politicians and government employees (Azanjac et al. 2012: 50), paying the traditional lip-service to the supposedly important role of young people in the country’s present and future. Such hypocrisy is not typical just of Serbia, but is rather a local variation of the more general tendency towards ageism in politics that masks itself with the unctuous valorisation of the role of the young. The discrepancy between such talk and reality is elucidated by the limited real participation of the young people in Serbian politics, a point I will return to later in this chapter.

47

The Serbian state indeed recently made some effort to acknowledge the importance of young people, to address the problems they are facing, and to provide for their engagement in political, social and economic life of the country. Establishment of a separate Ministry of Youth and Education in 2007 as well as adoption of the already mentioned Law on Youth in 2011 can be seen as a proof of positive changes in Serbia’s youth policies. There is a broad range of other state- run and funded programs and projects targeting youth, like the Youth Parliament of Serbia, regional offices for addressing the questions of youth throughout Serbia, various scholarships and grants. However, many young activists themselves feel that these latest attempts are still deeply paternalistic and treat youth as recipients of state policies, rather than active partners (Azanjac et al. 2012).

The state is not the only actor that concurrently popularises and tries to capitalise on the potentially positive connotations of youth in contemporary Serbia. Many political parties have youth sections, which are often used as a springboard by youth interested in political careers as well as by other young people because of the popular perception that one has to have political connections to advance in life (Azanjac et al. 2012; Vukelić & Stanojević 2012: 389).

Furthermore, there is a large range of non-governmental organizations in Serbia preoccupied explicitly or implicitly with problems of youth. Many of these organizations are sponsored by Western donors, thus allowing for the presence of international actors and influences on the youth scene. International institutions such as the World Bank and the European Commission are encouraging countries to engage more with youth issues and are sponsoring different youth-oriented programs (Roberts 2009: 180). And of course, all of these non-state players use rhetoric of the important role of Serbian youth as a resource to explain and legitimize their activity.

Yet some recent events in Serbia seem to contradict such glorification of youth. Young people have played an important role in recent violent mass protests – like demonstrations against Kosovo independence on 21st of February 2008, anti-Gay Pride protests on 10th of October 2010 (see Fig. 2.1), or protests against the arrest

48 of war-crimes suspect Ratko Mladić on 29th of May 2011. These protests not only severely damaged private and public property but were also manifestations of extreme nationalism and intolerance, reminiscent of the ‘dark period’ of 1990s.

Fig. 2.1. Youth rioting on the streets of Belgrade during Gay Pride on 10th of October 2010 (source: www.blic.rs). See Chapter Seven for more detailed discussion of this event. Nevertheless, some actors in Serbia interpreted these manifestations and young people’s role in them positively. For instance, Vojislav Koštunica, leader of the conservative Democratic Party of Serbia and Prime Minister of Serbia at the times of protests against Kosovo independence, commented in their aftermath that “Serbian People, and especially youth, have sent the message that they demand the rule of law, justice and freedom” (Bogdanović 2008). After 10th of October 2010, many commentators on the violent anti-Gay Pride protests were shifting the blame for the riots from their actual perpetrators to the “selfish and stubborn LGBT activists” (e.g. commentary section to Tanjug & B92 2010) who proceeded with the Gay Pride events despite the fact that many right wing organisations were threatening protests against it. Some Serbian citizens even justified these riots as legitimate dissent against the “Western disease”17 threatening to undermine the very foundations of Serbian nation (see commentary section to Beta 2010).

17 Interpretation of the LGBT movement as “Western disease” is quite popular in all of the former Socialist Eastern Europe. Probably it is both a legacy of socialist times, when homosexuality was

49

A Facebook page with the rather lengthy title Како Вас Није Срамота Да Србску Децу Зовете Хулиганима18 (“Shame on You for Calling Serbian Children Hooligans”) provides a good example of such attitudes. The page claims to represent a unified platform for the different and often warring soccer club fans, protests against the “demoncracy” (sic) that, supposedly, is destroying Serbia since the fall of Milošević. It promotes Serbian “patriotic” right-wing parties, all the while praising Mladić’s role in the Srebrenica massacre and advising how to arm oneself for successful participation in the protest (Facebook n.d.). Young members of soccer fun clubs and right-wing organisations are represented here as contemporary heroes and the future of the Serbian nation.

Contrary to such celebratory accounts, others interpreted the role of young people in these events in negative terms. It is used to strengthen the point that youth are both the product and the cause of the problems plaguing the state. Exemplary interpretation was offered by Olja Bećković, presenter of the popular TV show Utisak nedelje (“Impression of the Week”), aired on B92 TV station19 in the immediate aftermath of the unrest on 10th of October 2010. Bećković talked about protests as acts of ‘confused children’, who were growing up without proper care, in conditions of disintegration of the traditional familial and state support networks. Similarly, one Serbian scholar laments: “They grew up surrounded by narratives about evil others who want to destroy their own people, about an insensitive and often cruel world where they could not expect to find justice and understanding” (Petrović 2011: 144). As the result of such popular perception,

criminalised and medicalised, and an interesting illustration of Occidentalism. In the Serbian case, this discourse was popularised in 1990s by radical nationalists (Bakić 2009). 18 It is quite indicative that the name of the page on Facebook is written in Cyrillic alphabet. While Serbian language uses both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, with an increase in use of Latin with the on-set of the internet era, nationalistic circles prefer to use the Cyrillic script, identifying it as one of the core aspects of Serbian tradition and identity. One can find examples of this stance on the page in question. 19 B92 TV station was formed as a local Belgrade independent TV station in 2000, as an offshoot of the famous independent radio station with the same name that played an important role in creating an alternative cultural and informational space during Milošević era (Collin 2001). By the time I started my fieldwork in Serbia, however, both TV and radio stations had succumbed to commercialisation, and on a number of occasions I heard people dismissively comparing it to the “Pink TV” – the notoriously ‘trashy’ Serbian TV station. Nevertheless, alongside with a number of reality shows and popular TV series, B92 TV continues to air what are considered to examples of engaged critical and investigative journalism.

50 many people in Serbia speak of youth as “lost in transition”.20 They are disorderly, but also undecided, passive, ambivalent, feeling trapped and hopeless. Such portrayal of Serbian youth bears negative repercussions for the popular understanding of the role young people can and do play in the country’s life. In a paternalistic move, it denies the agency of young people, portraying them as dupes and victims, in need of help and guidance from state and society (Petrović 2011: 157).

As I have demonstrated in this section, popular attitudes towards youth in Serbia vary. Yet, at the same time, a tendency to ‘other’ young people - to portray them in a rather negative light, either as perpetrators of violence or passive victims of circumstances - is really strong. I often faced this interpretation when I started my fieldwork. I was repeatedly discouraged by different people from doing research among Serbian youth, who supposedly were indifferent not only to their country’s present, but also its past and future. In the next section I explore in more detail some of the reasons for and implications of such othering of Serbian young people.

2.2. Othering of contemporary Serbian youth

Very soon after I commenced my fieldwork in May of 2009, I followed recommendations of several Serbian acquaintances and visited a Belgrade NGO Centar Za Kulturnu Dekontaminaciju (CZKD, Centre for Cultural Decontamination). This Centre, led by charismatic long-time director Borka Pavičević, has a well- established reputation of being a crucial centre of critical intellectual activity in Serbia. During the Milošević times it was also one of the pivotal actors on the oppositional scene. It was created on the 1st of January 1995, as “a place of gathering for anti-war campaigners, intellectual and artistic platform that resisted the politics of terror on the territory of the former Yugoslavia” (www.czkd.org). Centre is strongly associated with so-called Second Serbia – loose circle of the liberally minded intellectuals that was formed in opposition to Milošević regime and what Second Serbia members saw as his official, nationalistic First Serbia (see Petrović & Spasić 2012 for overview of history of Second Serbia and of some of the

20 Indicatively, Young People Lost in Transition was a title of recent sociological study of youth in Serbia (Nikolić & Mihailović 2004). Nebojša Petrović (2011: 143) provides several other “alarmist” titles of recent studies of youth in Serbia: “in claws of transition”, “betrayed expectations”, “sacrificed generation”.

51 criticism levelled against it). Today, CZKD positions itself on its official web page as “a space for production and demonstration of the contemporary culture and art” and even, more ambitiously, “a place where people go so that they can become free” (CZKD 2012). Running on donations from local and international sponsors, Centre each year organizes or serves as a location for numerous exhibitions, performances, lectures, public lectures and discussions, film screenings and other activities.

After I entered CZKD’s premises in a beautiful historic location in centre of Belgrade, a big vintage map of Yugoslavia hanging of the wall greeted me. This gave me an impression that I came to a right place, and that my new friends were right in saying that people from CZKD could help me with conducting my research on yugonostalgia. I managed to arrange a meeting with Borka herself. However, after I began conversation with her in a couple of days, my enthusiasm began to dissipate. When we started discussing my ideas for the research project, initially Borka was nodding in approval and agreeing that yugonostalgia is interesting and important phenomenon, worth exploring. But when she heard about my plans to look specifically at the young people, she expressed strongly a negative reaction:

Forget about it. You will never find anyone interested in Yugoslavia among the youth. That kids nowadays; they do not know and do not want to know anything. They have been brainwashed and they do not travel at all. What do you expect to hear from them? Since at that early stage of my fieldwork I indeed had not yet met any young yugonostalgics, these words really confounded me. Luckily, soon enough I had a chance to prove to myself that Borka was not right (see next section of this chapter). But her words still stuck in my mind. I was wondering why Borka – herself already a mature woman, who was born and lived a large part of her life in Socialist Yugoslavia – had such negative impression of younger generations.

Throughout my fieldwork I repeatedly encountered variations of Borka’s comments – often from the older generations, but also, sometimes, from young people themselves. Even people who eventually played an important role in helping me to find informants were initially quite sceptical about the possibility of finding any yugonostalgics among the youth, in particular among the age group I was interested in. Instead, they suggested working with slightly older people,

52 belonging to the generation who had an experience of activism in 1990s and early 2000s, thus introducing me to the imagined division between the ‘better’ youth of previous days and the ‘worse’ young people of contemporary times. Most interestingly, many of my informants also portrayed their peers rather unfavourably, illustrating how popular are negative stereotypes about young people in Serbia, and how they contribute to othering of this group:

Contemporary youth does not have anything to look forward to and hope for. They are apathetic and indifferent. That’s also the reason why they are so prone to the right-wing ideologies, when one can think that if you kick out somebody from Serbia that will solve all of the problems. The right-wingers are not that numerous here but they are very visible and loud, so they attract [young people easily] (Časlav) What are the reasons for such prevalence of this negative image of contemporary Serbian youth? And how does it relate to the real situation? On the one hand, we might interpret such virtually uniform insistence as a sign that contemporary Serbian youth indeed are rather problem-ridden (a number of studies would support this observation as well, consider, for instance, Nikolić & Mihailović 2004; Obradović 2008).

On the other hand, in interpreting these attitudes we should also take into consideration the processes of production of cultural stereotypes and othering. Highly charged image of the unruly and difficult contemporary Serbian youth can lend itself to a variety of uses by different circles and groups in Serbia. It can be used in order to try and avoid the burden of responsibility or, on the contrary, as a part of the blame game. The state can use it as a part of strategy of normalisation of neoliberal condition with its shrinking of the youth policies, as it happens elsewhere in the world (Grossberg 2005; Comaroff & Comaroff 2006). Some intellectuals or artists may use this image to insinuate an innate and intricate link between hooliganism, a culture of violence and the Serbian state (Filipović 2010). Finally, well-established liberal opposition circles can apply this image (possibly inadvertently) as a part of their myopic construction of the alternative scene in Serbia, a process that fails to take into account some new and alternative developments, like the rise of the New Left.

53

A brief historical overview of the situation of young people in the region will help us to better understand some of the motives and methods of these othering practices. It will provide us with information about the changes that have occurred in the circumstances that young people live in. At the same time, this information is relevant not only to discussion of the situation of youth in Serbia but also as a mirror of the broader processes happening in the country and the region. Ultimately, however, these legacies provide a rich pool of symbols and signs that are used as points of reference and for comparison and contrast during the contemporary debate on Serbian youth.

2.3. Youth in SFRY and Milošević’s Serbia

In SFRY, as in other socialist countries (Pilkington 1994), official ideology relegated youth to the privileged position of builders of country’s future. But this special status came with the additional burden of high demands. These demands, to a large extent, were based on the historical legacy of young people’s participation in the Second World War and in the post-war renewal period. However, heroic deeds of the partisan struggle and sacrifices of the post-war reconstruction that became one of the foundational myths of Socialist Yugoslavia were difficult to match in the context of 1960s-1970s. This led to generational conflicts, which escalated in particular in 1968-1970, under the influence of the global 1968 protests (Kanzleiter 2008; cf. also Ramet 1995).

Sharon Zukin (1975) describes the mutual frustrations that youth and older generations articulated about in each other in her study of Yugoslav youth activists. Some of her older informants were really disappointed by what they saw as young people’s obsession with a consumerist lifestyle at the expense of commitment to revolutionary ideals. At the same time, young people were also feeling let down by Socialist Yugoslavia. Active members of Yugoslav League of Communists, who participated in Zukin’s study, voiced strong criticism of the official party line, and of high-ranking Yugoslav officials of the older generation, for lack of true commitment to revolutionary ideals and betrayal of ‘real’ communism.

But even youth not involved directly in Yugoslav politics had many reasons to experience frustration. Socialist Yugoslavia officially was supposed to provide for

54 many aspects of young people’s life – education, health care, employment, housing, entertainment – but was struggling with fulfilling these promises. Structural unemployment is one of the most obvious examples. It became a discernible problem in Yugoslavia in 1950s and haunted its population, in particular youth, until the country’s end, despite the state’s attempts to solve it by allowing citizens to work in Western European states, creating a significant stratum of gastarbeiter – guest workers (Woodward 1995). Failure of the Yugoslav version of a planned economy to provide consumer goods to meet the ever growing demands of citizen- consumers is another interesting example (Patterson 2011).

“Blocked” post-socialist transformation under Milošević brought around many negative changes to lives of young people in Serbia. These youth had to cope with living with a nationalistic authoritarian regime, involved in wars of Yugoslav dissolutions, with a dysfunctional economy, corruption, high levels of crime, and prevalence of the nationalistic, religious, traditionalist and patriarchal values. Even though the state was still run by a nominally ‘socialist’ party, it stopped providing many services to its citizens. For instance, after Milošević came to power, resources and infrastructure previously dedicated to youth became property of Milošević party and his allies (Azanjac et al. 2012: 56-57). Abandoned by the state and family, facing the reality of economic crisis, unemployment, and risk of being drafted into the army, young people contributed significantly to the phenomenon of mass migration out of Serbia in 1990s. It has been estimated that roughly 600 000 people left Serbia in 1990s – a significant percentage out of Serbia’s total population of 10 million - with 30 000 young university graduates leaving both Serbia and Montenegro21 in the same period, contributing to the significant brain drain (Uvalić 2010: 105).

Yet the 1990s, the heyday of Milošević regime, were also marked by significant levels of youth activity. Throughout the 1990s Serbia was continuously rocked by mass protests against regime, where young people invariably played important role (Gordy 1999; Jansen 2005; Tomić 2009). As Tomić (2009: 190) states, before the overthrow of Milošević in October 2000 there were three larger waves of

21 Since Serbia and Montenegro remained within one federation until 2006, when Montenegrin citizen voted for their state’s independence on referendum, a lot of statistical data for the period until then refer to both entities.

55 protests in Serbia – in 1991/1992, 1996/1997, and 1998/2000 – where student protest movements and Otpor (Resistance) movement participated together with the representatives of opposition parties.

Resistance to Milošević, importantly, was not limited to those well-documented22 mass protests. Throughout 1990s there were many other activities aimed at creating alternative and opposition to the regime in Serbia. I have already mentioned Second Serbia, one of the most prominent anti-nationalist milieus. Feminist organisations, like the well-known Žene u crnom (Women in black), a feminist anti-war NGO, played a crucial role in resistance, organising seminars, workshops, discussions, street protests and performances. Together with many other anti-Milošević activists, well described by Jansen in his study (2005), they provided for incessant everyday anti-nationalist activity.

This ever-lasting process of resisting, questioning, mocking and ridiculing Milošević’s regime also provided an opportunity for willing people to learn how to disobey and think critically. As my friend Zoe once told me “we all got a good schooling protesting on the streets back in 1990s”. Not only for her, but for many other people this period offered an opportunity to get heady and oftentimes transformative experience of activism (Collin 2007).

The Otpor movement is celebrated as a pinnacle of the struggle against Milošević. It was established by university students at the end of 1990s and managed to expand its membership to 70 000 by 2000 (Nikolayenko 2007: 171). Otpor secured support from Serbian citizens, offering them a welcome alternative to corrupt politicians, playing on the image, inherited from socialist times, of youth as leaders of change (Greenberg 2006: 563) and, to a certain extent, exploiting popular sentiment against the regime as persecuting “kids” (Bunce & Wolchik 2006). In liberal circles this movement is widely regarded to be one of the crucial actors in the regime’s eventual overthrow. Such veneration, however, comes at the expense of critical examination of Otpor’s politics, tactics and ideology. It also overlooks the movement’s use of clericalism and nationalism, as well as neglect of the “student” question (Marković 2011). Finally, admiration for Otpor can serve to obscure some

22 Tomić (2009: 185) states that there were more than 50 works published on the topic of mass protests in Serbia in 1990s, but even his bibliography is far from comprehensive.

56 of the other important actors and processes that contributed to the overthrow of the regime. We cannot ignore, for instance, international support for opposition in general and for Otpor in particular, which included both training and financial support (Bunce & Wolchik 2006; Collin 2007; Nikolayenko 2007). And ultimately, the end of the regime would not have been possible if other sections of society, like workers represented by the independent Trade Union, had not actively contributed to overthrowing it (Bunce & Wolchik 2006).

All in all, the period until the overthrow of Milošević was really turbulent for Serbian youth. It was marked, on one hand, by deep social and political troubles, and economic problems, which caused many young people to flee the country. Yet, at the same time, the period was characterised by high levels of political involvement and activism. This decade left a significant legacy for young people in Serbia today, not only in terms of post-Milošević changes and the impact they had for youth and the rest of the society, but also in terms of the image of young activists.

2.4. Image of young activists in contemporary Serbia

The image of the young/student activist created drawing on legacy of socialism and Milošević times has a number of consequences for the way people in Serbia perceive contemporary youth and the nature of their political activism. On the one hand, in its glorified version, this image eclipses everything that came after. For many, all other kinds of activism pale in comparison to the mythologised image of the young activists of the 1990s who brought Milošević down. One of my interlocutors, a young female student of history at Belgrade university, praised what she saw as the unifying force of Otpor and, based on this perspective, criticised contemporary student protesters who, in her opinion, could not really make up their minds about what they want. Such criticism disregards the internal problems and contradictions of the Otpor movement and ignores the difference between political and social settings and ideological motives of Otpor and contemporary protesters. As a result of such comparison, based on broad generalisations and lack of attention to the detail, contemporary student activists are portrayed as confused and ineffective.

57

On the other hand, there is also no lack of criticism of Otpor and other participants of the anti-Milošević protests in contemporary Serbia. The fact that some of those protestors have compromised themselves by their actions in the aftermath of the 2000s, has contributed to the disillusionment many people in Serbia feel about politics. This disillusionment set in soon after the Milošević overthrow, with some elections held in the country in early 2000s failing to attract sufficient numbers of voters. This came as a stark contrast to the mass mobilisations that culminated in the October revolution, and was interpreted by many observers as a sign of the bitter disappointment Serbian citizens felt with the politicians and politics in traditional meaning. This has, supposedly, particularly affected young people who are refusing to meaningfully participate in the traditional politics or even, as Jessica Greenberg (2010) argues, choose political non-involvement as a political stance.

Such dissociation of youth from traditional politics should not be interpreted in alarmist mode. First, this is a part of a global tendency, where young people (and the broader populace) withdraw from politics. Serbian youth are not an exception, but rather an illustration of the processes of individualisation (Beck 2002). Withdrawal of youth from traditional politics should not be interpreted as a sign of their passivity and disengagement. On the contrary, it can be argued, that such disillusionment of the young with traditional politics has led them to invent novel ways of being active – through identity politics, consumerist activism, environmentalism and so on. Some even argue for the concept of “radical unpoliticalness” (Farthing 2010), which comes close to what Greenberg (2010) has described in Serbian case.

In general I agree that it is important to acknowledge the variety and validity of ways young people are active, in order not to diminish their agency and creativity. This, however, should not be done at the expense of attention to and discussion of more traditional forms of activism.

Part of the problem, I assert, is that the image of the youth activists of 1990s has monopolised the popular imagination in Serbia and blocks out of view most contemporary young activities. As in socialist times, it is difficult to ‘outshine’ the

58 glorified predecessors. This does not mean that there is no activity. After all, the situation of young people in Serbia is difficult and to assume that it would not elicit any reaction would deny them basic human agency.

2.5. Precarious lives of Serbian youth

After Milošević’s fall in October 2000 Serbia’s young people were full of hopes and expectations for better life. They saw themselves as “winners” of this situation and expected revenues from transition (Mojić 2012), a sort of pay-off for contributing to the regime change. However, the payoff did not come. With the removal of the authoritarian Milošević regime Serbia’s “blocked” transformation was finally ostensibly unblocked, yet democratic reforms and improvement in living standards did not follow at the expected pace.

Popular attitudes and sentiments about life in Serbia illustrate this point very well. Contrary to observations made by Roberts (2009: 185) about the optimism of Eastern European youth regarding their countries’ and their personal prospects in the first decade of the new millennium, at this time young people in Serbia were expressing frustration and disillusionment (Tomanović 2012; Tomanović & Ignjatović 2006). Even in the immediate aftermath of overthrow of Milošević, according to one opinion poll, every second young person wanted to leave Serbia (Nikolić & Mihailović 2004), with the numbers remaining the same at the time of my fieldwork. As Mojić (2012: 312) states “… one thing has not changed in Serbia in the last decade – the fact that half of its youth have been constantly thinking about social integration – but elsewhere”.

Indeed, many of my informants also were considering leaving Serbia, either immediately or in the future. When I asked one of my friends, Miloš, about what he wanted to be doing in ten years, he replied that he could not imagine life for himself in Serbia, even though he wished he could. It obviously worried him. He was actively involved in the activist scene, trying to change the situation in the country for better, and dreaming about the utopian existence of the Balkan federation of the socialist and workers’ states. Yet, when he was trying to think ‘objectively’, he said, he could not see the situation improving and himself having any future in Serbia. My other acquaintance Milica, on first seeing me when I

59 returned to Serbia in 2010, exclaimed: “You’re totally crazy! Why do you keep returning here? All of us here can only think of the ways to leave [Serbia], and you keep coming back…” By 2012, she indeed had left the country to study abroad.

Young people who stay in Serbia face many challenges. Unemployment is one of the biggest problems for contemporary Serbian youth. Mojić (2012: 307), using data from the National Employment Agency, claims that youth unemployment rates have constantly been near 50% during the last decade. Youth unemployment also accounts for around 49% of total unemployment in Serbia (Azanjac et al. 2012: 27). Young people are particularly vulnerable as a workforce; they often have part-time and temporary jobs and are the first in the line to lose them. Thus, as Azanjac et al. (2012) argue, since the onset of the global financial crisis levels of youth unemployment in Serbia have increased.

In such circumstances, of course, young people have their own strategies of coping. One of them, developed already back in the time of Milošević, is prolonged university enrolment (Tomanović & Ignjatović 2006; authors also argue that such postponement strategy is applied by youth to many other key events in their lives, like moving out from parents house and marriage.). Azanjac et al. (2012: 34) claim that on average one academic year of study translates into 1,45 years of “real time”, with as many as 40% of university students failing to complete their studies at all. During my fieldwork I indeed met many people who were enrolled in the university for seven-eight years. One significant change that has occurred since the time of Milošević, however, was implementation of the Bologna process to university education in 2005-2006. This resulted in introduction of high education fees, even in public universities where education was previously free. This has caused a lot of additional problems for struggling Serbian youth.

***

Two recent films are quite indicative of these trends to portray youth, and the problems they confront, in predominately negative terms. Both Šišanje (Shaving, 2010) and Klip (Clip 2012) depict degradation of contemporary young people in Serbia. Šišanje, through the story of a young male protagonist (Fig. 2.2), deals with the question of right-wing extremism and hooliganism in Serbia, and provides an

60 illustration of popular perception about the existing link and cooperation between right-wing hooligans and state structures. Klip (Fig. 2.3), in its turn, focuses on the life of a young Serbian female high school student somewhere on the outskirts of Belgrade. Film portrays her continually consuming alcohol, drugs and having sex, but at the same time it demonstrates the devastating impact of social crisis, disintegration of family, patriarchal misogynist culture and consumerism.

Fig. 2.2. Young protagonist of Skinning after committing his first hate crime against Roma youth (Šišanje 2010)

Fig. 2.3. Young protagonist of Clip escapes herself and her reality in the alcohol-and drug-fuelled Turbo-folk dance party (Klip 2012) Both films show some of the important issues plaguing young people in Serbia. At the same time, the bleakness of the picture they portray is devastating. Neither film

61 has a positive young protagonist. Both leave the impression that contemporary youth in Serbia are lost beyond redemption in the mire of alcohol, drugs, consumerism, hatred and violence. But if young people in Serbia are really like that, how then did I find any yugonostalgics for my research project? I address this question in the next section.

2.6. Finding the Yugonostalgic Youth

My initial strategy for finding informants for my study entailed contacting representatives of the older generation who would have connections with many young people – university professors, some intellectuals, notable activists. Many of these people, just like Borka from CZKD, were sceptical about the possibility of finding anyone positively disposed towards Socialist Yugoslavia among youth. The image of young people emerging from these initial conversations was the one of an inert and passive mass of youth, with very materialistic and down-to-earth interests, who would not know and, even worse, would not want to know, anything about SFRY.

Despite this initial discouragement, I soon managed to find some people who eventually became subjects of this research project. Through these first participants, I met numerous others. But how did my first encounter happen? The short answer is - serendipity. The role of serendipity is often stressed in writing on the methodology of ethnography (Greverus 2003), and often is used to explain the successful “entry” into field (e.g. Berdahl 1999). It certainly played a significant role in my research, not only helping to find the first informants of my study but eventually narrowing down the initial scope of the study to focus on just left- leaning young people in Serbia and their relationship towards the Yugoslav past.

One of the first practical concerns I had to solve after arriving in Belgrade was finding a place to live. Although, as already mentioned, Serbian economics was not thriving at the time of my fieldwork, Belgrade, as the country’s capital, was attracting and retaining quite a large portion of country’s resources. It is also the biggest gravitation centre for internal migration flows. Belgrade is the only city in Serbia that saw a population increase in the last ten years, even though, at the same time, roughly 40 thousand inhabitants migrated out of it (Popadić 2011).

62

As a consequence, Belgrade is ridden with housing problems. This has direct negative consequences for many young people, being one of many factors inhibiting the development of an independent lifestyle (Tomanović 2012). On multiple occasions throughout my fieldwork I have heard city dwellers complaining about the availability and price of housing in Belgrade. Many young people consider buying a flat an unachievable goal, and even finding a good place to rent for an acceptable sum of money can be a difficult task. As a result, many young people remain living with their parents and other relatives, in a modern-day interpretation of the traditional pattern of living with kin (Tomanović 2012: 234).

Initially, I also experienced some frustration with finding an appropriate place to stay. Eventually one of my acquaintances, Mira, suggested I share a flat with her friend, whom she knew through the feminist activist scene. I immediately liked this idea; living with somebody from Serbia would provide me with an excellent opportunity to gain more nuanced and intimate knowledge of the country. Little did I know that my future flatmate, Zoe, would turn out to have such significant influence on the direction and process of my research.

“If you want to study yugonostalgia, you are in the right place!” On my first visit to Zoe’s flat, after talking about some of the mundane matters connected to sharing a house, she asked me about the purpose of my stay in Serbia. When she heard about my research idea she reacted very enthusiastically. True, initially Zoe also said that I chose the wrong age category and should focus instead on a slightly older generation, people who had a chance to experience Yugoslavia itself. But unlike some other people I met in the field, after listening to my motivations for this particular focus, she just said: “Do not worry, we will find something for you”.

After I moved into the flat, Zoe kept her promise. A veteran of the local queer movement, a self-identified anarchist with a background in feminist activism and artistic scene, Zoe had an extensive social network. During my stay in her place (I lived there for all of my fieldwork in 2009 and also for some time during my visit in 2010) I had an impression that she knew – personally or by word of mouth – everyone in the activist scene in Belgrade and even beyond. She was well informed about various events happening in Belgrade – from exhibitions of contemporary

63

Serbian art to street protests. And she was willing to share this information with me. She introduced me to a number of her younger friends.

Most of Zoe’s friends with whom I managed to arrange meetings to talk about their attitude towards Socialist Yugoslavia and yugonostalgia also turned out to be engaged in some sort of activism. They, in their turn, put me in touch with their friends and colleagues. The snowball started rolling. Simultaneously, I tried to go to a number of events that were happening at the time in Belgrade, to see if I could find there any hints of yugonostalgia and young yugonostalgics.

In early June 2009 I went to a one-day conference held at CZKD entitled “Future of the Left in Serbia”. I had seen information about it in media before and got interested in it, however, did not place it as a priority on my list of things to do. Nevertheless, during one of our evening conversations, Zoe pointed out that this event could attract some young yugonostalgics. Furthermore, the day before the conference I received a phone call from one professor of sociology in Belgrade University, who told me that a couple of her students who might be useful informants would be there. After receiving these hints, I obviously could not ignore the event.

As it turned out, the organisers of the conference were young people, graduates of the Faculty of Sociology in Belgrade University. However, most of the invited speakers belonged to the older generation – they were either established academics and scholars, or famous writers and intellectuals, or some prominent figures from the NGO scene. But the public attending the conference was mixed in terms of age. Although there were some representatives of older generations, mainly people associated with CZKD and the Second Serbia scene, quite a few young people were also present. Sitting in the back rows of the hall where the conference was taking place, I could not help but notice how eagerly some of those young people were listening and reacting to the talks delivered and subsequent discussions.

During the morning coffee break I approached the group of young people who seemed to be most active. They greeted me enthusiastically. Taking into consideration how small and well-connected the leftist activist scene in Belgrade

64 is, I suspect that they also were curious about new faces. Our conversation about the conference eventually grew into broader discussion. In sum, this event turned out to be very important for me and my research, because I established here many contacts, some of them leading to other events, some to recorded interviews, and some to friendships.

I soon realized that I was actually spending most of my time talking to the young people who belonged to the Belgrade activist scene, or, to be more precise, to the leftist segment of that scene. After weighing the pros and cons (see below), I decided to limit my research just to leftist activists. I found this idea appealing because this small yet vibrant scene was so obviously defying the negative image of Serbian youth that had been following me from the outset of the fieldwork. They presented a stark contrast to the pervasive negative stereotype of Serbian young people, which depicted them as either passive and confused, or dangerously nationalistic.

What was this leftist activist scene? Since defining the left or studying the left was not the main focus of my study, I decided just to listen to my informants and their classifications and characterizations of being left in contemporary Serbia. My informants all agreed that their scene is rather small and not visible to the Serbian public. The highly segmented and competitive nature of the scene, with a number of small groups arguing about the theory and practice of leftist activism, was another widely acknowledged problem:

I think the condition [of left in Serbia] is disastrous. All we have is some sort of quasi-left … Everyone thinks that they can call themselves left only because they deal with working with the past, Srebrenica, de-nazification… yet at the same time they do not have any social program, they have no idea about the legislation protecting working rights… I do not think that this is left. If you do not engage critically with EU and globalization, you cannot call yourself left. They sell education, health care… public space, Belgrade, everything! What kind of left is that? (Ivan) ***

[situation of the left in Serbia is] miserable and bitter… have you seen the “Star Wars”? that sums it up… all the groups would have to overcome their ideologies and determinations… the left scene here is very small and miserable compared to the majority… it is not mainstream… but they do not want to overcome their attitudes and beliefs … there is no communications

65

on certain level between those groups. They just are all against each other… and here the gossips can destroy anyone …and we cannot agree on what our aim is, how to struggle for the new society… (Sava) Despite the internal contradictions, disagreements and conflicts, throughout my fieldwork I also witnessed numerous displays of solidarity, cooperation and common struggle. On occasions, these young people were actively struggling against what they saw as the main problems facing Serbian society. Serbian youth are active not only as participants in the violent soccer gangs, displaying and defending nationalistic values, as a negative bias described earlier may lead one to believe. Some young people also actively oppose nationalism, increased clericalization of public life and intolerance, and struggle instead for the rights of the marginalised – workers, women, Roma and LGBT people. Research that I have conducted in this milieu will help to produce a more balanced view of youth in Serbia, by focusing on actions and subjectivities of members belonging to this generally neglected group.

I contend that these young people belong to the emerging Serbian New Left. The adjective ‘Serbian’ is important here, because Socialist Yugoslavia also had its own counterpart of the West European New Left in the 1960s-1970s. Yugoslav New Left, such as famous Praxis group, tried to reform from within what they saw as a stagnating and problematic system. Those in the Serbian New Left of the early 21st century sometimes hark back to the Yugoslav predecessors in their search for inspiration and the ideological basis of their work. What is more important for definition of the contemporary New Left, however, is their self-ascribed radical difference from the “pseudo-leftist” Socialist Party of Serbia. SPS is a successor of the League of Communists of Serbia, the Serbian branch of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, the sole party of SFRY. This party was founded by Slobodan Milošević in 1990 and remained a ruling party in Serbia until Milošević’s overthrow in October 2000. This explains why SPS had a negative reputation in the eyes of my informants23 and why they thought it could not be considered as a leftist party. In distinguishing themselves from the SPS or other minor parties that

23 Many Serbian citizens, however, seem to have a different opinion about this party. SPS has remained a significant presence on Serbia’s political scene. Prime Minister of Serbia at the time of writing, Ivica Dačić, is the leader of SPS.

66 at some point seceded from SPS or LCS, new leftists were trying, against all odds, to reclaim the left in contemporary Serbia, to re-invest it with some positive meaning.

While this thesis does not offer a comprehensive discussion of the leftist activist scene in Serbia or Belgrade, following Miyazake (2006) I argue that it should not be treated just as a collection of individual stories. Conducting his research in a context radically different from the one I was interested in – among Japanese businessmen – Miyazake (2006, 151) attempted to “investigate how certain economic concepts and neoliberal ideas may serve as sources of hope, that is, as a reorientation of knowledge”. This has helped him to chart the trajectories of how prevalent economic ideas generate concrete effects. In contrast to - yet also in similarity with - this attempt I have tried to capture how to a certain degree unpopular yugonostalgic ideas inspire revision of the hegemonic understanding of the Yugoslav past and of various aspects of the Serbian present – such as social and economic spheres, culture, international position. I also begin here charting out how these understandings can feed into concrete efforts aiming to criticise the present my informants found lacking. Therefore, this study adds to our understanding of leftist activism in contemporary Serbia. It shows how emotions and memories can provide a strong impetus for this activism – a point often overlooked by students of social movements (cf Haugerud 2012). While I cannot claim that yugonostalgia is prevalent in circles of the leftist activists I had a chance to study during my fieldwork, my encounters have shown that it is a feeling that has a certain degree of popularity among them, and ignoring it would compromise our knowledge of the local activist scene.

In its own way, this thesis attempts to contribute to reclaiming the meaning of the left in Serbia, former Yugoslavia and broader post-socialist region. As I have already pointed out, I am not explicitly concerned with studying leftist youth activists. I am interested, rather, in their attitudes towards the Yugoslav past and yugonostalgia, in an attempt to show how these attitudes can be a part of - or even feed into - a progressive stance. This is a part of my project of recuperating yugonostalgia. At the same time, this project is about young leftist activists. As such, it offers some answers to the question “What does it mean to be leftist in post-socialist times?” (cf. Razsa & Velez 2009).

67

2.7. Ignoring other stories

Finally, to understand the implications of doing research in this particular milieu, it is important to discuss also the un-materialized options and possibilities, the ones that never happened, whether because I decided not to follow them up or because I tried but did not succeed. It is quite possible that if in very initial stages of my research some of those ideas did work, I would have tried to implement my initial plan to look at yugonostalgia among Serbian youth as a broadly defined category.

One example of recruitment strategy that – contrary to my expectations – did not work for me at all was the attempt to find my young informants through internet. Since I was targeting young people who are typically avid users of the internet, I was absolutely sure that this would be an excellent way of finding potential informants. Among other things, this idea seemed to be so promising because of the abundance of yugonostalgia on internet (see next chapter). In particular, one can find a variety of yugonostalgic pages and applications on the popular social network Facebook. I was planning to recruit some informants through these pages, hoping to reach out to a broader cross-section of Serbian youth. I wrote an advertisement about my research project in Serbian, asked my local friend to proofread it, and posted it to a couple of popular Facebook groups. This, however, turned out to be a dead end. I did not get the response I was hoping for; as a matter of fact, I hardly got any response.

A couple of people just teased me about the project. However, one response that did strike a chord with me was a genuine question from a member of one community, asking why I wanted to talk only to young people: “Are they the only ones whose opinion matters?” This was a salient reminder of the implicit ageism of my project. This deliberate focus on the young, however, is also an attempt to give voice to at least one section of the Serbian youth that, as I have demonstrated above, is quite often silenced by representatives of the older generations.

While I have conducted research with a group of young people who are marginalised in Serbian public discussions, I have inadvertently ignored the young people marginalised in real life. Although, as I discuss in Chapter Seven, some of

68 my informants were making a claim to working class identity, the majority of them were middle class and relatively cushioned from the turbulent changes in Serbian society that left many young people marginalised and dispossessed.

It is impossible to say that during my fieldwork I was not exposed to dispossessed young people, was not aware of their existence, everyday struggles and toil. It is difficult to ignore their presence on the streets of Belgrade, with thousands of young people doing low paid and often half-legal jobs, like advertising or street vending. Consider one stark example: in an attempt to curb unemployment among the Roma community, the city of Belgrade employs a significant number of its members as city cleaners. Though at first sight this may seem like a genuine attempt to reduce unemployment between Roma, the policy is flawed for a number of reasons. It almost institutionalises discrimination against Roma based on the assumption that they do not want to, and do not know how to, do “proper jobs”, and reifies the popular stereotypes that link refuse and Roma. Apart from this, city cleaners in Belgrade have to wear bright orange vests. This makes Roma – one of the most despised ethnicities in contemporary Serbia (Obradović 2008) and frequent victims of hate-based crimes and violence – employed in this position highly visible on Belgrade streets (and, consequently, more vulnerable). Throughout my stay in Belgrade I often saw young Roma people in their orange vests cleaning the city streets.

However, as a foreign PhD student (coming from a country with similar conditions but studying and living for the last few years of my life in a developed “Western” country24), I half-consciously spent my time in Belgrade in a parallel world of people living in better economic conditions, reinforcing in this way the existing social stratification. This drawback of my study – inadvertent silencing of underprivileged Serbian youth - dawned on me only after I returned to Australia and started writing the thesis.

The fact that I have conducted research in Belgrade also had strong implications for my research. The capital of the country, with a legacy of previously being capital of Socialist Yugoslavia, it differs significantly from the rest of the country in

24 Australia, of course, is plagued by its own problems of inequality and discrimination, in particular against the Australian Indigenous population.

69 terms of demographics, economy, and infrastructure. These contrasts can be interpreted to different ends. During the Milošević era Belgrade was considered to be a centre of resistance to the regime. As a result, many nationalists vehemently criticised it for betrayal and allegiance to socialist, not Serbian values (cf. Vujović 1999). At the same time, the cosmopolitan, democratic and open-minded populace of Belgrade is also prone to production of negative stereotypes about the rest of Serbia. During my stay in Belgrade, a few of my friends actively dissuaded me from going to regional Serbia to conduct research, or even just to travel. They were especially adamant that I should not go south of Belgrade. Što južnije to tužnije (‘the further to the South, the sadder things get’) was a popular phrase they used to support their argument.

As it happened, fieldwork in Belgrade turned out to be so time-consuming that I did not have a chance to go to other parts of Serbia. I cannot therefore use any observations and data to refute or confirm what I have heard about the rest of Serbia. However, I suspect that we have here yet another example of cultural othering. On one hand, this is a case of urban cosmopolitan subjects creating their subjectivity by constructing their provincial/ rural uncivilised other. Throughout 1990s such discourses were quite popular among urban dweller of the former Yugoslavia, who, furthermore, constructed rural populations as the main backbone of nationalistic movements and main culprits in the wars of Yugoslav dissolution (for criticism of such practices of othering see, for instance, Ballinger 2003; Bougarel 1999).

At the same time, no one sought to dissuade me from going to Novi Sad, a city with Austro-Hungarian legacy, north of Belgrade in the multicultural province of Vojvodina. On the contrary, many of my friends were willingly travelling there to participate in different events, or for a restful weekend. This may well represent an internal version of nesting orientalism - a process whereby one region always constructs its Eastern and Southern neighbours as more oriental (see Bakić- Hayden 1995; 2006). The Serbian South, while indeed plagued by many real problems like economic stagnation and ethnic tensions, at the same time is constructed as the underdeveloped internal other. It is an omission of my study that I have not travelled in my research beyond Belgrade, to engage critically with

70 such stereotypes, but each PhD project necessarily has its own limits. However, this also points to one of the problems of the milieu in which I spent most of my time. Living comparatively comfortable lives in Belgrade, my informants were reproducing cultural stereotypes about provincial Serbia, without serious discussion about ways of addressing its problems or serious cooperation with local activists.

The decision not to include representatives of other political and ideological groups in my research was another important factor shaping my field. Possibly, by not talking to representatives of other political segments of the youth activist scene in Belgrade I missed interesting and informative interpretations of yugonostalgia. It would be wrong to assume that, for instance, representatives of right-wing groups would have no reasons to valorise the socialist past (just as it would be wrong to assume that all left-wing activists would be yugonostalgic).

Marko, a left-wing activist himself, emphasized this to me during one of our conversations. We were discussing the relation between yugonostalgia and leftist ideology, when Marko made a point that Serbian nationalists also can have a reason to long for Yugoslav times, or at least some aspects of it, like stability or the country’s previous position on the international scene. His point is an important reminder of how the ambivalent nature of yugonostalgia allows it to be co-opted by different forces for different purposes. After all, as I already have mentioned in the introductory chapter, yugonostalgia was successfully exploited by the Milošević regime throughout 1990s, and used to legitimise the country’s involvement in the wars of Yugoslav dissolution.

It could be interesting to do a comparison of yugonostalgic attitudes among both left-wing and right-wing activists, to see what aspects of the past are actualised, and to what ends. However, I decided against such project. Because my initial plan for this project was to show possible emancipatory and progressive dimensions of yugonostalgia, and because of my own subjective understanding of those terms, I explored yugonostalgia only among the leftist activists. This was an ideologically- motivated decision, for it is impossible to deny that in the contemporary world some people perceive right-wing ideologies as the ones that offer the visions of the

71 just and progressive social order (Pugh 2009). Consequently, this thesis is an engaged and partisan project that attempts to contribute to recuperation not only of yugonostalgia but of also left-wing ideologies, in particular in post-socialist settings, by highlighting attitudes and stances, as well as actions, of only left-wing young activists in contemporary Serbia.

The final problem addressed briefly in this section is underrepresentation of women in my research sample. Out of 25 recorded interviews, only 9 were conducted with women. Such underrepresentation is a result of relying on the snowballing technique in selection of interviewees. The sample is too small to speculate about how a different gender balance might have influenced the results. However, I also suspect that such gender ratio of my research participants is partly a consequence of machismo that often plagues leftist activist circles (see Coleman and Bassi 2011).

***

Following Pilkington and Popov, I see youth in contemporary Serbia as “deeply embedded in … post-socialist contexts” (2006: 15). As such, their opinions and experiences, dreams and desires, achievements and failures can serve as a good mirror of the post-socialist condition. Since I also see yugonostalgia as a symptom of post-socialist transition in Serbia and the broader ex-Yugoslav region, conducting research on yugonostalgic youth is not such an absurd idea as it may seem at first glance. On the contrary, investigation of yugonostalgic sentiments among the young people in Serbia can be a very insightful project for a number of reasons.

Despite the initial discouragements that I encountered in the field, I managed to find a group of leftist young activists in Belgrade that formed the core of my informant pool. This elicited surprise among some representatives of older generations who, as I have discussed in this chapter, construct and reproduce stereotype of young people as passive, unknowledgeable and incapable of forming any position, much less a ‘progressive’ one. In the next chapter I explore how emergence of young yugonostalgics became possible, dealing with socialisation of Serbian youth in families, schools and broader society.

72

Finally, a focus on young people and their concerns and needs and desires, helps to avoid production of a sanitized version of Memory Studies research, focusing just on representations and symbols. As I will argue in more detail in Chapters Three and Four, it is not enough to treat ‘memory’ just as text or symbolic representation and use textual / semiotic methods for its interpretation. We need to understand memory as social and cultural practice. Looking at the way young people relate to yugonostalgia helps to elucidate how yugonostalgic discourses can be actualised in everyday life.

73

Chapter Three

Being Yugonostalgic against the Odds

This chapter explores the processes and factors that can contribute to the formation of yugonostalgic attitudes among young people in contemporary Serbia. I approach yugonostalgia here using insights from Memory Studies about creation, maintenance and transmission of cultural memories. Contrary to essentialising understandings, I posit yugonostalgia as a cultural phenomenon, grounded firmly in its socio-cultural context. It is processual, dynamic and relational, its conceptualisations and manifestations can change both from individual to individual and even within one individual, with the passing of time or with a change of circumstances. Yugonostalgia, as any cultural memory, is of dialogic nature. It co-exists with other alternative memories and versions of the past, and is formulated in relation to them.

I illustrate these processes in this chapter drawing on the interviews I have conducted with my informants. I supplement this with analysis of official discourses and popular culture to provide for the broader context of the functioning of yugonostalgia.

I begin the chapter with an overview of the memory politics in Serbia. Revisionist tendencies, dating back to the 1980s, have come to their fullest force in the post-Milošević period. Communism is predominantly othered as a negative page in the history of Serbia. A nationalist version of the past has become a new norm. In such a context, yugonostalgia, in particular leftist yugonostalgia, emerges as a marginal and marginalised way of relating to the past. It still exists and not only among older generations, but also among the young, This poses the question about how exactly such phenomenon is possible.

I present here an overview of different factors that can contribute to the formation of yugonostalgia. I begin with personal experience and socialisation in the family. These factors are important, albeit not crucial. As I demonstrate here, some of my informants have become yugonostalgic despite their familial upbringing. An overview of the history education in schools leads one to conclude that young people can hardly acquire yugonostalgic inclinations here either. In the

74 remainder of the chapter I consider the role of popular culture and socialisation in peer milieu.

3.1. Politics of memory in post-socialist region and in Serbia

3.1.1. Overview of politics of memory in post-socialist region

A recent sociological study (Flere & Kirbiš 2011) claims that in general young people in Serbia have rather negative attitude towards Socialist Yugoslavia. While these authors find such negativity to be a ‘historical novelty’ (Flere & Kirbiš 2011: 330), I suggest that it is better understood as a consequence of the long-term processes of restructuring the politics of memory in Serbia. Consequently, the form of yugonostalgia that I have encountered during my fieldwork is rather a deviation from the emergent hegemonic interpretation of the Yugoslav past, grounded in the ideologies of nationalism and neoliberalism. The overview of the politics of memory in post-socialist Europe and Serbia25 that I present below supports this claim.

It is crucial to begin by description the politics of memory in the former Socialist Bloc in general. Although the Serbian context does differ in some instances, nevertheless, I suggest, it is a reflection of broader trends connected to the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, and, supposed substitution of one life-world with the other in the process of the post-socialist transition.

The collapse of the Socialist Bloc can be interpreted as resulting in the establishment of a neoliberal hegemony in the region. This hegemony had implications for the way political, social and economic life has been restructured in the affected countries (I discuss these changes in more detail later in thesis). However it also has implications for the less tangible aspects of human life – notions of self, interpersonal relationships, ideas about social and global order, values and norms (Verdery 1996).

25 Question of politics of memory in contemporary Serbia is too broad to be adequately addressed here. My overview will not dwell in sufficient detail on many important issues, especially the ones relating to the memories and historiography of the most recent period – collapse of SFRY and subsequent wars. This lacuna is dictated by the need to focus on the issues related to evaluation of the socialist past. Fortunately, a few good studies discussing Serbian politics of memory of recent traumatic events have been published (e.g. Govedarica 2012).

75

Out of all intangible changes brought about by transition and neoliberalism, at the commencement of this project I was most interested in the ways it influences people’s relationship to their past. As I have explained in the introductory chapter, one of the main features of the transition culture in former Socialist Bloc is its attempt to distance itself from its predecessors, socialist regimes. Complex processes of othering of the socialist past aim to discredit all aspects of the socialist experience. Resulting hegemonic ideology establishes neoliberalism as the only legitimate world order. At the same time, discredited socialism is removed from the list of the viable options both for present and future.

