This is by Marie-Janine Calic. She also wrote A History of the Balkans, which I enjoyed reading at the end of last year.

Originally published in German in 2014, this is an updated English version, translated by Dona Geyer, which came out in 2019.

I wasn't a fan of the translation, to be honest, but it was free -- "An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched" -- so I guess I shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

As last time, I was impressed with Calic's ability to convey a mass of complex data very simply and readably. There are lots of interesting trees along the way (contemporary testimonies, telling statistics, literary excerpts, and the like), but at the same time she makes sure you never lose sight of the wood.

It's a fairly tragic wood, mind you. In fact, reading the story of this country is like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Twice, first in 1918 and then in 1945, we see the emergence of this unlikely thing called Yugoslavia. It was an unwieldy conglomerate of different ethnicities, cultures, religions, historical experiences, and socio-economic circumstances. Neither time could it last the distance. The first time round, it was the wider war in Europe that sealed its fate -- "Hitler and Mussolini picked the country apart, turning it into a mosaic of annexed, occupied, and quasi-independent territories" -- but the cracks had been widening even before this crisis. The second time round, it was the home-grown war of the 1990s that blew Yugoslavia apart, and created a raft of successor states. Anyone living in Europe at the time will remember the feeling of horrified disbelief as news of sieges, massacres, and ethnic cleansing bubbled from our radios. But again, this implosion had been brewing for a long time.


Reminders of destruction in Sarajevo



Both times, the polity ended up dismembered. Whether that's ultimately a good thing or not I'm ill qualified to judge. But I generally lean towards amalgamation rather than fragmentation, and it's always sad to see a bold and promising experiment go terribly wrong.

There are some key ideas that emerge very clearly in Calic's narrative:

1. We need to dial down the determinism...

There's a terrible tendency for outsiders to speak of this part of Europe as though it is predestined for conflict.

We had all the propaganda in the early 20th century, for example: "In light of the violent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, when the Great Powers competed openly for its former European possessions, perceptions developed that were strongly colored by imperialist interests. Cliches and stereotypes about the Orient, such as references to it as the 'powder keg,' were also attributed to 'the Balkans', making the region appear overwhelmingly anarchic, violent, and backward and thereby compelling the Great Powers to intervene in order to reinstate order and civilize its inhabitants."

Later, in the 1990s, we had the "Balkan ghosts" variant -- the idea that violence was inevitable because these people groups are fundamentally and unstoppably at odds with each other, and have been since the day dot.

Calic rejects all this fatalism, which not only hands excuses to domestic perpetrators, but also gives outsiders a good reason (depending on the flavour of the decade) either to not care (what good can it do?) or to intervene (these people can't solve their own problems): "Instead of notorious Balkan intractability and ancient hatreds, the argument presented here stresses the politicization of differences in twentieth-century modern mass society... A central question thus focuses on why, how, and under what conditions ethnic identity and diversity were turned into a matter of contention and by whom."

It's not fate, it's choice, says Calic: "Internal conflicts were not predetermined by questions of ethnic, cultural, or religious identity but arose primarily from diverging interests, worldviews, and political persuasions... Nothing was irreversible, nothing was inevitable."

These are good words to hang on to in the consideration of any conflict, I think.


After WWII, parts of the Adriatic coasts that had been under Italian rule became part of Yugoslavia. Trieste: "In memory of the three hundred and fifty thousand Italian exiles from Istria, Fiume and Dalmatia"


Trieste: "The war orphans of Trieste, Istria, Fiume, and Dalmatia remember the sacrifice of their parents"

2. Great Powers are a pain.

Almost by definition, a Great Power is self-obsessed and hypocritical, and one way and another a raft of actual or would-be exemplars of this genus has done great damage in this part of Europe over the centuries.