After post-socialist changes started in the former Socialist Bloc, new elites re- wrote the history, as winners usually do in the aftermath of revolutions. This process was supposed to create legitimacy for the new project and transformation. To achieve that legitimacy, ancien régime had to be discredited. This was achieved by emphasising the slips and mistakes of the socialist regimes while at the same time silencing or denying its achievements. Gulag became a synecdoche for whole of the Soviet Union, Stasi – for the German Democratic Republic, and Goli Otok – for the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

At the same time, new elites turned their gaze to the more distant past in search of the historical figures and events that could be used to construct a genealogy, providing legitimacy for the new projects. Thus a period of nationalisation began. The renewed salience of nationalism in the former Socialist Bloc was interpreted as “a resurrection of nationalism after a long period of foreign subjugation” (Dogan 1998: 67).

This short quotation, summarising in a pinch attitudes towards nationalism that many policymakers and intellectuals at the time adopted, is problematic for a number of reasons. It interprets the history of socialism in Eastern Europe as a period of foreign subjugation, ignoring the cases of autochthonous socialism, as in the case of SFRY, or eventual development of support for socialism in Eastern European countries (Rév 2005). Further, the quote implies that nations and nationalism were suppressed, subjugated by the socialist rule. In reality, socialist states contributed significantly to the development of the national cultures and,

76 inadvertently, of the national identities as well (see, for instance Brubaker 1996; Slezkine 1994).

Finally, the whole idea that nationalism can be resurrected is problematic. As Rogers Brubaker (1996: 10) states “Nationalism is not a ‘force’ to be measured as resurgent or receding. It is a heterogeneous set of ‘nation’-oriented idioms, practices, and possibilities that are continuously available or ‘endemic’ in modern cultural and political life”. Consequently, he states, we should not look at how much nationalism there is, but how it is used. In his monograph Brubaker analyses how new elites that have emerged in the aftermath of the collapse of the socialist system attempt to “nationalise” their states by promoting the language, culture, demographic predominance, economic welfare and political hegemony of the state-bearing nation. This has also resulted in nationalisation of public and private lives:

…of narrative and interpretative frames, of perception and evaluation, of thinking and feeling. It has involved the silencing or marginalization of alternative, non-nationalist political languages. It has involved the nullification of complex identities by the terrible categorical simplicity of ascribed nationality. It has involved essentialist, demonizing characterizations of the national “other”… (Brubaker 1996: 20-21) An overview of these ideological transformations and re-writing of the history in the post-socialist period painted with a broad brush, has to be supplemented with the discussion of what this meant for the ordinary people. Hungarian historian Istvan Rév (2005: 9) provides a poignant and poetic – and very partisan – description of this:

Gone were the certainties, the pillars of one’s life: the recurrent familiar events, the rhythm of life, the everydays and the holidays, the well-known street names, the social significance of neighborhoods, the meaning of the photographs in the family album, the social capital, the knowledge of Russian as a usable foreign language, the value of the sociometrical network of one’s private and professional world, the stability of memories, the comprehension of private and public history. What remained was unknown. The gap of the unknown, however, as Rév (2005) himself points out, was quickly filled by politicians, historians, and other actors, both professional and amateurs. Operating under the assumed primacy of the national, these actors created a new history, written with a nation as a main protagonist, struggling for

77 centuries against foreign enemies – communism being just the most recent of them – to fulfil the ancient dream of independence.

Summarising this discussion of nationalisation of politics of memory in post- socialist Europe, I need to single out two points of particular relevance for the consequent argument. First, the re-invention of the national tradition led in many cases to attempts to incorporate into the national canon rather controversial figures. Examples include the positive reappraisal of interwar ruler and Nazi collaborator Miklós Horty in the Hungarian case (Rév 2005) or highly divisive efforts to officially honour radical nationalist Stepan Bandera in the case of Ukraine (Narvselius 2012). Such controversial actions were rationalised by emphasizing anti-communist aspects of Horty’s and Bandera’s activities, while ignoring their anti-Semitism, affiliation and cooperation with Nazism.

This leads to the second point – in many cases in former Socialist Europe new nationalistic ideologies pushed for equation of Nazism and Communism, positing them as equally evil totalitarian regimes. In efforts to level both regimes, “suppressed” memories of the communist past played an important role, as I illustrate in more detail in the next section dealing with Yugoslav/Serbian past. Such equation has received a legitimisation from the European Union, when in 2009 the European Parliament by overwhelming majority has passed a resolution on European consciousness and totalitarianism, calling Nazism, Communism and Fascism a shared legacy. Yet, as Uhl (2009) shows in her analysis of the resolution and events preceding and following it, the document mainly attempts to pathologize Communism. Crimes committed during the socialist rule truly were appalling. They deserve a thorough study, while their victims deserve appropriate commemoration. Yet with current trends in the politics of memory in Europe that I have just described, these crimes and their victims are politicized with the aim of irrevocably discrediting the entire socialist experiment.

Such stigmatisation of the socialist past in combination with overemphasis on the national provide a strong legitimisation to the dominant neoliberal ideology. This contradicts the traditional views of nationalism and neoliberalism as incompatible. Indeed, some scholars (e.g. Harmes 2012; Müller 2011) have criticised such understanding of nationalism as a reaction against neoliberalism.

78

But, as the discussed case of post-socialist Europe demonstrates, the two actually can mutually complement each other. Obsession with the national takes attention away from other aspects of political, social and economic life (cf. also Brubaker 2011).

3.1.2. Overview of politics of memory in Serbia

It is widely acknowledged that Socialist Yugoslavia entered an ideological crisis after the death in May of 1980of its “founding father” and leader, President Josip Broz Tito (I discuss his role and legacy in more detail in two following chapters). Tito himself oversaw a preparation of the reform of the state that was supposed to solve the crisis of legitimacy after his death. However, a combination of the local and global economic situation, together with the broader crisis of the socialist system, did not allow new visions of Yugoslavism to develop and gain popularity and legitimacy.

This was also a result of diversification of the ideological field within the country, which saw alternative interpretations of the country’s past entering the public domain. Nationalistic re-writing of the history, backed by many intellectuals,26 was particularly appealing to the republican elites, offering them a way of claiming legitimacy for the separate states. During the 1980s, nationalistic alternatives to Yugoslavia managed to eclipse more democratic attempts to solve the legitimacy crisis. “Traumatic memories” related to the socialist past have played an important role in nationalistic projects of delegitimizing the Yugoslav regime and constructing a base for it successors.

It is necessary to make several disclaimers about this phrase. First of all, it does not intend to mean that memories are “real” phenomena that can be suppressed or uncovered. Memories, history, myths, and other ways of relating to the past, as I have argued, are cultural constructs and we have to situate them in the broader socio-cultural dynamics. Secondly, this phrase does not intend to imply, that ‘memories’ have some special place in former Yugoslavia, or wider post-socialist

26 Nationalization of Serbian intellectuals and their role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia is particularly well-studied (see Dragović-Soso 2002, 2003; Miller 2002). It is worth remembering though, that, for instance Franjo Tuđman, first president of independent Croatia, whose role in the disintegration of Yugoslavia and subsequent wars should not be overlooked, also was an oppositional nationalistic historian in Yugoslav times.

79 region. A combination of both of these faulty assumptions has led to the creation of the image of the Yugoslav region as haunted by the (violent) past, and ghosts of ancient hatreds and animosities.

Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan (1993) is probably the most notorious example of such problematic misinterpretations of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, plagued by stereotypes, lack of adequate information and proper analysis. It has gained its notoriety because of the supposed influence it had on the decision of some Western politicians of the time not to engage in the regulation of the conflict (Kent 1997; Bet-El 2002). However, even Bet-El (2002) who rightly criticises Kaplan’s text falls into a similar trap, when discussing the “overpowering role of memory in Balkan wars”, and in particular, when talking about the suppressed memories of the conflicts that return in cycles to haunt the region. By doing this, she continues to re-produce Balkanist discourse (cf. Todorova 1997), that contributes to othering of countries in the region by positing them as irrational and caught in the whirlwind of the violent past. As Dominic Boyer (2010) argues, similar strategies of over-emphasising obsessions with past and memories are used by the “West” in general in relation to the post-communist “East”, in order to demonstrate its overall “past-ness”.27

In Serbia, as in many other countries of the former Socialist Bloc, the project of delegitimizing the communist past went hand in hand with the construction of an alternative, nation-based version of history. Govedarica (2012) describes two different milestones in the wave of historical revisionism that started in Serbia more than 20 years ago – 1989/1990 and 2000. The first milestone happened when Milošević came to power. He needed to construct a nationalistic version of history that would emphasise the ancient hatreds between the Yugoslav peoples as well as the heroic and tragic fate of the Serbian nation. Yet at the same time, the official version of revisionism in this period did not deconstruct completely the socialist past. After all, Milošević was claiming continuity with SFRY. Instead, he focused on exploiting the myth about the Kosovo as a cradle of the Serbian nation. At the same time other notable nationalistic figures present in the ideological field

27Following quotes illustrate Boyer’s point very well: “In central and eastern Europe, memory has of course also returned, with a vengeance that the West has been spared” (Müller 2002: 9). “While Western Europe has not enough of memory, Eastern Europe has too much of it” (Judt 2002: 180).

80 of the time, positioning themselves as in opposition to Milošević’s socialist regime, were actively undermining the legacy of Socialist Yugoslavia.

Discrediting this past became the main trend of historical revisionism after the overthrow of Milošević in 2000. Predominantly nationalistic elites that came to power in the aftermath were constructing a continuum of the suffering caused by ‘communists’ to Serbia, starting with Socialist Yugoslavia and ending with “Sloba” [Milošević]. In order to create an alternative base of legitimacy for new, supposedly democratic Serbia, they turned to pre-Second World War history, in particular the “civil” Serbia of the 1930s (Govedarica 2012: 174). Thus, the current project of ideological historical revisionism in Serbia has two main trends. The first one is discrediting of the communist past. This is achieved by negation of the socialist experience, by blaming it for the economic crisis, for the destruction of the ‘traditional’ Serbian values, including orthodox religion (despite the fact that Socialist Yugoslavia allowed for the practice of religion), but also through undermining the underlying foundations of the Socialist Yugoslav state. The second trend is the attempt to construct a new version of the national history, harking back to the Serbian experience in pre-war kingdom of Yugoslavia. Reburial of the remains of the last Yugoslav king, who fled Yugoslavia in 1941, organised in January of 2013, is quite indicative of this second trend. Remains were brought to Serbia with state support. In a lush ceremony, attended by the current Serbian president, prime minister and many other representatives of the current political elite, the coffin with the remains was placed in one of the churches in the centre of Belgrade, allowing Serbian citizens to pay respect to the king. Reburial itself is planned for spring of 2013, when the weather will allow for the appropriate public ceremony.

These two trends of current historical revisionism in Serbia converge in attempts to debunk one of the foundational myths of Socialist Yugoslavia about the heroic Partisan struggle during the Second World War. I discuss aspects of that myth in more detail in Chapter Five, while here I will consider briefly the main strategy used to deconstruct it, namely re-assessment of the role of the Chetnik movement.

81

The Chetnik movement was formed from the remainders of the Yugoslav Royal Army after Axis powers occupied the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Under the leadership of Draža Mihailović the movement fought against Axis powers. However, at some point Chetniks have come to see the Communist-led Partisan forces as their main enemy. Thus, for the remainder of the war they concentrated on defeating Partisans, and even cooperated with Germans to achieve this on several occasions. During the war Chetniks also practiced punishing raids on the civilian population they suspected of helping the Partisans. The movement was also characterised by strong anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim sentiments that resulted in their contribution to ethnic-based crimes in the territory of Yugoslavia during the Second World War.

When the Partisans emerged as winners from the Second World War (with help from the Allies, who changed their initial policy of supporting Chetniks and helped Partisan forces instead), Chetniks were persecuted. Draža Mihailović was captured and put on trial. Although during the trial Mihailović was claiming that ethnic crimes and cooperation with Germans were happening without his knowledge, the court sentenced him to the death penalty for high treason and war crimes. He was executed in 1946 and his remains were buried in an unknown place.

With the fall of the Milošević regime, attempts to rehabilitate the Chetnik movement gained momentum. In 2004 the Serbian Parliament passed a law that equalised the role of the Partisan and Chetnik movements in the Second World War, proclaiming them both to be anti-fascists. Further, in 2006 a law addressing rehabilitation was passed, allowing for the rehabilitation of the people who were punished by Partisans and later in Socialist Yugoslavia for crimes committed during the Second World War. A number of minor figures from the Chetnik movement already have been rehabilitated by Serbian courts. In 2012 Mihailović’s grandson filed a request for Draža’s rehabilitation in Serbia’s high court. At the time of writing, court proceedings were still on-going. They attracted a lot of attention both in Serbia and beyond. Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia expressed their concern about the possibility of the rehabilitation of Mihailović. In Serbia, opinion is divided. Each court hearing in the case is a cause for demonstrations of both supporters and opponents of rehabilitation.

82

As I have illustrated in the first part of this chapter, currently in Serbia a number of strategies are employed to discredit or suppress the socialist past, sometimes indirectly, by rehabilitating strongly anti-Communist historical figures. Such circumstances do not seem to be favourable for yugonostalgia. A positive attitude towards the socialist past nevertheless exists. I consider the factors that can influence the formation of such attitudes in the rest of the chapter.

3.2. Factors that can influence formation of yugonostalgia

“I would love to be able to call myself yugonostalgic, but I just can’t. I cannot be yugonostalgic for a very simple reason - I have no personal experience of that country and society,” twenty six-years old Časlav told me during our interview. As I have mentioned in the introductory chapter, such essentialising understanding of yugonostalgia was quite often expressed by young people whom I met conducting fieldwork in Serbia.

Yugonostalgia is for those older people who just whinge all the time about how good it was back in those times (Miloš CK) *** You have to be born in that country to be yugonostalgic, that’s it (Darko) One of the reasons why I decided to study yugonostalgia of young people was precisely their age and lack of substantial lived experience of Socialist Yugoslavia. This was a move motivated largely by discontent with the ideas I have already criticized in the opening of the previous chapter, ideas stating that only old dinosaurs cling to the past socialist values while young people welcome and embrace the transformations and brave new world of neoliberalism. The underlying assumption here is that the older generations have been brainwashed by the all-permeating communist ideological machine, while younger generations, who avoided such indoctrination, are able to recognise the ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, and choose liberalism over socialism.

Exploring yugonostalgia among young people, consequently, helps to show that positive evocations of the socialist past do not necessarily have to result from ideological indoctrination. Adoption of yugonostalgia can be an outcome of complex socio-cultural processes, and can happen under the influence of various factors.

83

Despite the claims of some of my informants cited in the opening of this section, as well as the current ideological climate I described in the first part of this chapter, many of my young interlocutors were expressing opinions and sentiments that can be characterised as ‘yugonostalgic’. How then, did they acquire such a position?

Based on conversations I had in the field, I have singled out four factors that influence young people’s socialisation and the formation of identity and cultural memory in general – personal experience/ family upbringing; education; socialisation in peer milieu; and popular culture. While the influence of these factors is important, I illustrate below that it is difficult, if not impossible to predict how exactly they shape young people’s subjectivities.

3.2.1. Childhood experience and family upbringing as factors influencing yugonostalgia

Most of my informants were born in the first half of the 1980s.28 Consequently they had some lived experience of Socialist Yugoslavia. However, how much they could tell me about those memories varied from case to case. Some of them claimed that they do not really remember much of that period, and instead wanted to talk more about their current perceptions and understandings of Yugoslavia. On the other hand, other informants shared with me beautiful and truly ‘nostalgic’ recollections of their childhood in SFRY.

Most often, these good memories of the Socialist Yugoslavia were connected to travel experience, in particular, the summer holidays spent on the Adriatic seaside. I will discuss them in Chapter Six. Here I want to point out that my informants often followed up these stories with the claim that childhood in SFRY was the most secure period of their lives. Even though the 1980s are generally considered to be times of crisis in SFRY, none of my informants had any memories of that.

Of course, childhood is often retrospectively constructed as the most secure period of one’s life. However in this case, a period that came after, a period of uncertainties, insecurities and deprivations, definitely influenced the way my informants thought about their childhood days. A few times I have heard from my

28 Partly this is a result of my initial idea to focus on young people born after 1980, the year of Tito’s death, and supposed beginning of the end of Socialist Yugoslavia.

84 informants that the 1990s changed the way their families lived, that they could not allow themselves the previous standard of living. Sometimes the change in standard of living has some more serious repercussions as well:

[it was] the beginning of the end of my family – that is crisis in relationships between my parents, and that was connected to the crisis …. if in the1990s everything did not collapse in such a brutal manner, maybe it all would have been different, if they did not lose their jobs… (Miloš) *** My parents got divorced … and there was this quite long period of quarrels and discussions before that, quite long period of conflict in the family… but before that, when I was small, I remember this nice time when they were together, when they were travelling and bringing us back presents, or talking or going out together. Atmosphere at home was really pleasant. When I think about this now, with some critical distance, I think that quite probably a broader social context influenced this. … I think that when things started going wrong in society … you know, when the value system is disintegrating, but also, when objectively things are not going that well - you start earning less - then definitely personal relationships get sour as well… so… [pause]… I don’t know, I think that maybe my mum and dad would still be together, if Yugoslavia still existed [nervous laughter] … I’m joking… (Milena) *** I remember that I really was crying [when Yugoslavia was disintegrating]. It all coincided with my [parents] getting divorced, and also at that time they have started bullying me at school, calling a girl, a faggot… so I was very confused then. But it seems to me that the collapse of SFRY was the most meaningful factor of all those … I remember that I was crying back then… it was a symbolic loss of everything I had before and I was blaming the state’s disintegration for all of that (Lazar) For these informants, Yugoslavia is associated with safe and peaceful lives in their home, while the country’s destruction is associated with disintegration of the family. As three of them admitted, memories of Yugoslavia that they have from their childhood, are in a sharp contrast with what came after.

As I have mentioned in the previous chapter, with the dissolution of Yugoslavia, many people left Serbia in the 1990s. While with migration they managed to avoid the critical conditions that the ones who were left behind lived in, they still faced challenges of their own, caused by migration. During my fieldwork I met two young people who migrated with their families out of Yugoslavia as children when the state started disintegrating. After growing up and receiving their education outside of the country, they both decided to attempt to spend at least part of their lives in

85

Serbia (and unlike some other migrants, engage in the life in the country through various kinds of activism).

Both Vlad and Mlađa described to me how the unsettling experience of migration they had as children, made them establish stronger connections with their Yugoslav pasts:

… when I left Yugoslavia, it became much closer to me than it would be if I stayed here… somehow, November 1991 [when he left – n ch] was some sort of dividing line, before that – everything was just great, and after that it wasn’t anymore… I went to live in Africa, in Zimbabwe, together with my parents and brother. From the very beginning I was conscious that I am different from them, because I had to learn their language in school and so on… And people were emphasizing to me that I am from Yugoslavia, they told me things like [speaks in English] “polish my shoes”… (Vlad) *** We left together with family to live in France in 1990s. There I had this massive identity crisis, because I did not really feel like I fit. My parents were telling me that I am a Yugoslav. I was listening music from here … that’s how I sort of claimed this [Yugoslav] identity for myself (Mlađa) Both these informants belonged to middle-class families, with their socio- economic status alleviating some of the negative effects of migration. Nevertheless, experiencing this rupture quite early on in their lives, made both of them connect more strongly with their Yugoslav past and Yugoslav identities.

Both informants who claimed to remember their childhood in Socialist Yugoslavia, and the ones who claimed to have no memories of it, acknowledge the importance of family upbringing in the creation of their attitude towards Yugoslavia. As I will illustrate in consequent chapters, using quotations from interviews, my informants often stated that they got their information about life (economic situation, travel, social security) in Socialist Yugoslavia from their families. However, the absence of a direct causal link between upbringing and stories circulating in the family, and the attitude towards Yugoslavia that young people have, is an important fact that came across during my fieldwork.

On the one hand, many stories that I have heard from my informants can be interpreted as examples of direct ‘inheritance’ of allegiance to Yugoslavia and socialist ideals from parents or other relatives. For instance, grandparents often figured as important sources of information or otherwise important influence on young people’s attitude towards Yugoslavia. This can be explained both by the

86 traditionally important role that grandparents play in children’s upbringing in this region and by their long and sometimes unique personal experience of the socialist past:

I did not go to the kindergarten, instead I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, until they passed away … I remember my grandfather especially well, he was a National Hero [from the times of Second World War]. I think this had a very important influence on my attitude towards Yugoslavia (Vlad) Often the narratives of my informants about the transmission of yugonostalgic stories through family channels illustrate poignantly how nostalgia is a combination of both certain knowledge of the past and the subject’s current concerns and perceptions. The following passage from the interview with Milena is a good example of emotional nostalgic appreciation of economic aspects of the Yugoslav past, created out of combination of the certain stories about the past and contemporary uncertain lives of young people in Serbia (see Chapters Two and Seven):

My parents were telling me how easy and joyful their lives were in those first couple of decades after their marriage [in 1970s]. It was just easy to buy a flat, to buy what you needed… as an illustration of how easy it was back then for young people, my mother tells me this anecdote, that in the first year after their marriage they started to buy pictures to decorate their flat. Can you imagine? That in the first year of your married life you already have everything else you need, and you can start buying pictures! All of the pictures in our flat are from that first year of their marriage (Milena) These examples illustrate how young people ‘inherited’ their positive attitude towards Yugoslavia from their families. Using such vocabulary is dangerously simplistic, though. It occludes the fact that memories are never simply inherited or transmitted, but are constructed under the influence of many different factors. Stories of the young people who had positive views of socialism despite the ideological outlook of their relatives, demonstrate this very well. An excellent example was provided to me by Milica, born and raised in a small town in the centre of Serbia, but studying in university in Belgrade:

I think that in my family they did not really like Tito… my grandfather used to be a Chetnik, so Draža Mihailović was a name in our household, there were many books about him around, transcripts from his trial… he was not considered a bad person, so when I started my study at the university I believed that he was a hero … when I was listening to all those stories, Tito somehow was a negative person for me. So when I asked them [my parents] if they were crying when Tito passed away they answered: “well of course we did, how can you even ask such questions! – But I thought you did not like him! - Yes, sure he

87

was doing all sorts of stuff while he was alive, yet at the same time we lived well back then”. I was really perplexed by this answer (Milica) Milica went on to describe how after starting her history degree in Belgrade she re-evaluated the role of these two historical personalities even more. She did not idealise Draža anymore, but thought about him critically and considers him to be a problematic historic personality. On the other hand, her contemporary understanding of Tito was that he was

…a very interesting personality… we do not know a lot of things about him. But he had this special charisma, that he knew how to use, especially in diplomatic relations… we were some sort of power back then, at least in diplomacy, I think that this was wonderful. Such binary description, singling out pro-Yugoslav families and anti-Yugoslav families, is a very simplified one, of course. In some instances, my informants described to me situations where different important members of the family had different views of the socialist past. Finally, juxtaposition of the pro-Yugoslav and nationalistic attitudes also does not describe the multiplicity of the attitudes towards the past that people could have. Miloš provided an excellent illustration of this important point when describing the attitudes of his parents:

My relatives on my father’s side have been in Belgrade for a really long time, this is interesting for me personally, because of how my attitudes have changed… as a kid I really was proud of that, I had that big Belgrade chauvinist [attitude] ‘peasants go home’, communists have brought them over to ruin the city and blah blah blah [used in the original]… in 1993-1994 my parents still had this petite bourgeois attitude, they were like “Who are those bearded Chetniks who are ruining our Belgrade?” They were not interested either in Milošević or Drašković, but only this story – those are savages… In conclusion, this section shows that on one hand we can speak, in analogy with Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post-memory (2002), of formation of post- yugonostalgia, where second and third generations ‘inherit’ from their parents and grandparents the yugonostalgic predisposition towards the past. This, however, should not be seen as ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’, for, as I have argued in the introductory chapter, naturalised and essentialised understandings of yugonostalgia make it easy to dismiss this complex and processual phenomenon that can be understood only in its broader context. The fact that some of my informants have come to hold yugonostalgic positions despite the moods and ideologies popular in their families demonstrates that yugonostalgia is not just inherited. As Hirsch (2002: 114) observes, “Family life, even in its most intimate

88 moments, is entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy and projection and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the transmission of individual and familial remembrance”. In other words, many other processes may be involved in the formation of such a position, and in it becoming a salient presence in people’s life, as I will illustrate in the consequent sections of this chapter.

3.2.2. Teaching history in contemporary Serbia

When thinking about factors that may influence the formation of young people’s attitudes towards the past, history education looms large. Education, especially history education, plays an important role in shaping young people’s understanding of the past, and consequently influences their attitudes to the present. Beyond this truism, we need to acknowledge also that education is often a field where the state is trying to influence young people, inculcate certain ideas into them. Hence, education’s role in the construction and dissemination of national identity has been acknowledged many times (see, for instance, Weber 1976 for classical exploration of the subject).

Yet, at the same time, discussion of history education in contemporary Serbia highlights the tensions between official ideology and its alternatives. On the one hand, schools are considered in Althusserian tradition to be one of the main instruments of interpellation of the official state ideology. Indeed, the analysis of the content of curricular and history textbooks in Serbia demonstrates poignantly how here “both historiography and the teaching of history have served more as forms of preparatory military training than as scholarly disciplines of critical thinking” (Stojanović 2009: 141). On the other hand, a closer look at the way history is (not) taught at schools in Serbia reveals how official ideology is either not endorsed or contested in the process. This allows us to get a better understanding of why the official version of the past is also not the only one.

I will begin this section by examining some of the changes that have happened in Serbian history textbooks in relation to covering the issue of the past of Socialist Yugoslavia. Analysis of school curricula and textbooks is often used by students of collective identity and memory. They are believed to provide a good illustration of official ideology of the state and highlight how the transmission of the official

89 ideology works through the state apparatus of official education and schooling; “National curricula are instituted in order to provide citizens with a common body of knowledge, which are thought to provide life-long cultural glue” (Wachtel & Marković 2008: 203).

For this obvious reason, the history textbooks that were used in Serbia in the last twenty years were a good mirror of the historical revisionism happening in the country. As Stojanović notes (2009: 142), the textbooks underwent two processes of change in this period. They were re-written with the aim of providing an appropriate version of the past, a pertinent tradition to legitimise the current events.

During the period of ideological eclecticism of the 1990s, textbooks were changed for the first time. The changes attempted to synthesise elements of the communist and nationalist views of history. The resulting confusing medley of views and interpretations provided a legitimation to Milošević’s regime and its involvement in the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution (see Stojanović 1997; 2009; 2010).

After the fall of Milošević in 2000, textbooks needed to be re-written once again. This time, the change was reflecting the hegemonic anti-communist historical revisionism. The version of the history of Serbia taught to young Serbian citizens in schools had to be retrospectively de-communised. This tendency had most obvious effects on the treatment of the period of the Second World War and Socialist Yugoslavia in the textbooks.

Some of my informants were studying in schools precisely at the moment when the new textbooks were introduced. Consequently, during interviews they often commented on how the new books were both unjustly criticising or diminishing the role of the communist Partisan movement, and elevating the role of Chetniks led by Draža Mihailović. According to Ivan, for instance, this was a part of the strategy to diminish the communist contribution to the victory during the Second World War and glorify instead the ‘proper Serb’ resistance.

The disapproving stance towards the new textbooks that some of my informants have adopted can be a result of their current position, rather than the attitude they

90 have had at the time. Their leftist activism propels them into criticising rigorously what they see as a growth of Fascism in contemporary Serbian society. Consequently, possibly the problematic content of the textbooks became to them obvious not at the time of their study but in retrospect.

The new textbooks, after 2000 … they are a little bit more objective than the previous ones, because they talk about Partisans’ crimes, but on the other hand you have a complete rehabilitation of the Fascist collaborators, like Chetniks or Nedić. You do not have there anything bad about Draža [Mihailović] or his murderers, no mention of how they were killing Croats and Muslims … And now they are representing them as an anti-fascist movement. For me, this is absolutely incomprehensible, because I support this Partisan tradition, I mean I do not follow it blindly because they also committed some crimes that weren’t okay … but when somebody offers Mihailović’s Chetniks as alternative to that, I have to say that I am against that… so my personal opinion is – what they write now in textbooks and what kids learn in schools, that’s just not okay… that is a real revision of history… (Darko) After I had a conversation about textbooks with one of my informants, Milen, he suggested bringing me a textbook he used in secondary school, so that I could see for myself how the socialist past was treated there. In the 235-page long textbook (Nikolić et al. 2004), covering the period of history from the second half of the 19th century up until present, only two chapters (spanning over 31 pages) dealt with the period of Socialist Yugoslavia. The main “actor” in these chapters is the Serbian state/ nation. There is hardly any mention of the developments happening in the other parts of SFRY.29

Even the names of these chapters are illustrative of the revisionist tendencies. While the first one of them is called “Yugoslavia after the Second World War” and deals mainly with the first two decades of the state’s existence, the second chapter, which is supposed to cover the period of Yugoslav history from the 1960s onwards, is called “The Roots of Yugoslavia’s Collapse”. In other words, the authors of the textbook imply that the dissolution of Yugoslavia was predetermined. They even go so far as to claim that “The reasons of the civil war [i.e. wars of Yugoslavia’s dissolution] … were in the events of the Second World War. It looked like the unfinished war just continued after 50 years” (Nikolić et al. 2004: 228, emphasis in the original).

29 Unless, of course, it is something as important as Maspok movement in Croatia, which, additionally can also be interpreted to prove the corrupt nature of the Yugoslav experiment.

91

The analysis of the textual/ visual materials dealing with the history of Yugoslavia shows that omissions, silencing and even factual errors can be used in order to support historical revisionism. For instance, on p.251 of the textbook a prominent figure of Yugoslav history, Milovan Djilas, is called “an important anti- communist fighter” despite the fact that until his death Djilas considered himself to be a communist and all of his critique of the malfunctioning of the Yugoslav state was rooted in Marxism

Analysis of the history textbooks and curricula also provides us with important insights into processes of interpellation of the official (nationalist) ideology. Yet, this method has its limitations. To begin with, exclusive focus on curricula and textbooks overlooks the role human agency plays in the process of education and transmission of ideas – agency of both students and teachers. It also privileges only one official aspect of the education, ignoring the presence of some other actors, working in the same field, offering different interpretations of history.

Teachers play an important role in interpreting the ideological messages of the textbooks to students. Therefore, I tried to talk to my informants about how the actual process of teaching the history of Socialist Yugoslavia was taking place in their schools. To my surprise, quite often the answer to that question was: “Well, history of SFRY was not taught at school at all”. In the history school curriculum, structured according to chronological principle, the discussion of the second half of the 20th century was scheduled for the end of the school year. Quite often, my informants told me, their teachers used this as an excuse to mull over the potentially controversial topic. Jelena, a history teacher from one of the schools in the centre of Belgrade, with whom I talked about this issue, also acknowledged that this was an important factor:

You know, it’s the end of the year, it is hot as hell, just like now [I talked to her in the end of May – n ch], we are tired and all we can think about is how to finish all the marking not how to talk about these [problematic things]… One of my informants, who worked as a teacher in school, reflected more broadly on the teachers’ reluctance to deal with the history of SFRY in classrooms:

Current textbooks treat Yugoslavia in a very dry manner, just a collection of facts – it was the member of United Nations, its leader was Broz Tito, it disintegrated then and blah blah blah [used in the original]…The most famous

92

Serbian [sic] musicians were Djordje Balašević and Bajaga, Riblja Čorba i Bjelo Dugme, the most famous Yugoslav writers were Ivo Andrić and that’s that… And this is the biggest problem of Serbian schooling. Teachers are not creative enough and they are not interested in this story … everyday just kills you and you do not have the opportunity to create the content of your classes on your own. History is now in general avoided as a subject; quite probably in the future it will become just a selective subject in secondary schools. People just want to forget what was in the past and continue with their lives (Milan) At the same time, I heard stories from my informants about teachers who were actively disseminating their own views and interpretations of the Yugoslav past. These encompassed the whole range - from severe criticism of the “Yugoslav blunder” to adoration of Josip Broz Tito. There were also attempts to approach the past in an innovative manner. Two of my informants, who attended the same school, told me the story of the teacher who during the discussion of the Second World War period divided the classroom into Chetniks and Partisans and attempted to generate discussion between two groups. In Ivan’s and Milen’s opinion, although this was an interesting methodological innovation, attempting to overcome stale teaching methods, it was applied to the wrong historical context, and was contributing to the levelling of the meaning of these two movements.

In concluding of this section, I want to emphasize once again that we need to pay more attention to the way history is actually taught in schools in contemporary Serbia, or anywhere where we want to know about the influence of the school education on people’s understanding of and relationship towards the past (cf. Dimou 2009). The content of history textbooks in Serbia has been profusely analysed, but this provides us only with one part of the story. Judging from the conversations I had with my informants, teachers’ attitudes towards the subject were far from uniform, and did not necessarily follow the story offered in the textbooks.

But ultimately, if we want to understand changes in people’s relation to the past, we cannot pay attention only to the academic history and how it is taught at schools. History as a discipline has to compete with alternative sources of historical knowledge and broader cultural dynamics. Consequently, we need to pay more attention to these, taking into account visions of the past abundant in politics, media, everyday, and sphere of popular culture, as well as people’s communication and socialisation.

93

3.2.3. Role of socialisation

Our broader social circles have important influences on the way our identities are constructed and performed. During our conversations my informants have often pointed out to me the role of their social milieu in the formation of their stance towards Yugoslavia. Communication with different people prompted them either to reaffirm or reconsider their identity, and consequently, attitude towards the socialist past. Thus the aim of this section is to highlight the context-specific nature of identity and memory.

Consideration of socialisation in broader circles is an important addition to the standard discussions about cultural memory. It helps to create a fuller picture of different factors that influence this process. Thus, discussion of the role of school education is not complete without consideration of the dynamics between the pupils themselves.

For instance, Miloš, whom I already mentioned in a previous section as an example of the person growing up in Belgrade-centred, ‘bourgeois’ familial environment, provided me with a good illustration of this:

In school everyone was divided into those who supported Milošević and Drašković. I was against Milošević, who pretended to be a communist, so I sided with the nationalists, supporting Drašković. Another good example was provided by Darko:

When I was in school, everyone was against Milošević. And since I in general like to do things just in spite, I supported him. Also, because he was saying he was supporting Yugoslavia. Darko explains this incident by his overall non-conformist attitude towards life. It is worth noting that, when telling this story, Darko presented it as an amusing and entertaining anecdotal incident from his past. Such a strategy of distancing himself from his younger self, that was supporting Milošević, was necessitated by his subject position at the time of interview. As a member of the New Left scene, student of sociology at Belgrade university, and critically-minded person, he felt a need to explain and rationalise his past deed – support of Milošević – that he found condemnable from his present viewpoint. This demonstrates the need for construction of the coherent and grounded identity in Darko’s narrative.

94

As we can see from these stories, surroundings and peer milieu do indeed play an important role in the formation of young peoples’ outlook, including their interpretations of past and present events. Another point that becomes obvious from these stories is that young people’s attitudes can change. The shift happens under the influence of many factors, but sometimes it is precisely the change of surroundings that instigates the modification of their views.

Thus, some of my informants acknowledged the role of university in their understanding of and attitude towards Yugoslavia. Yet, while they were acknowledging how university education forced them to re-consider some of their previous assumptions - the ‘educational’ aspect of the university - it is impossible to ignore the role of socialisation in these new surroundings.

It is naïve to assume that university education presents a more nuanced and balanced view of the Yugoslav past, untainted by the dominant ideology, compared to the one offered in schools. To the contrary, ideological frontlines run through Serbia’s university auditoria as well. The ideological battles that were waged in Belgrade University reverberated in conversations I had with my informants. I often heard stories about the split between Departments of Sociology and History in the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Belgrade. Many of my informants either graduated or were still students in the Department of Sociology (curiously, only one of my informants with whom I recorded interview studied at Department of History). Consequently, my knowledge of the conflict between two departments is quite one-sided. Nevertheless, this is an interesting story and worth being recounted here, for it provides material for understanding of not just how the university education per se can influence young people’s outlook, but also how university settings contribute to this.

According to my informants, there is a strong ideological rift between the left- oriented Department of Sociology and nationalistic Department of History. “You know that Obraz has originated on the Fifth floor [where Department of History is], don’t you?” Caslav asked me, referring to one of the most notorious and radical (yet at the same time popular) right-wing Serbian organisations. Milena, in her turn, explained to me that Sociology is traditionally left-oriented, and many Marxist and leftist professors work here. Sava excitedly confirmed to me the

95 existence of such split between History and Sociology and explained: “They [history students] even wanted the University to evacuate us from the third floor of our Faculty”

Sava told me about this attempt (without providing any more details) in the summer of 2010. During autumn of the same year, a similar story happened again. During yet another round of protests against the commercialisation of higher education, organised by the left-leaning student activists from sociology, right- wing student organisation sent an open letter to the right-leaning Chancellor of the University, asking him to intervene decisively and stop this “chaos” (e-novine2).

These sketches for the story about the conflict between the radically right-wing History Department and leftist Sociology Department have implications for my discussion for a couple of reasons. First, we can see that in university settings there is space for contrasting opinions, ideologies and evaluations of the past. The right- wing Department of History in these stories looms large as one of the epicentres of historical revisionism, helping to re-write Serbia’s history with the aim of making the nation the main hero and victim of historical narrative.

These stories also implicitly indicate the importance of being in one or another setting. The Department of History is portrayed as a reserve for right-wing nationalists and members of radical nationalistic organisations, while Sociology is portrayed as a place where leftists meet. In other words, there is an implication here that being a student in the Department of History, attending lectures of some of the notorious nationalistic professors and hanging out with the nationalistic colleagues would have quite different consequences for one’s understanding of and attitude towards the Yugoslav past. How much truth there is in these stories about the conflict between the departments of History and Sociology in University of Belgrade, and students enrolled there, is only partly relevant. Verifying these stories would call for a thorough study of its own, examining, among other things, student subcultures, official institutional life of the departments and their unofficial politics and so on.30 Nevertheless, my informants and friends, in

30Although the Department of History indeed employs some of the highly controversial historians that actively construct nationalistic and conservative historical narrative (for instance, Radoš Ljušić), at the same time, it employs historians critical of such tendencies in Serbian historiography

96 choosing to tell me stories about this conflict or alerting me to its expressions and manifestations, also alerted me to the role one’s broader social circle can play in the formation of the person’s outlook, which, in this particular case, also includes the attitude towards Yugoslavia.

Finally, I want to consider here the role socialisation in leftist circles can play in the formation of the attitude towards the Yugoslav past and yugonostalgia among young leftist activists. While many of my informants did comment on the role of the leftist milieu in rather vague and generalised terms, only a few of them presented a more critical interpretation of this role. I would not hasten to interpret this as a sign of (only) ideological indoctrination. Such lack of critical reflection can be explained by the lack of distance and time to reflect.

I have encountered during my fieldwork and beyond a stereotypical simplified understanding that a leftist disposition would make one ‘yugonostalgic’ as well. This does not take into consideration the variety of the leftist groups in contemporary Serbia that differ from each other in some nuances of their ideology, interpretations of the Yugoslav past and the Serbian present situation. It was quite revealing how Miloš used precisely the difference in leftists’ attitudes towards the Yugoslav past to illustrate the broader ideological difference between some of the groups active on the scene:

Well, there are many different groups on the scene here… and they will be telling you different stories about what Yugoslavia was. Some would tell you that it was very close to capitalist society. Some would tell you that it was a workers’ state, a degraded one, but still a workers’ state, that’s what I think at least. And then you would have someone like anarchists, who would be telling you that it was bad because it was a state [with emphasis]. Hence, socialisation in the leftist activist circles potentially can have a strong influence on one’s attitude towards the Yugoslav past and can invite one to adopt a more yugonostalgic position. Yet, at the same time, this socialisation can actually invite one to adopt a more critical stance towards the Yugoslav past. Few of my informants pointed out to me that a critical re-thinking of the socialist past, which is one of the main aims of their activist groups, led them to change their attitude from more “yugonostalgic” towards the more critical. At times, they even admitted

(Dubravka Stojanović). The Sociology Department, in its turn, has a number of outspoken leftist intellectuals as its employees – e.g. Todor Kuljić.

97 to me about the clash between their personal yugonostalgia and the outlook of their comrades. When I asked Milan (whom I already mentioned in Chapter One) why he showed up to the commemoration of Tito’s birthday on his own, he replied that his comrades from the party look down at practices like these.

While socialisation in leftist circles is in general conducive for yugonostalgia, this process is nevertheless complicated and far from pre-determined. For instance, many of the events organised by the leftist groups that I attended during my fieldwork – from discussions and summer schools to street events – contained some sort of validation of the Yugoslav legacy. Mere participation in such events, while exposing one to such uses of the Yugoslav past, would not necessarily determine its interpretation.

In this section I have discussed the role of socialisation in the formation of memories, identities and yugonostalgia. In general, peer milieu plays an important role in the formation of youth identities in two main ways. Young people can either choose to conform to their peers or to oppose them. At the same time, peer environments can change, and this also has implications for young people’s ideological orientation and identification.

Interestingly, my informants reflected on the role of their peer surrounding on their attitude towards Yugoslavia and yugonostalgia most explicitly when they were talking about their teenage and (high) school days. Only a few of them critically reflected also on the role their current environment, New Left scene in Serbia, played in these processes.

3.2.4. Role of popular culture and media

It is widely acknowledged, that popular culture, broadly defined, is another important factor in the formation of cultural memory. For instance, “…particular media offerings become agenda-setters for collective remembrance and it is then through the inter-medial reiteration of the story across different platforms in the public arena (print, image, internet, commemorative rituals) that the topic takes root in the community” (Erll & Rigney 2009: 2-3).31 Thus, a recent sociological

31 As these authors warn later, we should always study the dynamics of cultural memory at the intersection of both social and medial processes, shifting attention from particular media products

98 study of Serbian youth states that the second most important factor shaping political attitudes of young people are mass media (Petrović 2011: 149), with TV playing the most important role.

Cultural artefacts produced in Yugoslav times can spur yugonostalgia and desire to know more about the Yugoslav past, as few of my informants have disclosed. While Chapter Eight offers analysis of the relevance of some of the Yugoslav cultural products in present times, here I want to emphasize their potential role in the creation of yugonostalgic dispositions.

Thus, many of my informants have acknowledged the role of the literature written in Yugoslav times, and especially, the oeuvre of Yugoslav writer and recipient of 1957 Nobel literature prize Ivo Andrić. Wachtel (1998) has observed how difficult Andrić was to incorporate into the new national literature cannons in the 1990s. Andrić during his life repeatedly emphasised that he declared himself to be a Yugoslav writer. Nevertheless, he is still taught in schools in Serbia. Many of my interlocutors mentioned his work when talking about different influences on their attitude towards Yugoslavia.

Cultural products created in post-Yugoslav times can perform a similar role. Alison Landsberg (2004) has developed a term “prosthetic memory” to refer to the new form of memory “largely made possible by the commodification of mass culture” (Landsberg 2004: 152). With some adjustments, this term can be increasingly applied to the yugonostalgic phenomena observable in post-Yugoslav space. Yugonostalgia is strongly present in media and popular culture here. I discuss implications of the incorporation of yugonostalgia into pop-culture especially in connection to its commodification and consumption in much more detail in Chapter Nine. In this section I again just emphasize that contemporary pop-cultural products also can invite young people to engage more with the Yugoslav past.

For instance, internet is a place where yugonostalgia has been thriving (Mikula 2003). It was probably one of the first venues for relatively easy publication of and access to yugonostalgic narratives at times when the nationalist atmosphere in the

towards the social actors who ensure which topics are salient and are put on the society’s commemorative agenda (Erll & Rigney 2009: 3).

99 former Yugoslav republic was still not that conducive for such manifestations in the traditional media. Nowadays people from all over former Yugoslavia can access yugonostalgic information about the past on-line on a variety of web-sites. This relative ease with which on-line manifestations of yugonostalgia can cross recently established national borders is one of the reasons for its importance. Thus, a ‘personal’ web-site of Josip Broz Tito (see Figure 3.1.), created as a joke in late the 1990s by two friends from Slovenia, has visitors not only from all over former Yugoslavia, but also from the USA, Western Europe, Australia and Africa.

Fig. 3.1. “Yes, I joined the WWW community!”, screenshot of Josip Broz Tito’s “personal” website www.titoville.com, taken on 05th December 2012. The abundance of references to the Yugoslav past and yugonostalgia in popular culture of the former Yugoslav states makes it an important factor to acknowledge and consider during the discussion of the ways young people form their attitudes towards these phenomena.

***

I began this chapter by describing the shifts in memory politics in contemporary Serbia. We cannot understand them properly without taking into consideration the broader regional and historical context. The collapse of the Socialist Bloc led to the establishment of the new neoliberal hegemony. It discredits the socialist past as its negative Other, reaffirming and naturalising the current situation.

100

In Serbia tendencies to discount the socialist experiment entered the public sphere in 1980s. Despite the Milošević rule they have continued throughout 1990s only to come to the fore after his fall in 2000. Currently, I argue, we can observe in Serbia a peculiar constellation of neoliberal and nationalistic ideologies. They are both depending on erasing the ideology of socialism from the present and future. A strategy of discrediting past socialist experience is used to achieve this aim. Yugonostalgic understandings of the history of SFRY become marginalised and pathologised.

In the second part of the chapter, I have analysed factors and processes that could have influence on the development of such contradictory yugonostalgic positions among my informants. After providing an overview of the politics of memory in Serbia since the fall of Slobodan Milošević,I have demonstrated here historical revisionism aiming at the de-valuation of the socialist past and helping thus to establish the new neo-liberal hegemony. As alarming as this process is, however, it is not omnipresent and conclusive, illustrating the point that hegemony is never total. Precisely its ambiguous nature allows for re-creation and circulation of divergent ideologies and narratives, such as yugonostalgia.

101

Chapter Four

Introducing Post-Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire

In this chapter I set out the theoretical and methodological frameworks for analysing the material covered in the following four chapters. To begin with, I briefly illustrate the continued presence of the Yugoslav past in contemporary life in Serbia. One can find its traces in everyday life, in arts and in politics, in material objects, ideas and concepts circulating in Serbian society. While some of the aspects of the Yugoslav past, although still present, are ignored or half-forgotten, the presence and visibility of others is undeniable.

To analyse this phenomenon of the continued presence of the Yugoslav past, I draw on the concept of lieux de mémoire, developed by French historian Pierre Nora. In this chapter I discuss the genealogy of this concept. I highlight its flawed origins and explain why nevertheless I have chosen to use it in my discussion. This concept, as it is applied sometimes in memory studies, is appropriate for my study, because it elucidates the constructed and flexible nature of memory.

I finish the chapter by illustrating how the concept of lieux de mémoire can be applied in the post-Yugoslav context, using the example of ongoing celebrations of one of the official Yugoslav holidays – Dan Mladosti (Day of the Youth) in contemporary Serbia.

4.1. Continued presence of the Yugoslav past

Imagine the situation: I am talking with a group of friends, when someone mentions Maratonci Trče Počasni Krug (translated into English as ‘The Marathon Family’) – a cult Yugoslav satirical comedy filmed in 1982 by the famous local director Slobodan Šijan. Everyone starts nodding in recognition, remembering the favourite moments from the film and quoting phrases or even whole dialogues. Or another example: I am drinking evening coffee at friend’s place and she places a packet of Plazma biscuits on a kitchen table commenting “that’s something for you – you are writing a thesis on yugonostalgia, after all”. One more illustration: I am putting together an application form for a Schengen visa, which I need in order to go from Serbia to Ukraine, and complain to another friend about the bureaucratic

102 barriers one has to overcome in order to get the coveted passage document. The friend has similar stories to share – she also must apply for a visa if she wants to go to any of the countries in EU. She perceives this as a terrible inconvenience and injustice, especially compared to the freedom of travel her parents enjoyed. “Back in the day”, they owned legendary Yugoslav red passports that allowed them to travel almost anywhere in the world (see Chapter Six).32

Still, more examples: we gather with a number of friends from a leftist milieu, and somebody suggests a place called ‘Pavka Korchagin’ as the most appropriate for the meeting. Several friends of mine have already mentioned this kafić (café) to me – ‘with your interest in yugonostalgia you should definitely check it out’. When I arrive there for the meeting, all my expectations come true. This is precisely one of those numerous communist ‘nostalgic’ coffee places that, as many observers report (Boym 2001; Velikonja 2008), have sprung up throughout the whole ‘post- socialist’ region. And even though it is named after the hero of the socialist realist novel How the Steel Was Tempered written by the Soviet author Nikolai Ostrovsky in 1931, the café is decorated predominantly with Yugoslav-related memorabilia, or as some might say ‘kitsch’ – pictures of Tito, Yugoslav flags, copies of articles from the Yugoslav newspapers reporting on yet another success of the worker’s self-management system.

All of these examples point to the following. There are certain things – material objects, cultural products, ideas – from Yugoslav times that stubbornly refuse to succumb to oblivion and erasure and that re-enter the everyday lives of people in contemporary Serbia. Performing the role of Proust’s petites madeleines, they trigger the whole stream of reminiscences and musings. This phenomenon has already attracted attention of scholars of the region (Velikonja 2008; Volčić 2007). It has been present for over twenty years now and has become an integral part of everyday life, practices and discourses. I have observed that people in Serbia consciously acknowledge this continued presence of the Yugoslav past. Spontaneously indulging in the memories or images of the past that, for instance, a

32 This conversation happened in summer 2009, before Serbia joined the so-called “white Schengen” list, which allowed its citizens to travel without visas to the Schengen countries, see Chapter Six.

103 chocolate spread Eurokrem brings out in many, goes hand in hand with the conscious re-usage and re-cycling of those elements from the past.

Interestingly, many people who talked to me about these phenomena from Yugoslavia were quite self-conscious, and sometimes made ironic comments about their use of Yugoslav references. This means that people do not just uncritically indulge in consumption of these Yugoslav things, but attempt to analyse this process:

You know, we send this list [short encyclopaedia of ‘important’ things from Yugoslav popular culture] to each other by emails – just joking among ourselves (Dejan, see also Chapter Nine).

Before I arrived in Serbia to start my fieldwork I was wondering how my self- taught (via books, videos, music and internet) knowledge of this Yugonostalgic pop culture would play against the local knowledge, behaviour and expectations. Would it turn out to be obsolete and redundant? I was relieved to find out that what I thought of as ‘legendary’ songs were still legendary, the Adriatic seacoast was still considered as one of the best places in the whole world to go for your summer vacations, and Josip Broz was still considered to be cool.33 Of course, very soon I confirmed, somewhat to my distress, the suspicion that my knowledge of the shared Yugoslav symbols was minuscule compared to the one that the locals had. Their knowledge included also TV shows I never had a chance to watch growing up, sport stars I could not be bothered to read about because I am not interested in sports, and events from the Yugoslav and local history about which I have never heard.

Not only older people, for whom these Yugoslav items and ideas were a part of their life worlds for the greater part of their lives, talked about them. Also the younger generations with whom I spent most of my time in Serbia were aware of these Yugoslav artefacts. So, what can we say about such presence of Yugoslav past

33 Josip Broz dobar skroz can be translated, sacrificing the melodic play present in the original as “Josip Broz [Tito] is totally cool”. I heard this phrase for the first time from a friend in Zagreb but later I came across it also in Serbian context on several occasions. Probably because of its laconic and rhythmic form, the phrase has become quite popular throughout the whole region of former Yugoslavia and one can nowadays buy t-shirts adorned with it or join at least two Facebook groups using it as their title (cf. also Velikonja 2008).

104 in contemporary Serbian lives? I decided to approach this phenomenon using the theoretical concept of lieux de mémoire.

4.2. Introducing concept of lieux de mémoire

The concept of lieux de mémoire was developed by French historian Pierre Nora. In the late 1970s he held a seminar on French collective memory in École Pratique des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. It grew into a long-term multidisciplinary collaborative research project, resulting in publication of the seven-volume anthology Les Lieux de Mémoire over the period from 1984 to 1992. The anthology addressed the growing interest in the collective memory among academics and the general public, perhaps allured by its innovative approach to the topic. The anthology was an enormous success, with some referring to it as an ‘intellectual media-event, drawing into its slipstream academics, public and political figures, and, through the press and television, the wider public’ (Schwarz 2010: 49). Nora even remarked in the last volume of the French edition that Les Lieux de Mémoire had gained its own place in French collective memory, even before its completion, on account of its widespread enthusiastic reception (Carrier 2010: 51). Impressed by the success of the project many other European historians tried to replicate it in their respective contexts – German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch, among others (den Boer 2008: 22).

So what are the lieux de mémoire, after all? It is difficult not to notice that I have been avoiding even offering an English translation of the term so far. But this is not a personal whim – the term is notoriously difficult to translate into most European languages. Many of the translations currently in use are somewhat problematic because of their positivistic reification of the concept (den Boer 2008: 23). In English alone different authors use such terms as ‘memory places’ (Kritzman 1996), ‘locations of memory’ (Schwarz 2010), ‘spaces of memory’, ‘memory sites’/ ‘sites of memory’ (Winter 2010). All of these are just attempts to translate the French phrase quite literally, despite Nora’s warning against doing this uncritically (Nora 1996).

There is a reason why Nora opposes the uncritical usage of the terms ‘site’ or ‘place’: this could lead to a simplistic understanding of what the lieux de mémoire

105 are actually about. Nora himself acknowledges that even within his project one could discern two approaches towards the lieu de mémoire, a narrow one, which was used in the initial stages, and a broader one, which developed and crystallized as the project progressed. The narrow concept indeed emphasized the site: “the goal was to exhume significant sites, to identify the most obvious and crucial centres of national memory, and then to reveal the existence of the invisible bonds tying them all together” (Nora 1996: xviii). In other words, this was an empirical, almost descriptive approach. It treated elements of French national collective memory as simple objective categories and focused on ‘palpable’ things like memorials, museums, commemorations, historical figures and so on. The broader approach, however, emphasized the memory component of lieu de mémoire and looked instead at the way the memory ‘functions’ in society. It analysed and dismantled the process of creation and functioning of the sites examined within the narrower approach. In the end, Nora (1996: xviii) offers a broad and quite ambiguous “official” definition of what a lieu de mémoire is: “any significant entity, whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community”.

Nora and others (Hutton 1993; Rigney 2008) warn against a simplistic understanding of the lieux de mémoire for obvious reasons. It is all too easy to succumb to seduction of shedding light on the almost carnivalesque richness and variety of the ‘places’ or ‘sites’ of national memories that previously were pushed to the margins of discussions in the field of memory studies. Indeed, it might seem a provocative step to level out the pantheon of national memory, as was done in case of the original French project, which implicitly made such iconic symbols and images as the French revolution or General de Gaulle equivalent to the Gallic Rooster or coffee (although, as I will show a bit later, this step was somewhat contradictory). But in attempt to capture the multiplicity of lieux, we can easily overlook the most important component of these phenomena – their processual nature, their internal dynamics:

…the metaphor of “memory site” can become misleading if it is interpreted to mean that collective remembrance becomes permanently tied down to figures, icons, or monuments. As the performative aspect of the term “remembrance”

106

suggests, collective memory is constantly “in the works” and, like a swimmer, has to keep moving even just to stay afloat. (Rigney 2008: 345) I was initially attracted towards the lieux de mémoire and found it applicable to the post-Yugoslav phenomenon I have described here precisely because of these dynamic elements of the concept – such as the conflictual, ever-evolving nature of any lieu, or the crucial role of social actors in their creation and maintenance. Therefore, I will follow Nora’s suggestion in the abridged three-volume English edition of his project (Nora 1996) to use the French term lieux de mémoire, especially since it is already quite well-known to the students of the memory and because it helps to avoid the pitfalls arising from uncritical usage of the numerous English translations.

However, before showing how and why theoretical and historiographical insights about the nature and functioning of lieux de mémoire can be applicable to the context of my study, I have to signal, that I do find Nora’s concept, his usage and aim of its application, quite problematic. Nora, an established member of the French intellectual elite, belongs to the liberal-conservative part of the ideological spectrum. Perry Anderson has even voiced a concern that Nora played a decisive role in the shift to the right that has happened in French intellectual culture over the last few decades (cf. Schwarz 2010: 49). One can get a feeling of Nora’s political affiliations even from his explanation of the aims of the lieux de mémoire project. It can be seen as an attempt to re-write the recent French history with the aim of erasing the importance of French Revolution from it. Nora, after all, belonged to the same intellectual circle as French conservative and revisionist historian François Furet (Furet was his brother-in-law). Furet proclaimed the French revolution to be over (cf. Hutton 1993: 143), implying that it had lost any significance for contemporary French society and academia and that its legacy has become a burden that should be disposed of. He also authored an indicatively- named book The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999). According to Patrick H. Hutton (1993: 148), Nora “draws the theoretical implications of Furet’s argument and applies them to the contemporary historiographical scene”. In other words, his whole project “written at the bicentenary of the revolution but not exactly for its bicentennial” (Hutton 1993:

107

148) aims to show how irrelevant the Revolution has become not only for the political life in France but also for French historiography.

Nora takes as his ‘adversary’ twenty-seven volume canonical Historie de France by Ernest Lavisse, written at the beginning of the twentieth century, which created one seamless organic whole of French nation out of Revolution and Republic. Les Lieux de Mémoire are attempting ‘to decompose that unity, to dismantle its chronological and teleological continuity’ (Nora 1996: xix). By including, for instance, symbols and images as distant in time as the Gauls and the Middle Ages and as ‘quotidian’ as Le Tour de France or the French taste for gastronomy, the place of Revolution is relativized, and “…the significance of the revolutionary tradition is diminished, for it is only one stratum among many in the national memory unearthed in this archaeological probe” (Hutton 1993: 149).

Such methodological revisionism would not necessarily have to be problematic in itself, if only Nora’s iconoclastic attacks against the French revolution did not go hand in hand with his generally nationalistic outlook and methodology. One could say that the motivating force behind his project is Pierre Nora’s longing for the imagined one-time era of ‘national’ history, when such institutions as state, church, school and family were the agencies responsible for transmission of values and could regulate what and how is being remembered (Nora 1996: 2). It promptly becomes obvious to reader of Nora’s theoretical introduction to Les Lieux des Mémoire, yet interpretations of his intentions vary. Some authors reassure that Nora is far from being chauvinistic and in using ‘ethnological’ and ‘sentimental’ methods is trying to offer a new project of French national identity open to new configurations and combinations of previously existing memories (Carrier 2010). Yet others (Schwarz 2010; Winter 2010) – and I agree with them – see the nationalistic and Eurocentric implications of Nora’s argument as problematic.

Nevertheless, at least some of Nora’s insights into the way memory functions in contemporary societies are illuminating. They seem to be well-suited for my case study as well, even if they are applied contrary to Nora’s ideological intentions. In what follows I will offer a distilled overview of the most relevant points from Nora’s theorizing on lieux de mémoire emphasising, where relevant, their

108 problematic sides and clarifying why and how they can be applied, if with a little modification, to my study.

4.2.1. Conditions for creation of lieux de mémoire

First and foremost we should consider the circumstances under which, according to Nora, lieux de mémoire come into being. In his opinion, lieux de mémoire become possible only when, under the conditions of the acceleration of history, manifested in modernization, urbanization, globalization, democratization and the advent of mass culture (Nora 1996: 1-2) ‘the real’, ‘true’ memory (he uses the term milieux de mémoire to refer to it) dies out. Therefore, societies need to replace it with some artificial mnemonic techniques. Nora (1996:2) argues that in contemporary society not only memory has vanished from the everyday lives, but also “ideologies based on memory have ceased to function as well”. And since we no longer live our lives among our memories, there is a need to create ‘sites’ for embodying them:

Lieux de mémoire arise out of a sense that there is no such thing as spontaneous memory, hence that we must create archives, mark anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, and authenticate documents because such things no longer happen as a matter of course. When certain minorities create protected enclaves as preserves of memory to be jealously safeguarded, they reveal what is true of all lieux de mémoire: that without commemorative vigilance, history would soon sweep them away (Nora 1996: 7, emphasis added). We can make several points about this part of Nora’s argument. First, it is somewhat generalizing. On the one hand, Nora never openly makes a claim that he is providing a general characteristic of the state of things in the modern world. He is writing this in the introduction to the book on French national memory, and whenever he does use some specific examples in order to illustrate his theoretical musings, he uses chiefly examples from the French context. Thus one could assume that he is writing about French society. However, Nora adopts here quite an equivocal style, which some authors call meditative (Hutton 1993: 148), and others praise for its stylistic virtuosity while at the same time criticizing its explanatory powers (Schwarz 2010: 49). For most of his general remarks, Nora does not specify which context he is speaking about. Therefore one could easily form the impression that he is characterizing modern societies in general.

109

Precisely because of this many authors have accused Nora – and rightly so, in my opinion – of Eurocentrism. Jay Winter (2010: 315) argues, for instance, that milieux de mémoire and oral and written traditions of remembrance that inform them are alive and well in places like Latin America or India.

A second line of critique is that Nora’s argument contradicts other theorists’ writings on memory, who argue that modern societies are deluged by the obsession with history, that commemorations of the past not only haunt everyday lives but very much are part and parcel of contemporary political, social and cultural processes (cf. Husseyn 1995). Later in his academic career Nora also changed his mind on the subject of how much memory was present in the contemporary world and stated in quite a grandiose manner that the whole world has experienced an explosion in memories, with every country and every civilization being affected by it (Nora 2001: x).

After all, it is not that important which of the Nora’s observations were more ‘true’ to life. As Richard Terdiman (1993) notes, students of memory seem to be unable to come to a consensus about the nature of the transformations happening in contemporary world. Some say there is too much memory, others argue that there is too little of it, some say that there is too much history, others – too little; some say that there is memory rather than history, while others – history rather than memory and so on. And, as we have just seen, some change their opinion on the matter. But mostly everyone agrees that in modern life the attachment to the past has been broken and new ways need to be invented to revivify what has been lost.

A third problem with Nora’s argument about the passing of real memory is, as I already pointed out, that he is basically lamenting (many authors have ‘diagnosed’ him with nostalgic or melancholic attitudes - see Hutton 1993: 149; Winter 2010: 49) the passing of the ‘national’ memory, memory that functioned in strong centralized and hierarchical order of nation-state (France). Thus, there is an implicit nationalistic understanding in Nora’s argument that only ‘national’ memory can cope with our crisis of the relating to the past.

110

4.2.2. Agency and lieux de mémoire

The second important point that I take from Nora’s theorizing is the role of agency in the creation of the lieux de mémoire. Many times Nora emphasizes the importance of the desire to commemorate or, as Nora has called it in the passage above, “commemorative vigilance”. Since lieux de mémoire are artificial creations, emphasizes Nora, there needs to be an agent with a will not only to create but also to maintain them. The resulting phenomenon is “wilful and deliberate, experienced as duty rather than as spontaneous; psychological, individual and subjective, rather than social, collective and all-embracing” (Nora 1996: 8). Nora overemphasizes somewhat the role of the “isolated individual” who has to assume the responsibility for memory (Nora 1996: 11), without saying anything about how this individual would start feeling a need to memorialize something, what social/ cultural structures would have to come into play in order to determine such a subjective position. At the same time, this observation does offer a fresh insight compared to the traditional focus of memory studies on the role of the larger structures in this process. Eventually Nora admits that social groups are also actors in remembering process.

At the same time, when Nora discusses those previously marginalized, pushed out of official history groups who have ‘gained a right’ to memory of their own, he sometimes comes across as if almost disapproving of the democratization of memory and a chance to create their own lieux de mémoire that is now available to “workers, Jews … royalists, Bretons or Corsicans, women” (Nora 2001: xiv). To return to the criticism I developed in the last section, I contend that in Nora’s writings one can discern a longing not only for time when the nation state was imposing a unifying framework for dealing with the past, but the historians, acting as half soldiers, half priests bore the burden of responsibility for the nation (Nora 1996: 5). They held a monopolistic role in manufacturing the past, while nowadays they have to compete with lawyers, media and other actors (Nora 1996: 3). Nevertheless, Nora does make an important point: lieux de mémoire do not have any sense without taking into consideration the role of the social actor – be it an individual or a group – because precisely the actor brings meaning into them.

111

4.2.3. Dynamic nature of lieux de mémoire

The third point to consider, is precisely the meaning of lieux de mémoire, namely this meaning’s dynamic, ever-changing, and performative nature. As already noted above, this point is sometimes overlooked and sacrificed when scholars concentrate on the specific ‘site’ itself and omit the internal dynamics of it. Nora himself points out that ‘… it is also clear that lieux de mémoire thrive only because of their capacity for change, their ability to resurrect old meanings and generate new ones along with new and unforeseen connections’ (Nora 1996: 14). The change in the meaning comes, according to him, as the result of the change in our perception of the past. In other words, lieux de mémoire should be seen as a flexible mechanism of adapting past for the needs of present.

Sometimes the “same sites used for one purpose can be used for another” (Winter 2010: 324). This alteration can happen over time – when one lieu, as the time passes, loses its meaning and somebody invests it with another meaning. But also the meaning of the lieu can be contested at any given moment, and different groups can invest it with different values and use it for different purposes. And if they lose their flexibility, their ability to adapt, lieux also lose any raison d’être.

Jay Winter’s (2010) theorizing about the ‘life cycles’ of sites of memory is of great relevance here. When speaking about rituals surrounding public commemorations (but this can be expanded to all other lieux de mémoire in my opinion), he distinguishes three stages: ‘a construction of commemorative form’, ‘the routinization’ of it and, eventually ‘either transformation or disappearance as the site of memory’ (Winter 2010: 322-323). Precisely this changing life of lieux de mémoire — their flexibility of meaning – is their most exciting characteristic, the one that makes them so useful for studying the shifting attitudes towards the past happening in different societies.

4.3. Applying the concept of lieux de mémoire to the Serbian context: Dan Mladosti (Day of the Youth)

Although the preceding discussion has shown that Nora’s argument is riddled with internal problems and contradiction, it has also indicated how and why the theory about formation and functioning of lieux de mémoire is applicable to my

112 study. First of all, in the Serbian context ‘post-Yugoslav’ lieux de mémoire came into being after a life-world of which they were an integral and lived part disintegrated with the collapse of Yugoslavia. With the establishment of new countries, not only the core cultural symbols and values that were reproduced by the Yugoslav state ideological apparatus (schools and institutions of higher education, army, media, etc) were pushed aside but also very specific and palpable things, like brands of products or monuments to the partisan fighters from the Second World War, faced the same fate. New lieux, often permeated by the ideologies of nationalism and free market capitalism, replaced the Yugoslav past.

It is precisely in this context of officially supported erasure of Yugoslav memory/ history that the post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire were created. When the right to the Yugoslav-oriented memories was being denied, some saw it as important to create catalogues, sites and commemorations centred precisely on these vanishing phenomena. This illustrates the importance of agency in creation of lieux de mémoire. In Serbian (and in general wider post-Yugoslav) context, the ‘duty to remember’ described by Nora becomes strikingly noticeable. The role of the actors – both individuals and social groups – in creation, maintenance and negotiation of meaning of the post-Yugoslav lieux is impossible to overlook. Beginning with the few intellectuals who were articulating the “Yugoslav” lieux de mémoire starting with the early 1990s, and to numerous ‘ordinary’ yugonostalgics, many people are invested in creating, maintaining and negotiating these phenomena.

I could discern this feeling of ‘commemorative vigilance’ during many conversations with my informants. They stressed the importance of their on-going re-thinking, discussion and restoring the visibility of Yugoslav past, in order to prevent it from fading away into oblivion. “I think, Yugoslavia needs to be studied”, “We have to discuss these matters, so that we can get better understanding of them”, “Yugoslavia is not considered relevant anymore, but we still need to think about our past” – these are just a few examples of how my informants articulated the duty to remember.

113

Finally, Nora’s insight into the changing nature of the lieux de mémoire applies strongly to my study. To begin with, some of the lieux that circulate nowadays in Yugonostalgic circles achieved this status back in the days when Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia existed. Partisan struggle; ideology of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity); official state holidays, like Dan Republike (Day of the Republic), celebrated on 29th of November and commemorating the proclamation of Socialist Yugoslavia in 1943, or Dan Mladosti (Day of the Youth), celebrated on the day of Tito’s birthday, 25th of May;34 or, even Josip Broz himself, who had acquired this status still during his life – all of these lieux were created and maintained in SFRY as the founding blocks of the state’s official ideology. However, their meaning changed after SFRY’s collapse. An important insight into the nature of this change can be borrowed from Nora. He offers a distinction between the “dominant” and “dominated” lieux:

Dominant sites are spectacles, celebrations of triumph. They are imposing as well as generally imposed from above by the government or some official organization, and typically cold and solemn, like official ceremonies. One doesn’t visit such places; one is summoned to them. Dominated sites are places of refuge, sanctuaries of instinctive devotion and hushed pilgrimages, where the living heart of memory still beats (Nora 1996: 19). Many of the official Yugoslav lieux de mémoire have shifted their status from the dominant to the dominated ones in post-Yugoslav context. This can be illustrated by the case of the Dan Mladosti - Day of the Youth - one of the official Yugoslav holidays.

The origins of the holiday go back to the 1945. A group of young people from town of Kragujevac offered to organize a symbolic relay, where a baton with a birthday pledge was carried all over the country in order to be handed in to Tito himself. It was elevated to the status of the official state holiday in 1957. From that date on Dan was organized on a yearly basis. Children and young people from all over Yugoslavia competed for the right to carry the baton – at least in their own

34 Actually Josip Broz was born on 7th of May. However, both during his ‘revolutionary’ years in pre- war Yugoslavia and during the Second World War he used forged identity documents with different biographical data. German forces intercepted some of those documents indicating 25th of May as his birthday and in 1944 decided to launch the Seventh Anti-Partisan Offensive aiming to liquidate partisan leadership and capture Tito himself around that time, with the main attack scheduled precisely on that date. The operation that later became known as Raid on Drvar failed and Tito managed to escape (even though German forces had claimed to kill around 6000 Partisans). To commemorate this, Tito decided later on to officially celebrate his birthday precisely on this date.

114 locality, if not at the final stage, in Belgrade, where it was given to Tito during the grandiose celebration.

Young people in Yugoslavia had different reasons for participation in the relay. Some invariably did so out of their ideological beliefs. For instance, one of my informants, Tibor, described the feeling of pride and dignity he felt as a young Tito’s pioneer when he was chosen to carry the baton in his small town back in the 1980s. Some would describe this relay nowadays as something you were expected, if not coerced, to participate in by the state. There were undoubtedly cases when people invested this rigid state-organized ritual with their own meanings. Such a scenario was described, for example, in a popular film Tito i ja (‘Tito and Me’, Goran Marković 1992). The film’s young protagonist wants to participate in the relay in order to win over a girl from his class who had a crush on Tito.

The celebration of Dan Mladosti continued even after Tito’s death in 1980, commonly described as I posle Tita – Tito (After Tito – Tito). The meaning of this celebration was eventually contested in the late 1980s, as a result of re-thinking and/ or criticising Socialist Yugoslavia’s official ideology. For instance, in 1987, a Slovenian local organizing committee of the relay chose as an official poster for the event artwork submitted by the NSK, a radical political art collective. It later turned out to be a slightly re-worked copy of the Nazi propaganda poster “Third Reich” by Richard Klein, causing a lot of controversy.

The last official relay was held in May 1988. However, since the mid-1990s, the relay has been organized again – this time without official support of the state(s), on a much smaller and more humble scale, without elaborate decorations and sophisticated choreography. Reactions to these renewed celebrations vary – some people mock this as gathering of lunatics, some people attend it because they feel that this is an important thing for them to do. With no state interested in overseeing the organization of the relay and controlling its form and ideological content, a “democratization” and “decentralization” of the celebration has happened. It is organized by local initiative groups in villages, towns and cities dispersed all over former Yugoslav republic. Still, the one that takes place in

115

Belgrade, in Kuća Cveća – Josip Broz’s residency during lifetime and his burial place – is contending for the status of the principal relay.

Currently, people from all over Yugoslavia organize themselves to visit Kuća Cveća on the 25th of May. The attending crowds are quite motley. For instance, each year a numerous group of bikers from Slovenia arrive. This testifies to yugonostalgic mood in Slovenia, despite the popular belief that Slovenes were all too happy to erase everything “Yugoslav” from their lives. Although leather-clad Slovenes on their Harley Davidsons are probably most visible, one can see here ‘delegations’ basically from all former Yugoslav republics – Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Macedonia.35

From what I witnessed when I attended the event in 2009 and 2010, it was organized around some version of the ‘official’ ceremony from the Yugoslav times. The celebration includes a procession to Tito’s grave and laying of wreaths there with different people giving talks, partisan songs performed, and – the baton being returned in a contemporary version of the relay.

At the same time, there is a discernible chaotic, almost anarchic feeling to the celebration. It distinguishes the contemporary commemoration from the official events held in Yugoslav times. Previously they were organised under strict control, according to a well-planned and rehearsed scenario. Today, just a short stroll away from the ‘official’ part of the celebration, vendors spread temporary stalls on the grass selling Tito- and partisan-related memorabilia (see Fig. 4.1). Motorbike engines unintentionally cover up the sound of the speeches. People usually do not stay for the whole of the official part listening to the talks (which are sometimes really difficult to hear because of rather poor technical support), but feel free to wander around, go to the Museum of History of Yugoslavia (which on this day has free admittance), sit on the grass, and chat to each other. Or if they do stay for the talks, they listen actively, cheering to the parts that they support or booing the ones they do not agree with.

Young people, though present here, are not that numerous. One can see a few really small kids, brought here by their parents or grandparents. There are some

35 I have not noticed a ‘delegation’ from Kosovo though.

116

teenagers or people in their 20s and early 30s who decide to come here on their own, as well. But on both occasions that I visited Kuća Cveća on 25th of May in 2009 and 2010, the majority of young people were the journalists, who were filming, recording, taking pictures of, or making notes about the event. This can be interpreted as a sign of the growing fascination in Serbian society with this unofficial continued celebration of Tito’s birthday.

When I later asked few of my informants why not that many young people attend the 25th of May celebrations, I got some interesting responses. For instance, Milan, whom I initially met at the celebration, confided that most of his comrades frown upon the event and see it as an uncritical celebration of the problematic legacy of Titoism. Milan’s presence there was a result of a family tradition. His grandfather, while he was alive, used to take Milan there each year. Consequently, Milan’s attendance of the celebration was meant to pay respect both to Josip Broz,

Figure 4.1. Improvised stall selling Titoist memorabilia, 25th of May 2009, Kuća Cveća, Belgrade. Picture by author.

117

whom he still held in respect, in spite of the debates with his comrades, and to his grandfather.

None of my other informants told me that s/he went to Kuća Cveća on 25th of May. On the contrary, the continued celebration of Dan Mladosti was sometimes invoked as an example of the uncritical and therefore ‘pityiul’ attitude towards Socialist Yugoslav past. However, it was not the date itself that made the event so ridiculous in the eyes of some of my informants, but rather its uses in contemporary times. Passage from the interview with Siniša illustrates this point very well. Here he contrasts the meaning of celebrations of the Dan Mladsoti in socialist times with their meaning today:

For a long time I want to make a documentary about the youth relay in socialist times… I have been watching a lot of the documentary footage. They [participants] talk about it with such pride. He has just run 20 kilometres and says “Tito, we wish you a happy birthday” … if you go [now] to that museum [Kuća Cveća is a part of the Museum of History of Yugoslavia, see Chapter Nine], it all looks pathetic. Maybe that is only my impression, but I think that people who sell that… now, I am also one of them, but I try to be more realistic – but they just sell some worn out ideology. They sell some old records that no one would listen to, no meaning… I observed it all there, no one will buy that! Maybe some Slovene will buy it eventually, or someone from Berlin, who has some sort of understanding of that artefact, [who sees] that it is interesting. While someone from here will just pass by… In this sample, Siniša contrasts what he perceives as a genuine enthusiasm of the socialist days with the irrelevance of the celebration for current young people in Serbia. Interestingly, he distinguished between his own reflective nostalgic position and other ‘pathetic’ yugonostalgics. As Nadrkani and Shevchenko (2004) observe, such strategy is often used by some nostalgic subjects, to distinguish their own progressive and thoughtful attitude towards the past from uncritical nostalgia. Both Siniša’s and Milen’s interviews show that, in contemporary Serbia, respect for Tito, and yugonostalgia more broadly, are often restricted predominantly to the private sphere, while denied in the public one (see second part of Chapter Five and Chapter Nine for the related discussion).

***

Even though Dan Mladosti was established as a lieu de mémoire back in SFRY, its value and meaning have changed significantly. During Tito’s lifetime this was an

118

‘ideal type’ of the dominant lieu de mémoire described by Nora. It was an official celebration, organized and strictly controlled by the state, ‘summoning’ its citizens to participate in it (even though this does not mean that some of them did not participate willingly). But in the last two decades it turned into the ‘dominated’ lieu, almost a place of pilgrimage for the people who still invest Tito’s figure with important symbolic meanings, regardless of the attacks on his persona and role in history launched by the nationalistic ideologies of the former Yugoslav states.

However such devaluation of former dominant Yugoslav lieux de mémoire into post-Yugoslav dominated ones, is not the only type of their shifting of meaning that I came across during my research. Probably, even more fascinating is to observe how one and same post-Yugoslav lieu is invested with different meanings by different groups within the Serbian society. Most obvious this would be in case of different, sometimes even clashing interpretations offered by right-wing and left- wing groups. But even in case of the leftist circles only, the meanings can vary, depending on their position on the ideological spectrum. I will illustrate these processes of creation and negotiation of meanings of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire happening in contemporary Serbia in more detail in subsequent four chapters.

Finally, before moving to the discussion of these post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire that I encountered during my fieldwork, it is important to point out that I had, in a way, to repeat yet another drawback, previously not discussed, of Nora’s original project. It has been criticized for being a ‘work of classification, in the grand Durkheimian manner’ (Schwarz 2010: 50). Originally, I intended to try not to do the same with the material that I gathered in the course of my own research. The main reason for such reluctance was my belief that the material gathered during my fieldwork in Serbia would be severely compromised and harmed by such attempts at classification However, if only for keeping the story within the limits of any dissertation, I had to give in and attempt to classify the lieux de mémoire into bigger groups. As a result, the next four chapters deal with the following post- Yugoslav lieux de mémoire: political aspects of the Yugoslav ideology; Yugoslav internationalism; Yugoslav dream (that is social and economic stability); and pan- Yugoslav culture. These lieux are somewhat awkward intellectual constructs,

119 because, in everyday conversation, people would not refer to them, but would speak about more tangible phenomena – like higher employment rates, red passports, or Yugoslav success in the international sporting arena.

120

Chapter Five

Political Legacy of SFRY as Post-Yugoslav Lieux de Mémoire

In this chapter I examine the broad cluster of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire relating to the political dimensions of SFRY ideology I refer to as Yugoslavism. I discuss three inter-related themes that crystallised in interviews I conducted with my informants, relating to these aspects – the concept of brotherhood and unity, Yugoslav identity, and the persona of Josip Broz Tito.

This cluster of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire is of particular interest for students of memory. They were created still in times of the Socialist Yugoslavia and formed, in combination with several other elements, an ideological foundation of the Yugoslav state. Yet, while the other elements of this foundation, discussed in the following chapters, were relating to the Yugoslav present and future, these Yugoslav lieux de mémoire were to a large extent constituted in relation to the recent past, namely the Second World War. Socialist Yugoslavia built its official memory politics on these foundations, articulating, supporting and promoting these lieux through rituals, education and popular culture. At the same time, official line towards them sometimes was ambivalent. These lieux were also creatively appropriated and sometimes challenged by Yugoslav citizens.

With the gradual nationalisation of Yugoslav life and eventual collapse of the state, these lieux were discredited by the new nationalistic ideologies. Yet, in the context of the Yugoslav wars and the prevalence of extremist nationalisms, these ideas still retained relevance for some people in former Yugoslavia, as previous scholarship on yugonostalgia proves.

As I argue in Chapter Three, with the fall of Slobodan Milošević the nationalisation of Serbia continued, and so did the disparagement of these political aspects of the Yugoslav past. Thus, the way my informants relate to and conceptualise these particular ideas is connected to the current ideological settings in Serbia. As this chapter shows, brotherhood and unity, Yugoslav identity, anti- fascism and, on occasions, Josip Broz Tito are evoked in yugonostalgic narratives as important features of Yugoslav history, that remain relevant in Serbia because of the contemporary situation. I also demonstrate here some of the ‘shifts’ and

121 changes in the way my informants related to these lieux de mémoire. Importantly, I illustrate how my informants try to critically engage with these ideas, which is most obvious in their renderings of Josip Broz Tito’s personality.

5.1. Bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity) as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire

“Bratstvo i jedinstvo, of course”. This was the answer Tibor, a young activist from Serbia’s autonomous province Vojvodina,36 provided to my question about what was good about Socialist Yugoslavia in the very first interview I recorded during my fieldwork in Serbia. Later in the interview Tibor went on to describe what made this concept so ‘phenomenal’ in his opinion: Yugoslavia had a rich diversity of cultures, historical legacies, ethnic and religious groups and they had to co-exist according to the ideals of brotherhood and unity. According to Tibor, this turned Socialist Yugoslavia into a distinctive space with unique potential, which, however, was quite difficult to uphold. Despite shortcomings of attempts to implement the concept in real life, it still held strong appeal to Tibor. The advantages of brotherhood and unity particularly dawned on him, he admitted, after one conversation he had with his father:

…during my university studies I had a course on community development. I once started conversation at home about the things we learned, and I was very enthusiastic about them… To which my father said: “Hey, sorry, but you’ve just invented the wheel there” … [in Yugoslavia] those things existed and functioned… Brotherhood and unity were celebrated as one of the most positive aspects of the Socialist Yugoslav past in many other interviews I recorded during my fieldwork. Furthermore, they were often brought up in other conversations I had during the stay in Serbia. In other words, this concept is quite common in popular understandings of what SFRY was, particularly in people’s moral evaluations of Communist Yugoslavia.

36 I recorded this interview at the very beginning of my fieldwork, when I had not yet made up my mind about focusing only on the Belgrade activist scene. Tibor lived and worked mostly in Bečej, a small town in the north of Vojvodina. However, he did travel quite often to Belgrade where I met him and also was involved with some queer organisations there.

122

5.1.1. Bratstvo i jedinstvo in the 1990s

The idea of the unity and peaceful co-existence of different Yugoslav nations, ethnic and religious groups was also a very popular theme in the ‘first’ wave of yugonostalgic texts, written in the 1990s by intellectuals from the region with a significant experience of SFRY. This unity was described as both a product of the ideological apparatus of SFRY and as a lived reality. There were several symbols used to refer to this perceived unity, with the concept of bratstvo i jedinstvo being one of the most wide-spread and well-known ones. Let us consider, for example, an illustrative quote from essay by Dubravka Ugrešić (1998: 3):

I was born in the fifth decade of the twentieth century, four years after the end of the Second World War. I was born in Yugoslavia, in a small industrial town not far from Zagreb, the main city of the Republic of Croatia. Many children were born in those years. The country which had been devastated by the war was rapidly building its future. … When I went to school, I learned that Yugoslavia was a country which consisted of six republics and two autonomous regions, six national communities and several national minorities. I learned that there were in Yugoslavia several linguistic communities, and that in addition to Slovene and Macedonian, and the languages of national minorities – Albanian, Hungarian, Romany, Italian and others – there was Croato-Serbian or Serbo-Croatian … I learned that Yugoslavia had three large religious communities and a lot of smaller ones. I learned that Yugoslavia was a small, beautiful country in the hilly Balkans. I learned that I must preserve brotherhood and unity like the apple of my eye. In this eloquent passage Ugrešić skilfully sets up the nostalgic tone of the whole essay by describing the mythical time of her childhood, when the future was something to look forward to. Importantly, she explains here the main idea of the brotherhood and unity. Socialist Yugoslavia was remarkably diverse37 in its national cultures. Yet, despite, or maybe precisely because of this, it still was one ‘beautiful’ country.

In this brief passage Ugrešić also shows (through reference to school education) that bratstvo i jedinstvo were part of the official state ideology. Indeed, brotherhood and unity, similarly to the heroic Partisan struggle and ideal of anti-

37 Yugoslav cultural diversity became remarkable only in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the first half of the 20th century most of the states of Eastern and South Eastern Europe were multi- ethnic. Second World War, with Holocaust, Porajmos and mass killings and mandatory resettlements of other ethnic groups, as well as some post-war policies - expulsion of ethnic Germans from many countries, or forced ‘exchange’ of Ukrainian and Polish population between Poland and Soviet Union, for instance - turned most of the states of the region into predominantly mono-ethnic ones (Poland and Hungary provide stark examples of the ‘loss’ of multi-ethnicity). Although Yugoslavia was affected by all of these processes, it still retained its diversity.

123 fascism, became one of the founding stones of the socialist Yugoslav ideology in the aftermath of the Second World War. This concept was enshrined not only in textbooks but also in names of the schools, streets, enterprises, sporting clubs and so on. Famously, a pan-Yugoslav highway, running through four republics and stretching from the country’s north-west to south-east, also bore the name of “Brotherhood and Unity”. Its construction began in 1950 as a part of the post-war renewal and was intended to fill in a need for good connections between the Yugoslav republics. The highway was celebrated as an example of people’s enthusiasm, with youth brigades participating in its building.

Yugonostalgic references to ‘brotherhood and unity’ first gained their salience in the 1990s and have become, together with the concepts of Yugoslavism and Yugoslav identity and the myth of the anti-fascist partisan struggle, one of the most distinct features of the non-violent anti-nationalist movement throughout the region (cf. Jansen 2005). People throughout the former Yugoslavia drew on idealized images of the past that emphasized the peaceful co-existence of the different national groups in order to find some consolation against the nationalization of their lives or to voice strong criticism of these processes. It is an interesting example of the creative appropriation of the earlier lieux de mémoire to suit current needs and concerns. A brief historical overview of the concept of bratstvo i jedinstvo will help us to understand better why it was assigned such an important place in official Yugoslav ideology and how it was possible to use it again later.

5.1.2. History of bratstvo i jedinstvo and related Yugoslav lieux de mémoire

The roots of the idea of bratstvo i jedinstvo go back to the period before the Second World War. It was shaped as a result of an attempt by the communist ideologues and intellectuals to come up with the best possible solution to the national question in Yugoslavia. Initially, Yugoslav communists opposed the idea of unification of South Slavs (Južni Sloveni) in one entity, known as Yugoslavism (jugoslovenstvo). They considered it an ideological smokescreen covering up Great Serbian nationalism and imperialism in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, helping to exploit the rest of the country’s nations (Djilas 1991: 85-86). Therefore, contrary to the claims of some scholars (Wachtel 1998: 131), communists initially

124 envisioned the creation of separate independent peasant-workers states, organized according to the principle of national self-determination, which would later be united in the Balkan confederation. According to Ivo Banac, throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia considered the national question to be the most important one, and thought that solving this problem would eventually help to solve the social and economic ones (Banac 1984). However, influenced by the changes on the international scene in 1930s, such as the gradual rise of Fascism and Nazism in Europe, and the growth of nationalistic forces in Croatia and Slovenia among others, Yugoslav Communists changed their priorities. They planned to retain the single Yugoslav state after the defeat of the monarchy and Serbian nationalistic domination. This state, though, would be a federation, based on principles of equality of the ‘brotherly’ nations (Djilas 1991).

With the beginning of the Second World War, the idea of the brotherly truggle of the nations of Yugoslavia against the Nazi and Fascist occupiers was one of the main propaganda tools that the Partisan movement used to gain popular support and to unite the population of Yugoslavia in their resistance. In this period Tito started to make quite frequent use of the slogan ‘brotherhood and unity’ in his speeches. After the Second World War, the slogan became enshrined in the official state ideology. Tito continued to use it in his numerous public speeches. One of his phrases, “We spilt a sea of blood for brotherhood and unity. So, we will not allow it to touch it or to undermine from inside, to destroy that brotherhood and unity” (quoted in Velikonja 2008: 78) became an official slogan for the state holiday Dan Mladosti. Bratstvo i jedinstvo became one of the central and most vigilantly protected elements of official Yugoslav memory and ideology, with the state punishing its perceived critics (e.g. Guzina 2003: 97).

The symbolic concept of ‘brotherhood and unity’ was articulated in close relation to two other important concepts/ myths of communist Yugoslav ideology – the Yugoslav identity and anti-fascist Partisan struggle. The roots of the idea of the common pan-South Slav identity go back into the first half of the 19th century, to the pan-South Slavic Illyrian movement, existing predominantly in Croatia, which at the time was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While more conservative representatives of Illyrism strove for reform of the Empire that would

125 allow for better development of the Croatian nation, some of the radical representatives of the movement were articulating the idea of creation of an independent state uniting the South Slav nations. Croatian intellectuals coined the term ‘Yugoslavism’ in the second half of the 19th century. However, their views on Yugoslavism differed significantly from the later iterations of the idea (for more on these initial versions of Yugoslavism see Wachtel 1998; Rusinow 2003). 19th century Yugoslavism enjoyed little popular support among the South Slavs more broadly and was mainly a project restricted to certain intellectual circles.

The popularity of Yugoslavism grew with political and social changes in the region in the first half of the 20th century. The South Slav state that was created after the First World War initially was called the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.38 It was ruled by Serbian dynasty of Karađorđević. From the very beginning the state was plagued by the inter-ethnic tensions. In 1929 king Aleksander introduced dictatorship and renamed the state the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Many rightly saw in these acts an obvious sign of the Serbian dominance in the state. This perception also contributed to the discrediting of Yugoslavism in the eyes of many. However, this official version of Yugoslavism was not the only one in circulation at the time, with some intellectuals and artists articulating more emancipatory visions (see Wachtel 2003).

In the 1920s and 1930s, Yugoslav communists had rather negative views of Yugoslavism or rather of its unitarist version that was prevalent at the time. However, immediately after the Second World War, the Party offered strong support to the idea of the creation of a supra-national Yugoslav identity, which would replace the pre-existing national ones (Djilas 1991: 165-166). This shift can be explained by the idea, popular at the time, about a need to create a strong Yugoslav state, which, consequently, needed a Yugoslav identity. This idea was promoted by Aleksandar Ranković, the Minister of Internal Affairs at the time.

However, over time this position was defeated by an alternative view. It was elaborated by Edvard Kardelj and stated that the state in Socialist Yugoslavia should wither away. In order to do so, most of the powers were to be delegated to

38 This state did not incorporate another South Slav nation, Bulgaria. Bosnians, Montenegrins and Macedonians that were incorporated in the state at the time were not considered to be separate nations.

126 the constitutive parts of the federation, which, in their turn, would delegate powers to the local bodies. Ranković was accused of unitarism and Greater Serbian nationalism and removed from his position. Under such circumstances, support of Yugoslavism and Yugoslav identity were not that welcome (Jović 2003). Even Josip Broz - although he himself on a number of occasions proclaimed himself to be a ‘Yugoslav’ - quite often publicly attacked the idea of Yugoslavism, calling it artificial, and favourable for assimilation, bureacratization, centralization, unitarism, and hegemony (Marković 2001: 27). From the 1960s, the official party line ‘gave up’ on the idea of Yugoslavism.

These changes, eventuating in decentralisation of the state, had several significant consequences. First, the separate Yugoslav republics and autonomous provinces had a relatively high degree of independence within the common state. This was happening in political and economic terms and in the field of culture. For instance, each of the republics had its own Writer’s Union and its own educational system. The unifying elements were mainly symbolic ones, like the constantly repeated slogan about ‘brotherhood and unity’, and figure of the Josip Broz Tito. Yet, at the same time, this does not mean that Socialist Yugoslavia became just a sum of its parts. Yugonostalgic narratives, including the stories I heard from my informants, testify to the integration ‘from below’ with the movement of people and ideas between the Yugoslav republics.

Second, in Serbia, a number of prominent intellectuals felt betrayed by the shift in the Party’s ideology. As a result, over time they gravitated towards Serbian nationalism instead (literature on this famous Serbian case of trahison des clercs is quite extensive, see for instance, Dragović-Soso 2002, 2003; Miller 2002; Milojković-Djurić 1996). With the creation of strong localised elites resulting from such decentralization, the ground for their adoption of the ideologies articulated by these nationalist intellectuals in the context of the 1980s systemic crisis was prepared. As Andrew Wachtel (1998) argues, the absence of the overarching pan- Yugoslav ideology meant that there was nothing to prevent them from doing so.

Finally, these changes may be interpreted as leading to the abandonment by the state of the concept of Yugoslavism and attempts to create Yugoslav identity. Apart from the change in Tito’s official reaction described earlier, other data support this

127 claim. The League of Communists of Yugoslavia adopted in 1958 what can be seen as an official interpretation of the meaning of Yugoslavism, which explained it not as a contradiction to but as a “socialist internationalist” supplement to national identities (Budding 1997: 408). Aleksandar Pavković observes (1999: 156) that after the constitutional reforms of the mid 1960s that restructured political life in Yugoslavia along the lines of national/ ethnic representation, people who chose to declare themselves Yugoslavs did not have any chance for political representation.

However, the fact that the party and many intellectuals turned their back on the idea of Yugoslavism does not mean that ordinary citizens also did so. Statistical data shows that were was a gradual increase in number of citizens who identified themselves as “Yugoslavs”. This category was introduced for the first time into the population census in 1961, when 1.6% of overall population chose this option (one of my informants harshly criticised such late official recognition of “Yugoslav” as an identification category, interpreting it as a proof of “scandalously” bad policy of creating and promoting of this identity). In 1981 5,4 % of overall population chose this option, with some republics demonstrating quite a high increase in the numbers of self-declared Yugoslavs (see Dević 1993; Sekulić et al. 1994). These statistics demonstrate a slow but persistent increase in Yugoslav citizens’ identification not with the separate “old” national identities but with the Yugoslav one, a process that was happening without explicit support from the state itself. At the same time, census data do not tell us about the complex processes of identification. Many citizens of Yugoslavia held some identification with the state as a whole, created in dialog with the official stance on it, and overlapping with other group identities (see for instance, Ljubonja 2001, for interesting analysis of the different popular attitudes towards Yugoslav identity expressed in 1960s).

The myth of heroic Partisan struggle during Second World War, officially referred to as Narodno-Oslobodilačka Borba (People’s Liberation War) or NOB, was an important ideological foundation of Socialist Yugoslavia. While the events of that period on Yugoslav territory still need more historical investigation to evaluate the role of all parties involved, it is undeniable that there were many casualties in Yugoslavia during the war, and to a large extent they were the result of inter-ethnic animosities. In an attempt to address this problematic page of

128 history and to solve such tensions in the future, in the War’s aftermath, a myth of the heroic Partisan struggle of all Yugoslav nations was created. Like all myths, it was based on some omissions, some exaggerations and some free interpretations. For instance, the participation of Macedonians in the Yugoslav Partisan movement was amplified somewhat – for a long time communists from those regions considered it a better strategy to fight against fascism alongside their Bulgarian comrades (Poulton 2003).

This idea of an heroic anti-fascist Partisan struggle of Yugoslav nations, united by their brotherhood, “was a central component of the emancipatory communist memory politics” (Kuljić 2005: 450), yet at the same time it was used to justify the peacetime delinquencies of the regime, including persecution of ideological opponents.

The Partisan myth was actively promoted in Socialist Yugoslavia through education, public rituals and monuments, popular culture. The state built an impressive number of the monuments and memorials dedicated to the Second World War, commemorating certain events and battles, concentration camps or separate individuals (see Kempenaers 2010). Built by famous Yugoslav sculptors and architects (like Vojin Bakić, Bogdan Bogdanović, Dušan Džamonja), they were often impressive examples of the Fig. 5.1. Monument to Second World War experimental monumental Partisan hero Stjepan Filipović by famous sculptor Vojin Bakić near the Serbian city of sculpture (Fig. 5.1). Spread all Valjevo. Photo by author. over Yugoslavia, they attracted

129 large numbers of visitors. Another interesting example of the state-sponsored popular politics of remembrance of the Second World War is the phenomenon of Partisan films (Turajlić 2010). Yugoslavia’s thriving film industry produced a large number of Second World War-related movies, some of them depicting important real events from the past, and some of them fictionalised ones (for more on this see Chapter Eight).

In concluding this discussion of these three important building blocks of the official Yugoslav ideology, it is important to emphasize once again that they did not remain fixed and rigid throughout the existence of SFRY. As with all lieux de mémoire, their meaning was modified or even contested within the official discursive field and challenged by the different groups within the society. This significant point contradicts the simplified understanding of the socialist states as permeated by one static, all-powerful ideology.

5.1.3. Questioning, neglecting, and destroying bratstvo i jedinstvo

In the 1980s, following the shift in the memory politics that I described in Chapter Three, the concepts of Yugoslavism, brotherhood and unity, and the myth of the Partisan struggle were subjected to strong attacks, aiming to undermine the legitimacy of the Yugoslav state itself. Yugoslav identity was re-presented as an artificial creation of the communist ideologues, brotherhood and unity – as enforced cohabitation of the hostile neighbouring nations, and Partisan struggle – as criminally irresponsible and fratricidal (see Govedarica 2012; Kuljić 2005).

This kind of historical revisionism continued in the 1990s. As noted previously, in Serbia under Milošević memory politics was not as obviously anti-communist as, say, in Tudjman’s Croatia, because of the regime’s need to use some elements of the communist ideology to justify itself. Some of the elements of the Yugoslav ideology were abused by “parasitical rhetoric” (Jansen 2005: 213) of Slobodan Milošević, which led to discrediting of both Yugoslavism and the anti-fascist struggle in eyes of local and international public. Steff Jansen (2005: 207-208) describes how some of his Serbian informants – activists in the Serbian anti- nationalistic movement of the 1990s – were not ready to admit openly that they felt themselves to be Yugoslavs, for fear of being misinterpreted as supporters of Milošević’s nationalistic politics. At the same time, there was no lack of strong anti-

130 communist sentiments expressed by the intellectuals and politicians opposed to regime, nor more masked and ambiguous attempts at dismantling these Yugoslav lieux de mémoire. Let us consider two examples of the latter.