But -- and Calic's argument here definitely made me reconsider my views -- Yugoslavia wasn't simply the creation of these outsiders. It wasn't just an artificial construct foisted on a reluctant region. The Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (KSCS) was proclaimed on 1 December 1918. There was armed resistance in only a few places: "Yugoslavia was therefore not an artificial state created out of ignorance or just to serve the interests of the Great Powers. Instead, support for the Yugoslav project had been emerging from a variety of sources for quite some time: from cultural similarities and shared experiences in the ethnically mixed areas, from thwarted and -- at least since the turn of the century -- enormously radicalized feelings of nationalism, from new types of socioeconomic challenges and consciousness, and, last but not least, from the anachronistic, arrogant, and reform-hostile rule of the Habsburg monarchy. The First World War catalyzed all the forces that had been pushing for self-determination since the end of the nineteenth century... For many, 'Yugoslavia' became the code word for a better life in dignity, peace, freedom, and prosperity. Thus, the new state set out amid immense and euphoric hopes for the future."

3. None of the group actors in this whole saga is nice...

Everyone has done terrible stuff. We do the region a great disservice when we see things in black and white, and point the finger only at certain elements.


Reminders of destruction in Banja Luka

4. Of the problems that confronted both the first and second iterations of Yugoslavia, two stand out particularly starkly, and they proved intractable in the long run.

One is the sheer diversity of the elements being sewn together. KSCS, for example, inherited seven different historical entities, with differing systems and disparate levels of development. Modern Yugoslavia, despite massive effort, never managed to reduce the glaring discrepancies among the regions.

The second perennial issue is the tussle between the forces of centralism and federalism, which proved impossible to resolve. KSCS was highly centralized, but the way this status came about "left the new state with a dangerous deficit in legitimacy". Yugoslavia leant towards federalism. Tito's twin aims were to "reject the idea of merging all these coequal peoples into a supranational Yugoslav nation"; and "to thwart the dominance of the most populous people, namely the Serbs". But balancing the ideas of centralism and federalism -- retaining enough centralism for efficiency and enough federalism for legitimacy -- became more and more difficult.


Tito, Podgorica

4. Yugoslavia was different.

I'm not sure that we can fairly speak of any "typical" communist state, but if we could, Yugoslavia would not be a contender.

Calic teases out some of the distinctions: "Following the purge of the 1948 crisis, Yugoslavia allowed itself to deal with political critics in a relatively liberal fashion, as least as long as they did not fundamentally question socialism and 'brotherhood and unity'... Intellectuals were permanently threatened with occupational or publication bans or -- in serious cases -- prison sentences. On the other hand, the regime permitted contacts and trips abroad, did not operate a state censorship agency, and usually granted its defiers a second chance... In the 1960s, Yugoslavia was a culturally open and friendly country. Artists, writers, and philosophers had been enjoying considerable artistic freedom ever since Miroslav Krleza had give a sensational speech, 'On Cultural Freedom,' at the third congress of the Yugoslav Writers' Union in 1952, in which he criticized Stalin's negation of artistic freedom."


Miroslav Krleza, Zagreb

Calic doesn't go overboard here. She's no Tito apologist. She recognizes the shortfall in individual rights, the ever-present possibility of clampdowns, and the inhibiting effects of self-censorship. But compared with what we saw in Albania, and what I've recently been reading about Bulgaria, Yugoslavia was definitely in a different category.

And it trod a different path internationally, resolutely seeking equidistance from the two Cold War sides, and promoting non-alignment and the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

Economically, too, it had some successes. The 1960s were the "golden years", as they were in many other places. Urbanization continued apace; tourism (in-bound and out-bound) was possible; migration for employment was allowed. Things weren't wholly rosy, but "the relations between the peoples had never been as amicable as they were then". The socialist bourgeoisie grew ("we go to Trieste about twice a year to buy clothes and cosmetics..."), and the wealth gap with the Western industrial nations narrowed. The introduction of a 42-hour working week made possible the development of a leisure industry, and mass consumption had "a politically pacifying and socially integrating effect".