The film Lepa Sela Lepo Gore (Pretty Village, Pretty Flame) was directed in 1996 by Serbian director Srđan Dragojević. Dealing with the war in Bosnia, film attempted to critically analyse the reasons for and the development of the bloody conflict. It did this in a highly controversial manner, attracting a lot of criticism from all participants in the conflict, as well as some representatives of the international community. The events in the film take place mainly in the vicinity or inside of a road tunnel named “Brotherhood and Unity”, left unfinished from the Yugoslav times. In the short part of the film dealing with the pre-war life, the tunnel is just a gloomy presence in otherwise idyllic settings of lives of two local friends – one Bosnian Serb, the other Bosnian Muslim. As children, these main protagonists of the film believe that a nasty and dangerous ogre lives in the tunnel. During the war, the tunnel becomes a scene for the tragic events, a bloody fight between two warring parties that pit these childhood friends against each other. The final dialogue between two former friends turned enemies in the film is:

-Milan, why did you burn down my workshop? - And why did you kill my mother? - I did not kill anyone. - Neither did I burn anything down. -So who did that, Milane? Maybe that ogre from the tunnel? (Dragojević 1996) As Pavle Levi notes (2007: 141) in his excellent discussion of the film, the tunnel here is a central metaphor, ‘a sort of black hole that, during Yugoslavia’s communist years, stored everything that was repressed from the surface of the socio-political reality so that the country could maintain its image of the people’s solidarity’. Levi substantiates this argument by quoting from film’s director Srđan Dragojević: “Communism served as a fertile ground for our Balkan intolerance... I never believed that a multicultural model could be implemented in Bosnia without some kind of repression, whether by the communists, or – as is now the case – by the international community” (Dragojević, quoted in Levi 2007: 142). Lepa Sela Lepo Gore provides a good example of how certain representatives of the Serbian public sphere, while attempting to criticise the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution,

131 uncritically blame the socialist past for everything, and, in this particular case, with special attention to what they see as failed attempts to implement brotherhood and unity.

The gradual targeted erasure or silent eclipsing of the legacy of Yugoslavism and anti-fascist partisan struggle from the public spaces can serve as another good illustration of broader processes of discrediting of socialist legacy. The fate of the Second World War memorials provides a poignant illustration of these processes. In the 1990s, with the dismantling of official state ideology, these memorials fell out of grace with the new elites throughout former Yugoslavia. Sometimes the result of this was physical destruction, as in case with the Cubist monument created by the famous Croatian sculptor Vojin Bakić to the Croatian partisan Stjepan Filipović in his (i.e. partisan’s) native town Opuzen. The monument was blown up by unidentified vandals at the outset of the war in Croatia in 1991. Sometimes monuments were not consciously destroyed but left to slowly decay and disintegrate. This was the case with many other monumental sculptures by Bakić commemorating the partisan struggle dispersed throughout Croatia.

In Serbia, monuments relating to communist ideology were not destroyed actively, for the most part, but were left to ‘die’ slowly, lose their meaning and, as a consequence, fade away, both in physical sense and in their significance. State did not invest money – partly for the lack of it, but also because these monuments were not seen as important cultural heritage anymore – into maintenance of the monuments. As a result, their condition and appearance have worsened significantly over the last twenty years. They have become objects for vandals. As Fig. 5.1 shows, this was the fate of the second copy of the Bakić’s monument to Stjepan Filipović, built in Yugoslav times on the hill overlooking the Serbian city of Valjevo, near which the young partisan was executed by Germans in 1943. Even though, unlike its Croatian twin, the monument still exists, it stands deserted. It stopped being a part of any ritual. There are many other monuments like this throughout the whole of Serbia, as local documentary filmmaker Ivan Mandić has shown in his film Nestanak Heroja (The Disappearance of Heroes, 2009). If monuments to Stjepan Filipović can still attract attention because of its size and artistic appeal, the others, to evoke Jay Winter’s phrase (Winter 2010: 324), just

132 dissolve into white noise in stone to the passers-by (see Fig. 6.1 for another example of this).

Such abandonment of socialist-era monuments provides yet another example of the ambivalent attitude in Serbia of 1990s towards Yugoslav history and some of the key Yugoslav lieux de mémoire. The socialist vision of the past was not often actively rejected and destroyed, as it was in Croatia. Yet, it was often left to neglect. As I have argued earlier, remembrance is always an active process and demands the willing participation of groups and individuals. Neglect, problematic criticism or denial of the Yugoslav lieux de mémoire throughout the 1990s, prepared the grounds for more decisive attempts to do away with this legacy after the fall of Milošević. Yet, as I showed above, despite the hostile environment of the 1990s, at least some people from all over Yugoslavia were re-confirming relevance of brotherhood and unity, Yugoslav identity and the anti-partisan struggle, by using them to criticise contemporary politics. Similarly, as I found during my own fieldwork, some young people in contemporary Serbia resist the attempts to dismiss these aspects of Yugoslav legacy.

5.1.4. Salience of bratstvo i jedinstvo and related post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire for young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia

The concept of brotherhood and unity and the related ideas and ideals of Yugoslavism/ Yugoslav identity and the anti-fascist Partisan struggle were highly relevant for my informants. It is important to pay attention to how they understand these phenomena, for this will tell us about their understanding of and relation to the Yugoslav past, about what they value there and what they criticise, and about why exactly they find them salient in contemporary Serbia.

Quite soon I discovered – initially to my surprise – that some of my collaborators produced somewhat ambivalent reactions to these concepts. These reactions sometimes manifested as criticism of the way these national ideals were implemented in Socialist Yugoslavia. Sometimes the critical reflections were concerned with the foundations of these concepts. My informants attempted to re- think Yugoslav legacy so that it could contribute to the project of the construction of the New Serbian Left. This is an important illustration of how ‘yugonostalgics’ actually critically approach the past they are supposed to idolise.

133

But to begin with, let us consider a few examples of the predominantly positive interpretations of brotherhood and unity, anti-fascist Partisan struggle and Yugoslavism.

For me this country [SFRY] is ideal for the following reasons. It proved that many different groups of people, different in various respects – ethnicity, religion, nationality … different histories, because they lived in different countries before the end of First World War, they also spoke different languages. And it turned out that all those people, despite their differences when it comes to language, religion, ethnicity, can live together in peace, and not just this kind of negative peace, when you just have it [emphasis] and nothing else. It was a positive peace … there was nothing that could have ruined that peace (Darko) *** They had a certain mythology … it was called brotherhood and unity… You can call it with different names, like for instance, ‘diversity’ [uses English] … it existed once, but not anymore. They called it brotherhood and unity – all of us are different, but we live together. [later in the interview] Everything began with People’s Liberation War, NOB. This was a mythology: those Partisans who were fighting against the Germans – that is the battle of Good versus Evil … Back then everything was built on that. … It was called the People’s Liberation War, because it was the people, not the army, but the people who fought against occupiers … they were Partisans and they were connected to the party (Siniša) *** Many people, who relate to socialism’s ideals in Europe today, are also looking at the Soviet Union. This has determined their understanding of what socialism is and of what is possible. They are very pessimistic now. While I remember now more [about] the moments of anti-fascist victories. This also makes the difference with the rest of the Eastern Europe where the Soviet Union’s army brought so-called socialism, while in our country it was more a result of the home-grown struggle and movement … in the rest of Eastern Europe we cannot say that the change of the power was democratic and supported by the majority of the population. You actually cannot say this even about Yugoslavia. But the difference is that here we had a real mass movement… that’s also the reason why Yugoslavia left the Eastern Bloc so early … Because even though Red Army went through here and helped Partisans to liberate the land, there was this strong perception that we ourselves had won our freedom … and it’s not even such a ridiculous [idea]… yeah, ok we were on the periphery, the USSR did not care about leaving its troops here… but at the same time, unlike in the rest of the Eastern European countries, they got the permission from the Partisan movement to move through here. They asked [emphasis] for it … Anyway, this victory over Fascism is something that we – at least in our anti-fascist tradition – remember as something we have achieved on our own. … even though this is a nationalistic myth – and I am quite conscious of it – it was a myth connected to some mass struggle… and I can relate to all people who struggle against the Fascism (Vlad) Often my informants argued that the co-existence of the different nations and ethnic groups under the banner of brotherhood and unity resulted in a decrease of ethnic distance and encouraged productive intermingling and circumstances

134 conducive for creation of ‘popular’ Yugoslav identity. Inter-ethnic marriages were used as one of the most obvious examples of this. Quite a few of my interlocutors themselves came from ethnically mixed families: Croatian-Serbian, Slovene- Serbian, Macedonian-Serbian, Hungarian-Serbian and so on. For instance, Siniša, whose mother was Slovene and father a Serb, called himself ‘Yugoslavia’s real child’ on those grounds. He believed that if it were not for Tito’s Yugoslavia that provided for mixing of different peoples, he himself would not have existed.

Even after the collapse of Yugoslavia and the recent secession of Kosovo, Serbia remains an ethnically heterogeneous country. According to the demographic poll, conducted in 2002, 82.86% of country’s population declared themselves to be Serbs, while the rest chose to identify themselves with one of the ethnic minorities. There are more than 20 statistically significant national minority groups on official record, with Hungarians, Bosnians, and Roma being the largest ones. The autonomous province of Vojvodina in the northern part of Serbia provides for most of this ethnic diversity while central Serbia is populated mainly by people who identify themselves as Serbs. Despite this, dominant discourse represents Serbia as the country of the Serbian nation, and there is a large amount of hostility towards representatives of ethnic minorities. They are constructed as a threat to the nation and state. This particular context explains why yugonostalgic narratives celebrate the peaceful and productive era of Yugoslav bratstvo i jedinstvo. As Milen told me “Serbia is really dragged out now… we should renew that brotherhood and unity in Serbian context.”

My other informant Sava, who has a highly mixed ethnic background (he listed Serbs, Roma, Hungarians, Croats and Germans as his relatives), also eloquently juxtaposed current situation of ethnic minorities in Serbia and the Yugoslav past:

I recently read some statistics about public opinion on African-Serbian marriages … in Serbia, because it was totally isolated, people started treating the Other differently… maybe I am idealizing these things now… but you know in Šabac [the city in Western Serbia where Sava was born] people have really became intolerant now, like I had some problems in school when other kids saw my brother, because he looks like a Roma… and I am [with emphasis] half- Roma… but I identify myself as Yugoslav … And you know, few months ago they gave up on the idea of Yugoslavs as national minority, and now you cannot choose that … it is very difficult for people from the mixed marriages because they have to choose how to identify themselves, how to declare… earlier you could just say “I am a Yugoslav” and that was it, because you came [emphasis]

135

from that [situation]. Now, this [mixed marriages] does not happen so often, but still, people from Vojvodina, parts of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, they have to choose how to declare themselves … At the same time, the knowledge about the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia influenced the way my informants thought about brotherhood and unity, anti- fascism and Yugoslav identity. Often, their reflections on these topics were marked by attempts to find the explanation for the collapse of SFRY. For instance, Milena indicated both her uncertainty about the effectiveness of implementation of brotherhood and unity, and her suspicion about the betrayal of other ideals by Yugoslav state officials:

I think that the idea of brotherhood and unity is the best solution for the interethnic relations. Yet, at the same time, Yugoslavia collapsed precisely because of these problems… so it really bothers me this question, I think about it a lot, how come Yugoslavia was ruined by the problem which it supposedly has solved in this progressive way. I think that idea is great, and if I lived in that society I would be really proud of it. Why it happened then so, I really do not know. Is it because no one really, except party leadership and some narrow elite of the republics … because in general it was not understood and accepted properly, that concept of brotherhood and unity, I do not know. But obviously it was not solved well… [later in the interview] But with passing of time, [Yugoslavia] got more bureaucratised, and with the change of generations in the party those nobovci [NOB participants], people from the first generation, who participated in war and who had it in their [pause] gut [with emphasis, gesticulating towards her stomach], when they were changed by the people who did not have that experience, who [pause] I don’t now, in any case, there were not enough of those who understood it correctly and felt it in themselves ... then both the state and the party became more bureaucratised As I have noted earlier, many of my informants during our conversations were pointing out to me some of the shortcomings of these foundations of the Yugoslav identity. Yet at the same time, they did not use this critique as a reason to discard the collectivist past completely, but instead saw it as a useful history lesson about what kind of mistakes should be avoided in the future. During our interview, Miloš provided a good example of a seemingly celebratory approach towards these lieux that eventually developed into criticism:

It was not even an artificial project, as for instance European Union is, with its creation of the European identity, those were really similar peoples and ethnicities, so it was logical for them to attempt this … Especially Bosnia was a culmination of this – every third marriage was a mixed one, and at the same time it was not important, only in retrospect they got it that the marriages were mixed. [Later in the interview] The idea of Yugoslavism was contradictory [pause] take the name itself – it refers to the state of South Slavs while you had also Hungarians, Albanians living here …

136

At the same time, Miloš was thinking that the state actually should have promoted the idea of Yugoslavism more persistently (Miloš criticised the scandalously late introduction of the category of Yugoslav into the census). According to him, no one in Yugoslavia opposed strongly the promotion of Yugoslav identity; hence the state should have pushed for it more:

…but somehow it never disturbed a Hungarian from Vojvodina or Italian from Dalmatia and most of Kosovo Albanians… I suppose that for many Kosovo Albanians it was not a problem to say that I am an Albanian from Yugoslavia… I am not a South Slav but [who cares] … Vlad also voiced the similar criticism of the obvious failure of the Yugoslav state even on the declarative level to include representatives of the non-Slavic nations, which also was a symptom of their general discrimination:

I mean, even the name, Yugoslavia, it is very dear to me, because as I have explained to you, as a child I was strongly connected to many of those things. But it is a wrong name, because it discriminates against non-Slavic peoples. This is a problem, and it is symbolic in a much larger sense … Marko articulated a very strong criticism of the very idea of Yugoslav identity and pointed out to some of the negative consequences of its implementation:

You cannot destroy nationalism by creating a new one. You change some identity notions but it still remains nationalism. The good part of it was that everyone collectively could belong to that nationalism but it’s still a nationalism, which is good for some, while others just don’t fit in here. We had 6 nationalisms – or 7 and 8. But I think that… this was the politics of least resistance, that this was the easiest solution. On the one side you had this picture of father of nation, Tito. But on the other side you had to create sons of the nations as well… Yet, at the same time, not all of my interlocutors saw Yugoslav identity as an attempt to create yet another national identity. Just as much as back in Yugoslav times, when people had different visions of the meaning of Yugoslavism, my informants explained it to me differently. Some of these explanations offered a way of overcoming an impasse that Marko has described:

[Yugoslavia] was a multi-national state, which, back then, had really good social policy with people being integrated based on the work and economy, and not ethnicity. It had potential… it was a state with a potential which was maybe even better than EU principles today… I mean, so many different countries and peoples functioned and lived together … that principle of the inter-ethnic coexistence. It functioned really well. Right-wingers say that Tito enforced it, he had the army and police, hence there were no tensions. But I think there was a different reason for pacification of the interethnic relations and conflicts. We

137

have to study it… that industrialisation, modernisation, where people integrated on the economic basis, not national. For them it was more important to do something, not to argue about who was Croat, Serb or Slovenian (Ivan, emphasis added) Acknowledgement of some of the drawbacks of Yugoslavism and of the need to address socio-economic problems was important for how some of my leftist activist informants envisioned possible solutions for the ethnic question in the former Yugoslavia and the broader region. More bold and utopian visions expressed by some of my informants called for the creation of the Balkan confederation of the workers’ states. It would include equally all nations living in the region, without privileging just the South Slavs, and it would prioritise social and economic rights and concerns, helping to move away from somewhat artificial national problems (I discuss this idea in more detail in Chapter Eight).

5.2. Josip Broz Tito as post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire

Marshal Josip Broz Tito - the father of the Yugoslav nation, as Marko referred to him, - without any doubt played a crucial role in history of Socialist Yugoslavia. Interpretations of his personality and role in the region’s history that circulate in Serbia’s public discourse encompass a whole range of responses including idolization, sound criticism, derision and dismissal. Nevertheless, Tito’s persona is an important historical legacy that influences how people in Serbia understand the Yugoslav past, and also relate this past to their present conditions. My fieldwork has revealed that it is impossible to simplistically equate leftist leanings with unwavering allegiance to Socialist Yugoslavia and, therefore, also to Josip Broz Tito. Most of my informants voiced quite strong criticisms of his personality and often were critically re-evaluating his legacy. I see some of this criticism as a result of the long-lasting tendency to discredit the Yugoslav legacy. But in other instances, critical reappraisals of Tito’s personality are better understood as part of a reckoning with the socialist past within the project of the construction of a Serbian New Left. As a result of this, as I illustrate below, acceptable admiration towards Josip Broz Tito is mostly pushed out into the private sphere, while in public it is frowned upon.

The life, role and legacy of Josip Broz Tito provide a fruitful base for historiographical and lay speculations. Without any doubt, in SFRY Tito was not

138 just a real historical person and leader of the country, but also one of the most important lieux de mémoire, and foundational myths. This status was officially recognised in 1974 Yugoslav Constitution. In retrospect, we can say that this document acknowledges Tito as the embodiment of the positive sides of the Yugoslav experience:

…the historic role of Josep [sic] Broz Tito in the National Liberation War and the Socialist Revolution, in the creation and development of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the development of Yugoslav socialist self-management society, the achievement of the brotherhood and unity of the nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia, the consolidation of the independence of the country and of its position in international relations and in the struggle for peace in the world, and in line with the expressed will of the working people and citizens, nations and nationalities of Yugoslavia, the S.F.R.Y. [sic] Assembly … may elect … Josip Broz Tito President of the Republic for an unlimited term of office (quoted in Ludanyi 1979: 231). The Yugoslav state strictly controlled the information that was published about Tito. During his life only two official biographies were published. The institutionalization of Tito’s birthday celebration as a Yugoslav state holiday, the Day of the Youth (see previous chapter) helped to confirm his status of father of the nation. He was celebrated also in popular culture. For instance, one of the most expensive films in the history of SFRY’s film industry, Bitka na Sutjesci, (Battle of Sutjeska, Stipe Delić 1973) made to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the important battle from the Second World War, included Josip Broz himself. Of course, Tito could not portray himself in the movie (because of his status, and also because of his age - Josip Broz was 81 at the time of filming), so the famous Welsh actor Richard Burton was invited to perform this role.

As Kosta Nikolić (2010) describes, after Tito’s death the state vehemently tried to protect his image. Coordination Committees were instituted to commemorate and protect the name and the legacy of Josip Broz, and in 1984 a Law was passed on uses of his name and effigy. In the first few years after his death, Tito continued to dominate public space and popular imagination. His portraits were kept in all official institutions and, in 1980-1982 in Serbia alone around 180 books inspired by Tito’s life were published. The functioning of the rotating Presidency that replaced Tito was not that visible to citizens of Yugoslavia, and many younger schoolchildren still thought that Tito was the real president.

139

Nevertheless, overall the 1980s were a period when many of the foundations of Socialist Yugoslavia were questioned and criticised, and Tito did not escape this destiny too.

However, Nikolić (2010) argues that despite numerous attempts to discredit Tito in arts, culture and academia, his cult existed in Serbia until 1987s, when Slobodan Milošević came to power. While Milošević skilfully used references to Josip Broz to gain support,39 his rule laid the foundation for the end of Tito’s cult.

Revisionism of Tito’s role culminated in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2005 attempts to rename Tito Street brought many citizens of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to protest (successfully) on the streets. But in Belgrade, one of the main streets was renamed without much ado from Josip Broz Tito Boulevard to Boulevard of Serbian Rulers back in 1992. It was renamed again in early 2000s into a street of King Milan. As a result, Belgrade nowadays, unlike Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana or Podgorica does not have a major or centrally located street named after Josip Broz (although there is a Tito Street in Čukarica, a large but rather marginal Belgrade municipality).

While we can provide many other examples of the official politics of ‘forgetting’ of Tito in Serbia, they should be juxtaposed also with discussion of popular sentiment towards him. Želimir Žilnik in his film Tito po drugi put medju Srbima (Tito Among the Serbs for the Second Time, 1994) documents reactions of people in Belgrade to actor dressed up as Josip Broz. This documentary is just one of the early illustrations of the fact that in Serbian popular opinion, despite the official policy of erasure and denigration, Tito’s personality is capable of stirring strong responses. These responses do not necessarily are entirely positive, some of the passers-by who encounter Tito’s doppelganger criticise him strongly, but their persistence demonstrates that attempts to wipe out Tito from popular consciousness have been largely unsuccessful. As Levy (2007: 121-124) argues, this interesting documentary illustrates the depth of the symbolic identification of

39 One of my informants offered a poignant criticism of the confusion that Milošević managed to create: “I really do not like that my generation is the one who spat both on Sloba [Milošević] and on Tito, and equated them. And that is the problem, because those two men are definitely not equal. And that is the great illusion [that’s why] Milošević managed to be what he was, because everybody saw in him what they wanted to see, old communists saw a new Tito, nationalists saw a man who is coming…” (Tica)

140

Serbs with Tito’s authority even despite the presence of the strong anti-Titoist sentiments.

Such vivid and often positive responses of people to the actor dressed up in the Marshal’s uniform could be explained by timing of Žilnik’s film, when memories of life in Tito’s Yugoslavia were still fresh and Fig. 5.2. “Comrade Tito, do you know that today they provided strong feed us only with lies?” Traditional embroidery methods were used by women from rural Serbia in contrast to the grim 1990s to communicate their grievances to the deceased president of SFRY. Part of the “Tito and Us” exhibition in realities of the Museum of History of Yugoslavia, May 2009. Photo by state’s dissolution. author. So, one could be tempted to speculate that with a certain degree of normalisation of life in the region, as well as with more time for the anti-Titoist propaganda, popular regard for Tito might have diminished. However, popular opinion polls demonstrate that Tito is still a respected person for many, not just in Serbia, but also in other states of the ex-Yugoslav region (see Kuljić 2005; Veljikonja 2008). As I state in the preface, Tito’s revenant refuses to disappear and even seems to be reclaiming some of the spaces. The renewed interest in celebration of the Day of the Youth discussed previously is a good example of this. Similarly, Tanja Petrović (2010: 142) notes that the workers in town of Jagodina, where she conducted her fieldwork, after initially taking down Tito’s pictures from visible places in early

141

Fig. 5.3. A detailed photograph of the embroidered piece from the same exhibition. The text says “Comrade Tito, dear friend, everything that was good went away together with you: security on the streets, employment, housing, international travel, interpersonal relationships, better life”. Photo by author.

1990s, gradually have reinstalled most of them, and even put some new ones in the places where they were not seen before. Nowadays for many, Tito’s figure continues to signify all the best features of Socialist Yugoslavia, its “golden age”, and country’s collapse and consequent calamities are firmly associated with his death (see Fig. 5.2 and Fig. 5.3).

Based on my fieldwork in Serbia, I confirm these observations about the strength of Tito’s presence in the popular imaginary. He is ubiquitous in the ex- Yugoslav popular culture – films, video clips, books, TV shows, internet memes (see Fig. 5.4). Material culture is also inundated with Tito’s images. Nowadays, one can buy Tito-related memorabilia, mugs, pins, T-shirts, bags and even underwear with his portrait and/or quotes in Belgrade (or on-line).

Yet this apparent ubiquity of Josip Broz should not be interpreted as an undisputed sign of his adoration. The discussion that followed the demotivator meme from Fig. 5.4 contains a few good illustrations of dismissive opinions and negative interpretations of Tito and his role in Serbia’s history. While some of the forum users posted positive (“the man was able to create a strong state and restore

142 order”) or neutral and ironic comments to this meme, strongly negative reactions were both abundant and typical of the discourse that posits Tito as a main culprit of Serbia’s current ills. For instance:

What did ‘we’ screw up? [he] screwed up everything… for 15 years of the good life he screwed up the next 115 (user t_p_s_p) *** …when it comes to this Ustaša- Communist bandit who messed up our motherland, destroyed the kingdom, and sent the king into exile … goddamn Ustaša, he will burn in hell forever, the communist murderer and criminal (user KKK T2) *** He sold our image, faith and identity. Mafiosi, Ustaša, Nazi, Monster! He began the destruction of Serbia! … What Turks did not manage to achieve in 500 years, this spying crud did Fig. 5.4. An example of demotivator meme in 50. We were doomed when this with Tito’s picture and caption “Goddamn peasant replaced the educated you, you screwed everything up!” Source: person (user Gmazful) vukajlija.com And, to sum it all up:

I’m happy to see from these comments that there are some people here who understand that Tito did not bring us anything good (user lonelySTARSHINE) These angry eclectic comments illustrate very well how some people in contemporary Serbia hold Josip Broz Tito responsible for all the ills that have befallen the country today. In these and other comments on the forum Tito is blamed for incurring huge debts that contemporary Serbian citizens have to pay back; for creating factories that did not work properly; for destroying Serbian identity and orthodox church; for supporting Kosovars and other peoples in Yugoslavia at the expense of Serbian national interests; finally, even for being Ustaša, Nazi and a ‘bloody communist’ at the same time. Tito and the communist system that he embodied are portrayed as foreign impositions that have deterred Serbian national development and progress.

143

In contrast to the comments from the Vukajlija web site, my informants attempted to present me with less emotional and more reflective interpretations of Tito and his legacy. My interlocutors, when talking about Tito, presented narratives that were a mixture of respect and criticism, with the latter usually outweighing the former. These accounts suggest that some of the ‘yugonostalgics’ attempt to overcome what they perceive as an uncritical and problematic obsession with this contradictory historical personality. During our conversations they often separated what they saw as the problematic aspects of his legacy from the more progressive aspects of the Yugoslav experience, as well as critically evaluated his role in history of Yugoslavia:

Tito also was a key point. He was a charismatic personality, on one hand, but his strong charisma was grounded not just in his [ideological] position but also on natural authority, that was also grounded in his participation in war… there were many studies written about him, so, apparently, his skills as diplomat and statesman were really extraordinary, he organized his rule really well. But … as years went by, inside the party internal, inter-republican struggles escalated about what will happen when Tito will not be with us anymore, who should have the priority. And I think Serbs had the most arrogant attitude, they implied that [pause] Serbs have to have a clearly leading role… (Milena) *** .. all these conversations about Tito… well I think that he was quite a dude … He knew how to preserve the social peace, yet in his actions he definitely was very strict with people who were thinking differently … I am myself, by the way from the family … my grand-grandfather was really wealthy, but they suffered after the revolution. But again, maybe that had some good consequences, and maybe some bad (Tica) There was no lack of criticism in the narratives of my informants when it came to the authoritarian aspects of Tito’s personality and his politics, and some of his obvious mistakes, like persecution of the political opponents after the split with Stalin. As Miloš cited to me one of the dissidents from the post-1948 era, “When it comes to Tito, for things he did during the war, I would take my hat off, for things he did afterwards, I would take his head off”.

If decontextualized, some of the explanations of this aspect of Tito’s rule offered to me by my informants might come across as problematic:

He did not really need any absolutist power… because people here just adored him… not everyone, of course. There is this song by Hladno Pivo [Croatian punk rock band] – we all loved him, except the ones in prison. But you know, the ones who were in prisons, on that infamous Goli Otok where all political prisoners went [pause] that was one exceptionally brutal prison, created in 1948, they

144

sent there everyone who was against Tito and for Stalin, after 1948 [split]. That Goli Otok was a classic concentration camp, people were tortured in the worst possible manner, day and night, and many of them perished there or were psychologically wounded … so there, according to estimations, there were 10- 15 thousand people. And Yugoslavia had 22 million. You see, if we look at the percentage, that was nothing, maybe 0,1 % of the population of the whole state, that’s really insignificant… I mean if we talk about the level of support that he had… I do not mean that it’s insignificant… every victim is a terrible tragedy, but if you look politically at the level of support… (Darko) Obviously Darko did not mean to imply that the human victims of the development of the Yugoslav version of socialism were unimportant or dispensable. This is clear from the last part of this excerpt, where he explicitly acknowledges the tragedy of Goli Otok. This quotation also should be understood as a part of the larger interview, where Darko was arguing for the idea that Tito enjoyed enormous popular support in Socialist Yugoslavia, contrary to the claims of contemporary nationalist ideology.

Finally, it is interesting to note how some of my informants have reflected on their change of attitude towards Tito over time. In quite few cases they have described how they moved away from nearly idolising him to a more nuanced and balanced approach acknowledging also his blunders and negative consequences of his rule. Open admiration of Tito, as I have noted in previous chapter, is considered to be example of unreflective yugonostalgia. It is seen either as a result of the lack of the critical engagement with the Yugoslav past, that would admit its mistakes and shortcomings, or a consequence of proliferation of the commodified nostalgia (Chapter Nine). This does not mean, though, that there is no space left for appreciation of Tito’s role. It is, however, oftentimes moved to the private sphere. As one of my informants and friends confided in me, after a long conversation:

Well, you know how critical I am towards all that… but still, sometimes, nowadays, when it gets really hard for me and I feel like I cannot cope with the pressure, I cannot help but think about Tito, and how difficult it was for him in times of war… Occasionally, there were also cases of the shift from the negative understanding of Tito to the positive one, as in case of Milica, discussed in previous chapter. Another example of the move away from the negative evaluation of Tito was offered to me by Lazar. Initially he said that he could not really evaluate Tito’s role in history of Yugoslavia and described how as a child he had a rather negative view of him, which he explained by the anti-Titoist propaganda in the media:

145

I remember when I was in 4th grade… I organized ripping out of the Tito’s picture from the textbook subject for the study of society … I do not know why really, I have heard somewhere on the TV that everything Tito did was crazy, that he created that awful camps, Goli Otok and so on. And I was disgusted by that. So when I came back home and told my dad [a local communist activist] all about it, how I organized the whole class to rip out Tito’s portrait from the book … my dad got really angry with me “You’re just a kid! Why you are messing with this” [to which I replied that] I watch this stuff with you [on the news] everyday anyway But eventually, Lazar described his current attitude towards Tito in the following manner:

On one hand he was really positive guy, because he managed to reconcile all those peoples, but the way he did it … I do not know how good it was. I don’t know if the way that Yugoslavia was created did not influence later its dissolution. But in the end, I think that Tito was not responsible for the dissolution, but the people who stayed after him… actually it all reminds me about those stories: we are like that because we were under the Turks for 500 years, we are like that because Tito was our leader… all the time the personal responsibility is avoided. I’m sure that I cannot judge him badly; I would rather judge him well, if I had to compare now on paper his positive and negative sides… I think that they created for him such a negative image only to cover up for others’ mistakes committed after him (Lazar) ***

In this chapter I have presented a discussion of the post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire relating to the political aspects of the official ideology of SFRY. In first part of the chapter I discussed the concept of bratstvo i jedinstvo (brotherhood and unity), Yugoslavism and the anti-Fascist Partisan struggle, while the second part dealt with the figure of Josip Broz Tito. These lieux offer interesting material for students of memory. They have been formed as official (dominant, in Nora’s terms) lieux de mémoire in SFRY, providing for its legitimacy and politics. Consequently, we can trace their genealogy from this status to the status of the dominated lieux de mémoire in post-Yugoslav times.

These concepts retain relevance for the young leftist ‘yugonostalgics’ in contemporary Serbia. They use them to reflect critically on the political situation in their country. They also try to critically rethink certain aspects of the Yugoslav past, as the section on Tito illustrates.

146

Chapter Six

Yugoslav Internationalism as a Post-Yugoslav Lieu de Mémoire

In this chapter I will explore second broad cluster of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire related to Yugoslav internationalism. Internationalism was yet another foundation of the official ideology of Socialist Yugoslavia. The idea was articulated partly in an attempt to find a solution to ethnic tensions. But it was further developed after the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 when Yugoslavia was excluded from the Comintern and needed to find an international legitimisation for its unique version of socialism.

My yugonostalgic interlocutors described what they saw as a unique Yugoslav geopolitical position and juxtaposed it critically with the contemporary position of Serbia. This could be criticised as a sign of Yugoslav nationalism. However, analysis of their narratives shows that the longing for more space does not necessarily equate to a nationalistic longing. On the contrary, it could represent a longing for cosmopolitanism, mobility and openness. In other words, it could be interpreted as a longing for a “historically specific form of citizen agency that emerged in relationship to a functioning, sovereign, and internationally respected socialist Yugoslav state” (Greenberg 2011: 88).

Precisely because of this, very often conversations about Yugoslav internationalism were concerned with the recounting of the rights and privileges Yugoslav citizens had when it came to travel. Therefore, yugonostalgic discourses on Yugoslavia’s international position are often mediated through stories about people’s everyday lives, mundane experiences, concerns and imaginings. This helps us to move the discussion about these particular lieux de mémoire from the level of abstraction to the tangible contexts of people’s lives.40

Hence, these post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire perform a couple of important functions. First, they help us to go beyond the stereotypical understandings of the

40 I conducted the main part of my fieldwork, where I gathered most of the data, in 2009, before the many subsequent changes that have occured in relation to Serbia and its standing internationally. For instance, in 2009 Serbia became a member of the so-called “white Schengen list”, allowing its citizens to travel to countries within the Schengen zone without visas. Furthermore, in March 2012, another important development occured when Serbia officially became a candidate for membership in the European Union.

147

Serbs’ responses to international politics. They indicate that there is more to such yugonostalgic narratives than just patriotic feelings. They illustrate the people’s longing for the privileges that they lost as a result of the post-Cold War restructuring of the world order. Finally, the yugonostalgic interpretations of the meaning of Yugoslav internationalism offered by my informants can also be construed as a criticism of contemporary geopolitics.

6.1. Longing for Yugoslavia as a ‘respected’ country

The SFRY occupied a unique position in the geopolitical scene during the Cold War era that still elicits feelings of pride and nostalgia among Serbian citizens. Such nostalgic longing for the status of Yugoslavia can be interpreted as a sign of nationalistic sentiment and reaction to the drastic loss of the international status that Serbia has endured with the collapse of the SFRY. As a result of its role in wars of Yugoslav dissolution, Serbia was subjected to international sanctions that not only affected its international status, but also severely limited the mobility of its citizens. Another negative legacy of the 1990s for Serbia, as well as for the broader region, was the re-affirmation of their reputation as dangerous and explosive people in the eyes of the broader international community (cf. Todorova 1997).

During our conversations about Socialist Yugoslavia, many of my informants pointed out to me that once Socialist Yugoslavia was a well-respected country in the world, especially when compared to contemporary Serbia. Tito’s personal role in establishing the reputation of the country was also often acknowledged:

Yugoslavia had a really good reputation in the world, everyone knew about it... But now… Now if you say that you are from Serbia people just start wondering: Serbia?.. or is it Siberia?.. What is it? Where is it? But they still would know about Yugoslavia and about Tito, even though he died 30 years ago (Maria) ***

Then you have Yugoslavia’s position in the world… I think Tito was very skilful in international politics. During the Cold War he did not have conflicts either with one side or with the other, he was good with both of them. He had his own position and was not afraid [to stand up for it]. I think that this is a very big achievement for such a small country in such a big world. It is very important, in my opinion (Staša) Such comments can be easily interpreted as a sign of veiled nationalistic sentiment: either Serbian longing for a larger state where Serbs supposedly had a

148 dominant position, or longing for the larger and stronger Yugoslav state. However, such equations are too simplistic, and are built on false premises. Interpretations of the history of SFRY as dominated by one particular group (‘Serbs’, ‘communists’ or ‘Serbo-communists’), I contend, is largely a product of the ideological wars that prepared the grounds for the real war of the 1990s, by undermining the legitimacy of Socialist Yugoslavia.

While I disagree with the equation of nostalgic narratives about Yugoslavia’s unique position on the international scene with Serbian nationalism, I do agree that they can be seen as a sign of the patriotic and/ or nationalist sentiment towards Yugoslavia as a country. This point, however, rarely surfaced as a topic of critical reflection in the conversations I had with my informants. As I have already discussed in a previous chapter, few of them were critical of the Yugoslav project as an attempt to create national identity, or another group identity functioning on similar principles. For most, Yugoslavia with its multi-ethnic composition represented a viable and desirable alternative to the traditional ideal of the mono- ethnic nation state. On the international level, according to my informants, the multi-ethnic Socialist Yugoslavia was a well-respected country, skilfully negotiating the Cold War geopolitical scene and stimulating some positive impulses in international politics. Such an interpretation of the country’s international image and role only strengthened the sentiment that Socialist Yugoslavia was a country one could be proud of.

The peculiar international position of Socialist Yugoslavia, according to my informants, had several different elements. The ones most often mentioned during our interviews included: a feeling of patriotic pride; the important role Yugoslavia played on the international scene, in particular its contribution to the Non-Aligned Movement; the positive effects on the Yugoslav economy (mainly in terms of the influx of money from other countries); and the resulting mobility of Yugoslav citizens. As with other post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire, my informants also pointed out to me a number of limitations and/or drawbacks of Yugoslavia’s international position .

149

6.2. Nostalgic stories about Yugoslavia’s important role in international politics

As mentioned above, SFRY’s unique international position was a consequence of Tito’s split with Stalin in 1948, when he refused to be included in the Soviet Union’s zone of influence. This had consequences for both political (Chapter Five) and economic (Chapter Seven) aspects of Yugoslav life. And this also had significant consequences for Yugoslavia’s international politics and position. During the Cold War, Yugoslavia attempted to balance between the two opposing blocks – the “capitalist” West and the “socialist” East. At the same time, Yugoslavia became one of the co-founders and active members of the so-called “Non-Aligned Movement” – a large group of states that were not aligned formally with either of these two main Cold War era antagonists. As one of my informants explained to me:

SFRY’s international position and all the benefits it managed to extract from it, were a result of the geopolitical situation at that time. Tito, as a skilled politician, managed to balance very well between the East and the West, and used it for our benefit. Now such politics is just unthinkable, because we live in a completely different world, the world with just one power centre (Časlav) Indeed, at time of my fieldwork in 2009 and then in 2010, the history of Yugoslavia’s role as a leader of a distinct geopolitical bloc, and a country with a unique role within international politics, was only a memory, and, one could also say, a somewhat fading memory (see Fig. 6.1). Following the decade of international isolation under Milošević, Serbia’s international policy has been aimed at achieving membership in the European Union. These efforts were framed – by both parts of this international process – in terms of a re-integration into the European community, to ‘return home’, to the place where Serbia rightfully belongs (cf. Petrović 2009).

It seems, though, that neither party involved in this process of re-integration believes wholeheartedly in the metaphors that they use. Although, on an official level, “Europe” – as the European Union is often referred to – is the main priority of Serbian international policy, in practice, Serbian politicians often seem reluctant to fulfil the demands that would make EU membership possible. Because of the lack of political will in Serbia to address the serious issues that the country faces, it acquired the official status of EU candidate only in 2012.

150

It is also important to note that, at the level of popular sentiment, many people in Serbia actually look to Russia as an international partner, not the European Union, which is often blamed for many of the ills that has befallen Serbia in the past, and especially, for Kosovo’s independence. According to many ideologues of Serbian nationalism, Serbia should develop and maintain ties with Putin’s Russia, because these Russian orthodox ‘brothers’ are the only force that are willing to help Serbs out. Some of the radical right-wing organisations in Serbia and Russia even cooperate, organising exchanges and summer camps for teenagers (cf. e-novine 2011).

Yet at the same time, a certain level of hypocrisy cannot be denied on the part of the European Union and other international actors, in both specific, political terms, and on a symbolic discursive level, in regards to the acceptance of Serbia and other former Yugoslav countries (see, for instance,

Petrović 2009; obviously, processes of Fig. 6.1, Part of the obelisk marking the first conference of the Non-Aligned othering that Maria Todorova has Movement, held in Belgrade in 1961. described in her seminal Imagining Situated in the centre of Belgrade, it has turned, in Jay Winter’s (2010: 324) the Balkans (1997), also play an terms, into “white noise”. Picture by important role here). The recent author. controversial reversal by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) of its previous indictment of two Croatian generals for their role in Operation Oluja (Storm), implies that Serbia is the only wrong-doer in the wars of Yugoslav secession, and this is just the latest example of the rather problematic politics of Western intervention in the region.

Despite these mutual frustrations, at the time of my fieldwork, European integration was officially posited as the only alternative for Serbia in the future. It

151 was not just the country’s official policy, but also the aspiration of the liberally minded parts of population. Only supporters of right-wing ideologies, supposedly, would have anything against the European integration (Nezi et al 2009).

However, in a context where the European Union has become the strongest power on the European continent, determining the shape and content of both the political imagination and the concrete politics of the former Socialist states, it is necessary to listen to dissenting voices, criticising the EU’s shortcomings. While, as I will illustrate below, most of my informants can hardly be called Euro-sceptics, in their discussions about Serbia’s international position, they voice a number of concerns about the EU’s policies and the shape of the EU-Serbian relationship.

Most of my informants firmly agree that it is in Serbia’s interests to be a part of the European Community. This does not mean, however, that they are happy with all aspects of the European integration and all the internal and international policies of European Union. To recall Ivan’s words that I quoted in Chapter Two, to be a real leftist in contemporary Serbia means to think critically about the role that processes of globalisation and European integration play in the region. When thinking about resisting what they saw as the neo-colonialist presence of the EU, my informants would sometimes cite the history of Yugoslavia as a source of inspiration. Learning from mistakes of the past, as I have indicated in the previous chapter, they were expressing visions of the Socialist Balkan confederation, or at least some sort of closer cooperation of the states in the region, as a way to struggle against the EU’s hegemony.

In particular, my stay in Serbia in 2009 coincided with the escalation of the financial crisis in Greece and consequent mass protests there. Some of my informants found inspiration in these events and were actively engaged in campaigns of solidarity with the people of Greece. These campaigns, of course, were supposed to perform at least two functions: first, to offer symbolic support to their Greek neighbours, increasingly negatively affected by the crisis, and inspire the Serbian population to take a more critical stance towards the situation in their own country.

152

Some of these radical political fantasies of international inspiration, support and cooperation reached beyond Europe to embrace former Yugoslav partners in the Non-Aligned Movement.

I wish revolutionary events in Latin America would speed up, so they could form a socialist confederation and spread the revolution also to the USA. While here, in Europe, together with Greece we would also fight for that … but in reality, I guess things will be different. We will just become a member of the EU and hopefully will be able to create there a common bloc together with the other former Yugoslav states. We’ll see… You know, I do not have anything against the EU, we should just take its flag, leave all the stars but change the background from blue to red [laughter] … yes, I really think the EU should be based on principles of social democracy (Miloš) In this excerpt Miloš expresses his utopian dreams of an international leftist revolution that will begin with the unification of “Latin America” as a socialist confederacy and then spread to the USA. The European side of this equation is more modest: he longs for the rapprochement of the former Yugoslav states, at least within the EU, so that together they can again act as a progressive force on the international scene, instigating positive reforms in the European Union.

This example illustrates how some of my informants were not happy with all aspects of European integration and were articulating a need for changes to the EU along with the broader international scene. However, one of the best illustrations of the grievances people in Serbia had about the politics of European institutions in the region is provided by the example of the lack of mobility that comes as a stark contrast to the nostalgic stories about international travel in Yugoslav times.

6.3. Nostalgic stories about international mobility in Yugoslav times

One of my informants, Dejan, illustrated the mobility Yugoslav citizens were once imagined to have enjoyed using the figure of Josip Broz Tito. “What a type he was,” he said, “he visited so many countries, he was in Africa, the Americas, Asia… he travelled all over the world”. Tito’s numerous international travels, as well as the memory of him hosting many renowned international guests– from politicians to famous cinema actors – thus making a public spectacle of the world coming and seeing Socialist Yugoslavia, are an integral part of the yugonostalgic narratives circulating in contemporary Serbia. However, while Tito himself travelled profusely, visiting 72 countries between 1945 and 1980 (Hozic 2011), it may be

153 asked how much international travelling ordinary Yugoslav citizens were able to do.

In Yugoslav times we had red passports that allowed us to travel anywhere in the world. People could easily go for a summer vacation somewhere in France, or even just for a coffee in Trieste if they felt like that (Milen) The anthropologist Steff Jansen (2005: 237) states that the trope of the Yugoslav red passport was the most popular in the stories his yugonostalgic informants told him. While my own research does not identify this trope as the most prevalent, it certainly figured very often in conversations I had with my informants. I have heard all of the urban legends surrounding this document that Jansen describes: that it was the most sought after and the most expensive passport on the international black market, and that it allowed its owner to go to any country in the world, “except, maybe, Albania, but who would want to go to Albania anyway?...” (Darko). My informants even commented on the popularity of the red passport trope: “well, and then there is that famous [with ironic emphasis] red passport” (Darko again); “and we had the red passport – you surely must have heard about it before” (Vlad) and so on.

The unique geopolitical position of the country during the Cold War era, as discussed in the previous section, explains why Yugoslav citizens were in possession of this valued document that allowed them to travel abroad. Citizens of Yugoslavia, in this respect, differed from citizens of other socialist countries, who, by and large, were locked within their states and could only dream of visiting the ‘West’.41 This privilege experienced by Yugoslav citizens is an important part of the idea that the Yugoslav socialist project was exceptional and substantially better than the other socialist countries. Immediately after the Second World War, Yugoslav citizens could not travel freely to either Western or Eastern Europe. International travel become possible only after Yugoslavia changed its geopolitical position. From the 1950s, the Yugoslav state decided to somewhat liberalise the travel regime for its citizens, a move that was reciprocated by few foreign governments (Jansen 2009). However the mass liberalisation of foreign travel

41 This inability to go West, in my opinion, contributed to socialist citizens more eagerly travelling around and exploring their own countries (with the encouragement of their own states). After the collapse of the Socialist Bloc and at least partial opening of the borders, the preferred direction of the travel shifted to the West.

154 came only in the 1960s. As Susan Woodward (1995) argues, to a large extent, this was a response to the economic crisis in Yugoslavia that followed the economic boom of post-war reconstruction. Opening up the borders and allowing its citizens to travel to Western Europe to work helped to alleviate the problem of unemployment as well as create the additional money influx through remittances that gastarbeiter were sending back home. Hozic (2011: 617) even argues that in the 1970s, money from these remittances, together with income from the local tourist industry, was the most significant factor in helping reduce Yugoslavia’s trade deficit.

Jansen (2009: 822-823) estimates that approximately only half of Yugoslavia’s adult population actually had red passports. He adds that in reality the document was not as all-powerful as the yugonostalgic narratives speculate. Yugoslavs still needed visas to go, for instance, to the USA (and Albania). Nevertheless, Hozic (2011: 617) provides data that confirm the increase of foreign travel by Yugoslav citizens. The number of Yugoslavs crossing the country’s borders grew from 191 000 annually (500 a day) in 1960 to 16 000 000 (40 000 a day) in 1976, or, roughly, from one per cent of the Yugoslav population to 75 per cent. Foreign travel – be it for work, for tourism or shopping— contributed to the creation of the “ordinary comfort” (Hozic 2011) for citizens of Socialist Yugoslavia.

Foreign travel became an integral part of the Yugoslav identity. This is reflected in certain yugonostalgic stories, including the ones that I heard from my informants:

Young people in Yugoslav times could travel and see the world. They were not as isolated as we are now. They had a chance to learn more, to understand more. And they knew where they belonged. They knew, for instance, that they could listen to rock music, unlike young people in other socialist countries. So this helped them to understand what Yugoslavia was about (Časlav) This mythical status ascribed to the Yugoslav red passport is easily explained by the fact that, after the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia, international travel for citizens of newly independent post-Yugoslav states became rather more complicated. Citizens of Serbia were particularly affected by these changes. In 2005 it was estimated that half of the general Serbian population and two thirds of the country’s students have never travelled abroad (Jansen 2009: 831fn).

155

The reality of being stuck in Serbia is juxtaposed in yugonostalgic narratives with either frequent trips abroad that Yugoslav citizens apparently had, or with the very idea of the possibility to go wherever the owner of the prized red passport wanted. Most of my informants did not tell me of any personal experiences of going abroad in Yugoslav times. However, the possibility of travel that Yugoslav citizens with their red passports had was a constant and recurring theme in our conversations. This trope performed a number of functions. It was used to underscore the unique character of Yugoslav socialism and the substantial difference between Yugoslavia and other states from the Socialist Bloc. Importantly, however, as with many other yugonostalgic stories and tropes, it was used not only to explain the socialist past to me, but also to reflect critically on the present situation.

As mentioned above, when I was conducting my fieldwork Serbian citizens experienced restricted international mobility. Importantly, frustration with this was already a long-term phenomenon. After the fall of Milošević, and the declaration of European integration as a strategic aim, many in Serbia hoped for the improvement of the travel regime (see also Greenberg 2011). However, international institutions did not hasten to remove restrictions. Among the reasons for this was internal corruption, and Serbia’s reluctance to deal with the legacy of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution and the constituent failure to capture and extradite some of the main war criminals.

The internal reasons for Serbia’s continued isolation were acknowledged in the milieu where I spent most of my time in Serbia. Young people with whom I communicated were fully aware of the contradictions and short-comings of the internal and international politics in post-Milošević Serbia that hindered the country’s progress on the international scene and in the international ranking systems.

At the same time, while my friends and informants recognized Serbia’s responsibility for the fact that its citizens could not travel freely, they also pointed out the fact that restrictions were the result of what they saw as an unjust international order. Here one of the inherent contradictions at the heart of the

156 neoliberal post-Cold War world order is revealed. Although, with the fall of the Berlin wall, borders between the two blocs were supposed to be erased, and people from the former socialist republics were supposed to have gained the opportunity to travel freely, in reality, many developed countries quickly imposed strong restrictions on the movement of people from the former Socialist Bloc, fearing the influx of unwanted intruders. The Iron Curtain has transformed into the Golden Curtain – travel to the EU is available first and foremost to well-off people, while the rest are treated with suspicion; as potential aliens and intruders into European space. But then, as Jansen specifies (2009), even plenty of ‘gold’ sometimes does not help to overcome these newly imposed restrictions. Sometimes citizens of post-socialist countries, who earn enough money and lead a decent and content life there, are still dismissed or treated with great suspicion by the immigration offices of the wealthier nations, because they do not meet “Western” standards of prosperity.

In sum, while bitterness and resentment against the EU for imposing controls on the movements of people, is wide-spread in the eastern outskirts of the EU, in Serbia, during the period in which I conducted my fieldwork, these feelings were even stronger, due to the cultural memory of a time when the citizens of Yugoslavia could travel abroad if and when they wanted to.

Well, my dad keeps telling me these stories about how he travelled all over Europe when he was young with his friends, just like that. And I cannot leave this country even if I want to. A few years ago I wanted to go to Italy to a soccer competition. I gathered all the documents, paid all the fees. And then I still had to wait for hours and hours in front of the embassy. Why [do I have to endure] such humiliation? (Ivan) We can understand how yugonostalgic narratives of international travel influence the way the citizens of Serbia understand their (lost) rights and privileges through a comparison with the Ukraine. Currently, Ukrainian citizens need visas to travel to the Schengen zone. In September 2012, a local artist Ihor Gaidai organised an activist photo exhibition in Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, critically reflecting on travel restrictions imposed on Ukrainian citizens by European countries. The exhibition consisted of 12 portraits of prominent Ukrainian intellectuals, artists and activists, who, despite their respected position in Ukrainian society and long history of individual international travel, were recently

157 refused visas to any of the Schengen zone countries. Short texts were printed on each photograph, where these people detailed how exactly they were denied the right to travel and vented their frustration about it. For instance, the intellectual Myroslav Marynowych was so offended by this experience that in protest against such unjust treatment, he decided to refuse to travel to “Western Europe” for one year (Українська правда 2012).

In the light of my fieldwork in Serbia, I found this project deeply elitist. It was an example of privileged people, who otherwise enjoy a mobile lifestyle, lamenting one-off instances of unjust treatment by representatives of European countries. At the same time, it was not used as an opportunity for a broader and more critical reflection on these unequal power relationships. Finally, reactions to this project by users of the popular internet news portal pravda.com.ua were also quite interesting (Українська правда 2012). A few commentators were actually defending the right of the Schengen zone countries to protect themselves against the unwanted intruders, even if it called for an infringement of the basic human right to the freedom of movement.

This case illustrates how different historical legacies of socialism can inform current people’s understanding of their rights and privileges. Citizens of the Ukraine, which was part of the Soviet Union, do not have historical/ nostalgic memories of international travel to hark back to when faced with restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by more developed countries. They can still treat the right to travel abroad, in a Western direction, as a unique and lucky opportunity. In contrast, citizens of contemporary Serbia know – either from personal experience, or, as is the case with my informants, from nostalgic stories – that once upon a time they could travel freely wherever they wanted.

This right to international travel, which was lost with the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia, is a recurrent trope in yugonostalgic stories. It was often used by my informants to point out what they saw as the unjust and denigrating treatment they receive from European countries. But these stories also testify to the fact that many people in former Yugoslavia have experienced a shrinking of their horizon of

158 possibilities. This experience was heightened by the reduction of opportunities for travel between the former Yugoslav republics, as I show in the next section.

6.4. Nostalgic stories about internal mobility in Yugoslav times

Descriptions of travel within Socialist Yugoslavia are an integral part of many yugonostalgic narratives. In this section I will discuss in more detail some of these nostalgic stories. They highlight both people’s concerns with the immobility they experience or perceive and also create a link with the theme of the previous section, the contemporary position of Serbia on the international scene. These stories testify to frustrations over the loss of internationalism that characterized Serbia as a part of Socialist Yugoslavia.

The opening lines from the short story ‘Islands’ by Sarajevo-born writer Aleksandar Hemon poignantly render the feelings characteristic of many other yugonostalgic narratives about travel to the Adriatic seaside:

We got up at dawn, ignored the yolky sun, loaded our navy-blue Austin with suitcases and then drove straight to the coast, stopping only on the verge of Sarajevo, so I could pee. I sang communist songs the entire journey ... We waited for the ship on a long stone pier, which burnt the soles of my feet, as soon as I took off my sandals. The air was sweltering, saturated with sea-ozone, exhaustion, and the smell of coconut sunscreen, coming from the German tourists, already red and shellacked, lined up for a photo at the end of the pier (Hemon 2000: 3). The Adriatic seacoast was one of the main Yugoslav tourist destinations, offering the promise of summertime bliss to Yugoslav citizens and cheap holiday options for tourists from abroad (see eds Grandits & Taylor 2010 for their pioneering contribution to history of tourism in Socialist Yugoslavia). Unlike international travel in Yugoslav times, almost all of my informants had had experiences of summer vacations on the Adriatic seacoast. Consequently they often had very good memories of these places and of that period of their life. Let me quote at length from interview with Darko:

We often travelled with my whole family for a summer holiday to one little town in Istria, in Croatia, very close to Italy and Slovenia. I spent there half a year… ok, maybe not half, but at least four months each year I was spending there, at the seaside. We were going there four times each year – winter holiday, summer holiday, First of May and 29th of November [Day of the Republic, one of the official holidays in Yugoslav times]. So I spent there quite a lot of time. I do not remember my childhood here, in Belgrade, but I remember my childhood there

159

… it may sound a little bit stupid, if I say that this was the happiest period of my life, but in general that was the most peaceful period of my life and I really felt great back then … I remember the Croatia of those days … everyone was so welcoming and hospitable, it did not matter if you were a Serb, because we all were Yugoslavs, and that’s it ... no one made any distinction between people based on their ethnicity or nationality. There were no divisions between people. It was one beautiful and burden-free place Milena told me quite similar story:

When it comes to Yugoslavia, I remember summer holidays in Croatia. We had a house there at the seaside. My grandparents build it. So I remember well how we used to go there. I also remember my environment there, I had a really good friend there [with laughter] if one can have a good friend at such a young age… That has remained with me… I have really warm feelings about those memories… Memories of actual travel and/or the idea of the possibility of travel in Yugoslav times not only to the Adriatic seacoast, but to many other parts of the country, loom large in many other accounts as well:

When I think back to my childhood days I have this certain important feeling, that one lives in a larger land, feeling that one can cross certain boundaries, can go to the seaside in Croatia, can go to mountains in Slovenia, can go to Macedonia …. These are very good memories for me, when I think about them (Siniša)

***

When I was a kid I visited a lot of monasteries with my grandma. I think that is interesting, because now they say that you could not practise religion in Yugoslavia, but that is not true. With my grandmother I visited so many monasteries, all over the place, including many of them in Kosovo (Tica)

***

A part of my family hailed from Macedonia, so as a child I went to Ohrid a couple of times… I mean, the lake. I remember it very well; I learned how to swim there (Vladimir) These accounts of travels all over Yugoslavia that many of my informants have experienced as children with their parents or other family members, testify that at least some segments of Yugoslav population enjoyed mobility within the limits of their country. Yugonostalgic texts produced by ‘older’ generations of yugonostalgics also imply this strongly (e.g. Debeljak 1994; Hemon 2000; Ugrešić 1996). The state itself encouraged and facilitated this mobility in various ways, thus fostering social integration and sense of belonging and common identity:

… with Yugoslav concept of brotherhood and unity … one of the methods used for its popularisation and propaganda was organization of different

160

manifestations and events, where young people from the whole country participated – like those work actions, or JNA, the army, where one went on a service to different republic… Or whenever they were celebrating some events, visitors from other republics were always expected … and now those contacts have disappeared (Milena) Based on other stories I heard, we can also add that this cohesion was achieved not just through encouraging and organising ideological tourism but also through the leisure-oriented tourism that citizens of Yugoslavia engaged in. These various kinds of internal tourism, in combination with the international mobility discussed before and the economic prosperity discussed in the next chapter, contributed to the creation of the Yugoslav identity and the “Yugoslav dream”. In the remainder of this section, I will discuss some of the ways Yugoslav citizens travelled within SFRY, relating this to the narratives I have heard from my informants. This will help us understand better how exactly Yugoslav identity was promoted from above and lived from below. Importantly, these stories will also signal what types of mobility have been rendered irrelevant, undesirable, or impossible for contemporary Serbian citizens.

Schools in Socialist Yugoslavia organized trips for pupils, to visit different places of interest – both natural wonders like caves in Slovenia (Ugrešić 1998) and locations of historical relevance. Thus, Kumrovec, a small village in the Croatian region bordering Slovenia, where Josip Broz Tito was born, in Yugoslav times became a place of secular pilgrimage for Yugoslav citizens, both children and grown-ups (Alempijević & Kelemen 2010). Similarly, many of the monuments to the National Liberation War that I have discussed in Chapter Five, dispersed throughout Socialist Yugoslavia, were a destination for such organised politico- educational tourism (Kempenaers 2010).

A cult film Tito i ja (Tito and Me), directed by Goran Marković in 1992, set in SFRY in 1950s, follows a young protagonist going on one of these school-organised trips along the route of one of the Partisan offensives during the Second World War. As Pavle Levi (2007: 111) notes, the film skilfully parodies Tito’s cult of personality, without employing the prevalent by that time ethno-nationalistic criticisms of communism. Tito i ja was often recommended to me by people I met in Serbia, who characterised it as an excellent example of yugonostalgia on film.

161

The story of a young boy in Socialist Yugoslavia, going on a school-organised journey, which, however, spins out of control and takes him, literally and figuratively, to unexpected places, apparently offers a point of identification for many people in contemporary Serbia.

My informants, who went to school either at the end of the 1980s or in the early 1990s, did not have a chance to participate in such outings to places of ideological importance for Socialist Yugoslavia. However, nowadays, this type of tourism is being renewed, although not on a mass scale and without official support. For example, some schools organise tours to Tito’s burial place on 25th of May. When I attended the Day of the Youth back in 2009, one journalist I met there told me that she counted at least 3 buses with schoolchildren from Serbia and one bus with schoolchildren from Macedonia. There is a certain level of interest in visiting important centres of Yugoslav ideological tourism, although, it is not that easy to organise such trips nowadays.

Another Yugoslav institution that provided for mobility for at least the male part of SFRY’s population was the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA). Conscripts were dispatched to service in parts of the country different from their native one. The experience of army service, exposure to different surroundings, as well as encounters with people from other Yugoslav republics often fostered the feeling of belonging to greater entity and some sense of common identity. However, in contemporary circumstances, as Petrović (2010a) shows, memories and stories of the JNA experience are often suppressed. They often contradict dominant narratives, and consequently are considered to be inadequate and problematic.

In conversations that I had with my informants, the Yugoslav People’s Army was seldom mentioned. Possibly, this is partly a consequence of the suppression of stories of positive experiences of JNA service. However, in a notable exception, one of my interlocutors did describe the function of social integration that JNA could perform through travel: “when someone [from Serbia] went to the army and met a Croat there, he did not use a gun against him. No, they would became friends and later Serb would often visit a Croat at the seaside” (Staša).

162

Another institution that allowed Yugoslav citizens to experience travel within SFRY, were youth work actions. Apart from gathering young people under the banner of developing the country and working for the collective goal, labour actions were designed to give young people an experience of travel and leisure (Petrović 2010b). None of my informants had participated in these events, but they had heard positive stories about them from their relatives:

I have heard from my grandma a lot about travel in those times, how she could go where she wanted to the seaside and so on … in relation to that she also told me about the work actions, how they just used this opportunity to travel, to socialise, to have fun, listen to the music … all of these stories made me want to be able to travel like that as well (Mirela)

***

The work actions, people who went there, they not only harvested corn, or did something like that. For my parents they also gave an opportunity to see other parts of Yugoslavia and meet people from there (Časlav) Stories about travel that were organised with the help of one’s workplace almost invariably figured in conversations I had with my informants. These stories overlap significantly with the socio-economic post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire discussed in the next chapter. Industries and enterprises in Socialist Yugoslavia often had their own holiday resorts. Consequently, their employees had a right to a yearly paid vacation, guaranteed by the state and in most cases also had a place where they could spend their vacations. My informants quite often mentioned this right of ordinary citizens of Yugoslavia to enjoy a vacation at an industry-owned resort. Its evocation was used to illustrate the fact that people back then enjoyed much higher standards of living than in contemporary Serbia. Interestingly, though, most of my informants did not illustrate this point with accounts of personal experience of such resorts, perhaps because of their middle-class backgrounds.

The choice of location for summer vacations was not necessarily dictated by the state or industry one worked in. Many Yugoslav citizens had small vacation houses, so-called vikendice,42 either somewhere in the countryside close to the place where they lived, or somewhere in the forests, mountains or at the seaside. This

42 The name, derived from the English word ‘weekend’, implies that these houses were supposed to be a destination for shorter vacations.

163 phenomenon appeared in 1960s and by 1986, according to official statistics that left many vikendice unaccounted for, their number reached 550 000 (Taylor 2010: 172). As Taylor (2010) observes, vikendice were a vital part of Yugoslav holiday culture and idea of “good life” in general.

Many of the stories I have heard about idyllic summer days at the seaside were set in such vikendice. They were tinted with a particular regret if these houses were built in the Croatian part of the Adriatic seashore. This meant that they were located in what is generally regarded as the “best” part of the former Yugoslav coastline, with stunning views, swimmable beaches and proximity to beautiful cities, such as Dubrovnik or Split. But it also meant that in the aftermath of the 1990s, people very often could not claim these houses back. While during the 1990s travel to these vikendice was by and large impossible because of the war, in the 2000s one just did not have anywhere to go to. In many instances these houses were either confiscated or destroyed. This caused a feeling of bitter resentment. For instance, my friend Maša told me nostalgic stories about happy summer days she used to spend as a child in her family house located in a village near Split.

But then, in 1991, they just blew it up. Our neighbours did that, as somebody else told us later. They just came around, mined everything and blew it up into the air. I really miss that place. You know, the Adriatic is the best sea in the whole world, and I would just love to swim in it again. But because they did it to us, I will never go there again. Some of the stories I heard mourned the passing of the opportunity to travel between the Yugoslav republics, without any explicit need, as people occasionally just do. An older relative of one of my informants told me:

As students back then we did not even think about borders [between the republics]. For example, we could start a party somewhere in Zagreb, only to board a train later in the evening, and finish the outing on the streets of Belgrade. I have heard similar accounts from people active in arts or music, when they were describing the pan-Yugoslav cultural scene, hence I will discuss them in more detail in Chapter Eight. Now, I just want to underline that such accounts show how Yugoslav citizens experienced Socialist Yugoslavia as their space, open for free travel. And even if this is just a romanticised representation of the past, and in reality Yugoslav citizens did experience some obstacles when travelling within

164 their country, these stories are still valid and relevant. They are valid not because of what they tell us about the Yugoslav past, but because they are a product of the current frustrations of Serbian citizens experience. During my fieldwork, travel from Serbia to other former Yugoslav republics was often thought of as if not impossible then difficult, for a variety of reasons. I address these issues in the following section of this chapter.

6.5. Going back …

During the summer of 2009, the streets of Belgrade became a setting for advertising campaigns by the Ministries of Tourism of other former Yugoslav republics, aiming to attract Serbian tourists (see Figures 6.2-6.4). For example, Bosnia and Herzegovina tried to attract Serbian citizens with pictures of the cobble-stoned streets of Sarajevo, while Slovenia encouraged them to visit the “nearest European sea”.

However, the most aggressive advertisement campaign was organised by Croatia, at the initiative of its Minister of Tourism of the time, Damir Bajs. Dubbed by Croatian media “the offensive against Serbia”, the campaign cost several million Euro (p.v. 2009). The Ministry placed 100 billboards and 230 giant posters on the streets of the main Serbian cities - Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš. The slogans used in this advertising campaign definitely make reference to experience and/ or memories of the common Yugoslav past. “When the heart says summer, it says … Adriatic” implies that citizens of Serbia do not just know, they feel in their heart what the best destination for the summer vacations is. And the phrase “Spend your vacations where your parents did” is explicitly intended for the younger generations, who might not have had the experience of the Croatian seaside, but definitely have heard stories about it.43 Croatian Ministry reports declared the campaign to be a success, with the number of visitors from Serbia growing by 1,3% in the summer season of 2009. This has, Ministry representatives argued, continued the trend of increasing interest in the Croatian seaside by Serbian

43 These slogans are a distinct departure from the ones used in another advertisement campaign of Croatian Ministry of Tourism, inviting visitors to experience “The Mediterranean as It Once Was”, subtly occluding any references to the Yugoslav space (see Patterson 2010: 369).

165 tourists that began in 2002. Consequently, the same advertisement campaign was held in 2010 as well.

Fig. 6.2. This “Feel Sarajevo” billboard is a part of a campaign organised by Ministry of Culture and Sport of Bosnia and Herzegovina to attract Serbian visitors. Picture by author.

Fig. 6.3 “Croatia… Spend your summer where your parents did”. One of the ads placed by the Croatian Ministry of Tourism to attract Serbian visitors. Picture by author

Fig. 6.4. “When the heart says summer, it says… Adriatic” - another example of tourist advertisement sponsored by Croatian government. Here the ad’s text was ‘edited’ by someone. The phrase “Croatia. So beautiful, so close” was finished off by “so genocidal”. Source: www.glasssrpske.com

166

The popular reception of this campaign in Serbia was hardly enthusiastic. It was often interpreted as a desperate attempt by the Croatian tourist industry to attract at least some visitors in face of the financial crisis. Serbian media ridiculed the supposed success of the campaign, noting that Croatia remains too expensive for Serbian citizens. Instead, they chose to go to much cheaper resorts in Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria and Egypt.

However, economic factors were not the only ones that could influence Serbian citizens’ decision not to spend summer where their parents once did. In few cases, anonymous graffiti writers ‘supplemented’ the message on the billboards to represent their view of Croatia as extremely nationalistic and Serb-hating country (Fig. 6.4). During my fieldwork I gathered the impression that such resentment, in different levels of intensity, is quite popular in Serbia. Many people are reluctant to travel to Croatia, fearful of the cold or even hostile reception. The popular imagination is inundated with various urban legends about bad things that can happen to a Serb visitor to Croatia. According to these stories, the standard inventory of the torments that await unprepared and well-meaning Serbian tourists, include: being ridiculed or attacked for speaking Serbian, getting one’s car with its Serbian licence-plate damaged by vandals, and being accosted without any reason by police officers. These stories are validated by claims that the events being described happened to a narrator or to someone s/he knows.

Well, during my travels I had a negative experience once, in early 2000s … In Zagreb I wanted to buy bread in the shop [bread is one of the words that are completely different in Serbian (hleb) and Croatian (kruh), usage of one or another word makes it obvious immediately, which language one speaks]. And the situation was just like in movies, you know, when music stops, and everyone just stares at you. And then the saleswoman … something just got into her … so I could not get that bread from her until I said kruh (Staša)

***

You know, when I was young I loved going to Zagreb, I had many friends there on the artistic scene there, we used to hang out a lot together. But now… now I do not want to go there, that is out of question. I will not go there, I just do not want to have these bad experiences, like things that happened to my friends, when their Belgrade car-plates were stolen, and such... (an older friend of one of my informants)

167

Such perceived threats prevented some of my informants from travelling to Croatia. Yet at the same time, they attempted to rationalise such unfriendly Croatian behaviour, rather than just portraying them as Serb-hating nationalists:

I really wish I had that freedom to travel. For instance I visited Split recently. I spent just four hours there but was absolutely blown away by it. I really want to be able to just get into my car and go there. But I do not have the total freedom to travel there without any worry that someone will not smash the windows in my car because it has Belgrade plates or that some policeman will not stop me in the street and will give me a fine … or somebody will not puncture my tires… of course those are some small things but they are the results of those wars that happened during the 1990s … I personally did not have any negative experience at that time. Well, some relatives came over from Bosnia and lived with us for 2 months. … But imagine for somebody who was born in 1985 or so … that means that they were 10 years old when their houses were burned down and they were expelled. Now, how can anyone just get over this? (Maria)

***

I am not talking about that kind of fear when you are afraid that something will happen to you, that is the fear that you are filled with, but they are just filling you with it, like if you go to Croatia something will happen to you and you have some sort of resistance towards it. That is a result of politics … Now all of those criminals … are cooperating and crime and politics, they overlap… So they just keep us in fear, so that they could profit from that (Tica) Further, some were attempting to minimise the urban legends about negative consequences of going to Croatia by interpreting them as exceptions, deviant behaviour, rather than normal attitude of ordinary Croats:

Well yes, I think that if you go to Croatia you can still have these incidents … when someone hears you speaking Serbian and starts harassing you because of this … but you know, that would have to be some nationalistic idiots, you have them here as well… I think if a person just does not overreact in such a situation, it can all be somehow solved (Darko) Another important explanation that my informants offered for the lack of travel between former Yugoslav republics was the relatively high cost. Young people in Serbia often do not have enough money for everyday life, so international travel, even just to neighbouring countries that once used to belong to the same state as Serbia, now often becomes an unachievable luxury.

For many of my informants, participation in the activist scene with its international connections in the region helped to overcome feelings of fear or unease about travelling to other former Yugoslav republics. Activism prompted

168 and facilitated international travel and cooperation between my informants and their counterparts from neighbouring countries.

When, six or seven years ago, I went to Zagreb [the Croatian capital] for the first time after the war, it was through the feminist organisation that I worked with at the time. I had this feeling as if I belong here. I absolutely did not feel like I am in a foreign country. I thought that maybe this is because as a kid I used to come here, to live here [in Croatia]. But back then, as a kid, I did not even think that Yugoslavia can cease to exist and this can be another country. And that is something that makes me sad… that now we have only such little [with emphasis] space where we can feel at home … Actually, I feel sorry for people who feel at home only in Serbia … unlike them I feel that way in all of our former republics. Even in Macedonia, which I visited recently for the first time in my life … still, I feel like somehow Macedonians are ‘ours’ (Milena)

The utopian dreams of the post-Yugoslav or even Balkan socialist confederation that I already mentioned in the chapter have quotidian incarnations in the acts of cooperation, support and solidarity that activists from the region offer to each other. Activists from different countries – according to the opportunities available – go to other countries to participate in protests, conferences, fora, or even just to visit friends they have met previously on such events.

Such actions, though, can also be problematic and turn into a kind of ‘activist tourism’. This can create a strong sense of resentment among other activists, who sometimes criticize their colleagues for spending too much time in other countries, relaxing on the summer schools or retreats, instead of facing urgent issues within Serbia.

Even though this ‘activist tourism’ may have its drawbacks, it does serve a very important role – (re)creation of the connections between former Yugoslav republics. Of course, these connections already exist or are recreated on many other levels as well. At the official state level where mutual declarations about importance of cooperation and strategic partnership are made, between criminal circles of different countries as Tica implied, in sport, or in culture. Activist connections, however, aim to create a common space for the fight for the common good (see also Dioli 2009). This space is open to internal contradictions and conflicts. It is still important to at least acknowledge the existence of this cooperation between young activists from the region. Taking it into account will help us to avoid producing the generalised and somewhat denigrating stereotypes

169 of young people in Serbia as narrow-minded and chauvinistic victims of nationalistic propaganda, who do not travel anywhere (as Borka from CZKD implied to me in a phrase that I have quoted in Chapter Two) and as a result do not know about the differences and possibilities the world outside of Serbia has to offer. It is interesting that my informants themselves sometimes reproduced such stereotypes, but I see this as a sign of a general discourse of disparaging youth in Serbia that I have described and criticised previously. To conclude this section, I will quote at length from the interview with Milan:

In the whole of the former Yugoslavia, if you mention SFRY everyone will first of all think about freedom of movement. I’ll tell you what I heard yesterday. One girl from Sarajevo yesterday was talking about how they have one festival there, and people from the whole region participate. But it is the biggest absurdity, really, because yesterday that ‘whole region’ was just one state. I remember that Yugoslavia for its connectedness, for the richness of the culture, richness of the diversity …that is why my orientation is strongly pro-Yugoslav. I am not yugonostalgic, because I do not wish that Yugoslavia returned the way it was. If it were that good, it would not have collapsed. But I wish we could renew that entity, but on some other, more healthy basis.

6.6. Post Script

In October 2012 I re-visited Belgrade for a couple of days. I caught up with Maša, the friend of mine who refused to go to Croatia, because their family vikendica was blown up at the beginning of the wars of Yugoslav dissolutions. When we were chatting in one of the Belgrade cafes, she told me:

And you know, last summer I finally went to the Croatian seaside! After so many years... It was beautiful, I had a great time. They did steal our numberplates though [laughs]. We should not have left the car in that car park I guess... But then police were very helpful about this as well; we did not have any problems because of that. You know, it was such a great experience all in all. I cannot wait to go there again. Maša’s story can be dismissed as a personal anecdote, a peculiar experience without much broader relevance. However, its strength also lies precisely in its particularity and singularity. This is a story of an individual, embittered by negative experience of nationalistic violence during the 1990s, to the extent where she had declared that she would never go back to Croatia. However once she did, her new experience of the place – even though it was quite mixed – provided Maša with enough of a positive impetus to want to go back. As mundane as this story is, it still gives us hope that, in words of my other informant, ‘once we start travelling,

170 in spite of those borders, visas, and so on, it becomes obvious that we have much more in common than we’ve been told’.

***

In this chapter, I analysed a broad cluster of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire relating to the internationalism of Socialist Yugoslavia. As the ideological foundation of the state, created from a need to provide solutions for former problems and fill in the lack of legitimacy caused by conflict with the Soviet Union, internationalism had consequences not only for the geopolitical position of the Yugoslav state, its role in international politics and reputation, but also for ordinary citizens. They enjoyed international mobility. This privilege distinguished them significantly from the citizens of the other countries of the Socialist Bloc.

Importantly, the travel destinations described in these nostalgic narratives include locations from both within former SFRY and from outside. After all, internationalism was also about overcoming the divisions between the constitutive parts of SFRY. Therefore nostalgic invocations of pan-Yugoslav travel indicate the shrinking of the horizon of possibilities – and not only for travel – that many ex- Yugoslav citizens have encountered after the state’s collapse. The creation of the new nation states after SFRY’s dissolution had among its consequences not just the realisation of the nations’ longing for independence, as nationalists intone. This process also had the tangibly negative consequences of severely limiting citizens’ mobility.

The constraints on the mobility of Serbian citizens resulted both from their state’s unwillingness to meet some of the demands of the international community, and from the shortcomings of the policies of international community. However, another important factor that limits mobility for people living in Serbia is the fact that now new international borders cut across travel routes that were established in Yugoslav times. Crossing these new borders is costly and time-demanding, which provides a stark contrast to stories about the ease of pan-Yugoslav travel in socialist times. Further, people are still afraid or unwilling to travel to other former Yugoslav countries. These fears and their effects, however, can be challenged and

171 overcome, as my brief discussion of the activist cooperation in the region illustrates.

172

Chapter Seven

Yugoslav Dream as Lieu de Mémoire

In this chapter I examine the broad cluster of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire evoking the economic situation and social atmosphere in SFRY. I refer to them, following Patterson (2011), as the “Yugoslav dream”. High levels of employment, a salary that provided for one’s living, social benefits guaranteed by the workplace, and feelings of stability and security are just some of the aspects of Yugoslav experience that appeal to citizens in contemporary Serbia who struggle with their precarious situation. My informants often described Socialist Yugoslavia’s economy and society precisely in such a wistful manner.

I illustrate here why the lieu de mémoire of Yugoslav dream is so relevant in contemporary Serbia by contextualising it in the present. First of all I discuss how my informants imagine the Yugoslav dream as a whole: how they describe the successes of the Yugoslav economy, admitting at the same time some of its shortcomings and failures. I move on to discuss in more detail two aspects of the Yugoslav dream that were frequently mentioned to me by my informants – worker’s rights and security in public spaces.

It is my intention to show in this chapter that nostalgic evocations of the better economic and social conditions under socialism – real or imagined – should not be dismissed as something unimportant or interpreted solely as a negative phenomenon. They provide a counter-narrative to the triumphalist discourse of transition culture that celebrates neo-liberalism and overlooks the losses endured by some in the course of ‘transformation’. According to the UNDP analysis, Eastern Europe was the only world region to suffer rapid economic decline in the 1990s. Still, some scholars reject these facts arguing that the situation in the region was not that dramatic: “Coping with the minor disturbances of everyday life and with the occasional major crisis is an eternal fact of life all over the world. ... we do not want reader to believe that [such a situation] is solely related to the process of transition from Communism to free-market liberal democracy” (Sik and Redmond 2000: 266). This chapter provides counter-narrative to such problematic dismissal of the suffering caused by the post-socialist transformation.

173

7.1. “One just could live honourably…” – imagining the Yugoslav dream

“You really should not focus on the young people who do not have much experience of Yugoslavia,” – one of my older informants, 36-year-old Siniša, told me - “you see, the problem is that they just do not have that personal experience, while older people would explain to you why Yugoslavia was such a good country [emphasis added]”. It is worth quoting at length the next part of interview with Siniša, because here he invokes most of the post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire related to the so-called “Yugoslav dream” I encountered in different contexts throughout my fieldwork:

No, no, life in Yugoslavia was not bad at all… One just cannot live badly in society that, in my opinion, was a quite successful socialist society … Even unemployed, they still had their flats, they had food, you had to be a complete hobo, a total idiot to live badly there… I remember some friends from America that visited back in the 1980s and how they were amazed, like ‘Wow, you all live so well here! You have a month of leave each year, you work, you get your salary!’ … these things, they were just taken care of… one could go to the seaside through one’s trade union… You really just had some privileges that nowadays you can afford only if you take credit… Despite Siniša’s scepticism, most of his younger compatriots with whom I had conversations over the course of my fieldwork also had similar idealised understanding of the social and economic life in Socialist Yugoslavia. This is yet another reminder that one does not necessarily have to have the substantial personal ‘lived’ experience of the past to form yugonostalgic predisposition (or any other kind of nostalgia). Some childhood memories, combined with stories about the past, transmitted through family, friends and wider social milieu or through different socio-cultural institutions, and unsatisfactory present, can facilitate the creation of such ‘prosthetic’ yugonostalgia. Let’s consider Tica’s brief description of the ‘good life’ in Yugoslavia. He was born in 1983, so had quite a brief lived experience of SFRY, which, at the time had already entered the crisis. Nevertheless, as an excerpt below demonstrates, he still had positive memories of good life in Yugoslav times:

I definitely remember that the standards were much better then, every year we could go to the seaside, we could allow ourselves this or that. And we were a working-class family [also a single-parent one – N Ch], my grandfather was a worker in factory …. and my mother was a worker in a factory… And we could allow ourselves a more relaxed life…

174

Analysis of the idealised images of Yugoslav social and economic life that emerge from the interviews I conducted in Serbia singles out the following recurring features: well-functioning economy; high economic standard of living for Yugoslavia’s citizens; social protection that they enjoyed as a result of Yugoslavia’s socialist system; social equality and stability; security. Yet, as in case with other post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire, I found that in my informants’ narratives there was no wholesale acceptance of these idealised images of different aspects of Yugoslav dream. They contested different stories, depending on their own subject positions and understanding of the Yugoslav past.

My informants almost uniformly agreed that Yugoslav citizens enjoyed a high quality of life. International respect I have discussed in the previous chapter was often presented to me as proof of impressive economic success of Yugoslavia.

Did you know that Yugoslavia was invited to join the EU? If we did not disintegrate, we would be there already by 1995, and now, who knows when and if that will happen (Dejan)

***

Well, you know, Yugoslavia, if it did not disintegrate, it would be an EU member already by the end of the 1980s. And we would be one of the strongest members economically as well, right after Germany! (Čira) More detailed conversations about the reasons for the Yugoslavia’s economic success were already revealing some contradictions. For instance, Sava attempted to describe to me why Yugoslavia’s economy as a whole functioned so well:

Sava: Well, the economy functioned well. I think what was really good is that they were stalling the development of some parts of the country so that the others could catch up. So, Slovenia and Croatia were the most developed, but then their development was stalled, so that underdeveloped rural and mainly agricultural regions could catch up. And then you would have for instance a plant in Šabac [Serbia] that was getting raw material from the mines in Kosovo, or the plant in Nikšić, [Montenegro] working with raw materials from mines in Eastern Serbia…

Me: But some understand this mode of production as one of the biggest drawbacks of socialist economies…

Sava: Well, imagine the city in the middle of nowhere that has no prospects, it would just disappear over time, and people would migrate out of it. But with this socialist planning, it would be developing… the factory would work, but you’ll also have specialized trade schools … hospitals and so on… the whole infrastructure around those fabrics would develop … and this is much better, because [as a result] you do not have any migration or the conflict of interests…

175

The regions would be developing and you would have universities there, employment opportunities… people would not have to “follow the bread” [migrate for economic reasons – N Ch]… like for instance me today, I had to come to the larger city to get education and I also have to work some odd jobs that I do not really care about, only so that I could continue my studies at the university Such views differ a lot from the contemporary interpretation of the failure of the planned economy precisely because of the way it broke down the production process (see, for instance, Verdery 1996). Yet, we should not dismiss Sava’s free interpretation of the planned nature of economy as a good asset, if we understand it as a part of the broader effort to construct a picture of Yugoslavia as a well- developed, modernised and prosperous country. This particularly makes sense as a part of the broader argument about economic development in Yugoslavia providing for social cohesion for its diverse ethnic groups (see Chapter Five). Evocations of the industries as providing not only for economic but social aspects of the workers’ lives (Chapter Six) were also very common in the interviews I have recorded.

At the same time, not all of my informants were enthusiastic about the planned aspects of Yugoslav economy, depending as well on decisions of one – Tito’s – personality:

Its economy was not really sustainable. Some of its factories were built more for the sake of employment rather than for the market. There is famous anecdote about Tito and the steel factory… There is one very large steel factory, yet its location is totally crazy … there are no mines, no large rivers nearby… in the middle of nowhere… so why is it there? Supposedly, there was a train line going through there and Tito was travelling there in his Blue train. And there were a lot of grapes there… and he said – he had a bit of a lisp – that they should build fabrika grožđa (grape factory) there, while they understood that he said fabrika gvožđa (steel factory)… and sometimes, when I think for instance about the economy in my town, I have the impression that some of those factories were built [pause] because of the speech impediment [laughs] (Tibor)

Other criticism that I have heard from my informants quite often during the interviews – and this is a much broader popular perception as well – is that the whole Yugoslav miracle was possible only because of the large international loans Yugoslavia had.

Well, we did live very good life back then, but one has to admit that it was all because of the credits Tito was borrowing. And now we have to pay them back, and will be paying them for a long time as well (Dejan)

176

***

We lived at that time mainly off credit… mainly American. Tito was just taking money from Americans and giving it to people here, so that is why we were living here so well, up until the moment when one had to return all this back… although the majority of those credits we did not have to pay back really, so the problem is much more broad than just that… (Darko) While Dejan in his interpretation of the role international credits played in Yugoslavia’s history comes quite close to the anti-Yugoslav sentiments that see the contemporary crisis as a payback for the Yugoslav sins (already mentioned in the previous chapters), Darko departs from such simplistic causal interpretation, hinting at some broader processes involved in the economic decline of the region. Časlav, in his turn, suggested that the whole issue of loans Yugoslavia was taking from the international community and the consequent huge debt, was unnecessarily exaggerated, especially if compared to the contemporary situation:

Well, yes, everyone is talking about that international debt that Yugoslavia had. But the truth is that if you look now at all of the former Yugoslav countries separately, they all have larger debt than Yugoslavia had back then! (See also Petrović 2010: 143, for discussion of similar opinions expressed by her informants) My informants occasionally constructed Yugoslavia’s good economy as some sort of compensation for its flawed political system. Nostalgia for socialism in general and yugonostalgia in particular are sometimes strongly criticised precisely on those grounds (Marković 2007; Рябчук 2003). Its critics portray it as problematic readiness to forget the authoritarian aspects of the socialist past for the sugar pill of the memories about good life. My informants often reflected extensively on this Faustian dilemma:

Now if you ask anyone what they think about SFRY they would answer: oh, it was shit! ... Yet, no one can tell you exactly what was “shit” about that country … like, it was not democratic… well, screw the democratic society, if I do not have any money to put food on my table … if I can travel, if everyone respects me, if I have education, why should I give a damn who is in power, maybe even if those are aliens. If everyone is living well, and I am living well, and I do not have to hide it, I do not have to feel ashamed for it, and I do not need any bodyguards who would protect me from the rest of the people. And I can go to the sea… and I can do whatever I want and get paid for it... now, people get their salaries with 3 months delay… and I need to return credit… well, you had to return credits back then as well, but I knew that from the same salary I could also buy a flat and huge amount of different stupid things… and in this society, which is democratic, where I can choose the power representatives in elections happening every month or so [laughs] I am not [living] well… and other people are not well too… But no, “fuck

177

that, SFRY was a shithole!” I think it was great. If anyone asked me – I would have brought back SFRY at this very moment [laughs](Sava) As this section has demonstrated, all in all my informants offered me a quite idealised picture of the “Yugoslav dream” – a prosperous and secure life in Socialist Yugoslavia. Yet this rosy picture starts making a lot more sense to us if we view it in context of the popular perception about the rapid decline of the quality of life in contemporary Serbia (Fig 7.1.).

Fig 7.1. “Goddamn you. How did you manage to screw everything up?” A Titostalgic internet meme. Here a picture of Tito’s visit to a factory is electronically modified, so that Tito is surrounded by contemporary Serbian politicians.

7.2. Precariousness of life in Serbia

A few days before I arrived in Serbia in May of 2009 to begin my research an incident happened in Novi Pazar, a town in South-Western part of the country, which reverberated in public discussions for months after. Zoran Bulatović, middle-aged leader of the local textile workers’ trade union cut off most of the little finger on his left hand. This happened during the hunger strike of workers from

178 the local textile factory – Raška – who barricaded themselves in one of the buildings in the centre of the city. Bulatović said that the purpose of his desperate act was to attract wider public attention to the plight of the Raška workers. Once a big textile industry, providing employment for roughly 4000 workers not only in Novi Pazar but also in broader region of Sandžak and exporting its produce to other countries, throughout the 1990s the factory deteriorated. By the time of this incident it was verging on bankruptcy and employed only 65 workers. And those claimed that the factory owed them significant parts of their salaries for the period starting in 1993.

This incident immediately grabbed attention of local and international media, especially since some reports stated that Bulatović ate his cut digit, to show that he and his co-workers - many of who were single mothers - had nothing else left to eat. Serbian newspapers and TV stations for days continued to report about the incident, speculated about the state of Bulatović’s mental health and, for that matter, even provided some coverage on the further development of the strike.

Bulatović’s desperate act set an example for other wretched workers. A bit less than a year after the initial incident, another worker, this time in Sremska Mitrovica - a town in the North-Western part of Serbia - tried to bite off his finger. This happened during the hunger strike he and his co-workers organized to protest against what they thought to be a fraudulent bankruptcy of the firm where they were employed for the biggest part of their lives.

Although these acts can be singled out for the extreme display of the desperation, all in all they should be viewed in the context of the overall high levels of dissatisfaction of Serbian citizens with the quality of their lives. This is not surprising, because currently the Serbian economy is in a bad condition. Some attribute this to the impact of the global financial crisis (Stamatović and Zakić 2010), while others argue that the Serbian economy was starting to show signs of a recession even before the crisis happened and it only worsened the trends set up by the wrong directions of the latest economic reforms (Kovačević 2010). As we will see later, this disastrous economic situation is often blamed for the broader crisis in the society, in particular for the rise in crime and hooliganism.

179

Improvement of the economic situation was definitely the expectation of the majority of people in Serbia after the fall of Milošević regime in October 2000. One of the strongest motives in the opposition’s electoral campaign was the emphasis on Milošević’s fault for bringing the country into the situation it found itself in throughout the 1990s. The wars of the Yugoslav dissolution had their impact on the state’s economy and social atmosphere, even though, until NATO’s Kosovo campaign, war was never ‘officially’ waged on the country’s territory. Nevertheless, Milošević’s rule of the country, its involvement in the wars, and consequent international economic sanctions contributed to the creation of a severe economic crisis.

It is difficult to provide an ‘objective’ and brief description of the Serbian44 economy throughout the 1990s. To begin with, there is insufficient data. Official statistics – when available at all – do not say much about non-urban areas, where people managed to survive mainly because of the existence of the so-called grey economy (see Sorensen 2006). Keeping that in mind, the available macroeconomic data show that throughout the 1990s the Serbian society had to cope with the economic meltdown. The first half of the decade was especially difficult. By the end of the 1993 the GDP had fallen to 43 % of its 1989 level. Expansionary monetary and fiscal policies necessary to finance the war caused one of the longest and highest hyperinflations in the world history (Uvalić 2010). Unemployment levels soared. Official figures for unemployment in 1992, for instance, were 22% (Sorensen 2006: 323). Furthermore, many people throughout the 1990s in Serbia had to go on ‘compulsory leave’ from work, lasting from a few months in better cases to years in a row in worse. Workers still retained their jobs formally, together with the ensuing benefits, such as health insurance, retirement, and minimum wages. This forced them to engage in other economic activities, ranging from growing and selling vegetables to smuggling and trading in smuggled goods. All in all, by the mid-1990s, from 20 to 40 % of Serbia’s population lived at or below the poverty line (the numbers vary depending on the scale used for establishing these data, Milić 2007: 364). At the same time, a small part of Serbia’s

44 Even though up until the 2006 Serbia was still part of the same state as Montenegro (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or so-called “rump Yugoslavia” until 2003, and Union of Serbia and Montenegro after that), in what follows I refer only to Serbian situation.

180 population (1-2%) became really rich, mainly as a result of participation in black/ grey economy (Sorensen 2006). After the Dayton Peace Accord put an end to the war in Bosnia and resulting in lifting of the international sanctions, the situation was supposed to improve. However, by the 1999 GDP level was still 46.9% of that in 1990, while industrial production and wages and salaries were at 39,5% and 33% for the same period, respectively.

All in all, the dramatic economic situation in Serbia by the end of the 1990s together with the lack of prospects for the better future were main factors contributing to the collapse of the regime of Slobodan Milošević. Even workers, one of the most vulnerable groups of the turbulent decade, who hitherto participated in the mass protests predominantly as private individuals, creating one of the biggest contradictions of Milošević era (Arandarenko 2001), went on general strike.

This economic legacy of Milošević era turned out to be one of the biggest challenges for the winning coalition of opposition forces. The challenge for them, however, was not about the possible ways out of the economic crisis. The answer for this particular set of actors was quite obvious – adopting a set of neoliberal reforms, similar to those that were previously ‘tested’ in other countries of the post-socialist Europe. The local version of ‘shock therapy’, among other things, foresaw the radical restructuring of enterprise ownership, with the transfer of the state and socially owned enterprises, employing more than 150 000 workers into private and foreign hands, without any attempt at social dialogue (Hollinshead and Maclean 2007: 1554).

For a while, it seemed that the economic reforms were producing some sort of dividends, allowing certain scholars to portray them as a success story:

After 2001, Serbia has been one of the fastest growing transition economies, it has reached substantial macroeconomic stabilization, it has had a stable ... domestic currency, it has accumulated substantial foreign exchange reserves … it has at last attracted some FDU, and privatization opportunities still abound (Uvalić 2010: 273) At the same time, such a celebratory account does not take into consideration stories of the suffering of the ordinary citizens who became not beneficiaries but

181 rather victims of these reforms. And even Uvalić (2010) admits that at least since the second half of the 2008 Serbian economy has again entered a problematic phase.

In retrospect we now can say that 2009, the year when I started my fieldwork in Serbia, turned out to be particularly bad for the country’s economy. While, according to the World Bank data, GINI index for the country was slowly decreasing in previous few years, the crisis of 2009 influenced people’s perceptions of their situation in present and prospects for future. That year Serbia experienced negative growth of the real GDP (-3%), while unemployment - which was decreasing over the previous few years - grew again, reaching 20,3% (Country Report Serbia 2010). During my fieldwork both my informants and many others whom I encountered in everyday life were extremely unhappy with what was perceived as wide-spread pauperization of Serbian society and the lack of any prospects for improvement in the foreseeable future. It is in this context that we have to understand the popularity of the lieu de mémoire of the Yugoslav dream.

7.3. Economic prosperity, stability, and work as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire

The question of whether the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was an affluent state, as well as what kind of factors contributed to the creation of this image of the country, remains a hotly debated issue – just like any issue related to Yugoslav history. It can be argued that after a post-Second World War period of poverty a phase of relative prosperity ensued, which lasted roughly until the onset of crisis in the late 1970s-early 1980s. During this ‘golden age’ Yugoslav citizens could enjoy the positive sides of the local version of the socialist economy, which included self-management, relative openness to the West, and creation of the consumerist society (Patterson 2011).

All of my informants are too young to have memories or lived experience of that period. In contrast, most of them were born in the 1980s, which were a decade of shortages and rising unemployment. However, in their narratives a lieu de mémoire of Yugoslav economic prosperity occupies a very important place; together with the lieu de mémoire of stability and economic security (lieu de mémoire of social security will be addressed in the next section of the chapter).

182

Those were the times when people could pošteno (honourably) live off their wages, had money to build homes, buy cars and other goods, and travel.

Questions relating to employment, work rights and class struggle were another very important and popular topic in conversations I had with my informants. Since most of them identified themselves as leftists, they were convinced of necessity of bringing these overlooked questions back into discussion of the situation in Serbia. In previous chapter I have noted how some of my informants were developing the criticism of the traditional ethno-centric understandings of the dissolution of SFRY and of its history. But they also found it important to de-nationalise their understanding of contemporary Serbia through using Marxist analysis of its past and present, as well as through their leftist activism. The attitude towards the issue of Kosovo I often encountered in conversations with my informants exemplifies this change of attitudes.

In one of the first conversations I had with Vlad, I asked him what I thought would be a delicate and potentially controversial question: what did he and his friends and comrades think about the future of Kosovo? “Come on,” he replied with ironic laugh, “isn’t it obvious? We need to let it go, we should have done it a long time ago, really. And start addressing the real problems Serbia has”. During conversations I had later in my fieldwork, I often heard similar approach towards the Kosovo issue. Serbia must acknowledge its independence, and it had not happened yet only because certain circles in Serbia exploited this question, many of my informants believed. In other words, Kosovo became ideological smoke- screen, used to both hide the reality of other problems – like unemployment – and to channel citizens’ frustration.

As we have already seen from the previous sections of this chapter, workers as a group were suffering significantly from the transformations in the Serbian economy, with unemployment being one of the biggest problems. This obviously was a big concern for my informants because, as young people, soon enough they would have to face the challenge of finding stable work in Serbia. However, they often thought about this challenge not in terms neoliberalism invites us to use –

183 personal career and development, profit (cf. Hörschelmann 2008) – but in terms of working class identity and solidarity.

During my fieldwork, however, I did not conduct any interviews with the people who would normally be perceived by others first and foremost as workers. As I explained in Chapter Two, an overwhelming majority of my informants did not have a working class background, but belonged rather to the middle class. With a few exceptions, many of them came from relatively well-off families, had often attended prestigious schools, and were university students – quite a far cry from the traditional image of working-class youth.

Yet, interestingly, a few of my informants with such background were nevertheless claiming a working class identity. For instance, 26-year-old Miloš described to me social history of his family over the few generations - his great- grand father held high position in the interwar Yugoslavia, but already his parents occupied a ‘lower-middle class’ rank in Socialist Yugoslavia - only to finish this account by emphasizing that he considers himself to be a member of urban proletariat. To my surprised reaction (I knew that Miloš was a student of sociology in university of Belgrade and he himself told me that to earn money for living he works as a sales assistant in a large bookshop in centre of the city) he promptly responded, referencing Marx, that a worker is a person who can make a living only from selling her/his labour-power to the capitalist employer.