Ljubljana. Material progress meant a lot...



5. But -- again as in many other places -- the foundations were not solid, as the cold economic winds of the 1970s all too easily revealed.

Yugoslavia was living beyond its means. The tension between federalism and centralism had never gone away, but the 1964 reforms brought further federalization -- alongside further economic liberalization. Unemployment became highly problematic (with 1.1 million Yugoslavs living abroad as guest workers at one point); and regional disparities were growing. When Tito protested Soviet intervention in Prague, and was severely reprimanded by Moscow, a sense of military vulnerability led to security reform. This was a double-edged sword, though: "Foreign observers at the time recognized the serious risk to domestic security that decentralization posed... Thanks to the dual military structure, the republics practically maintained their own armies." And nationalist rhetoric was on the rise.

Decentralization also eroded the Yugoslav market and its infrastructure. Not only did the exchange of goods between the republics drop, but "railways, postal service, and foreign trade were divided de facto into eight subsystems that interacted less and less with each other" (on the trip we're just completing, with its dearth of railway opportunities, we have been seeing, I think, the continuing effects of this). The Constitution of 1974, meanwhile, "subjected politics at the national level to a complicated negotiation process between the republics" -- always a challenge to problem-solving. Plus, everyone was turning inwards: "A person attending school in the 1970s learned very little about the other republics and peoples of Yugoslavia -- an important step down the road to institutionalized alienation."

While Tito was still there, things held together. But when he died, in May 1980, "things got bad quickly".


Tito, Skopje

Problems such as negative growth, inflation, and supply shortages produced radically different ideas for solutions. The wealthier republics did not want more federal regulation, and yet "the Slovenians were nearly nine times richer than the Albanians"...

It became easier for various groups to style themselves as victims, easier for religion to end up promoting nationalism rather than peace, easier for the media to promote images distinguishing "us" from "them".

"Yugoslavia became obsessed with history," and WWII, its traumatic experiences, and the subsequent failure to deal with them, became fertile ground for nationalist reinterpretation.

Again, Calic emphasizes that the wars of the 1990s weren't just a revival of old, latent conflicts: "The experience of war is not a given with invariable influence; it changes in the process of remembering and with the language used retrospectively to describe it. The Yugoslav example shows how ideas about the past and the creation of historical consciousness are continuously being filtered and reshaped into something new by existing social conditions."

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I was interested to come across some references that would have meant nothing to me before this trip...

The Mountain Wreath keeps popping up, for example. Calic explains how sagas and legends about the Battle of Kosovo were incorporated not only into Serb national mythology, but also into the common Yugoslav national culture that came to undergird KSCS, and adds: "Further inspiration was provided by contemporary national poetry, especially the immensely popular, monumental work The Mountain Wreath by Montenegrin prince-bishop Peter II Petrovic Njegos from 1846, who praised the sixteenth century. This epic poem and play represented one of the most important works of the time." Later, Tito turned to the poem: "The communists staged a modern propaganda event in 1947 to celebrate the centennial of the publication of the monumental epic The Mountain Wreath, ... which had so greatly moved the South Slavic patriots in the nineteenth century." In the period of fragmented nationalism, however, "the constant exposure to the same stylized historical figures had an adverse effect on some, like the school pupil who found the required reading of the Montenegrin national epos The Mountain Wreath to be 'ludicrous, exaggerated, rural, macho,' and simply 'repulsive'."


Petar II Petrovic Njegos, Podgorica

Krleza I've already mentioned. But Jean-Paul Sartre gets a mention too, when Calic refers to the Praxis group. This was founded in 1962, and stood for "an undogmatic, creative Marxism, comparable roughly to critical theory originating in West Germany". It drew inspiration from many quarters, among them Sartre.

*_*_*

All in all, then, this was a good, informative, highly relevant read. And, of course, we now HAVE to get to Serbia and Kosovo, so we can fill in the missing pieces...