After spending some more time in circles of young leftist activists, I realized that such appropriation of the working-class identity is not such a rare strategy. From the point of view of the transitional culture, it is an aberration. Transition culture’s Other – state socialism – was envisaged as the system for and of the workers. In reality though, it often failed to live up to that ideal. However, in the new neoliberal order working class has been pushed to the lower symbolic and material positions. Being a worker, aspiring to be one, or publicly claiming a working class based identity can hardly be considered as useful strategies in a society that prioritises entrepreneurship and individualism. Yet, for my informants reclaiming the ideals of the worker’s struggle against the capitalist oppression and creating broader

184

solidarities with other workers was an important part of construction of the New Left.

It is open to discussion, just how effective such attempts of my informants to reclaim workers’ identity at use it as a base for formation of solidarity with others can be. As Lesley Gill (2009) persuasively illustrates in a completely different context of USA college student activist campaigns against Coca-Cola’s appalling infringements of workers’ rights in Colombia, creating and maintaining solidarities between predominantly middle-class students and workers is a difficult process fraught with contradictions.

In the Serbian context, film director Želimir Žilnik has provided an interesting commentary on the viability of a student-worker’s union in face of the capitalist adversary in his work Stara Škola Kapitalizma (Old School of Capitalism, 2010). The

Fig 7.2. Searching for a middle ground in face of capitalist adversary. Still from the Old School of Capitalism (2009) by Želimir Žilnik. film - a traditional for Žilnik docu-drama45 - is inspired by the real workers protests against dubious privatisation of the few large enterprises in Serbia –

45Žilnik is one of the most well-known and prolific film directors from ex-Yugoslav cultural space. He started making films in 1960s and became to be considered one of the main representatives of the Yugoslav Black Wave, a counter-cultural film movement in SFRY, providing a strong criticism of the developments within the country. Žilnik remained an outspoken critic not just of Socialist Yugoslavia but of any state or system – Milošević’s Yugoslavia (‘Tito for the Second Time among the Serbs’ that I discussed in Chapter Five is an example), European Union (‘Fortress Europe’) or

185

Jugoremedija, BEK, Šinovoz. Film, created in cooperation with workers and leftist activists probes, among other things, the question of the possibility and sustainability of the common struggle of different factions of Serbian society against the economic changes brought in by transition. This insightful film is rather pessimistic. ‘Old School…’ ends with workers, frustrated and alienated by the intellectuals and students, ‘betraying’ the common struggle, lured by the promise of the possible short-term earnings.

Žilnik is correct to point out the contradictions and challenges that haunt the formation of the overarching solidarities in contemporary times. Yet this does not mean that such projects should be dismissed or abandoned. Many of my informants envisioned class struggle as an important way of dealing with the problems Serbian society is facing. In doing so, they drew on both their contemporary situation and their knowledge of the Yugoslav past:

In Serbia everyone who has money and opens a business becomes a gazda (master). He is your god, if he employs you. Today in Serbia you just don’t have workers’ rights… If you are a woman and want to get employed, he’ll ask you if you are going to get married and planning to have children. God forbid you get pregnant – you are fired. I worked after I finished school, and that makes you think about that Yugoslavia, where you did not have such attitude, where people did not have the capital, where you had some sort of social possibilities… that makes you think. Why someone has to be a gazda and someone a servant? I hate this, and I despise this. If you get employed in the state-owned business, maybe you’ll feel like a human being, because you have some rights there. But if you go to work for gazda he will just enslave you. They earn huge sums of money but give you just 200 euro to survive. I hate both male and female gazde. I do not know anyone who would be happy [with their boss]. I have worked 2,5 years, I know it. You did not have this in Yugoslavia, it was impossible! (Čira) My informants also often evoked the idealised picture of the solidarity that existed in Yugoslav times, to criticise what they saw as disparities and lack of social justice in contemporary Serbia.

…attitude towards Yugoslavia in [Serbian] society is really negative. This is because currently everyone just wants to be rich, and they do not really care about what happens to anyone else. That’s why when you have all these protests, [to support Gay] Pride or about Jagodina [notorious case of discrimination of Roma people – n ch] … no one wants to care about them, help them….so the attitude towards Yugoslavia is very negative, because no one gives a shit about the idea of solidarity … We all [with emphasis] have to work contemporary Serbia caught in turbulent transition. Žilnik applies in his films explicitly anti- aesthetic aesthetics, works with non-professional actors and does not use a detailed script, preferring improvisation (Dimitrijević 2010).

186

together if our society is to become better. It cannot become better if there is a big part of our society that is exploited. And this [exploited] majority … did not exist in SFRY. They all had jobs, you finished school and you got a job … and you could travel (Sava)

7.4. Social security of Yugoslav dream as post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire

As it is often the case, in contemporary Serbia a strong link is established between the bad economic situation/ poverty and the appalling wider social conditions in the society. My informants often emphasised this connection during our conversations.

I talked yesterday to one woman, and she complained to me that she needs to get new passport. In order to do that, she had to be in police station really early in the morning, and that is quite difficult for her, because she lives currently in different part of Belgrade. So she was actually telling me how scared she was to go to the police station in the wee hours of the morning, being afraid that something bad can happen to her. And back in Yugoslav times it was not like that at all, you were safe on the streets (Ivan)

***

My grandad told me the story once about their neighbour. One night he got really drunk and on his way home, he confused two doors and walked into our apartment instead. So he slept a night on a couch in the corridor, and in the morning my grandad was like “Good morning, neighbour, how you’re doing? Care for a cup of coffee?” Nowadays, that would not be possible! If someone walked into somebody else’s apartment like that, owners would immediately call the police or maybe even would beat up the intruder! (Milen) One of the best illustrations of this point is how commentators explained the violence that broke out on the streets of Belgrade in October 2010 during what was called the first ‘successful’ Gay Pride in Serbia. While there was an attempt to organize Pride back in 2001, it ended in bloodshed. People involved in the organization of that event admit that they were not expecting such violence. But also, according to the participants’ testimonials, police forces were not willing to protect the Pride, and, as I have heard numerous times, were passive witnesses of the violence against the few participants of the event (see also Blagojević 2011). Supposedly, they started dispersing hooligans only after the latter attacked a few policemen.

Another attempt to organize Gay Pride in 2009 was cancelled a day before the event by the organizers, because they decided that the state was not eager and ready to provide sufficient protection for the participants of Pride. The official

187 trigger of such decision on behalf of Pride’s organizers was the last-minute decision by the state to relocate the Pride from the centre of the Belgrade to Ušće, a park on the banks of the Danube. European human rights institutions and European Union were extremely dissatisfied with such developments, which they saw as a serious infringement of the basic human rights in Serbia and as a proof of the rise of extreme hooliganism, especially in circles of soccer fans. According to many of my informants, this dissatisfaction of the international organizations played instrumental role in forcing the Serbian state to provide enough support to the organizers of the Pride in 2010.

On 10th of October 2010 when the Gay Pride was held, an estimated 10 000 anti- Pride protesters gathered in Belgrade. Many people felt that centre of the city had turned into a warzone on that day. Violent protesters spent all day trying unsuccessfully to break the security cordons guarding a little less than 1000 participants of Pride with Molotov cocktails, stones, and metal spikes. They did not manage to break through the cordons only because the state provided enough forces to protect participants of Pride. The state’s support was rather reluctant, and was granted mainly under the pressure of international community, including the European Union, which made it clear that support of the human rights in Serbia would be one of the pre-requisites of Serbia’s membership in organisation. Homophobia permeating the Serbian establishment is well illustrated by the fact that only a small handful of state and city officials actually supported Pride, while the majority of them either sent ambivalent messages or explicitly objected to it, as the mayor of Belgrade Dragan Djilas did on a number of occasions.

There are few reasons why I spent so much time describing this event. Firstly, it deserves a mention because of how this event was later explained by many politicians and public figures (see also Chapter Two). Nationalistic radicals were explaining the violence on the street by the expression of the righteous anger with the manifestation of the “unhealthy Western tendencies”, ruining the values of the traditional Serbian culture. But more relevantly for our discussion, many people identifying themselves as ‘liberals’, including the mayor of Belgrade and vice- president of the Democratic Party Dragan Djilas, were referring to the rioters as a bunch of confused youngsters, too poor and too hopeless about their future, who

188 just vented off their frustration, directing it at what was portrayed in this discourse as highly untimely manifestation of LGBT rights.

But secondly, this case also illustrates how insecure the life in contemporary Serbia still remains, a long time after 1990s, with their sinister war-connected atmosphere. Even though the state’s security apparatus did a laudable job on the 10th of October 2010 and managed to prevent significant bloodshed during the Pride, the violence against the members of the LGBT community is not such a rare occurrence in Serbia. Violence is directed not only against LGBT, but also against anyone who is perceived as a threatening Other – be it a foreign soccer fan, a tourist from Croatia or a person from a Roma community.

Finally, this case illustrates well how in yugonostalgic narratives perception of the past is oftentimes influenced not by the knowledge of it, but by the contemporary situation. After all, male homosexuality was banned in Socialist Yugoslavia and was effectively de-criminalized only in 1994 (Blagojević 2011, see also Kulpa and Mizielińska 2011 for a discussion of homosexuality in other socialist and post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe). It would be unthinkable to attempt to organise Pride in Socialist Yugoslavia, saying nothing of counting on the state’s support and protection of such a manifestation. LGBT people in SFRY were forced to live in the closet (Blagojević 2011). My informants and friends from the LGBT activist circles in Serbia were well aware of such a position of sexual minorities in Socialist Yugoslavia and usually emphasized it to me in our conversations on the nature of the socialist experience. For instance, Tibor, when praising how well the concept of equality was put into practice in SFRY compared to contemporary Serbia, paused for a while, and added “well, of course some minorities were absolutely invisible [pause] like, when you were gay…”.

Yet, these interlocutors at some other point during the same conversation, or on some different occasion, also offered me quite nostalgic interpretations of the Yugoslav times. These nostalgic stories were related to some other aspects of the Yugoslav past, and occasionally, even to gay life in SFRY. Thus, Lazar talked to me at length about popular cruising places in Belgrade and the city’s vibrant nightlife in the 1980s. Such incongruency in my informants’ narratives should not, I argue, be interpreted and dismissed as an uncritical or problematic attitude towards the socialist past. It is not a

189 flattened representation of the past, but a creative appropriation of this past by yugonostalgia, to suit the present needs. My informants were well aware of the fact that Socialist Yugoslavia persecuted members of the sexual minorities and were highly critical of these Yugoslav policies. Yet, at the same time, the social safety net that the Yugoslav dream offered, where people could feel secure on the street, appeared as a stark contrast to the feeling of insecurity that haunted some of my friends belonging to the LGBT community, especially in the lead up to and aftermath of the 2010 Pride (as well as ‘unsuccessful’ attempts to organise Pride in 2009 and 2012).

True, there are some contradictions even in such juxtaposition. Construction of socialist times as times of relative security for the LGBT community as long as they stayed in the closet, overlooks instances of the occasional violence on behalf of ‘usual’ members of the society (as some older people I met during fieldwork told me). Nevertheless, in face of the widely perceived hostile attitude of contemporary Serbian society towards the LGBT community, in combination with the latent homophobia of many state officials (see Chapter Two), this past sometimes was constructed by my LGBT informatns as a more secure – for the general population, and even for LGBT people, provided they chose to stay out of the sight of the state and broader public. In contemporary Serbia, by contrast, even hiding from the sight of homophobic segments of the population often did not bring the illusion of safety anymore. In the lead up to the Pride of 2010, there were reports of hooligan attacks on gay bars and nightclubs in Belgrade, forcing some of them to close down for the time period immediately before and after the event. Additionally, many of the cultural events for the LGBT community organised at the time had to be protected by the police. For instance, getting into a nightclub where a launch of the book on the history of the Belgrade’s Queer Collective was happening, involved passing a group of police cars and police officers – and this did not contribute to one’s feeling of being secure.

As we can see, yugonostalgia for the security and safety that SFRY seemed to offer to its citizens reverberated even with the representatives of the minorities that were persecuted in Yugoslav times.46 This dissonance, as well as any other seemingly strange

46 Dioli (2009) also offers similar conclusions about the appeal of yugonostalgia to the queer activists from the broader region of former Yugoslavia. Some of her informants even came up with a notion of “Queeroslavia”: “This non-normative geography, that finds abandoned places to inhabit, metaphorically (the abandoned Yugoslav space) and physically (the abandoned place chosen for the first queer festival in Belgrade), is engaged in a constant confrontation with official borders

190 manifestations of yugonostalgia, should be interpreted in the context of the contemporary situation in Serbia. My informants uniformly pointed out to me that Serbia is not a safe country for anyone who does not fit into the nationalistic, conservative and hetero-normative ideal of the Serbian nation. Taking this into consideration, it is not strange that I have heard numerous times from many of my informants a popular anecdote that back in Yugoslav times, if one felt too tired after a good night’s out to go home, one could safely spend a night on the bench in the city. Some of my informants reflected on the reasons for such ‘safety’. You could do that, Časlav explained to me, only because, in reality, Yugoslavia was a ‘police state’, with security forces everywhere. But then, his reflection continued, so is contemporary Serbia, only in Serbia police are corrupt and do not prevent violence and crime on the streets.

***

Yugonostalgia evoking the socio-economic lieux de memoire and referring to the “Yugoslav dream”, as Petrović (2010b: 131) notes, is ascribed to ‘losers who did not succeed in finding their way around in the ongoing social and economic transformation’. However, as in case with other yugonostalgic narratives, this version also reflects significant losses that some parts of the Serbian society are experiencing as the result of transition.

Workers are one of the most vulnerable groups in this process. Even though most of my informants would not be classified by others automatically as belonging to the ‘working class’ many of them self-identify this way and actively try to participate in the attempts to organize workers’ movement in Serbia. In their reasoning why such actions are necessary they often refer to the socialist times with their economic prosperity/ stability and economic security. During my fieldwork in Serbia, security in the more broad social sense was one of the most popular post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire. This comes as no surprise, when put in the context of the violence that still is a usual occurrence in the public spaces in contemporary Serbia.

where the space of “normality” is policed, more often than not with repressive results that lead to the erasure of spaces for expression and … citizenship” (Dioli 2009: 38-39).

191

Chapter Eight

Common Yugoslav Culture as Post-Yugoslav Lieu de Mémoire

In this chapter I explore the meaning of the post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire related to the common Yugoslav cultural space. My young informants have demonstrated a good knowledge of the Yugoslav culture, often acquired through the pursuit of personal interests. Yugoslav culture as post-Yugoslav lieu was important throughout 1990s, when its mere existence was often denied by the nationalistic discourses. But it retains relevance also in contemporary Serbia and is invoked to criticise both the continued prevalence of nationalistic values and some of the changes connected to neoliberalism, such as withdrawal of state support for the cultural life.

To structure the discussion in this chapter I refer to three broad clusters of cultural post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire – the one asserting the existence of Yugoslav culture; the one explaining how it came into existence; and the one referring to the ‘qualities’ of this culture.

8.1. Introducing post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire

As I have already mentioned in Chapter Four, symbols and cultural products that until recently were unanimously recognized as belonging to the ‘Yugoslav’ culture have a continued presence in contemporary Serbian society. Older generations who used to live in SFRY undoubtedly have a greater expertise in these matters by virtue of their lived experience. But younger yugonostalgics, as I illustrate in this chapter, also seem to be quite knowledgeable about the Yugoslav culture.

Of course, one can assume that this knowledge was ‘simply’ inherited by young yugonostalgics through family, earlier socialization and the continued, if sporadic, re-emergence of these cultural products in contemporary cultural space. But, as I have argued in Chapter Three, it is risky to present such crude interpretation of transmission of cultural knowledge and values. We risk ending up with uncritical and simplified interpretation of this complex process as something ‘natural’ and obvious. This observation would apply to any society, but becomes especially pertinent and evident in case of Serbia, where the processes of social and political transformations happening in the recent two decades have even further

192 complicated the competition for visibility between different cultural systems/ traditions/ values.

As I show here, some Serbian youth actually actively seek to deepen their knowledge and understanding of the “Yugoslav” culture. These activities encompass a wide range – from personal consumption of these cultural products, to discussions on internet forums, to attending exhibitions, discussions, film festivals and other events aiming at exploring Yugoslav culture, or even (co)organizing such events.

It is not enough just to acknowledge the acquaintance of the youth with culture of the Yugoslav era. Question about how exactly young people react to and interact with this knowledge is of great importance for my study. Is, for instance, their acquaintance with the Yugoslav popular music just a result of accidental exposure to it in public spaces of Belgrade or to its ubiquity on the internet? Or is it the result of active interest? It can be either, or a combination of both. In any case, interest in Yugoslav culture is not just an obsession with relics of by-gone era, but can have productive effects and generate fruitful interactions. Case of my friend Sava illustrates this point well.

A big fan of the Yugoslav new wave music – rock music created in late 1970s- 1980s – he is constantly seeking to re-discover new bands from that period. During our conversation, not without certain pride, he told me that he spent quite a bit of time online, seeking out these half-forgotten cultural products. This provided him not just with feeling of personal satisfaction over finding an album or a video clip previously unknown to him, but was also a trigger for processes of social interaction. When we were talking about his latest ‘find’, a video-clip of one 1980s band from the (now Croatian) city of Split, Sava told me that he learned about it through one of his friends from Croatian capital Zagreb.

This vignette illustrates not just Sava’s great interest in music from the period, and his re-discovery of one particular band, whose, “lyrics maybe are not too smart, but in general they are cool” (Sava). It also tells us about the continued salience of the Yugoslav cultural products in contemporary Serbia for young people who did not grow up in Socialist Yugoslavia. Importantly, this story shows also that this phenomenon is not limited only to Serbia but we can find signs of it

193 all over former Yugoslavia (see also Velikonja 2008). And it also shows how lieu de mémoire of Yugoslav culture has a capacity to facilitate re-creation of connections over recently sketched national borders:

I met this girl when she came for a visit here, and we were walking around, and I’m like – here’s SKC [Student Cultural Centre] and she’s like ‘but I know SKC, the [new] wave was born here!” I mean its Belgrade part. So we sort of ‘got’ each other based on that, on our common interest in those small groups that even back then had maybe 20-30 fans (Sava) What are the reasons for such interest and sometimes even longing for the imagined Yugoslav culture? Creation and continued active use of this lieu de mémoire made a lot of sense throughout the 1990s. Back then the mere possibility of existence of such culture was actively denied not only by the nationalistic regimes, their ideologues and supporters, but also - interestingly enough - even by foreign observers, scholars included. One of the strategies of resistance against such denial, which went hand in hand with the growing nationalization of everyday life, was to look to the Yugoslav past and to show not only the existence of the denied culture, but also its high qualities and values. These were often extolled as more desirable than what was created and popular under contemporary circumstances.

As with most post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire I have discussed so far, this sentiment was well-documented by Stef Jansen in his study of anti-nationalist resistance in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s (Jansen 2000, 2005). Similarly, Ana Dević (1997: 128) establishes “a continuity between some cultural milieu of the now deceased Yugoslavia … and the motives for participation in the anti-war, i.e. anti-nationalist initiatives in 1991-1994”, showing how an imagined notion of certain Yugoslav cultural space was politicized in reaction to the growth of the nationalism within the region.

The significance of the post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire, still remained at the end of the first decade of 21st century in Serbia. This can be explained by the continued presence and even domination of nationalistic beliefs and values in the cultural and political life of the country. But, as with all the other lieux that I have discussed so far, cultural ones can also be imbued with other meanings as well. Therefore they can be used not only for anti-nationalistic resistance but also to

194 address a set of other issues that some young activists in Serbia consider to be of great importance. I will analyse these meanings and uses in this chapter as well.

8.2. Methodological issues or how not to drown in the sea of (pop) culture

Before moving on to this discussion though, it is necessary to clarify what exactly I mean when talking about the cultural post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire. First, we have to face the conundrum that many of the lieux I have described in the previous chapters have already entered the realm of (popular) culture in post-Yugoslav states and have become a cultural myth themselves. Regardless of whether their ‘point of origin’ was the economic situation in Yugoslavia, social stability, or relative freedom of travel, nowadays they have firmly established presence in the realm of (popular) culture. They are constantly invoked in everyday situations, conversations, newspaper articles, internet discussions, books, video clips and other cultural processes and products. What distinguishes lieux that I am discussing in this particular chapter from the rest is the already mentioned fact that they themselves were a cultural product/process in Yugoslav times. Cultural representations of partisan struggle would be a good illustration of my point.

Chapter Five has demonstrated that partisan struggle was elevated to the status of the official lieu de mémoire still in Yugoslav times. As I have mentioned, even back then its commemoration and celebration went beyond official state holidays, museums and monuments. It also was integrated into cultural realm, became the subject of numerous novels, poems, theatre plays and films. As a matter of fact, partisan movies were enormously important part of burgeoning Yugoslav film industry (Levy 2007).

Often visually and technically elaborate representations of the official history of the Second World War via simplified pattern of struggle of Good (partisans, led by Tito) versus Evil (Nazis and their collaborators) contributed to the further affirmation and wider circulation of the myth of the heroic partisan struggle. The Yugoslav film industry produced films not only about most of the major wartime events but also about the fictional(ised) characters and events. While the former were also quite popular in SFRY, it was the latter category which developed a real cult following. This happened partly because this was a diverse category of movies trying to ‘emulate’ the popular “Western”/ Hollywood movie genres (such as

195 action movies, Westerns, thrillers, comedies) using the local frames of reference. One of the most popular examples of such cult partisan film was Valter Brani Sarajevo (‘Walter Defends Sarajevo’, Hajrudin Krvavac 1972), loosely based on the story of the real hero of anti-fascist struggle, Vladimir Perić Valter. Apart from the qualities of film itself, we can name few factors that probably contributed to such status. A famous Yugoslav punk rock band Zabranjeno Pušenje named their debut album after the movie “Das Ist Walter” (1984).47 The album became very popular in Yugoslavia, selling more than 100 000 copies. There were also stories circulating in popular realm about the immense success of the movie in China, with a Chinese brand of beer named after Walter himself. This only contributed to the strengthening of the cult status of the movie back in Yugoslavia. As a matter of fact, one could argue that the Walter not only managed to survive the culture of forgetting of the 1990s but also is coming back with a vengeance (see fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1. Chinese poster of the “Walter Defends Sarajevo”, used on the web-site of the Belgrade Museum of History of Yugoslavia to promote the short retrospective of the partisan action movies, organized there in December of 2009. Source: www.mij.rs

This short discussion of this partisan film is intended to clarify how exactly in this particular study I am trying to separate the ‘cultural’ post-Yugoslav lieux from the other types. The partisan struggle is a post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire in itself, referring to the set of political issues, discussed previously, such as resistance to nationalism and adherence to ideals of the People’s Liberation War. But the figure

47 The name of the album, translated from the German as “This is Walter”, refers to the closing dialog from “Walter Defends Sarajevo”, which is also the first track on the album. In this dialogue two Nazi officers at the end of the Second World War talk about the legendary defender of the Sarajevo, who was impossible to catch. One of them eventually says “I will show him to you. You see this city? This is Walter”.

196 of partisan fighter Walter is an ultimate cultural lieu, because it was generated within the “cultural” field of Socialist Yugoslavia. It is not my intention to claim, however, that cultural lieux like this can be used as an introduction to the discussion only of culture-related problems in contemporary Serbian society. In my opinion, it is impossible to divorce cultural from the political, social, and economic, and any attempts to do so would only have a detrimental effect on the attempt to analyse the situation in Serbia.

Finally, I will address the challenge of fitting the discussion of cultural post- Yugoslav lieux de mémoire into one chapter. This is the standard problem of any researcher trying to describe succinctly any cultural field. In conversations with my informants, in my observation of everyday life in Serbia, and in continued exploration of local mass media, I have encountered references to simply astonishing magnitude and multiplicity of the cultural products and processes from the Yugoslav era. It is difficult not to succumb to the seduction of simply recording them, especially since we are dealing with the culture of a country no longer in existence, which therefore - according to the dominant interpretations - is doomed to pass into oblivion. In the future, consequently, it may be of interest only to the romantic archaeologists of the extinct. It is not by accident that parallels are drawn between the Socialist Yugoslavia and Atlantis (cf. Lešić 1995). As alluring as this truly nostalgically tinted epistemological drive may be, the most probable outcome of it would be just too broad and at the same time a far from comprehensive catalogue of the post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire, leaving no time for their analysis.

On the other hand, in my attempt to classify the cultural lieux de mémoire I have encountered during my research, I have run into an obstacle, somewhat different from my usual reservation towards classification as inherently reductionist and a sometimes dangerously simplifying intellectual process. Which of the already existing attempts to ‘divide’ culture into the more comprehensible components can one follow in this case, what should be adopted as a basic unit of taxonomy? An easy option would be to attempt to group these lieux by their ‘origin’ and look separately at Yugoslav music, Yugoslav films, Yugoslav sport, Yugoslav conceptual art, Yugoslav TV shows, Yugoslav theatre, Yugoslav poetry… As is already obvious,

197 such approach would not be significantly helpful in reducing the quantity of the potential units of analysis.

The other possible solution would be to separate the discussion into two larger groups dealing with the phenomena relating to what is understood to be “high” and “popular” realms of culture. However, this solution has several serious drawbacks. The main one, in my opinion, is the inherent artificiality of the division of the cultural field into “high” and “popular” (where “popular” is very often just a more politically correct version of the older and compromised notion of the “low/mass” culture). Such division is often based on the assumption that there are substantially different qualities to the phenomena related to popular and ‘high’ culture, and henceforth, they should be discussed separately. This, however, is a prime example of reductionism and snobbish dismissal of the popular culture- generated and related phenomena (see Burke 1994, for a broader discussion of this).

Despite the futility and even counter-productivity of such division, it still remains appealing to some scholars. There is a general tendency in scholarship of nostalgia to, on the one hand, treat the high-culture manifestations of nostalgia as something critical, ‘reflexive’, ironical (Scribner 2003), while at the same time, portray nostalgia centring on the popular culture artefacts as negative (Appadurai 1996).

In the case of yugonostalgia some scholars seem to have adopted a similar approach. True, Stef Jansen (2005: 250-254) does evaluate in rather positive manner a nostalgia-driven popularity of Yugoslav/Serbian pop-singer Djordje Balašević, but in the more recent scholarship, few authors choose to engage with the yugonostalgia looking up to and manifesting itself in pop-culture without dismissing it from the outset as the product of the market (Volčić 2007, 2010; while Velikonja 2008 is an example of a more pop-culture friendly approach). And it is true, culture-related lieux de mémoire do invite us to think critically about the complex relationship between the memory, construction of the past and consumption. This, however, is a significant problem of its own, and therefore it will be discussed in the next chapter.

198

Therefore, in this chapter I will abstain from any attempts to bring systematic order to the chaotic richness of the cultural post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire. Instead I will look at the way they are constructed, regardless of their ‘highbrow’ or ‘low’ origins, as well as regardless of the ‘area’ of their circulation – be it an internet discussion forum or within the confines of the contemporary art gallery. As in previous chapters, dealing with other lieux, I will consider how and why some narratives/tropes are becoming salient in the transitional context, how they are circulating, what they testify to, and how they can be put to use.

In order to somewhat structure my discussion, I develop it around the specific functional traits attributed in contemporary discourse of my informants to the Yugoslav culture, which are:

 ‘quantity’ of common Yugoslav cultural space

 conditions that have contributed to the creation of this specific Yugoslav culture

 ‘quality’ of the Yugoslav culture, resulting from the combination of the first two traits.

This chapter goes on to explore these rather cryptic-sounding characteristics of the post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire.

8.3. “Quantity” of the Yugoslav cultural space or the common Yugoslav culture as post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire

Many of the conversations I had about the specifics of the Yugoslav culture began with my interlocutors’ stating – reaffirming, literally - the mere existence of this culture, which is often juxtaposed to ‘smaller’ Serbian national culture (see also Chapter Six). The task of proving that there was a separate and distinct phenomenon of Yugoslav culture might seem redundant at first glance. After all, Socialist Yugoslavia existed for five decades, and was preceded by another Yugoslav state as well. Most contemporary theories agree that modern states, even if they are not ‘originating’ out of the common cultural basis, over the course of their existence attempt to create it (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

But precisely these theories lead so many people - both in academia and in the lay world – to argue that Yugoslavia either lacked a common culture or failed to

199 popularize it sufficiently. Sometimes this is even interpreted as one of the few, or indeed the main, reasons for Yugoslavia’s collapse. The more radical deniers, coming from the right-wing milieus, argue that Yugoslavia was communist smokescreen, imposed from above and finding no rapport among the ordinary citizens (cf. Pauker 2006). Instead, throughout the whole existence of Socialist Yugoslavia, they continued to identify themselves as belonging to their respective nations. The notorious ‘ancient hatreds’ theory (Kaplan 1993) is based on a similar premise; it portrays the nations of Yugoslavia as co-existing in a state of eternal animosity, without any productive exchange resulting in creation of the common cultural space.

More moderate and popular version of this attitude admits that there were attempts by the communists to create a Yugoslav culture, but many of those attempts were misguided and had limited reach. Consequently, they did not result in production of any tangible Yugoslav culture worth speaking of. Andrew Wachtel’s important study Making the Nation, Breaking the Nation (1998) is one of the most interesting elaborations of this approach. Wachtel does not offer an outright simplified portrayal of the cultural processes happening in SFRY. Drawing on rich data from the political, social and cultural life of Socialist Yugoslavia he argues instead that Yugoslavia failed mainly because at some point the party abandoned the idea to support the creation of the over-arching Yugoslav identity. As a result, it also did not put enough effort into the development of a common Yugoslav culture (see also Chapter Five, where I highlight how some of my informants shared these views).

Such academic speculations about the lack of a common cultural space in Socialist Yugoslavia were informed by the wars of Yugoslav secession and the need to explain (sometimes too hastily) what exactly was going on there. In the region itself, in an ironic twist, on the one hand the mere existence of the Yugoslav culture was denied by nationalistic forces, but on the other, the very same forces put an enormous amount of effort into the unravelling of any illusion of a common cultural space – both by means of ‘traditional’ and ‘cultural’ (Galtung 1969) violence. Most obvious and glaring attempts of this, of course, go back to the 1990s and the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution. As mentioned previously, yugonostalgic

200 discourses emerged for the first time precisely in this context of ‘confiscation of [cultural] memory’ (Ugrešić 1998). This is also the reason why they were full of the references to the Yugoslav culture, reaffirming the existence of the shared cultural space, with the free flow of cultural ideas and artefacts between Yugoslavia’s constitutive parts.

Main states-protagonists of the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution have been around for almost two decades. And even though from a historian’s point of view this time is really negligible, it feels like most of them are an established presence on the political world map.48 With Yugoslavia relegated to the dustbin of history, however, the denial of its culture continues. This is done because of new states’ on- going need to create the mythology of their own long-standing and rich cultural tradition. It is easier to ‘recruit’ heroes to the national cultural cannon from the periods prior to the Yugoslav experiment, but in order to illustrate that the national cultures continued to function during the second half of the 20th century, they have to resort to the division, reshaping and retrospective nationalization of what is seen by the yugonostalgics as common Yugoslav culture into the smaller national cultural traditions.

Therefore, the first and most obvious reason why Yugoslav culture still retains its significance as a post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire lies in the fact that contemporary Serbian social and cultural life is dominated by nationalistic paradigm. It not only denies the previous existence of the common Yugoslav culture, but also tries to downplay the significance of the connections between artificially isolated “Serbian” culture and rest of the national cultures from the region. In such context of continued nationalization of the public and cultural life, the idea of Yugoslav culture seems to some as a more positive phenomenon of a bigger scale, overcoming the traditional petty divisions along the national / ethnic lines.

Another reason why the loss of the bigger common cultural space is being mourned, especially by the producers of the cultural products, lies in the fact that together with it they have lost the potentially bigger markets for their produce. If

48 “Existence” and viability of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo as independent states are often contested in nationalistic discourses circulating in Serbia though.

201 during the Yugoslav times, at least according to the yugonostalgic perception49, authors could count on the pan-Yugoslav readership and popular bands – on pan- Yugoslav audience - in contemporary situation they feel by and large constricted to the national boundaries. Recently there are more and more attempts to overcome those boundaries, but since most of those attempts are grass-root, coming from NGO or the private sectors, and often without direct support from the state(s), they run into specific limitations imposed on the exchange of the cultural flows between the countries.

Illustrative of this point is a complaint I heard from one of my interlocutors, a member of Serbian garage rock band. According to Tica, it is quite difficult for bands like his to go on tour into neighbouring Croatia. Nowadays they are treated as citizens of foreign country who arrive into Croatia to earn money. While back in Yugoslav times, as Tica pointed out, even relatively unknown bands (like his) could tour all of the Yugoslavia without any obstacles.

However, not only Croatia - with its aspirations to become a successful neoliberal economy, aiming for membership in EU, and therefore regulating strictly labour and financial flows - erects such barriers. During my fieldwork I have heard stories testifying to Serbia’s similar attempts. For instance, in October 2009, my friend, organizing a lesbian festival in Novi Sad, invited a female pop-rock band from Croatia. The band was invited not only because it was one of the few openly gay performers in whole ex-Yu cultural space, but also because they were from Croatia. Festival’s organizers really wanted to confirm the regional, ex- Yugoslav aspirations and meaning of their event (which is yet another example of the activists’ attempts to recreate connections between former Yugoslav states, see Chapter Six). Aware of possibility of complications arising at the border, however, the band had to prepare themselves in advance, and to come up with some

49 This perception, again, is being contested not only by the nationalists, but also by some scholars. For instance, Sabrina P. Ramet argues (2002: 187) that Yugoslav rock bands could gain significant following only within the boundaries of their respective republics. At the same time Eric Gordy offers completely different observation, stating that the Yugoslav rock artists had greater chance of becoming famous “outside” of their home republics (1999). My own observations also definitely refute Ramet’s argument. According to my interlocutors, the ‘national’ background of Yugoslav cult bands was not significant, and even nowadays people in Serbia continue to listen to their music, not paying much attention to whether they were originally from Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia or Slovenia.

202 fictional stories they later had to tell to Serbian customs officers, explaining why they are travelling to Serbia with their musical equipment.

These stories illustrate the way the contemporary ex-Yugoslav states still prevent the free circulation of the cultural flows between each other. One could argue that the situation has changed compared to the 1990s though, because strong nationalism does not come into play anymore. Indeed, the situation is much less drastic than the one described by Catherine Baker (2010) in her study of the ways Serbian Other was pushed out of the Croatian music scene in the Tudjman era. This, however, would mean turning a blind eye to the other, more banal ways (cf. Billig 1995) nationalism can function. It is easy to single out and criticize the ideologies and practices of blatant nationalism prevalent in the ex-Yugoslav space throughout the 1990s. But it is also dangerously easy to overlook the ways nationalism is engrained inextricably in the supposedly normal settings and policies of the neoliberal democracies. Of course, this is not the nationalism of the scale observable in the 1990s, or nationalism of the contemporary extreme right- wing groups; but nevertheless it is still important to expose it. For such exposure not only points out to the continuous importance of nation states in contemporary world, but also invites us to rethink more critically the conflation between the ideologies of free market and nationalism.

At the same time, it is indicative that Tica framed his complaint about the difficulty of touring to the other ex-Yugoslav states in terms of worsening of the conditions and diminished possibilities. After all, compared to the 1990s, the situation has improved. However - and this is what makes my friend’s stance ‘yugonostalgic’ - he chose to compare his current predicament not with the worse situation of the previous decade but with the imagined conditions of the functioning of the popular music scene in Socialist Yugoslavia, where bands supposedly could freely travel between the state’s constituent parts.

8.4. How the imagined common Yugoslav cultural space became possible

As I have already mentioned briefly in Chapter Six, my informants often considered Socialist Yugoslavia to be a place of cultural freedom, especially if compared to the other socialist Eastern European states. This is interpreted as yet another result of the attempts to develop a unique Yugoslav model of socialism. In

203 the initial stages of after-war consolidation of Socialist Yugoslavia, as Carol S. Lilly (1997) shows, the party was trying to subordinate art to the needs of the revolution and ideological struggle.50 In this early period state censorship was quite strict. However, the split with Stalin and the consequent choice to decentralize the Yugoslav state influenced the cultural sphere as well. The established turning point is the speech delivered by the Yugoslav writer Miroslav Krleža in 1954, where he criticized the notion of socialist realism and called for more freedom of artistic expression.

Yugoslav artists did take a cue. Some of the artwork produced in the Yugoslav times, in an oppressive regime, not allowing for the freedom of expression or experimentation as its nationalistic critics argue, was not only tuned to what was happening on the contemporary art scene in Europe, but remains relevant even today. Among celebrated examples we can name the work of the ground-breaking performance artist Marina Abramović, or films of Želimir Žilnik and Dušan Makavejev.

Censorship, undeniably, existed in the Socialist Yugoslavia. The laws protecting Tito’s image that I mention in Chapter Five are just one example of it. In particular, experimental film directors, like Dušan Makavejev or Karpo Godina, often had to grapple with state’s control. Controversial films were banned from release in Yugoslav cinemas. Yet, as one of my informants pointed out, at least directors had a chance to create these films:

I watched for the first time Mlad i Zdrav kao Ruža (‘Young and Healthy as a Rose’) when it was shown at some Belgrade festival recently. Its director, Jovan Jovanović, is this Belgrade patriot, anti-communist type. Now they showed [the film] after 20-30 years… and they always were telling these stories – films were banned etc. But to begin with, that film was made, he was allowed to use [state] resources to make it… and a lot worse things also had this kind of support [from the state]… I think there was too much of freedom, too much [with emphasis] was tolerated. (Miloš) Mlad i Zdrav kao Ruža was filmed by Jovanović back in 1971. It was shown once during the film festival in Pula before being banned and shelved to the archives of the state security services. Heavily influenced by French Nouvelle Vague film movement and displaying, for the Yugoslav context, an innovative approach

50 Even though it is important to remember that many of the artists connected to the Yugoslav party and Partisan movement did firmly and honestly believe in these ideas and saw their art as a contribution to the revolutionary struggle (Komelj 2009).

204 towards script writing and cinematography, the film focuses on Stevan – a young thief, making quite an extravagant living by stealing cars. He is offered cooperation by state security services, which he accepts. Stevan both openly mocks the Yugoslav state and system and makes use of it at the same time. In a very Godardian twist, in the second half of the film, the plot escalates into a spiral of gratuitous violence, where Stevan becomes a ‘glamorous’ and blatant criminal with a taste for senseless murder in the spotlight of TV cameras. The last phrase that Stevan utters, while holding a gun in his hand, is ‘I am your future’.

Mlad i Zdrav kao Ruža was rediscovered in the 2000s and shown again in Belgrade in 2006. Jovan Jovanović, who currently lives and works in Slovenia, visited Serbia on that occasion. In his interviews he offers explanation of the film as showing the beginnings of connection between the organized crime and state in Serbia (Milivojević 2006). Such closed reading of the film, in my opinion, is a good example how our interpretations of the past are informed by our present. Theories about connections between organised crime and state, especially security services, are quite popular in contemporary Serbia (see also Chapter Two for brief discussion of contemporary cinematic treatment of this theme). Jovanović’s insistence on such reading of his work should be viewed in this context. Otherwise, Steven’s final line ‘I am your future’ can also be interpreted as exposing other shortcomings of the Yugoslav socialism, such as nascent consumerism or irresponsible youth.

Similarly, Miloš’s critical view of this film as going even too far, and as something that could have been censored even more, should be interpreted taking into account the present situation. To begin with, Jovanović nowadays identifies himself as a representative of conservative right and openly talks about the Masonic conspiracy theories and supremacy of Serbian race (Djurašković 2010). One can be tempted to read his current political views back into his previous work and criticise it on those premises. But most importantly, Miloš’s evocation of this incident aims to dispel the popular myth that there was no freedom of artistic expression in the Socialist Yugoslavia. On the contrary, he states, SFRY was providing – if inadvertently – material support for the projects that were effectively undermining its legitimacy.

205

My other interlocutors pointed out further instances of Yugoslav state actually actively contributing to the creation of what is now considered to be examples of experimental culture. Marko, who was involved in the alternative art scene in Belgrade, running a small independent gallery, turned my attention to the strategy of poaching of the subversive dissent adopted by Socialist Yugoslavia after 1968 revolt by giving more ‘freedom’ to the youth. As a result, the 1970s saw the creation of the so-called Student Cultural Centres in all major cities of Yugoslavia. Due to the quite lavish state financial support and lack of strict control they became epicentres of vibrant cultural life and experimentation.

In general, my interlocutors were rather enthusiastic about the SFRY’s state cultural policies and the support that it provided to the artists. Boris, a young rock- musician whom I interviewed was, in general, quite critical of the state of musical industry in Yugoslavia. But he keenly discussed the fact that back in socialist times, one could organize a gig with state’s support.

Similarly, on a number of occasions during interviews my informants told me that the state’s support for art in Socialist Yugoslavia freed artists of those times from the constraints of the free market. They did not have to compete between each other for the grants from the state, international organizations and private sponsors, and did not have to lower their artistic standards in order to satisfy consumers’ tastes and needs. Marko, for instance, bitterly contrasted this with the current situation; he turned my attention to the fact that during my fieldwork a producer of cement sponsored the renovation of one of the main museums in Belgrade. Consequently, the construction net, covering the museum’s building in the very centre of the city, was adorned by a huge advertisement for this producer. According to Marko, such overlap of art/culture with business is a negative phenomenon, and this never would have happened in times of Socialist Yugoslavia, when the state provided money for such reconstructions.

One could assume that such narratives are a symptom of the common tendency among the artists who in socialist times used to rely on the support from the state and find the pressure of functioning under the constraints of the laissez-faire environment too frustrating and too difficult. At least this is one of the conclusions Andrew Wachtel (2006) arrives at in his study of the coping mechanisms

206 developed by intellectuals in Eastern Europe after the collapse of the socialist system.

But, in the case of some of my interlocutors, such laments for the lack of the ‘proper’ state support for the culture are also a critique of nation-state, with its obsession with creation of the national canon and mythology. Contemporary Serbia is all about that, according to Marko. As he explained to me, the Serbian Ministry of Culture does not give a single dime to the experimental and alternative art which could later represent Serbia on the international art scene, but spends instead millions and millions of dinars on supporting monasteries in Kosovo, which are constructed as national cultural treasures.

Finally, Milica offered me a somewhat less radical but still poignant critique of the lack of the support for culture on behalf of the Serbian state that results in some places in contemporary Serbia being deprived of cultural events:

I started to think [recently] about that circle of artists that existed back in 1950- 1960s… that art scene somehow was very lively… if the state is developing economically, then its cultural scene is developing as well…. Culture somehow always is placed last [in contemporary Serbia], yet at the same time it is very important and it influences many things … I do not really know how the cultural life was back in the Yugoslav times, but I know very well how it is now. And it is really bad. I went recently with three of my friends to museum. Although the entry was free, in hour and a half that we spent there no one else came in! And the exhibition was really interesting. But I think it is still ok in Belgrade – you have galleries, theatre, you don’t feel it that much here, but in small towns people just don’t have time for it, there are no cultural events. In my own town, if anything happens once a month that is already great. But that is all connected to the economic situation in the country. If the economy is working well, and all basic needs are satisfied, then they will be giving money for culture as well 8.5. ‘Quality’ of the Yugoslav cultural space

Quite often the nostalgic stories about the loss of the ‘quantitative characteristic of the Yugoslav culture are followed by nostalgic stories about the loss of its ‘qualities’, meanings and values, and replacement of them with something of significantly lower standards. So what precisely is missing in contemporary Serbian cultural processes and products compared to the Yugoslav ones, according to the yugonostalgic narratives?

Based on conversations with my interlocutors I concluded that a wide-spread consensus exists that Yugoslav culture was better than contemporary Serbian. Partly this was attributed to its openness to experiments, partly – to the freedom

207 from constraints of the nationalistic ideology. It was often constructed by my interlocutors as a culture promoting other, more progressive values. The following dialogue between two of my informants about Yugoslav popular music illustrates this point very well:

Maria: I have to say that what really gets me is when I listen to some songs from those days, there a couple of songs, when they are singing about Tito or something like that. It gives me so much energy that I am ready to walk all the way to Japan [laughs]. Jovana: Yes, you just get goose bumps when you listen to them. Maria: There are a couple of those songs and you can see that there was such high energy in those times… that they were doing all these things, building all those roads… now we live in totally different times, when everyone is egoistic… Jovana: Yes, it’s not like in our times when people do not want to do anything for others… go and try telling kids to plant a tree in a park! They will ask – and what do I get for it? Jovana and Maria obviously discuss here the earlier examples of Yugoslav popular music that was quite supportive of official party ideology. But even Yugoslav rock (and to a lesser extent pop) music that developed somewhat later and often in opposition to the official party line is still imbued with similar characteristics in yugonostalgic narratives.

Yugoslav rock was relegated to what I consider to be a post-Yugoslav lieu de mémoire back in the 1990s. This was mainly the result a conflation of this music with the anti-nationalist resistance in the region, while the nationalistic Other was portrayed as listening to the so-called turbo-folk (see Gordy 1999; Jansen 2005; Živković 2011). The stars of Yugoslav rock – with the exception of a few that became supporters of nationalistic regimes – sometimes even participated in the protests themselves (especially in the 1992 protests in Belgrade) or expressed their solidarity with the anti-nationalist struggle. As a result, Yugoslav rock came to be seen as contributing to and promoting democratic, liberal, cosmopolitan values.

At the same time, attitudes towards Yugoslav popular music among my informants sometimes were quite ambivalent. The following vignette can serve as a good illustration of this point. During my stay at the summer camp organized for the ex-Yugoslav youth of a ‘social-democratic orientation’, one of the evenings had a planned ‘cultural event’ – a band playing live music. A few people pointed out to

208 me that I should not get too excited about this, because the invited band was not famous, and would not be playing anything ‘special’. As the event was getting closer, I was also told that this band – which was quite often invited to play at the events arranged by this organization – was as a matter of fact a cover band, specializing in Yugoslav popular music. As someone even pointed out to me: “Now, this is something for the real yugonostalgics!” In the evening the band delivered what was promised. It played a few hours’ long show, consisting of popular hits of the Yugoslav times – so popular that even I, with my unfortunately limited knowledge of such music, recognized the overwhelming majority of the tunes.

Most of the people were enjoying themselves enormously (fuelled by their youth, feelings of being united in exceptional circumstances, and – no denying this – some alcohol as well), singing along to the music. However, one of the participants of the summer school, sometime in the first half of the evening, considered it important to point out to me that this was precisely an example of the uncritical yugonostalgia everyone (him included) were talking about. A little later in the evening, however, I spotted him singing along with his friends to one of the songs. Ironically, the song was not even the popular hit of one of the new wave or post-punk bands. It was a song written by the already mentioned here singer Djordje Balašević to commemorate Josip Broz Tito, Računajte na nas (You Can Count on Us).

As this story illustrates, popular music very often serves as the proverbial Proustian petite madeleine capable of invoking nostalgia in unexpected circumstances. This process is often explained as the result of the functioning of the market, and this question will be addressed in the next chapter. But I want to use the example of popular music to illustrate another imagined strong point of the Yugoslav culture that my interlocutors were offering.

Some of my informants argued that there was something inherently ‘Yugoslav’ about the cultural products of that era. This ‘Yugoslav-ness’ of local culture was a result of the specific historical legacies and geographic location. Thus, it was distinct from the attempts just to ‘copy-paste’ the Western styles that, in my informants’ opinion, were present in the contemporary Serbian cultural scene. Boris eloquently illustrated this when speaking about local music scene:

209

Belgrade really is the centre of the alternative music in this part of the Europe. This is a legacy of SFRY times, because back then you could not play rock-n-roll here anywhere besides Yugoslavia, not in Poland, nowhere… well, maybe they played some covers, but here the bands were playing even some anti-regime things, but it was all so subtly packaged, that those censors just could not get it… it was interesting to create on that border between provocation and … Belgrade, because of its size and some sort of Oriental sound, does not look up too much to the West. If someone played here something too similar to the West … he would be criticised for imitating others, so they had to enrich it with something from Belgrade, from here … In the yugonostalgic narratives presented to me by my interlocutors one can also notice an implied assumption that there is indeed a causal link between quantity and quality. Very often I heard that one of the main reasons why the Yugoslav culture was better than the contemporary Serbian one was because it was “bigger”. It was not constrained by the (diminishing) boundaries of the Serbian nation state but had a chance to develop on a much bigger and more diverse territory, under the already discussed slogan of brotherhood and unity.

Even though some of my informants were somewhat critical of the official ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’, others still seemed to be enthusiastic about the idea that Yugoslav culture comprised so many different constituent parts (nations and nationalities, ethnic minorities, religious groups). They saw this ‘diversity’ of Socialist Yugoslavia as very productive in cultural terms, resulting in a culture which was much more vibrant and interesting than the parochial Serbian culture with its fixation on the re-discovery of tradition:

Yugoslavia was positive in the cultural sense – I now sound like a multi-culti [sic] liberal, but there was a real contribution of all those small groups, who created different good things… I mean, I could now go in circles and say that Yugoslav cuisine was good or Yugoslav sport… ok, maybe “Yugoslav” cuisine did not really exist, but the idea is that there was this special space created here, where everything could mingle. Especially Bosnia was a culmination of this (Miloš) ***

This chapter provides an answer to the question why young generation in Serbia still is interested in post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire. Despite the continued effort of different actors inside and outside of Serbia to deny the mere existence of pan-Yugoslav culture, I found out that my young informants not only believed in it, but also often found it to be superior to the culture of contemporary Serbia.

210

I have organised my discussion of the impressive variety of post-Yugoslav cultural lieux de mémoire around three broad themes that were often mentioned by my informants when talking about the Yugoslav culture. The first one was the simple assertion of the existence of this culture. Such simple act acquires meaningfulness in the context of the confiscation of memory, in Ugrešić’s (1998) words, that I have described throughout this thesis. Second theme was concerned with the reasons for creation of the unique Yugoslav culture. My informants critically grappled with the issue of the state control over the culture that existed in SFRY. They also celebrated the state support artists, musicians and cultural workers received in Socialist Yugoslavia. They contrasted this to the situation in contemporary Serbia, where artists by and large, have to cope with the neoliberal condition, while the state support is limited and extends to predominantly nationalistic cultural projects. Finally, my informants also talked at length about the various reasons why Yugoslav culture was better compared to the culture of Serbia now.

But, as I have pointed out already several times, discussion of the continued presence of the Yugoslav culture in the contemporary times could never be complete without considering the impact of consumption on the yugonostalgia. The following chapter discusses this problem at length.

211

Chapter Nine

Commodification and Consumption of Yugonostalgia

“Nostalgia – it just ain’t what it used to be”. This catchy phrase attributed to novelist Peter de Vries (Davis 1979: 117) is often invoked in writings on the subject of contemporary nostalgia (Boym 2001; Chase & Shaw 1989; Grainge 2002; Lowenthal 1989). If we remember the origins of nostalgia in the medical discourse of the 17th century, the statement that it has changed comes across as a truism. Nevertheless, as I indicated in the introductory chapter, demedicalization is not the only considerable shift in the meaning of nostalgia that has happened. Of even more relevance to this discussion is my other argument about the co- existence of the multiple meanings under the umbrella term of nostalgia (and, by extension, yugonostalgia) in the contemporary world. Despite all this, there is a certain trend in scholarship on the subject stipulating that contemporary ‘nostalgia’ went through a detrimental transformation and quite a few scholars whose work I shall discuss below invoke nostalgically and/or ironically the times when nostalgia was different: ‘better’. What crucial changes in the nature of nostalgia are these influential theorists and academics talking about? And what implications do they have for my study of yugonostalgia as a potentially positive phenomenon?

This chapter begins with engagement of the criticism of commodification of yugonostalgia, offered by Zala Volčić (2007, 2011). Her criticism is grounded in the general theories of this process, developed by Fredric Jameson and Arjun Appadurai. I then illustrate how the supposed ‘shift’ in the nature of yugonostalgia towards its commodification has happened by examining the case of the Leksikon Yu Mitologije (‘Lexicon of Yugoslav Mythology’, Andrić et al. 2005). Next I discuss different ways commodification of the socialist past – which is seen by many as the essence of yugonostalgia – functions in contemporary Serbia. Finally, to provide a counterbalance to this material, I will discuss how people respond to such commodification through their various consumption practices.

212

9.1. Criticism of commodification of yugonostalgia

I will start critically examining this debate on the changing nature of nostalgia by considering an illustrative quote from the article by Zala Volčić on the manifestation of yugonostalgia in popular culture in the ex-Yugoslav space. She summarizes her analysis of the uses of the image of Josip Broz Tito in advertisements for consumer goods by stating:

… the former champion of the international proletariat has become one more way to sell cars (Slovenia), wine (Croatia), coffee (Macedonia) and mineral water (Serbia, Macedonia). … Tito originally signified opposition to all things commercial and capitalist. The revolutionary promise has been co-opted by a marketing ‘‘revolution’’ ostensibly to ‘‘empower’’ consumers through the (commercial) consumption of history. The political dream has been reduced to yet another marketing appeal (Volčić 2007: 31; emphasis added). Although by “political dream” Volčić here means the Yugoslav project, the same phrase also applies to her understanding of the shift in the nature of (yugo)nostalgia. She (Volčić 2007: 27) acknowledges that yugonostalgia can be a potentially interesting, creative and politically productive phenomenon. However, she gradually shifts her emphasis to the ways in which yugonostalgia, through its incorporation into contemporary consumerist culture, becomes an empty vehicle for selling products to uncritical citizens, postponing their crucial reckoning with the socialist past:51 “The alacrity with which the market commodifies memory and stimulates nostalgia as a marketing strategy bolsters the forms of deferral associated here with Yugo-nostalgia. Creating a marketable version of the past requires smoothing over its rough spots and filling in its contradictions in order to consume it rather than engaging with it” (Volčić 2007: 35).

Volcic’s argument draws heavily on works by Fredric Jameson (1989; 1991) and Arjun Appadurai (1996). She translates their criticism of the commodification – creating a marketable version - of nostalgia in general to the post-Yugoslav context. These scholars are among the most pronounced critics of “contemporary” nostalgia. They see it as a negative and inextricable component of the modern-day capitalist system. The way contemporary nostalgia operates, according to this

51 And, by extension, the more immediate past of the wars of the Yugoslav dissolution, for there is an implicit assumption in Volcic’s argument that they were caused by the exacerbation of tensions existing in the socialist times (Volčić 2007: 35).

213 argument, is indicative of how the neo-liberal market permeates all aspects of contemporary life. It also shows how a commodified relation to the past is instrumentalized in the creation and practice of post-modern subjectivities. There is a discernible negative bias to most of the writing based on this argument, which is indicative of the attitude towards the market and forces associated with it, popular among many leftist thinkers. While sharing the modality of their general approach, I would argue that such criticism is short-sighted, for it ignores the multiplicity of ways consumers are (sometimes simultaneously) going with the flow, resisting and overcoming these processes. As Daphne Berdahl rightly points out about the German context, practices of consuming nostalgia “both contest and affirm the new order of a consumer market economy. … to paraphrase de Certeau, consumers of Ostalgie may escape the dominant order without leaving it” (Berdahl 2010: 59). It takes much more than an analysis of the visual uses of socialist symbols in advertising to understand what is really happening in the processes of commodification and consumption of (yugo)nostalgia.

At the same time, it is striking how this link between market and nostalgia has already become a part of vernacular discourse. On a number of occasions throughout my fieldwork I have heard people explaining yugonostalgia as a by- product of the market and a result of the naïve consumerist obsession with a commodified glossy version of the past.

Contemporary post-Yugoslav

cultural and social and economic

Fig. 9.1. A beauty parlour in centre of space in general, and Serbia in Belgrade called ‘SFRY’ utilizes a number of particular, abounds with glossy visual symbols from Yugoslav times. Photo by author. representations of the Yugoslav

214 past (see Fig. 9.1 and 9.2). One can encounter them in advertising and in souvenir shops, in glossy magazines, in TV shows, video clips, movies and so on. Probably, this is one of the reasons why I have encountered such explanations of yugonostalgia both in the public discourse (media and public discussions) and in the narratives of my informants and friends.

Initially I was feeling somewhat let down by the latter’s readiness to dismiss yugonsotalgia as a negative – almost harmful – by-product of the capitalist system.

Fig. 9.2. Yugoslav-themed souvenirs for sale in a shop in Belgrade. Photo by author. Such a stance did not fit very well into my original project design of showing how yugonostalgia can also be a positive phenomenon. But eventually this turned out to be one of the most gratifying challenges of my fieldwork. This version of critical definition of yugonostalgia turned my attention to the salience of some transformations happening within the region. While at first glance it may seem that we are dealing here only with the transformation – commodification – of yugonostalgia, I argue that this shift is much more complex and is connected to many other socio-cultural processes happening within the region, processes that

215 have often been overlooked in the literature on the former Yugoslavia and even the broader post-socialist region. The transformations in question contribute to the debate about how relevant the notion of post-socialism is in the contemporary world. Discussing and situating them into a broader global perspective will help to further normalise the study of the region.

Furthermore, this fieldwork experience has encouraged me to rethink the relationship between commodification and consumption. Contemporary yugonostalgic phenomena and practices illuminate some of the ways market forces influence the political, social and cultural lives of people and how people respond to those influences. Finally, this discussion is also an invitation to look again at the broader theoretical issues of structure vs. agency, cultural hegemony and resistance.

9.2. Nostalgia goes to market: overview of the theoretical debate on commodification of nostalgia

‘…contemporary nostalgia … is a very big business’ stated Fred Davis in his pioneering sociological examination of the phenomenon, written more than 30 years ago (Davis 1979: 118). A lot of the writing on present-day nostalgia has been regurgitating this statement. My aim is not to diminish the importance of such discussions. In the contemporary world a lot of things have been subsumed into the logic of the market. What is unsettling, however, is the bias against nostalgia inherent in most of these discussions. This attitude can only partly be attributed to the traditional negative understanding of nostalgia, discussed in detail in the introduction. It owes a lot also to the one-sided, elitist, generalised and simplified understanding of the complex processes of commodification and consumption.

Fredric Jameson is a representative and influential proponent of this mode of thinking. One of the most prolific and – at least according to some – controversial critics of the post-modern condition has returned to the topic of nostalgia quite a few times throughout his career. In his different works he offers what may seem to be strikingly different interpretations of the phenomenon. For instance, in one of his earlier essays “Walter Benjamin or Nostalgia” he suggests that although nostalgia as political motivation is often associated with fascism, at the same time

216 it can furnish a revolutionary stimulus (Jameson 1969), while in his influential opus Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism he, by and large, equates nostalgic to regressive (Jameson 1991: 155).

Such differences in Jameson’s interpretation of nostalgia cannot be criticized as revealing inconsistencies in his attitude or explained away as evolution/ development of that. Jameson speaks about different kinds of nostalgia, which he accords two different valencies. The first, depicted by Jameson favourably, is nostalgia of the high-modernist type, while the other one is the “historicist”52 nostalgia of post-modern society of the spectacle and simulacra, where images are ruled and reproduced by the media. One could point out many problems with Jameson’s dichotomist reading of nostalgia. Susannah Radstone (2007) in her study on the sexual politics of time presents an extensive and complex criticism of his interpretation. Among other things, she questions the correctness of the attribution by Jameson of a nostalgic stance to Benjamin and points out patriarchal bias and belittlement of “Woman” in his reading of the post-modern condition (Radstone 2007: 141-146).

At the same time, Jameson’s famous reading of contemporary nostalgia in his study of the nostalgia film genre undeniably makes a few important critical comments about the Hollywood production and US cultural sphere. What is disturbing is the way some insights from Jameson’s critical evaluation of American nostalgia film have been eagerly decontextualized by other scholars and applied to different historical, geographic and socio-cultural contexts.

Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) generalizations on contemporary nostalgia provide examples of this. In his – undeniably valuable – book Appadurai builds on Jameson’s characterisation of nostalgia to claim that that inculcation of “imagined”, “ersatz” or “armchair” nostalgia for things that never existed is the central feature of contemporary merchandising. Accordingly, in a contrast to the ‘real’ nostalgia of the past, modern consumers are taught to miss the things that they never really lost (Appadurai 1996: 76-78).

52 “Historicist” in the sense of having too much regard for past styles.

217

The weakness in Appadurai’s argument is not its oversight of the imagined nature of any nostalgia (as discussed in the introduction). Rather it is dismissive of the agency of contemporary consumers. True, he admits that, in general, “consumption of the mass media throughout the world often provokes resistance, irony, selectivity, and, in general, agency” (Appadurai 1996: 7; emphasis in original). However, when he discusses the consumption of nostalgia, as we have seen, he succumbs to reproduction of the negative stereotypes about this process.

Zala Volčić’s (2007) work, quoted in the beginning of this chapter is a case closely related to the region of my interest. It is difficult to deny that yugonostalgia in contemporary Serbia is commodified. However, one should not dismiss it because of that. It is my intention, therefore, to show that a much more nuanced approach towards commodified nostalgia is possible and is indeed necessary to understand the ethnographic data that I have collected.

9.3. Transformation of yugonsotalgia. case of Leksikon Yu Mitologije

The story of Leksikon Yu Mitologije (Andrić et al. 2005) adequately illustrates the commodification of yugonostalgia. One could argue that it was one of the first attempts to start openly selling yugonostalgia to the public. However, the history of this project disrupts the simplistic interpretation of the coopting of Yugonostalgic symbols by the market in the post-Yugoslav time and space.

Although the book was published for the first time in 2004, the history of the project goes back to 1989, when Dubravka Ugrešić, Dejan Krsić and Ivan Molek, working together at the Zagreb-based cultural magazine START, decided to create a book dedicated to “Yugoslav mythology”, that is Yugoslav popular culture. According to the initial intention, the project could “help to define our identity … not for the rest of the world, but first and foremost for ourselves… to explore the map of collective memory and shared cultural and lived space at the time when the future of the project Yugoslavia is unclear” (Andrić et al. 2005: 4). The quote illustrates the systemic crisis in SFRY in the end of the 1980s, when the historical revisionism I have described earlier in this thesis was already undermining the notions of Yugoslav identity. It also attests to the fact that not everyone was ready

218 to let go of Yugoslavia. On the contrary, some people were calling for critical examination of the foundations of Yugoslav society, in order to reform them.

However, according to the official history of Leksikon, written by its authors, the project did not have a chance to be realized at that particular moment because of the beginning of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution. Following the triumph of ethno- nationalistic sentiments and hatred of all things Yugoslav (described throughout the thesis), it was impossible to proceed with publishing such a book in the 1990s. Obviously, the fact that one of the key initiators of the project, Ugrešić, as we already know, had to leave ex-Yugoslavia (by then – independent Croatia), was also not that conducive for the success of the project.

Ugrešić, however, returned to the idea of Leksikon in the middle of the 1990s. By then she was living in emigration in Amsterdam, where she taught at university. One year most of her students were emigrants and/or refugees from former Yugoslavia. Common work on re-creating the mythology of their lost homeland was supposed to provide some sort of therapy for them. Eventually, they decided to create a web-site, inviting everyone interested to post entries there. To their own surprise, they were literally flooded with proposals from former citizens of Yugoslavia dispersed all over the world. Based on such an overwhelming response, the idea to publish a book was revitalized. In 1999 an editorial committee consisting of writers and intellectuals from different ex-Yugoslav states was created with the task of choosing the best entries for the future Leksikon.

The book was published in 2004, after five years of work. A Serbian and a Croatian publishing house – in a step that was quite unique at that time but was heralded as appropriate for such a project – published the book together. The first edition of Leksikon had over 400 pages, and was lavishly illustrated with more than 700 pictures. It also had a well-planned marketing campaign. The first ‘experimental’ copies appeared on the market on the 25th of May (Dan Mladosti), while the official book launch in Belgrade was held on the 29th of November, the former Yugoslav holiday Dan Republike (Day of the Republic). This publicity stunt bought back from oblivion – if for a moment – former Yugoslav celebrations, illustrating the process of transformation of dominant lieux de mémoire into

219 dominated ones (see Chapter Four). The book immediately became a bestseller, regardless of its relatively high price. Currently, one can find the second, expanded edition of the book in all major bookshops in Belgrade (or purchase it on-line) without any problems.

Leksikon Yu Mitologije is really well-known and popular in contemporary Serbia. It is regarded to be, in words of Serbian critic Teofil Pančić (2004), “a bible of yugonostalgia”. A lot of people I met during my fieldwork, upon hearing about my interest in Socialist Yugoslavia and yugonostalgia, were insisting that this book is an absolute must-read for me. I saw its recognizable blue-white-red book spine (the cover is stylised after SFRY’s tricolour flag) on the shelves in homes of my friends or offices of some of the NGOs I visited. Not surprisingly, it has attracted attention from both ‘local’ and ‘Western’ scholars (Labov 2007; Lindstrom 2006; Marković 2009). What are the reasons for such popularity of this book?

This question elicits two main lines of response. On one hand, one can say that the book is popular because its content makes visible the history of Socialist Yugoslavia, already half-forgotten/half-erased by the nationalistic propaganda of the newly independent states. It shows that Yugoslavia was not only about the Goli Otok, repression, persecution and bureaucracy, but also about listening to music, eating sandwiches with chocolate spread Eurokrem and supporting the Yugoslav basketball team. It can be seen as a distilled and preserved memory of the everyday, maintained against the attempts to confiscate and erase this memory by the nationalistic ideologues.

On the other hand, Leksikon can be interpreted as a project, where yugonostalgia, to paraphrase Boym, is represented as a past without any pain. The book definitely does not mention problematic pages of Yugoslav history, and some of the controversial ones it tries to turn into a joke. As such, it can be interpreted as presenting a glossy version of Yugoslav history, an integral part of contemporary commodity culture, an instance of so-called “retro-style” (Palmberger 2008).

9.4. Selling Yugoslavia: how yugonostalgia is commodified in contemporary Serbia

In July 2011, the Museum of history of Yugoslavia in Belgrade opened an exhibition entitled “Golden Album – Fashion Photography of the Yugoslav

220

Presidential Couple, 1952-1968”. According to the information provided by the Museum,

The exhibition ‘Golden Album’ traces the style of clothes of the Broz couple during the most glamorous period of their lives. Tito and Jovanka [Jovanka Broz – Tito’s third wife] in the Élysée Palace, visiting the English Queen Elizabeth, dining with the leaders of the Non-Aligned movement, Jovanka with guests during fashion shows, on the world’s biggest hunting grounds – from Sahara to the Latin American plains to the icy Syberia - in wine cellars on the Vanga Island with Sophia Loren…” (from MIJ web-page, emphasis in original). The text refers to the 1950-1960s, the years of Yugoslav history that commonly are interpreted as time of rapid development and rising standards of living, especially compared to the hardships of the recent Second World War. This exhibition showcased a selection of pictures from the huge Museum’s photothèque, never shown to public before, a few costumes and uniforms that Tito wore on special occasions, reconstructions of some of Jovanka’s elaborate evening gowns and original golden jewelry, and other items that the exhibition’s authors thought would be interesting for the public (for instance, cigars and an old piano Tito used to play). Indicatively, the exhibition was opened not by the historians or photographers but by the fashion stylist Ashok Murti (Murti, coming from a mixed Serbian-Indian family, is one of the few famous public figures who continue to openly identify themselves as “Yugoslavs”).

This was the latest event from the whole range of exhibitions dedicated to Josip Broz Tito held at this institution in the previous few years. The thematic focus of these exhibitions was quite varied. In what follows I will discuss briefly the exhibitions dedicated to Josip Broz organized at the Museum of History of Yugoslavia, putting them into a broader context of the history of this institution. This discussion, in my opinion, will help to illustrate the increasing commodification of the Yugoslav history/ past that creates an opportunity for different kinds of relating to it via consumption.

The fact that so much of the Museum’s attention is devoted to the figure of the President of SFRY is connected not only to the widely-held perception that Josip Broz was a symbolic ‘father of the nation’ who held Yugoslavia together, but also to the history of this particular institution, at least its official version (presented, for instance, on the Museum’s web-page, www.mij.rs ). In 1962 the city of Belgrade

221 presented Tito with a “Museum 25th of May” for his 70th anniversary. It was built according to the project of the Yugoslav architect Mihajlo Janković in the leafy Belgrade suburb of Dedinje, near Tito’s personal residence. With the exhibition space of 1600 square meters, the aim of the museum was to collect and display the relay batons that Josip Broz received each year on 25th of May during the celebration of his birthday, institutionalized as a state holiday under the name of “Day of the Youth”. A few years later another building, the “Old Museum” was constructed nearby with the similar aim of preserving and showcasing numerous other gifts Tito received for his birthday and otherwise, for instance, during his numerous travels both within Yugoslavia and outside of it. The third important component, the “House of Flowers” was built in 1975. This was a winter garden with a working space, built for Tito’s personal use. It was here, that, according to his own will, Tito was buried after his death in 1980. In 1982 Museum 25th of May, Old Museum and House of Flowers were united into the Memorial Centre “Josip Broz Tito”. Finally, the current museum was formed in 1996 as a result of the merging of this Memorial Centre with the Museum of History of Revolution of Nations and Ethnicities of Yugoslavia.

What is striking in this history of the institution is how much attention is devoted to explaining how and why the separate parts of the Museum connected to Tito’s persona were created. There is a corresponding absence of any detailed information on the second constitutive part, the Museum which was supposed to be devoted to the revolution of nations and ethnicities of Yugoslavia. In other words, the Museum to a large extent continues to serve the function of commemorating one personality, implicitly equating this personality with the history of the whole country. True, currently the museum organizes and hosts a number of other exhibitions and cultural events (some of them completely unconnected either to the personality of Tito or the history of Yugoslavia) as I will discuss below. However, for many in Serbia the Museum still is associated first and foremost with Tito.

Undoubtedly, the renewed visibility of the continued celebrations of the Day of the Youth in Serbian and wider regional ex-Yu media, described in Chapter Four contribute to this. These celebrations and their media coverage, help to establish

222 firm connection between this place and Tito. Secular pilgrimages to a Tito’s burial place do not happen only during the former Yugoslav holidays. There is a small but

Fig. 9.3. Visitors of “Tito Effect” exhibition watching a multi-media projection of Tito’s gifts from the museum’s collection. Photo by author. steady influx of visitors to Kuća Cveća – both from Serbia and from other countries. Interestingly, quite a few people whom I encountered in Belgrade referred to the whole Museum complex precisely as to Kuća Cveća. Of course, this can be explained by the fact that many would find it too uninteresting and unnecessary to follow the changes – both structural and in official name – that the Museum was undergoing recently and therefore were just using habitually the name of Tito’s burial place. But at the same time, I think this can be also interpreted as a sign that many people connect this place with Josip Broz.

The Museum’s activities also capitalize on this association. The celebrations of the day of the Youth are not organized by the Museum itself, however, each year around that time for the last few years the Museum tried to organize exhibitions about Tito. And as I have already mentioned, Tito-themed exhibitions are also held in other times of the year as well.

223

One of the more ambitious projects was an exhibition with the self-explanatory title “Tito Effect: Charisma As A Mechanism of Political Legitimacy”, organized in 2009. Tito Effect claimed to explain the “functioning of Yugoslav society through the prism of popular attitudes towards Tito, who is widely seen as the personification of that period” (from the exhibition catalogue). In order to do this, the curators of the exhibitions selected from the funds of the museum more than 500 gifts that Josip Broz Tito received over the years on different occasions, such as New Year or his birthday. However, these were special gifts. As I mentioned before, Tito, as a famous politician, was receiving throughout his career many exclusive and often expensive gifts – these, however, are part of the permanent exhibition of the Museum, plus some of these special gifts never shown to the public before were showcased during another exhibition “Deadly Treasures”, organized in the same year. “Tito Effect”, instead, attempted to display a selection of gifts Tito had received from “ordinary” citizens of Yugoslavia – both individuals and smaller groups and collectives. According to the exhibition catalogue, these gifts – ranging from the hand-made relay batons to embroidered kitchen towels - had not been exhibited to the general public before, because they were considered to have no historical and artistic value (Fig. 9.3).

Some other exhibitions at the Museum, similarly to the “Golden Album”, focused not on Tito’s personality or his ‘charisma’ but rather on his material life. For example, in February of 2010 an exhibition “Tito Photo” showcased a number of photos and polaroids made by Tito himself. Apparently Tito was an avid amateur photographer and recently museum workers have discovered a large collection of his amateur photo work depicting diverse places he visited, people he met and objects he owned. December 2008 - January 2009 saw a concurrent running of two shows dedicated to the President of SFRY. “Josip Broz’s Hunting Weapons” documented Tito’s well-known obsession with hunting through a display of his numerous hunting weapons and equipment, hunting trophies and pictures documenting him hunting (often in the company of the other important historical figures and statesmen). The other show, entitled “Tito’s New Years”, dealt, on first sight, with the organization and actual celebration of the elaborate New Year’s Eve parties for the president of SFRY. The exhibition showcased not only pictures from

224 the various New Year parties that Tito participated in – in Yugoslavia and abroad – but also documents and protocols for these parties, a uniform Marshal was wearing on one of them, newspaper coverage of the celebrations and even a re- construction of a ‘typical’ Yugoslav household of the 1960s with a TV set (on which citizens could see how Yugoslavia’s Marshal celebrated his New Year) occupying a prominent position. Such fetishisation of certain aspects of Tito’s life, the ones tied to his legendary bon vivant lifestyle, can be seen as a part of the already described ‘obsession’ with the material life of Yugoslavia, its commodification and selling.

Quite a few other recent events and exhibitions at the Museum seem to follow this trend. The most recent one (at the time of writing of this chapter in December 2011) entitled “The Last Youth in Yugoslavia, 1977-1984” is dealing with the Yugoslav youth alternative pop-culture, feeding not only into nostalgia for the socialist popular culture, but also into a global ‘return’ of the 1980s, with the new wave in music, fashion and lifestyle. Another guest exhibition Drugarica a la Mode (“Comradess a la Mode”), running concurrently with “Golden Album” show described earlier, dealt with the fashion scene in Zagreb in the early years of Socialist Fig. 9.4. Poster for Ženska Strana exhibition. Yugoslavia.53 However, I Source: www.mij.rs want to focus in more detail here on the exhibition “Women’s Corner”54 (summer

53 It was also the first cooperation of the History of Museum of Yugoslavia with other cultural institution (Zagreb Museum of the Contemporary Art) from former Yugoslav countries.

225

2010) dealing with the female ‘aspect’ of the Yugoslav history/ experience, that I had a chance to attend in person.

Ženska Strana opened in MIJ in May of 2010 and lasted for two and a half months, attracting 24 000 visitors. It was a product of cooperation of MIJ and Museum of the Contemporary Art. According to the show’s catalogue, it offered a foundation for further research on the position of women in socialist times and was just a first step in the reflections/ reviewing of the new history of the Yugoslav space. The exhibition focused on the time period from the 1940s until the end of the 1950s: from the beginning of the Second World War, through the post-war period and to the “Golden age” of the Yugoslav socialism.

Authors of the exhibition used various materials for its creation – interviews with women who lived in that period, materials from the archives of the women’s organizations, newspapers, women’s journals, public and private photographs, TV shows, and, of course material objects from the period in question. The posters used to advertise the exhibition used the pictures from the fashion magazines published in the SFRY (Figure 9.4). Also, some of the advertising material for the show stressed heavily the everyday dimension of the show, promising visitors a glimpse of the ordinary day from the life of the Yugoslav woman in the mid-XX century. This way, curators of the exhibition (both of them female) attempted to “punctuate in a chronological but non-linear manner the main female roles of that period as well as the official representation of those roles. The Exhibition will be divided into segments or moments that woman has to deal with every day: family, household, free time, fashion, etc.” (www.mij.rs).

However, before being exposed to this part of the exhibition, visitors had first to make their way through the part dealing with the earlier years of the time period under examination – the period of the Second World War and the Yugoslav Front.

54 In my opinion “Women’s Corner” is rather an unfortunate official English translation of the Serbian title of the exhibition. Ženska Strana can also be translated more broadly as “Female Aspect”. Another possible meaning of the phrase is “Women’s Page” and in this meaning it is quite often used to name sections targeting the female readership in the newspapers and magazines in the region. The official English translation of the name of the exhibition shrinks female side of the Yugoslav experience and recluses it into just one “corner”. While the overall interpretation of Yugoslav history represented in the exhibition is a bit problematic, as I will discuss in a moment, such shrinking seems to be too extreme even for that framework.

226

This part of the show was supposed to document the ideological foundations of the position of women in Socialist Yugoslavia. It focused mainly on the party documents, official speeches (for instance, Tito’s speech on the role of the female partisans in the struggle), propaganda materials (including posters) and activities of the Women’s Antifascist Front (AFŽ), female socio-political organization. In stark contrast to the other part of the exhibition, here visitors did not learn about the everyday lives of the partisan women fighters, about what they had to wear or about their romantic lives. Instead we learned more about the “ideological” promise that the Communist Party of Yugoslavia was making to women about their liberation from the patriarchal pre-war order and promises about their equal status with men. At the same time, commentary provided by the exhibition explications showed that the ideological messages by the male party officials were sometimes mixed and still separated the “male” sphere from the “female”, restricting the role of women in the partisan struggle mainly to the domain of the medical help and the kitchen, and hinting at the fact, that some of those promises were not fulfilled after the end of the war.

The part of the exhibition dealing with the post-war years focuses in more detail on how the Yugoslav women were again ‘cornered’ into the traditional roles. Apart from occupying much more space compared with the first part (and for good reason, one might say, since the first part dealt with just a few years of the war, while the rest of the exhibition covered a period of 15 years), it differed as well in respect to what objects were used here and how they were made use of.

Here exhibition space was divided into separate “rooms” – kitchen, bathroom, living area, bedroom, etc. – representing different parts of the day of the ordinary Yugoslav woman and her respective roles – as mother, as housewife, as worker, as consumer. Exhibits did not require that much reading – even if there were reproductions of newspaper / magazine clippings on the wall, they were dealing with less serious themes mainly – like fashion trends or the supply of pasteurised milk. Each of the “rooms” was filled with details and everyday objects – washing machine, cooking stove, mirror, brush for hair, colourful summer dresses… It comes as no surprise then, that this part of the show attracted much more attention from the visitors. While quite a few people were just rather quickly

227 walking through the first part, without stopping to read the reproductions of the documents, typed originally in quite a fine print, the second part elicited much more attention and excitement. These material objects triggered waves of recognition among some of the exhibition visitors, despite their age. During my visits here I saw elderly ladies giggling and reminding themselves how difficult it was to cook a dinner for a whole family on such a small stove and younger people of my age pointing at some an object of furniture with an exclamation of recognition: “We also had something just like that in our flat!”

All in all, the story that Ženska Strana was trying to tell is about the betrayal of the women by Socialist Yugoslavia, about unfulfilled promises of female liberation and a levelling of the status of women and men in society. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the very beginning of its activity was stressing the importance of female liberation (this was typical of all Communist parties who in the first half of the century took a much more progressive stance towards the role of women in the society than the parties of the ‘liberal’ orientation), especially taking into consideration the patriarchal traditional culture of the Balkan Peninsula. And initially it looked like the promise was being fulfilled. Without going back to the pre-war period, the exhibition is hinting that the CPY offered to women the chance to liberate themselves from their traditional roles. However, as I already briefly mentioned, another implication of the exhibition is that even this liberation during the war years was a result of the necessity of the moment, rather than the whole- hearted commitment to gender equality.

The post-war years, according to this interpretation, however, saw women not only being ‘cornered’ back into their traditional roles of housewives and mothers, but also forced to cope with the additional burden of being good citizens and workers. Additionally, with the advent of popular culture, mass media and consumerism, women were sexualised again and put under pressure to conform to certain standards of beauty and femininity.

Without any intention of diminishing the importance of the achievements of the authors of the exhibition, I have to note that such an interpretation of the history of women in socialism is not that new. It rather offers a local variation of the recent

228 interpretation of this history suggested and elaborated by a few historians of socialism (Penn & Massino 2009). On one hand, an attempt to popularise such a version of the history of women in Socialist Yugoslavia is quite commendable. It goes against the portrayal of socialist women as victims of the regime: devoid of the ‘private’ sphere of life, cogs of the bureaucratic system, industrial workers, or farmers, wearing drab uniforms. The exhibition manages to ‘normalize’ somewhat women in Socialist Yugoslavia, offering a glimpse behind the walls, into their private lives.

On the other hand, the exhibition seems to be offering a sobering cure from what might be seen as a too ‘yugonostalgic’ interpretation of women’s role in Socialist Yugoslavia, by showing that both the ideological side and the lived reality of it were fundamentally flawed. At the same time, in my opinion, this cure is also somewhat lacking. There are few problematic moments with the exhibition’s representation of the women’s experience of Yugoslav Socialism in the post-war years. To begin with, it does not situate the Yugoslav women’s position in a broader global context. The post-war years saw the return of women – sometimes just encouraged, sometimes enforced – to the more traditional roles almost everywhere. But also, focus on the representation of the everyday aspect at the expense of the coverage of the role women continued to play in the social, political and cultural life of SFRY in the post-war years distorts the history. And a final point of criticism, also the most relevant for this thesis, is that such a specific representation of post-war life of an “ordinary Yugoslav woman” can be seen as a consequence of and a contribution to commodification of yugonostalgia.

How is the version of Yugoslav history offered by this museum perceived by people in Serbia? I saw only positive reviews from the visitors to the exhibition Ženska Strana in the guest books. Similarly, “Golden Album” authors noted that their exhibition also received mainly positive comments in the guest book (with a disclaimer, that visitors to the Museum anyway usually are positively inclined towards Yugoslavia and its president). Interestingly, they claim “visitors of the younger generation are surprised, entertained and even charmed by the world they did not have a chance to see” (Spasojević 2011).

229

It might seem that all these events at the Museum of history of Yugoslavia celebrating the extravagant dimensions of Tito’s lifestyle, Yugoslav fashion, and aspects of everyday life related to popular culture and consumerism contribute to the consumerist version of yugonostalgia, with the avoidance of any critical reckoning with the past, along the lines of Volčić’s criticism of the phenomenon. Online discussion about the “Golden Album” that developed around the reportage about the show published on the famous Serbian news portal B92 also seems to support this. “I suggest that Tito’s golden album is complemented by the pictures from the Goli Otok from period 1952-1968” user Kica posted on 3rd of July 2011 (see commentary section to Tanjug 2011). The Museum’s gift shop, selling Yugonostalgic memorabilia, provides even more support for such criticism. It still did not exist when I started my fieldwork in May 2009, however, one year later, a small counter appeared in the Museum’s hall. Now MIJ’s web-site boasts of a new shop, selling over 100 different souvenirs.

However to interpret the Museum simply as the peddler of yugonostalgia, contributing to the uncritical consumption of Yugoslav history and past would be too dangerously simplistic. This becomes apparent when one considers other activities taking place here – organized both by the Museum and by external parties. As I have already noted, even Ženska Strana in its ambiguity leaves a space for further critical investigation of the history of women in SFRY. Another example of an exhibition organized by the Museum that demonstrates the institution’s commitment to serious well-researched and critical projects, was the show “Critical Discourse of the Post-Yugoslav art” (December 2009). Also, external parties often hire the Museum’s premises for the organization of various events. Of course, some of the events (for instance, the Belgrade annual Jazz Festival) just make use of the excellent location. However, it would not be an exaggeration to state that some events, while obviously making use of the location, were also using the symbolic significance of the space. Conferences and seminars, public lectures and discussion forums, book launches and film premiers, art performances and other events in various ways connected to Yugoslavia, its history and its legacy are very often held at this institution. For instance, since 2009 the Museum has been a

230 base for the annual regional festival of writers from the former Yugoslav countries Krokodil.

Sometimes the symbolic connection is even subtler. When in the summer of 2010 my friend Zoe had to organize a promotional event for the women’s fund she was working at, she decided to do it at the Museum. Zoe saw it as an excellent opportunity to use the allure of the place to attract even more people to the event – the Museum has agreed to provide not only a guided tour of the exhibition Ženska Strana for the guests of event, but also to open a small garden usually closed for public for the poetry recital and concert scheduled for the evening. At the same time, in our conversation about the event, Zoe definitely was glad it is taking place in this particular location because of the connection between the egalitarian ideals of Yugoslav socialism and her work as a feminist and queer activist. To round off a light veneer of yugonostalgia to the event, Zoe managed to invite the Slovenian female choir Kombinat (“Plant”) – quite famous in post-Yugoslav sphere amateur clubs performing Yugoslav partisan songs along with the other revolutionary

Fig. 9.5. Slovenian Female Choir Kombinat performs in the garden of MIJ at Radost Ludost event, summer 2010. Photo by author.

231 music.

In summary, analysis of the recent activities of the Museum of History of Yugoslavia opens up the possibility for its criticism for exploitation of the connection between the increased uncritical interest in Yugoslav past and for popularising commodified yugonostalgia. However, as I have demonstrated such conclusions would be too simplistic. A more nuanced interpretation has to admit that this immensely popular cultural institution (boasting more than 100 000 visitors each year) mirrors complex processes of both commodification and critical reckoning with Socialist Yugoslavia taking place in contemporary Serbia. To understand what influence these processes have, one has to look at the way commodified yugonostalgia is consumed.

9.5. Consuming yugonostalgia

Yugonostalgia is not only sold in contemporary Serbia (together with the other versions of the past), it is also eagerly consumed. Sometimes this consumption is un-reflected and just follows what is in ‘vogue’. Sometimes people consciously resist such practices. And yet sometimes, they are a part of the intricate identity and memory games. To start the discussion of consumption of yugonostalgia, I will focus on the case of the cell phone with the Yugoslav’s coat of arms that belonged to one of my friends (Fig. 9.6).

I met Ivan, student of sociology in Belgrade University and (at that time) Fig. 9.6. Ivan’s cell phone with Yugoslav activist of one of the left- coat of arms on display. Photo by author. leaning political parties, during the summer camp for “social-

232 democratic” youth from the region of former Yugoslavia that he helped to organize. Eventually he agreed to record an interview for my study. However, our first attempt at this was interrupted very soon – somebody called Ivan over the phone to discuss some organizational matters. On this occasion, however, Ivan with laughter pointed out the screen of his phone to me, saying that he is a perfect “case study” for my research.

We agreed to meet specifically for the interview after the summer camp came to an end, in one of the coffee places in the centre of Belgrade. At the end of our talk I asked Ivan about the phone. By that time I already was aware that many of my friends were quite wary of the “consumerist” aspect of yugonostalgia and was wondering how Ivan would explain this. Here is what he told me:

That coat of arms… I do not consider myself to be a yugonostalgic, I do not think that I need to cry after Yugoslavia. Ok, this is what it was, it is over. We did some terrible mistake, we were killing each other in the wars, which maybe were not even ours but of some profiteers, but it does not mean that now we have to cry and look backwards. I am saying this to you because I was not surfing internet looking for this … I noticed this on the phone of my friend’s brother, so I just took it from him. I like this whole story. We have to think about Yugoslavia … And people’s reactions are different. Some say – what a moron you are, what a commie … But people who are interested in this as well, they react with a smile … like, this is ‘cool’. I have this [picture on the screen] for 2-3 months, which is already a bit too long, because this stuff is supposed to be changed often. A few things are particularly interesting and relevant to my argument in Ivan’s story. He could be easily seen as just another uncritical young consumer, following the latest fads and, as a result, uploading the politically ambivalent image to his phone. Even his narrative suggests such an interpretation. However, the broader context points to different possibilities as well. Socialist Yugoslavia does have a meaningful presence in Ivan’s life – not only through his interest in it, displayed every now and then in such “consumerist” manner – but also through the actions these interests sometimes inform.

The figure of the young consumer and her/his ideas about the consumption of the past is of crucial importance to my study of yugonostalgia as a positive phenomenon. Discussion of this will serve not only to refute the existing negative stereotypes and unsettle the traditional ways of thinking of such phenomena in rigid binary terms but also to open new areas of inquiry in the field of post-

233 socialist and memory studies. This reverberates with Daniel Miller’s (1995: 1) strong claim that:

...consumption has become the vanguard of history ... in many cases the topic of consumption seems to present a fundamental challenge to the basic premises that have sustained each discipline up until present. ... Such studies many not only cause us to rethink our conception of consumption but also point to the need for a radical rethinking of areas of already acknowledged importance. To add to this, Michele Rivkin-Fish (2009: 81) alerts us to the importance of studying consumption in the post-socialist context, claiming that it helps to throw light on subjects’ position in shifting social sphere and performance of the changing sense of self.

Discussing the relationship between the yugonostalgia and consumption during my research turned out to be a complicated task. As I already said, quite a few of my informants were aware of the theoretical efforts to link (yugo)nostalgia with the consumption and some of them even saw this link as a defining or even constitutive feature of yugonostalgia. Therefore, when asked straightforwardly about the nature of this link they very often presented me with a simplified (for the sake of the conversation, for some of them were capable of producing theory- heavy narratives as well) explanation of yugonostalgia as the product of the contemporary market which profits greatly from instilling the desire for the goods connected to the Yugoslav era. Similarly, most of them often deliberately distanced themselves in their narratives from such uncritical consumption (as Miloš from the previous chapter, who “frowned upon” the popularity of the Yugoslav rock among the youth from the region).

However, things other than direct discussion point to the fact that consuming yugonostalgia is not that irrelevant for my friends as some of them were trying to persuade me it was. For instance, quite soon after I started recording interviews for my research I realized that many of my informants, whom I always was asking to choose a place for our meetings (as locals they surely knew ‘better’), were taking me to the same places. Surely, partly this can be explained by the fact that the centre of contemporary Belgrade is increasingly dominated by quite uniform- looking and expensive kafići (coffee places) with huge plasma TV screens projecting either some sport game or the latest music videos of one of the stars of

234 the turbo folk.55 One has to know where to go to be able to have a relaxed conversation,56 to feel comfortable near the people sitting at the neighbouring table and not to be looked at with contempt by the waiter who will eventually present you with a disproportionately large bill. This does not leave one with that many choices. But still, even taking this into consideration, I could not help but notice that I was especially often taken to three or four places. All of them had some ‘special’ connection to Yugoslav times in the eyes of my informants, and they were always explaining it to me on our first visit to those places. One was the place where students barricaded themselves during the protests of 1968. Two others were decorated by the Yugoslav-era visuals. The last one, purportedly, was run by the Yugoslav dissident, but contrary to my initial reaction to this news, not a nationalist, but a Maoist.

Does the choice of such meeting places say anything about the consumption of yugonostalgia? Was my friends’ decision to take me there motivated by their desire to demonstrate to me the existence of the alternative spaces in Belgrade or were they drawn to those cafés by some sort of hype (and cheap-ish Turkish coffee that was still served in all of them)? The answer would be somewhere in between, only showing that thinking in terms of “either/or” is not productive. I guess these cafés were shown to me because of the reputation they had in certain circles as the places of yugonostalgia and for yugonostalgics. But this reputation was not only the result of marketing, but also of the fact that they were – some of them for years – places where like-minded people were gathering. Finally, although some of my informants who were taking me to these cafes, as noted, were sceptical of yugonostalgia because of its connection to consumption, at the same time, they were ‘locals’ in these yugonostalgic places. Ultimately, some of them acknowledge the fact that yugonostalgic practices connected to consumption have some meaning in their lives.

55 Turbofolk music has been extensively criticised in the literature on former Yugoslavia for its promotion of nationalistic values (Baker 2010; Gordy 1999; Jansen 2005). 56 Especially if this conversation has to be over a cup of domaca/turska kafa – a traditional Turkish- style coffee - which has been replaced by espresso in most of the places. It is hard to resist the temptation to interpret this as another sign of the battle between the “Balkan” tradition and Western modernization.

235

The reluctance to admit this is quite indicative. I noticed it not only among my friends and informants but in a broader context as well. If people - especially the ones whose reputation is dependent on their image of critical intellectuals (journalists, writers, academics) - admit their penchant for instance for the Yugo rock, they always stress that their attitude towards it is ‘healthy’ and not nostalgic at all. During my stay in Belgrade I once attended the whole discussion panel on the role of Yugoslav-era media in the development of the Yugo-rock phenomenon organized during one of the cultural festivals. Participants of the discussion were mainly journalists, cultural workers and musicians from that era. One of the main things that the panellists were debating among themselves was how and why they, despite their obvious sentimental connections to that period, cannot be considered yugonostalgics. In what seemed to be a unanimous consensus, they reached a conclusion that while yugonostalgia is an uncritical and advertisement-driven obsession with the phenomena connected to Yugoslav rock – music, styles, legendary stories, theirs interest was more of a critical investigation of the same phenomena but in their political and socio-cultural context. I contend that this is just another example of problematic distancing of oneself from nostalgic practices, criticised by Nadkarni and Shevchenko (2004).

But if we return to the ambivalent attitude that informants of this study sometimes profess towards commodification and consumption of yugonostalgia, I argue, it can be read as an important attempt to criticise the neoliberal restructuring of the sense of identity and subjectivity. Neoliberalism establishes a strong link between consumption and practices of citizenship (cf. Greenhouse 2010). In combination with disappointment with the traditional ways of participation in politics (Chapter Two), this produces an alluring image of citizens- consumers, or even activists-consumers, who can meaningfully participate in political life through their consumption practices (Farthing 2010). Nostalgia can become entangled in these processes, with its capacity to “…become a convenient desire that can transform public concepts such as the national past or identity into personalized commodities” (Özyürek 2006: 9).

Previous discussion in this chapter demonstrates that outright dismissal of consumption and commodification of yugonostalgia is unproductive. It would just

236 overlook the complex ambiguities involved in these processes, some of them allowing for the positive uses of yugonostalgia. But, inspired by my informants, I posit that we should avoid wholesale celebration of consumption as way of meaningful engagement with the world around us.

237

Conclusions

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens

we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.”

André Gide This thesis was written first and foremost as a partisan defence of the nostalgia felt for the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, also known as “yugonostalgia”. Yugonostalgia first emerged very soon after the collapse of the SFRY as a critical discourse that was employed by anti-nationalistic intellectuals. It was articulated in opposition to the hegemonic nationalistic discourses which pathologized socialist experience. It can be interpreted as a struggle against the ‘confiscation of memory’ (Ugresic 1998) of the positive aspects of the Yugoslav experiment. Nowadays, however, yugonostalgia is used as an umbrella term for a variety of different phenomena of varying scales and origins and which perform different functions in different spheres of life.

This work is not mere tilting at the windmills. As I illustrate, the negative bias against yugonostalgia has not dissipated with the end of the explicitly nationalistic regimes in the region. On one hand, this prejudice is a consequence of the popular understanding that any nostalgia is negative, an idea that is deeply rooted in the project of Western modernity. At the same time, yugonostalgia is now othered from the point of view of transition culture and a hegemonic discourse that privileges the neoliberal doctrine over the socialist past.

In an attempt to illustrate the positive connotations of yugonostalgia I have conducted most of my fieldwork in the milieu of the leftist youth activists in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. My work, therefore, falls into a recently growing body of literature on the region’s youth (Biehl & Locke 2010; Greenberg, 2010; Palmeberg 2008). I am trying, in Biehl’s and Locke’s words, to “step beyond explaining dark realities to the work of imagining in collaboration with its interlocutors, concrete ways in which things could be otherwise” (Biehl & Locke 2010, 335).

The analysis of both yugonostalgic narratives and attitudes towards yugonostalgia by my interlocutors shows that yugonostalgia can still be a powerful

238 tool of criticism of present conditions, which many people in Serbia find lacking. People whom I met during my fieldwork draw on their understandings of the socialist past in order to critically reflect on the contemporary socio-economic, political and cultural processes both within Serbia and the (broader) region. Nostalgic feelings for Socialist Yugoslavia in this case are far from a debilitating emotion that keeps people passively stranded, longing for the past. To the contrary, this emotion underscores the intrinsic discrepancies and contradictions between the neoliberal order in its particular manifestations in post-socialist Serbia. It also can serve as an impetus for an articulation of desires and visions of different world.

Nevertheless, yugonostalgia remains a very divisive phenomenon. It is still quite strongly contested by some of my informants, who in this way question some of the aspects of the Yugoslav experiment and the contemporary processes of commodification of the socialist past. Keeping in mind all of these criticisms of yugonostalgia, I still remain faithful to its recuperation. One can draw parallels between the project of yugonostlagia and other projects of reclaiming certain aspects of the past in order to construct strategic identity projects – such as the attempts to re-claim the concept of the Balkans (see Razsa & Lindstrom 2004). These projects, I argue, are similar to the concept of “strategic essentialism” developed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. And as in the case of strategic essentialism, it is important to embrace the limitations of these projects. It is useless to attempt to reify them and freeze them in a certain form. Instead we have to embrace their ambiguity and be ready to move beyond them whenever they are not applicable / useful anymore.

Against the othering of youth in contemporary Serbia

My decision to look at yugonostalgia among young people was motivated precisely by my/a/the desire to illuminate emancipatory aspects of this emotion, to show at least tentative links between it and the motivation to act (after all, the words emotion and motivation share a common Latin root). This focus has been honed even more over the course of the fieldwork. Ultimately my informants were drawn predominantly from the small Belgrade leftist activist scene. This step

239 brought about additional, unexpected challenges and gratification.

From the very beginning of my fieldwork in Serbia I was exposed to strong tendency to negatively portray Serbian youth. As I explain in my work, this tendency is a result of several historical and contemporary processes. A negative image of contemporary Serbian youth as either passive or violent is created through a juxtaposition with the positive image of preceding generations and through changes in the understanding of the role of youth in society brought about by neoliberalism, which were not matched by changes in the material base / social structures.

Consequently, one of the aims of my thesis is to deconstruct such unfair, negative images of youth in Serbia. One can do this by simply avoiding hasty interpretations and generalizing conclusions. Yes, young people in Serbia experience many problems and frustrations, but we should not interpret their reactions to such challenges in a dismissive or negative manner. Instead, we should contextualize those reactions. They will then cease to be bewildering phenomenon and instead provide us with crucial insight into life in contemporary Serbia.

Another way of deconstructing this negative stereotype – and this is the way that I have adopted here – is to throw more light on young people who defy it through their thoughts and actions. I have chosen to focus here on a relatively small leftist activist scene, not only because I thought that there would be many yugonostalgics here or wanted to attempt to trace down the link between their yugonostalgic attitudes and activism. I chose this focus rather, because it defies the negative stereotype of Serbian young people as disengaged, passive, and capable only of destructive and reactionary behaviour – street violence, nationalistic hatred and so on.

Yugonostalgia among the young

Ken Roberts (2009: 184) argues about young people’s attitudes towards the past in the post-socialist Eastern Europe:

Young people today have no personal experience of adult life under the old system but they have been told about it, and they are not nostalgic. They know that people were guaranteed jobs, health care, pensions, etc., and that life was

240

more secure and in this sense more comfortable in the old days, but they prefer the new uncertainties and opportunities to the old guarantees. The findings of my research contradict such a generalizing interpretation. My informants are not embracing uncertainties and the illusion of opportunities offered by the neoliberal condition. Their knowledge and interpretations of the Yugoslav past inform their criticism of the current situation. They do not long to turn back time and indeed sometimes are quite wary of the term “yugonostalgic”, precisely because of its various negative interpretations, including as a state of uncritical fixation on the past or a product of marketing. But, as I have argued in the introductory chapter of the thesis, contemporary theorizing about nostalgia invites us to abandon and move beyond such interpretations of this phenomenon, and acknowledge its ambiguity, allowing for its critical dimension. Therefore, I argue that there are young people in contemporary Serbia who are nostalgic. Contrary to what Roberts argues in the passage quoted above, some young people in Serbia do not embrace ‘new uncertainties and opportunities.’ To the contrary, they criticize them, exposing as shortcomings of the current neoliberal and nationalistic conditions in Serbia. This criticism is informed by their own experiences of these shortcomings but also by their specific knowledge of the Yugoslav past.

Yugonostalgic lieux de mémoire

In this thesis I draw on the concept of liéux de memoire developed by French historian Pierre Nora to analyse the content of the interviews I have recorded throughout my fieldwork. I use this concept because it emphasises the constructed nature of our understanding of the past, the role of agency in remembering, and the shifting meaning of the past.

I have singled out four broad clusters of post-Yugoslav lieux de mémoire. I analyse here the lieux of the political aspects of Yugoslav ideology, Yugoslav internationalism, the “Yugoslav dream”, and Yugoslav culture. Extensive quotes from interviews with my informants demonstrate the content of the yugonostalgic narratives. This in-depth insight is an important contribution to the study of yugonostalgia and nostalgia for socialism in general. Here I let my subjects speak for themselves.

241

And when they speak, they offer astonishingly sharp and critical observations about the Yugoslav past and the Serbian present. This helps us to defy the stereotype about nostalgics as ‘dupes’ who uncritically wallow in the rosy pictures of the past. As I have demonstrated throughout this thesis, the attitude of my informants towards SFRY can hardly be called uncritical. First, they actively study and rethink the socialist legacy. Second, they eagerly admit what they see as the shortcomings of this legacy. For them, criticising the mistakes of the Yugoslav project often means helping to build the Serbian New Left, a project inspired by, but departing from its predecessor. Finally, it is important to remember that these yugonostalgic narratives are first of all (first and foremost) a mirror of the present, not a portrayal of the past. Paying attention to them helps us to get a better understanding of the situation in contemporary Serbia.

From yugonostalgic emotional communities to critical communities

Historian of emotions Barbara H. Rosenwein (2002) in her work develops a concept of the emotional community. It is a system of feelings that unites individuals based on definition and assessment of certain things as valuable or harmful, evaluations about others’ emotions, the nature of the affective bonds between people that they recognize, and the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore. In other words, this concept invites us to think beyond the conventional understanding of community (based on national/ religious/ class/ gender/ regional belonging) and opens up the prospects for negotiating new kinds of solidarities.

This concept can be applied, with certain reservations, to the yugonostalgics as well. Despite the variety of their responses, reactions and thoughts about both the Yugoslav past and contemporary Serbian, one can discern certain similarities in attitudes and subject positions, similarities that I think can be attributed, at least partly, to their yugonostalgic disposition.

At the same time, as I have shown in this thesis, the division between yugonostalgia as (an often othered) feeling and attitude towards the past is very blurry and ambiguous. I suggest therefore, that yugonostalgia can form not only emotional communities but also something akin to “critical communities”,

242

“originators of new value perspectives… relatively small communit[ies] of critical thinkers who have developed a sensitivity to some problem, an analysis of the sources of the problem, and a prescription for what should be done about the problem” (Rochon 1998: 22). On one hand, Rochon’s quite tangible networks of actors – intellectuals, academics, artists, intellectuals, civil society leaders – may seem to be worlds apart from the small activist milieu I have described in this study. On the other hand, yugonostalgic discourses circulate not only in this particular milieu, but among youth in broader region (Palmemberg 2008), as well as among scholars studying the region. At the same time, if we look at the global intellectual scene, we can see a discernible effort to reinvigorate debates about the Marxist philosophy and praxis, led by the likes of Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, and Terry Eagleton among others. Most probably, these intellectuals would recoil upon hearing that their efforts are compared to yugonostalgia. I think however, that even though these phenomena are not of the same scale and range, they are a part of the same processes. They are part of the attempt to cope with the perceived crisis of the contemporary neoliberal world order.

In other words, I think that maybe the post-socialist transition should not necessarily be read as the end of certain episteme (Buyandelgeriyn 2008) even though more than twenty years have passed since the collapse of the socialist systems in Eastern Europe. The salience of yugonostalgia in contemporary Serbia demonstrates the capacity of the socialist past to inform people’s understanding of and relation to their present even now. It also demonstrates once again the notion that an historical legacy can be reinvented over and over again, in order to address the current problems.

***

Peter Burke ends his paradigmatic text “History as Social Memory” (1989) by evoking the figure of a remembrancer. A remembrancer, contrary to what our modern etymological stereotyping would make us believe, was a person whose job was to collect taxes. Bourke argues that it is the task of any historian to perform a similar role - to remind us about unpleasant aspects of the past. Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on Philosophy of History” (1968) similarly calls for historians to rub

243 against the grain. In my opinion, not only historians but any scholars have to rub against the grain, and challenge the perceived truths at any given historical moment. To force others to remember and not to forget.

Yugonostalgia could be accused of indulging in the numbing pleasure of remembering only the positive aspects of the Yugoslav Socialist state. Nevertheless, against all odds, yugonostalgia can be seen as performing the function of a remembrancer. Contradictorily, in bringing back the only nice aspects of the Socialist Yugoslavia, it disrupts and unsettles the neoliberal hegemony which interpolates us into forgetting about other modes of social, political, economic and cultural life.

Ghassan Hage (2012) in his recent article on the critical anthropological thought and radical political imaginary emphasized the need for the ethos of primitivist anthropology which helps us to be on constant look out for “minor and invisible spaces or realities that are lurking in the world around us”. To this I want to add that in order to find a radical alterity that would help us to rethink and eventually change our reality we do not have to look only to the ‘exotic’ places where the anthropological gaze has traditionally been aimed. We can find similar instances in our own past. For the current “reality” has emerged not only at the expense of alternative ways of life everywhere, but also as a result of the annihilation and discrediting of our own alternative pasts. Yugonostalgia, even though it is a somewhat biased understanding of the past, still reminds us about the existence of the attempt to organise social, economic and cultural life in a different way. Engaging with this past is essential for the development of the critical relationship to the present and utopian ideas for the future.

244

References

2010. Country Report Serbia. London: Economist Intelligence Unit. Abu-Lughod, L 1990, ‘The romance of resistance: tracing transformations of power through Bedouin women author(s)’, American Ethnologist, vol.17, no. 1, pp. 41-55. Anderson, B 1991, Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, London, Verso. Andrić, I, Arsenijević, V & Matić, D (eds), 2005, Leksikon Yu Mitologije, Zagreb, Beograd, Postscriptum, Rende. Appadurai, A (ed.) 1986, The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective, New York, Cambridge University Press. Appadurai, A 1996, Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press. Arandarenko M 2001, ‘Waiting for the workers: explaining labor quiescence in Serbia’, in S Crowley & D Ost (eds), Workers after workers' states, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, pp. 151-179. Ariès, P 1962, Centuries of childhood: a social history of family life, London, Jonathan Cape. Atia, N & Davies, J, 2010, ‘Nostalgia and the shapes of history’, Memory Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 181-186. Azanjac, T, Bradic, D, Krivokapić, D & Stojic T 2012, Youth and public policy in Serbia, Youth Policy Review Series, Demokratie & Dialog. Baker C 2010, Sounds of the borderland: popular music, war and nationalism in Croatia since 1990, Farnham, Ashgate. Bakić, J 2009, ‘Extreme-right ideology, practice and supporters: case study of the Serbian Radical Party’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 17, no.2, pp. 193-207. Bakić-Hayden, M 1995, ‘Nesting orientalisms: the case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 4, pp. 917-931. Bakić-Hayden, M 2006, Variacije na temu 'Balkan', Beograd, Filip Višnjić. Ballinger, P 2003, ‘Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing the Habsburg Trieste’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 84-101.

245

Banac, I 1984, The national question in Yugoslavia: origins, history, politics, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Beck, U 2002, ‘Freedom's children’, in U Beck & E Beck-Gernsheim (eds), Individualization. Institutionalized individualism and its social and political consequences, London, Sage, pp. 156-171. Benjamin, W 1968, ‘Theses on Philosophy of History’ in H Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 253-264. Berdahl, D 1999, Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland, Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press. Berman, M 1982, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity, New York, Simon and Schuster. Beta 2010, 'Roditelji uhapšenih protivnika Parade ponosa najavili protest', Blic, 23 December, viewed 17 October 2010, . Bet-El, IR 2002, ‘Unimagined communities: the power of memory and the conflict in the former Yugoslavia’, in JW Müller, Memory and power in post-war Europe: studies in the presence of the past, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 206-222. Biao, X 2006, Global ‘Body Shopping’: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry, Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press. Biehl, J & Locke, P 2010, ‘Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming’, Current Anthropology, vol. 51, no.3, pp.317-351. Billig, M 1995, Banal nationalism, London, Sage. Blagojević, J 2011, ‘Between walls: provincialisms, human rights, sexualities and Serbian public discourses on EU integration’, in R Kulpa & J Mizielińska (eds), De-centring western sexualities: Central and Eastern European perspectives, Farnham, Ashgate, pp. 27-42. Boer, PD 2008, ‘Loci memoriae – lieux de mémoire’, in A Erll & A Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 19-25. Bogdanović D 2008, ‘Neredi u Beogradu 21. februara 2008’, Peščanik [Online], 22 February, viewed 17 October 2010,

246

u-beogradu-21-februara-2008/>. Bonnett, A 2006, ‘The nostalgias of situationist subversion’, Theory Culture Society, vol. 26, no. 5, pp.23-48. Bougarel, X 1999, ‘Yugoslav wars: the ‘revenge of the countryside’ between sociological reality and nationalist myth’, East European Quarterly, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 157-175. Boyer, D 2008, ‘Thinking through the anthropology of experts’, Anthropology in Action, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 38– 46. Boyer, D 2010, ‘From algos to autonomos: nostalgic Eastern Europe as postimperial mania’, in M Todorova & Z Gille (eds), Post-communist nostalgia, New York, Berghahn Books, pp. 17-28. Boyer, D 2001, ‘Foucault in the bush. The social life of post-structuralist theory in East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg’, Ethnos, vol. 66, no. 2, pp. 207-236. Boym, S 2001, The future of nostalgia, New York, Basic Books. Bringa, T 2004, ‘The peaceful death of Tito and the violent end of Yugoslavia’, in J Borneman (ed.), Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End of Political Authority, New York, Berghan Books, pp. 148-200. Brown, M 1996, ‘On resisting resistance’, American Anthropologist, vol. 98, no. 4, pp. 729-735. Brubaker, R 1996, Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Brubaker, R 2011, ‘Nationalizing states revisited: projects and processes of nationalization in post-Soviet states’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 34, no. 11, pp. 1785-1814. Buchowski, M 2006, ‘The specter of orientalism in Europe: from exotic other to stigmatized brother’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 79, no. 2, pp. 463-482. Budding, AH 1997, ‘Yugoslavs into Serbs: Serbian national identity, 1961-1971’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 25, no.3, pp. 407-426. Bunce, VJ & Wolchik, SL 2006, ‘Youth and electoral Revolutions in Slovakia, Serbia, and Georgia’, The SAIS Review of International Affairs, vol. 26, no.2, pp. 55- 65. Burke, P 1989, ‘History as social memory’, in T Butler (ed.), Memory: history, culture, and the mind, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 97-114.

247

Burke, P 1994, Popular culture in early modern Europe, Aldershot, Hants., England, Scolar Press. Buyandelgeriyn, M 2008, ‘Post-post-transition theories: walking on multiple paths’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 37, no. 1, 235-250. Carrier, P 2000, ‘Places, politics and the archiving of contemporary memory in Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire’, in S Radstone (ed) Memory and Methodology, New York, Berg Publishers. Coleman, LM & Bassi, SA 2011, ‘Deconstructing militant manhood: masculinities in the disciplining of (anti-)globalization politics’, International Feminist Journal of Politics, vol. 13, no. 2, 204-224. Collin, M 2001, Guerrilla radio: rock 'n' roll radio and Serbia's underground resistance, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books. Collin, M 2007, The Time of the Rebels: Youth Resistance Movements and 21st Century Revolutions, London, Serpent's Tail. Čolović, I 2002, The politics of symbol in Serbia: essays in political anthropology, London, Hurst & Co. Comaroff, J & Comaroff, J 2006, ‘Reflections on youth, from the past to the postcolony’, in . MS Fisher & G Downey (eds), Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy, Durham, Duke University Press, pp. 267-281. Confino, A 1997, ‘Collective memory and cultural history: problems of method’, American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5, pp. 1386-1403. Creed, GW 2011, Masquerade and postsocialism: ritual and cultural dispossession in Bulgaria, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Davis, F 1979, Yearning for yesterday: sociology of nostalgia, Macmillan Publishers. Debeljak, A 1994, Twilight of the idols: recollections of a lost Yugoslavia, Fredonia, N.Y., White Pine Press. de Certeau, M 1984, The practice of everyday life, Berkeley, University of California Press. Dević, A 1993, Anti-war and anti-nationalist activism in the age of nationalism in former Yugoslavia: a look at frustrated attitude, Copenhagen, Centre for Peace and Conflict Research. Dević, A 1997, ‘Anti-war initiatives and the un-making of civic identities in the

248

former Yugoslav republics’, Journal of Historical Sociology, vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 127-156. Dimitrijević, B 2010, ‘Concrete analysis of concrete situations: Marxist education according to Želimir Žilnik’, Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, vol. 25, pp. 48-55. Dimou, A 2009, ‘Introduction’, in A Dimou (ed.), ‘Transition’ and the politics of history education in Southeast Europe, Göttingen, V&R Unipress, pp. 7-43. Dioli, I 2009, ‘Back to a nostalgic future - the Queeroslav utopia’, Sextures, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-21. Djilas, A 1991, The contested country. Yugoslav Unity and communist revolution, 1919-1953, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Djilas, A 2003, ‘Funeral oration for Yugoslavia: an imaginary dialogue with Western friends’, in D Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: histories of a failed idea, The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 317-333. Dogan, M 1997, ‘Nationalism in Europe: decline in the West, revival in the East’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 66-85. Dragović-Soso, J 2002, 'Saviours of the nation': Serbia's intellectual opposition and the revival of nationalism, London, Hurst & Co. Dragović-Soso, J 2003, ‘Intellectuals and the collapse of Yugoslavia: the end of the Yugoslav Writers' Union’, in D Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: histories of a failed idea, The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 268-285. Dragović-Soso, J 2008, ‘Why did Yugoslavia disintegrate? An overview of contending explanations’, in LD Cohen & J Dragović-Soso (eds), State collapse in South-Eastern Europe. New perspectives on Yugoslavia's disintegration, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, pp. 1-39. Drakulić, S 1992, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Harper Perennial. Drakulić, S 1993, The Balkan Express, London, Hutchinson. Duda, I 2010, Pronađeno blagostanje. Svakodnevni život i potrošačka kultura u Hrvatskoj 1970-ih i 1980-ih, Zagreb, Srednja Europa. Dunn, EC & Verdery, K 2011, ‘Dead ends in the critique of (post)socialist anthropology: reply to Thelen’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 251-255.

249

Đurašković, M 2010, 'Slepa praksa' u srpskom filmu’, Balkan Magazin [Online], 23 February, viewed 05 October 2011, . Ekman, J & Linde, J 2005, ‘Communist nostalgia and the consolidation of democracy in Central and Eastern Europe’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, vol.21, no. 3, pp. 354–374. e-novine 2011, 'Kako poslati dete u ruski vojni kamp?', e-novine, 29 October, viewed 20 November 2011, . Erll, A 2011, Memory in culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Erll, A, Nünning, A, Young, SB & Ebooks Corporation (eds) 2008, Cultural memory studies: an international and interdisciplinary handbook, Berlin; New York, Walter de Gruyter. Erll, A & Rigney, A 2009, ‘Introduction. Cultural Memory and its Dynamics’, in A Erll & A Rigney (eds), Mediation, remediation, and the dynamics of cultural memory, New York, Walter de Gruyter. Facebook, n.d. Како вас није срамота да србску децу зовете хулиганима [group page], viewed 13 November 2012, . Farthing, R 2010, ‘The politics of youthful antipolitics: representing the 'issue' of youth participation in politics’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 181-195. Flere, S & Kirbiš, A 2011, ‘The image of Yugoslavia among post-Yugoslav youth in 2009’, Southeast Europe: Journal of Politics and Society, vol. 3, pp. 330-348. Forić, S 2011, ‘O jugonostalgiji, otvoreno’, Puls demokratije [Online], 29 May, viewed 30 November 2011, . Forsey, MG 2010, ‘Ethnography and the myth of participant observation’, in S Hillyard (ed.), New frontiers in ethnography, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 65-79. Fritzsche, P 2002, ‘How nostalgia narrates modernity’, in A Confino & P Fritzsche

250

(eds), The work of memory: new directions in the study of German society and culture, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, pp. 62-85. Fukuyama, F 1992, The end of history and the last man, New York, Free Press. Furet, F 1999. The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Galtung, J 1969, ‘Violence, peace, and peace research’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no.3, 167-191. Gilbert, A 2010, ‘Invited commentary on Joao Biehl & Peter Locke ‘Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming’, Current Anthropology, vol. 51, no. 3, p. 341. Gilbert, A, Greenberg, J, Helms, E & Jansen, S 2008, ‘Reconsidering postsocialism from the margins of Europe: hope, time and normalcy in post-Yugoslav societies’, Anthropology News, vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 10-11. Gill, L 2009, ‘The limits of solidarity: labor and transnational organizing against Coca-Cola’, American Ethnologist, vol. 63, no. 4, pp. 667-680. Golubović Z 2012, ‘Tranzicija u Srbiji posle 2000. godine - lavirinti tranzicije’, u Z Stojiljković (ur.), Dometi tranzicije od socializma ka kapitalizmu, Beograd, Službeni Glasnik, ss. 35-40 Gordy, E 1999, The culture of power in Serbia. nationalism and the destruction of alternatives, University Park, Penn State University Press. Govedarica, N 2012, ‘Zemlja nesigurne prošlosti. Politike sećanja u Srbiji u periodu 1991-2011. Godina’, in D Karačić, T Banjeglav, & N Govedarica (eds), Sarajevo, pp. 163-240. Grainge, P 2002, Monochrome memories: nostalgia and style in retro America, Westport, Conn., Praeger. Grandits, H & Taylor, K (eds) 2010, Yugoslavia's sunny side: a history of tourism in socialism (1950s–1980s), Budapest, Central European University Press. Greenberg, J 2006, ‘Serbia, Youth Activism in (1990-2000)’, in LR Sherrod (ed.), Youth Activism: An International Encyclopaedia, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press. Greenberg, J 2010, ‘There's nothing anyone can do about it: participation, apathy, and "successful" democratic transition in postsocialist Serbia’, Slavic Review, vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 41-64. Greenberg, J 2011, ‘On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and State

251

Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia’, American Anthropologist, vol. 113, no. 1, pp. 88-100. Greenhouse, CJ 2010, ‘Introduction’, in CJ Greenhouse (ed.), Ethnographies of Neoliberalism, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 1-10. Greverus, IM 2003, ‘Anthropological voyage. of serendipity and deep clues’, in IM Greverus. (ed.), Shifting grounds: experiments in doing ethnography, Mu nster, Lit Verlag, pp. 9-50. Grossberg, L 2005, Caught in the crossfire: kids, politics, and America's future, Boulder, Paradigm Publishers. Guzina, D 2003, ‘Socialist Serbia’s narratives: from Yugoslavia to a Greater Serbia’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 1, pp. 91- 111. Hage, G 2010, ‘Migration, food, memory, and home-building’, in S Radstone & B Schwarz (eds), 2010, Memory: histories, theories, debates, New York, Fordham University Press, pp. 416-427. Hage, G 2012, ‘Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today’, Critique of Anthropology, vol. 32, no. 3, pp. 285-308. Harmes, A 2012, ‘The rise of neoliberal nationalism’, Review of International Political Economy, vol. 19, no. 1, pp. 59-86. Harvey, D 2005, A brief history of neoliberalism, New York, Oxford University Press. Haugerud, A 2012, No billionaire left behind: satirical activism in America, Stanford, Stanford University Press Hemon, A 2000, The question of Bruno, New York, Nan A. Talese. Hirsch, M 2008, ‘The generation of postmemory’, Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 103-128. Hobsbawm, E & Ranger, T (eds) 1983, The Invention of tradition, New York, Cambridge University Press. Hollinshead, G & Maclean, M 2010, ‘Transition and organizational dissonance in Serbia’, Human Relations, vol. 60, no. 10, pp. 1551-1574. Holmes, DR & Marcus, GE 2005, ‘Cultures of expertise and the management of globalization: toward the re-functioning of ethnography’, in A Ong & SJ Collier (eds), Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 235-252.

252

Horowitz, SR 2010, ‘Nostalgia and the Holocaust’, in RC Sprago & RM Ehrenreich (eds), After representation? The Holocaust, literature, and culture, New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Lodon, Rutgers University Press Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, pp. 41-58. Hörschelmann, K 2002, ‘History after the end: post-socialist difference in a (post)modern world’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 52-66. Hörschelmann, K 2008, ‘Transitions to work and the making of neoliberal selves - growing up in (the former) East Germany’, in A Smith, A Stenning, & K Willis (eds), Social justice and neoliberalism. Global Perspectives, London and New York, Zed Books, pp. 135-163. Hozic, A 2011, ‘Travel for ordinary comforts’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 613-627. Husseyn, A 1995, Twilight memories: marking time in a culture of amnesia, New York, Routledge. Hutcheon, L 1998, ‘Irony, nostalgia, and postmodern’, viewed 22 April 2013, . Hutton, PH 1993, History as an art of memory, [Burlington, Vt.], University of Vermont. Iordanova, D 2001, Cinema of flames: Balkan film, culture and the media, London, British Film Institute. Jameson, F 1969, ‘Walter Benjamin, or nostalgia’, Salmagundi, vol. 10-11, p. 52-68. Jameson, F 1989, ‘Nostalgia for the present’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 88, no.2, pp. 517-537. Jameson, F 1991, Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, Durham, Duke University Press. Jansen, S 2000, ‘The streets of Beograd: urban space and protest identities in Serbia’, Political Geography, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 35-55. Jansen, S 2005, Antinacionalizam. Etnografija otpora u Beogradu i Zagrebu, Beograd, Biblioteka XX vek. Jansen, S 2009, ‘After the red passport: towards an anthropology of the everyday geopolitics of entrapment in the EU's ‘immediate outside’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 15, no.4, pp. 815-832.

253

Jenkins, K, Morgan, S & Munslow, A (eds) 2007, Manifestos for history, London, Routledge. Jergović, M 2004, Sarajevo Marlboro, Archipelago Books. Judt, T 2002, ‘The past is another country: myth and memory in post-war Europe’, in JW Müller, Memory and power in post-war Europe: studies in the presence of the past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 157-183. Kanzleiter, B 2008, ‘Yugoslavia’, in M Klimke & J Scharloth (eds), 1968 in Europe. A history of protest and activism, 1956-1977, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 219-228. Kaplan, RD 1993, Balkan ghosts: a journey through history, New York, St. Martin's Press. Kempenaers, J 2010, Spomenik, Roma Publications. Kennedy, MD 2002, Cultural formations of postcommunism: emancipation, transition, nation, and war, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Kent, SA 1997, ‘Writing the Yugoslav wars: English-language books on Bosnia (1992-1996) and the challenges of analyzing contemporary history’, American Historical Review, vol.102, no. 4, pp. 1085-1114. Kesić, O 1999, ‘Women and gender imagery in Bosnia: amazons, sluts, victims, witches, and wombs’, in S Ramet (ed.), Gender politics in the Western Balkans: women and society in Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav successor states, University Park, Pa, Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 187-202. Kesić, V & Lyubimir, V 1993, ‘The high price of free speech’, The Women's Review of Book, vol. 10, no. 10/11, pp. 16-17. Komelj, M 2009, Kako misliti partizansko umetnost?, Založba /*cf. Kovačević, M 2010, ‘Uzroci duboke ekonomske krize u Srbiji’, Škola biznisa, vol. 3, pp. 1-14. Kritzman, LD 1996, ‘Foreword’, in P Nora & LD Kritzman (eds), Realms of memory: rethinking the French past, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. ix-xiv. Kuljić, T 2005, Tito: sociolosko-istorijska studija, Zrenjanin, GNB 'Žarko Zrenjanin'. Kulpa, R & Mizielińska, J (eds) 2011, De-centring western sexualities: Central and Eastern European perspectives, Farnham, England; Burlington, VT, Ashgate. Labov, J 2007, ‘Leksikon Yu Mitologije: reading Yugoslavia from Abramović to žmurke’, in T Aleksić (ed.), Mythistory and narratives of the nation in the

254

Balkans, Newcastle, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 22-48. Landsberg, A 2004, Prosthetic Memory: the Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, New York, Columbia University Press. Lemon, A 2000, Between two fires: Gypsy performance and Romani memory from Pushkin to post-socialism, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Lešić, Z (ed.) 1995, Children of Atlantis: voices from the former Yugoslavia, Budapest, CEU Press. Levi, P 2007, Disintegration in frames: aesthetics and ideology in the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav cinema, Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press. Lilly, CS 1997, ‘Propaganda to pornography: party, society, and culture in postwar Yugoslavia’, in MK Bokovoy, JA Irvine & CS Lilly (eds), State-society relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, New York, St. Martin's Press, pp. 139-162. Lindstrom, N 2006, ‘Yugonostalgia: restorative and reflective nostalgia in former Yugoslavia’, East Central Europe, vol. 32, no. 1-2, pp. 231-242. Ljubonja, S2001, ‘Štampa o jugoslovenskom i srpskom identitetu’, in L Šekelj (ed.), Idenititet: Srbi i/ili Jugosloveni, Beograd, Institut za evropske studije, pp. 63- 100. Lowenthal, D 1989, ‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t’, in C Shaw & M Chase (eds), The imagined past: history and nostalgia, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, pp. 18-32. Ludanyi, A 1979, ‘Titoist integration of Yugoslavia: the partisan myth & the Hungarians of the Vojvodina, 1945-197, Polity, vol. 12, no.2, pp. 225-252. Marcus GE 2010, ‘Notes from within a laboratory for the reinvention of anthropological method’, in M Melhuus, JP Mitchell, & H Wulff (eds), Ethnographic practice in the present, New York, Berghahn Books, pp. 69-79. Marković, PJ 2001, ‘Ondos partije i Tita prema jugoslovenskom i nacionalnom identitetu’, in L Šekelj (ed.), Idenititet: Srbi i/ili Jugosloveni, Beograd, Institut za evropske studije, pp. 13-62. Marković, PJ 2007, ‘Socijalizam i njegovih sedam ‘s’ nostalgicnih vrednosti’, Treci Program, vol. III-IV, no. 135-136, pp. 340-350. Marković, PJ 2009, ‘Emocionalna topografija secanja’ Jugonostalgije: primer Leksikona YU Mitologije’, in G Djeric (ed.), Pamcenje i nostalgija: neki

255

prostori, oblici, lica i nalicja, Beograd: Filip Visnjic, pp. 201-211. Marković, V 2011, ‘A re-examination of the position of the student movement in Serbia’ in R Hudson & G Bowman (eds), After Yugoslavia. Identities and politics within the successor states, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 105-119. Mihailović S (ur.) 2011, Dometi tranzicije od socializma ka kapitalizmu, Beograd, Službeni Glasnik.

Mijazaki, H 2006, ‘Economy of Dreams: Hope in Global Capitalism and Its Critiques’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 21, no.2, pp. 147–172.

Mikula, M 2003, ‘Virtual landscapes of memory’, Information, Communication & Society, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 169-186. Milić, A 2007, ‘The family and work in the post-socialist transition of Serbia: 1991- 2006’, International Review of Sociology, vol. 17, no.2, pp. 359-380. Milivojević, V 2006, ‘Vizija kriminalne budućnosti’, Глас Jавности [Online], 03 March, viewed 12 June 2012, . Miller, D 1995, Acknowledging consumption: a review of new studies, London, Routledge. Miller, N 2002, ‘Mihiz in the sixties: politics and drama between nationalism and authoritarianism’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 30, no. 4, pp. 603-621. Milojković-Djurić, J 1996, ‘Approaches to national identities: Ćosić's and Prijevec's debate on ideological and literary issues’, East European Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 63-73. Mojić, D 2012, ‘Means of getting ahead in post-socialist Serbia: perceptions and preferences of young people’, Sociologija, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 301-314. Müller, JW 2002, ‘Introduction: the power of memory, the memory of power and the power over memory’, in JW Müller (ed.), Memory and power in post-war Europe: studies in the presence of the past, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-35. Müller, M 2011, ‘Market meets nationalism: making entrepreneurial state subjects in post-Soviet Russia’, Nationalities Papers, vol. 39, no. 3, pp. 393-408. Nadkarni, M & Shevchenko, O 2004, ‘The politics of nostalgia: a case for comparative analysis of post-socialist practices’, Ab Imperio ,vol. 2, pp. 487-

256

519. Narvselius, E 2012, ‘The ‘Bandera debate’: the contentious legacy of World War II and liberalization of collective memory in Western Ukraine’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 54, no. 3-4, pp. 469-490. Natali, MP 2004, ‘History and the politics of nostalgia’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies [Online], vol. 5, pp. 10-25, viewed 14 June 2012, . Nezi, S, Sotiropoulos, D & Toka, P 2009, ‘Explaining the attitudes of parliamentarians towards European integration in Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia: party affiliation, ‘left–Right’ self-placement or country of origin?’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 61, no. 6, pp. 1003-1020. Nikolayenko, O 2007, ‘The revolt of the post-Soviet generation: youth movements in Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine’, Comparative Politics, vol. 39, no. 2, pp. 169- 188. Nikolić, K 2010, ‘I posle Tita – Tito’: održanje і rušenje Titovog kulta u Srbiji 1980- 1990’, in o Manojlovic Pintar (ur.), Tito - vidjenja i tumačenja, Beograd : Inst. za Noviju Istoriju Srbije, pp.760-769. Nikolić, M & Mihailović, S (eds) 2004, Mladi Zagubljeni u Tranziciji, Beograd, Centar za Proucavanje Alternativa. Nora, P 2001, Rethinking France = Les lieux de mémoire, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Nora, P & Kritzman, LD (eds) 1996, Realms of memory: rethinking the French past, New York, Columbia University Press. Obradović, J 2008, ‘Tolerance and prejudice in Belgrade: young people’s constructions of selves and others’, The Anthropology of East Europe Review, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 22-36. Olick, JK, Vinitzky-Seroussi, V & Levy, D (eds) 2011, The Collective Memory Reader, Oxford University Press. Ong, A 2007, ‘Neoliberalism as a mobile technology’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 3–8. Ortner, S 1995, ‘Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 37 no. 1, pp. 173-193. Özyürek, E 2006, Nostalgia for the modern: state secularism and everyday politics in

257

Turkey, Durham, NC, Duke University Press. Palmberger, M 2008, ‘Nostalgia matters: nostalgia for Yugoslavia as potential vision for a better future’, Sociologija/Sociology: Journal of Sociology, Social Psychology & Social Anthropology, vol. 50, no. 4, pp. 355-370. Pančić, T 2004, 'Leksikon Yu Mitologije' - knjiga smeha i pamćenja’, Vreme, 27 May, viewed 21 November 2012, . Patterson, PH 2010, ‘Yugoslavia as it once was: what tourism and leisure meant for the history of the Socialist Federation,’ in H Grandits, & K Taylor (eds), 2010, Yugoslavia's sunny side: a history of tourism in socialism (1950s– 1980s), Budapest, Central European University Press, pp. 367-402. Patterson, PH 2011, Bought & sold: living and losing the good life in socialist Yugoslavia, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press. Pauker, I 2006, ‘Reconciliation and popular culture: a promising development in former Yugoslavia?’, Local-Global, vol. 2, pp. 72-81. Pavković, A 1999, ‘Yugoslavism: a national identity that failed?’, in L Holmes & P Murray (eds), Citizenship and Identity in Europe, Aldershot, Dartmouth, pp. 147-157. Penev G & Stevanović R 2002, ‘Smanjenje ili povećanje stanovništva? Prvi rezultati popisa 2002. u centralnoj Srbiji I Vojvodini,’ Stanovništvo, Penn, S & Massino, J (eds) 2009, Gender politics and everyday life in state socialist Eastern and Central Europe, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Petrović, N 2011, ‘The social values of Serbian youth’, in O Listhaug, SP Ramet & D Dulić (eds), Civic and uncivic values. Serbia in the post-Milošević era, Budapest-New York, CEU Press, pp. 143-160. Petrović, T 2009, A long way home. Representations of the Western Balkans in political and media discourses, Ljubljana, Mirovni Institut. Petrović, T 2010a, ‘Nostalgia for the JNA?: remembering the army in the former Yugoslavia’, in M Todorova & Z Gille (eds), Post-communist nostalgia, New York, Berghahn Books, pp. Petrović, T 2010b, ‘When we were Europe’. Socialist workers and their nostalgic narratives: the case of the cables factory workers in Jagodina (Serbia)’, in in M Todorova (ed.), 2010b, Remembering Communism: Genres of

258

Representation, New York: Social Science Research Council, pp. 127-153. Petrović, T 2012, Yuropa - jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima, Beograd, Fabrika knjiga. Petrović, T & Spasić, I 2012, ‘Varijante 'Treće Srbije', Filozofija i Društvo, vol. 3, pp. 23-44. Pickering, M & Keightley, E 2006, ‘The modalities of nostalgia’, Current Sociology, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 919-941. Pilkington, H 1994, Russia's youth and its culture: a nation's constructors and constructed London, New York, Routledge. Pilkington, H & Popov, A 2006, ‘Cultural production and transmission of ethnic tolerance and prejudice: introduction’, Anthropology of East Europe, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 7-21. Plehwe, D, Walpen, B & Neunhoffer, G (eds) 2006, Neoliberal hegemony: a global critique, London and New York, Routledge. Pole, C 2010, ‘How could you possibly know anything about that? Methodological congruence in the conduct of life history research’, in S Hillyard (ed.), New frontiers in ethnography, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp. 161-176. Popadić, J 2011, ‘Više stanovnika u 11 beogradskih opština’, Politika [Online], 19 November, viewed 06 February 2012, . Poulton, H 2003, ‘Macedonians and Albanians as Yugoslavs, 1918-1992’, in D Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: histories of a failed idea, The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 115-135. Pugh, J (ed.) 2009, What is radical politics today?, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. p.v. 2009, 'Hrvatska - tako lepa, tako blizu, tako genocidna', Index, 2 June, viewed 20 November 2012, . Radstone, S 2007, The sexual politics of time: confession, nostalgia, memory, London, Routledge. Radstone, S & Schwarz, B (eds) 2010, Memory: histories, theories, debates, New York, Fordham University Press. Rakowski, T 2009, Lowcy zbieracze praktycy niemocy. Etnografia człowieka

259

zdegradowanego, Slowo/Obraz/Terytoria. Ramet, SP 1995, Social currents in Eastern Europe: the sources and consequences of the great transformation, Durham, Duke University Press. Ramet, SP 2002, Balkan babel: the disintegration of Yugoslavia from the death of Tito to the fall of Milošević, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press. Razsa, M & Lindstrom, N 2004, ‘Balkan is beautiful: Balkanism in the political discourse of Tudman's Croatia’, East European Politics and Societies, vol. 18, no.4, pp. 628-650. Rév, I 2005, Retroactive justice: prehistory of post-communism, Stanfrod, Calif., Stanford University Press. Rigney, A 2008, ‘The dynamics of remembrance: texts between monumentality and morphing’, in A Erll, A Nünning, SB Young & Ebooks Corporation (eds), Cultural memory studies: an international and interdisciplinary handbook, Berlin; New York, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 345-353. Ritivoi, AD 2002, Yesterday's self: nostalgia and the construction of personal identity, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Rivkin-Fish, M 2009, ‘Tracing landscapes of the past in class subjectivity: practices of memory and distinction in marketizing Russia’, Amercan Ethnologist, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 79-95. Roberts, K 2009, Youth in transition: Eastern Europe and the West, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Rochon, TR 1998, Culture moves: ideas, activism, and changing values, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Rosenwein, BH 2002, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, The American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 821-845. Rusinow, D 2003, ‘The Yugoslav idea before Yugoslavia’, in D Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: histories of a failed idea, The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 11-26. Saunders, A & Pinfold, D (eds) 2012, Remembering and rethinking the GDR: multiple perspectives and plural authenticities, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Schwarz, B 2010, ‘Memory, temporality, modernity. Les Lieux de mémoire’, in S Radstone & B Schwarz (eds), 2010, Memory: histories, theories, debates, New York, Fordham University Press, pp. 41-68.

260

Scott, JC 1985, Weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance, New Haven, Yale University Press. Scott, JC 1990, Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts, New Haven, Yale University Press. Scribner, C 2003, Requiem for communism, Cambridge, MIT Press. Sedikides, C, Wildschut, T, & Baden, D 2004,’Nostalgia: conceptual issues and existential functions’, in J Greenberg, SL Koole, & T Pyszczynski (eds), Handbook of experimental existential psychology, New York, The Guilford Press, pp. 200-214. Sekulić, D, Massey, G, & Hodson, R 1994, ‘Who were the Yugoslavs? Failed sources of a common identity in the Former Yugoslavia’, American Sociological Review, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 83-97. Sik, E & Redmond, G 2000, ‘Coping strategies in Central European countries’, in S Hutton & G Redmond (eds), Poverty in Transition Economies, New York, Routledge, pp. 266-286. Simmons, C 2009, ‘Miljenko Jergović and (Yugo)nostalgia’, Russian Literature, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 457-469. Slezkine, Y 1994, ‘The USSR as a communal apartment, or how a socialist state promoted ethnic particularism’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 2, pp. 414-452. Smith, KK 2000, ‘Mere nostalgia: notes on a progressive paratheory’, Rhetoric and Public Affairs, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 505–527. Sorensen, JS 2006, ‘The shadow economy, war and state building: social transformation and re-stratification in an illiberal economy (Serbia and Kosovo)’ Journal of Contemporary European Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 317- 351. Spasojević, I 2011, ‘Moda u doba komunizma’, Wave. International Youth Web Magazine, 19 August, viewed 30 September 2012, . Stamatović, M & Zakić, N 2010, ‘Effects of the global economic crisis on small and medium enterprises in Serbia’, Serbian Journal of Management, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 151-162. Starobinski, J 1966, ‘The idea of nostalgia’, Diogenes, vol. 54, pp. 81-103.

261

Stenning A, Smith A, Rochovská A & Świątek D 2010, Domesticating neo-liberalism: spaces of economic practice and social Reproduction in post-socialist cities, Wiley-Blackwell. Stewart, K 1988, ‘Nostalgia - a polemic’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 227-241. Stewart, S 1984, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham, Duke University Press. Stojiljković Z (ur.) 2012, Lavirinti tranzicije, Beograd, Štamparija Topalović.

Stojanović, D 2004, ‘Construction of historical consciousness: the case of Serbian history textbooks’, in M Todorova (ed.), Balkan Identities. Nation and Memory, London, pp. 327-339. Stojanović, D 2009, ‘Slow burning: history textbooks in Serbia, 1993-2008’, in A Dimou (ed.), ‘Transition’ and the politics of history education in Southeast Europe, Göttingen, V&R Unipress, pp. 141-158. Stojanović, D 2010, Ulje na vodi. Ogledi iz istorije sadašnjosti Srbije, Beograd, Peščanik. Sutton, DE 1998, Memories cast in stone. The relevance of the past in everyday life, Oxfrod New York, Berg. Święćkowska, T 2011, ‘Dyskusja wokół książki Tomasza Rakowskiego ‘Łowcy, zbieracze, praktycy niemocy’, Bez Dogmatu [Online], vol. 88, Spring, viewed 30 September 2012, . Škrbić Alempijević, N & Kelemen, P 2010, ‘Travelling to the birthplace of “the greatest son of Yugoslav nations”: the construction of Kumrovec as a political tourism destination’, in H Grandits & K Taylor (eds), Yugoslavia's sunny side: a history of tourism in socialism (1950s–1980s), Budapest, Central European University Press, pp. 141-169. Tanjug 2011, 'Tito i Jovanka u Muzeju 25. maj', B92, 3 July, viewed 30 July 2011, . Tanjug & B92 2010, 'Hiljadu učesnika na 'Paradi ponosa', B92, 10 October, viewed 20 November 2011,

262

Tanjug & Beta 2011, 'Usvojen zakon o mladima', Blic, 05 July, viewed 06 June 2012, Taylor, K 2010, ‘My own vikendica: holiday cottages as idyll and investment’, in H Grandits, & K Taylor (eds), 2010, Yugoslavia's sunny side: a history of tourism in socialism (1950s–1980s), Budapest, Central European University Press, pp. 171-209. Terdiman, R 1993, Present past: modernity and the memory crisis, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Todorova, M 1997, Imagining the Balkans, New York, Oxford University Press. Todorova, M (ed.) 2003, Balkan identities: nation and memory, London, Hurst & Company. Todorova, M 2010a, ‘Introduction. The process of remembering communism’, in M Todorova (ed.), 2010b, Remembering communism: genres of representation, New York: Social Science Research Council, pp. 9-34. Todorova, M & Gille, Z (eds) 2010, Post-communist nostalgia, New York, Berghahn Books. Tomanović, S 2012, ‘Changes in transition to adulthood of young people in Serbia between 2003 and 2011’, Sociologija, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 227-243. Tomanović, S & Ignjatović, S 2006, ‘The transition of young people in a transitional society: the case of Serbia’, Journal of Youth Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 269- 285. Tomić, Đ 2009, ‘Ulične studije – odsek: protesti! Studentski protesti tokom ‘Ere Milošević’, in Đ Tomić & P Atanacković (eds), Društvo u pokretu. Novi društveni pokreti u Jugoslaviji od 1968. do danas, Novi Sad, Cenzura, pp. 184- 231. Ugrešić, D 1998, The culture of lies: antipolitical essays, University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State University Press. Uhl, H 2009, ‘Conflicting cultures of memory in Europe: new borders between East and West?’, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 59-72. Uvalić, M 2010, Serbia's transition. Towards a better future, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan. Velikonja, M 2008, Titostalgia: a study of nostalgia for Josip Broz, Ljubljana, Media Watch

263

Velikonja, M 2009, ‘Povratak otpisanih. Emancipatorski potenciali jugonostalgije’, in I Čolović (ed.), Zid je mrtav, živeli zidovi! Pad Berlinskog zida i raspad Jugoslavije, Beograd, XX vek, pp. 366-397. Verdery, K 1996, What was socialism, and what comes next?, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Vlada Republike Srbije 2011, Zakon o mladima, Službeni glasnik Republike Srbije. Volčić, Z 2007, ‘Yugo-nostalgia: cultural memory and media in the former Yugoslavia’, Critical Studies of Media Communication, vol. 24, no. 1, pp. 21- 38. Volčić, Z 2011, ‘Post-socialist recollections: identity and memory in former Yugoslavia’, in RI Yudhishthir & H Anheier (eds), Cultures of globalization: heritage, memory and identity, London, Sage, pp. 156-167. Vučetić, R 2012, Koka-kola socijalizam, Beograd, Službeni glasnik. Vujović, S 1999, ‘An uneasy view of the city’, in N Popov (ed.), The road to war in Serbia: trauma and catharsis, Budapest, CEU Press, pp. 123-145. Vukelić, J & Stanojević, D 2012, ‘Environmental activism as a new form of political participation of the youth in Serbia’, Sociologija, vol. 54, no. 2, pp. 387-399. Wachtel, A 1998, Making a nation, breaking a nation: literature and cultural politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press. Wachtel, A 2003, ‘Ivan Meštrović, Ivo Andrić and the synthetic Yugoslav culture of the interwar period’, in D Djokić (ed.), Yugoslavism: histories of a failed idea, The University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 238-251. Wachtel, A 2006, Remaining relevant after communism: the role of the writer in Eastern Europe, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Wachtel, A & Marković, PJ 2008, ‘A last attempt at educational integration: the failure of common educational cores in Yugoslavia in the early 1980s’, in LD Cohen & J Dragović-Soso, J. (eds), State collapse in South-Eastern Europe. New perspectives on Yugoslavia's disintegration, West Lafayette, Purdue University Press, pp. 203-219. Wacquant, L 2012, ‘Three steps to a historical anthropology of actually existing neoliberalism’, Social Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 1, pp. 66-79. Walder, D 2010, Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory, New York and London, Routledge.

264

Wanner, C 1998, Burden of dreams: history and identity in post-Soviet Ukraine, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press. Weber, E 1976, Peasants into Frenchmen: the modernization of rural France, 1870- 1914, Stanfrod, Stanford University Press. Williams, R 1973, The Country and the City, London, Hogarth Press. Wilmer, F 2002, The social construction of man, the state, and war: identity, conflict, and violence in former Yugoslavia, New York, Routledge. Winter, J 2010, ‘Sites of memory’, in S Radstone & B Schwarz (eds), 2010, Memory: histories, theories, debates, New York, Fordham University Press, pp. 312- 324. Woodward, S 1995, Socialist unemployment: the political economy of Yugoslavia, 1945-1990, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press. Žarkov, D 2007, The body of war: media, ethnicity, and gender in the break-up of Yugoslavia, Durham, Duke University Press. Živkovic, M 2011, Serbian dreambook: national imaginary in the time of Milošević, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Zukin, S 1975, Beyond Marx and Tito: theory and practice in Yugoslav socialism, London, New York, Cambridge University Press. Рябчук, М 2003, Дві України: реальні межі, віртуальні війни, Київ, Критика. Українська правда 2012, ‘Ірена Карпа, Мирослав Маринович та інші протестують проти віз в Європу', Українська правда, 08 October, viewed 08 October 2012, < http://life.pravda.com.ua/travel/2012/10/8/113458/>.

Films

Bastards of utopia 2009, motion picture, Harvard University. Directed by M Razsa & V Pacho Bitka na Sutjesci 1973, motion picture, SFRY. Directed by S Delić. Cinema Komunisto 2010, motion picture, Serbia. Directed by M. Turajlić Klip 2012, motion picture, Serbia. Directed by M Miloš Lepa Sela Lepo Gore 1996, motion picture, SFRY. Directed by S Dragojević. Maršal 2000, motion picture, Croatia. Directed by V Brešan.

265

Maratonci Trče Počasni Krug 1982, motion picture, SFRY. Directed by S Šijan. Mlad i Zdrav kao Ruža 1971, motion picture, SFRY. Directed by J Jovanović. Stara Škola Kapitalizma 2009, motion picture, Serbia. Directed by Ž Žilnik. Šišanje 2010, motion picture, Serbia. Directed by S Filipović. Tito i ja 1992, motion picture, FRY. Directed by G Marković. Tito po drugi put medju Srbima 1994, motion picture, FRY. Directed by Ž Žilnik. Valter Brani Sarajevo 1972, motion picture, SFRY. Directed by H Krvavac.

Websites www.blic-online.rs www.czkd.org www.glasssrpske.com www.mij.rs www.pravda.com.ua www.titoville.com www.vukajlija.com

266

Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: CHUSHAK, NADIYA

Title: Yugonostalgic against all odds: nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia

Date: 2013

Citation: Chushak, N. (2013). Yugonostalgic against all odds: nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia. PhD thesis, School of Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne.

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/38288

File Description: Yugonostalgic against all odds: nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among young leftist activists in contemporary Serbia

Terms and Conditions: Terms and Conditions: Copyright in works deposited in Minerva Access is retained by the copyright owner. The work may not be altered without permission from the copyright owner. Readers may only download, print and save electronic copies of whole works for their own personal non-commercial use. Any use that exceeds these limits requires permission from the copyright owner. Attribution is essential when quoting or paraphrasing from these works.