One morning we woke up and we didn’t have a country anymore. We suspected that it might happen, but you always hope that the worst won’t happen […] It was a strange feeling, you might imagine what it would be like to wake up one morning and find that France, Italy or England didn’t exist anymore. It was difficult to believe that Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore. I spent my life literally between Zagreb and Belgrade, living simultaneously in two cities. We were always trans-republican, transnational, what at the time was called Yugoslav. Today and for some time now, they have deprived us of that attribute, they compromised it […] I speak about the loss of the homeland without patriotic fervour. I despise all modes of attachment to the accidental nature of one’s ethnic origin. But the loss of the parents […] is similar to the loss of the homeland in that they position us in a situation of radical ontological insecurity, uprootedness.
In recent Yugoslav studies “there has been a tendency to ‘read history backwards’, ignoring alternatives to the dominant nationalist discourses and policies throughout Yugoslavia’s history.” However, if Yugoslavia’s dissolution is to be comprehensively analyses, the anti-nationalist, democratising and pro-Yugoslav tendencies must be considered as an essential part of that complex mosaic. They are a parallel stream which from the late 1980s attempted to counterbalance the upsurge of nationalism and militarism. This article explores the Yugoslav-oriented, pro-European, reformist/democratic and anti-nationalist undertakings before the definite break-up of the Yugoslav federation. I focus on Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as these are two federal units which pursued a less combative, pro-Yugoslav political vision and stayed outside of the dominant Serb-Croat-Slovene political axis.
In this regard, I examine several civic initiatives that aimed to democratise the federation and prevent war — namely, the Association for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI) and the YUTEL television channel, as well as the attempts of the political elites to reform Yugoslavia within its state borders. I seek to — at least partially — subvert the dominance of the ethno-national paradigm in Yugoslav studies by shedding light on the anti-nationalist stream as progressive supra-nationalism/Yugoslavism in opposition to institutional/socialist Yugoslavism. Until 1990, the latter embodied the ethno-national and the class paradigms, while the former revolved around various liberal or radical left ideas which sought to reform the unstable federation. Once the class paradigm started to wither away, institutional/socialist supra-nationalism was hollowed out, without a new, consensually agreed upon political content to fill in the empty space. The reformist, democratising and pro-Yugoslav initiatives analysed here not only entered the race too late, but they wrapped their bid for a new political paradigm in a rather complex and non-populist language.
While the political elites were driven by instrumentalist motives and rational calculations, the intellectual, cultural and popular milieus —which advocated a reformed democratic Yugoslavia of equal citizens and nations — clung to cosmopolitan or European platforms. This article argues that the reformist initiatives sought to redefine the Yugoslav supra-national framework by decoupling Yugoslavism and socialism without giving precedence to any exclusivist, ethno-nationally coded solutions, i.e. by forwarding a vision of democratic Yugoslavism which would remain a viable political and cultural framework without the socialist/revolutionary/Titoist core as its raison d’être. While the pluralisation of politics, human rights and freedom of expression were demands shared almost by all of the oppositional political and intellectual actors on the late Yugoslav public scene, UJDI and the Alliance of Reformist Forces were the only ones to advance the Yugoslav as a primary frame of reference without giving legitimacy to any of the on-going projects of nationalist homogenisation.
In addition, the article maintains that the mobilization of the Yugoslav intellectual and cultural elite within UJDI and the rest of the civic democratization and anti-war campaigns eventually failed, generally due to the interplay of two factors:
1) many Yugoslavs were socialized in a system which from 1974 onwards functioned as a de facto confederate arrangement and promoted “Yugoslav socialist patriotism” rather than a sense of Yugoslav belonging,
2) pro-Yugoslav campaigns and initiatives were led by anti-nationalist opponents of the regime(s) (former Sixty-Eighters, Marxists associated with the Praxis Journal, side-lined intellectuals or artists of the liberal or the New Left opposition, who throughout their professional lives openly or subtly criticised the Yugoslav regime, pursued a non-nationalist line and lacked concrete political support and capital in the second half of the 1980s).
Even though these initiatives did not have practical political relevance, they, nevertheless, constitute an integral part of Yugoslav history which has not been given adequate attention in recent accounts.
The “postmodern Babel” — mapping Yugoslav supra-nationalism
Although anti-fascism was the main pillar of Yugoslav institutional/socialist supra-nationalism, the place and meaning of anti-fascism was formally similar, but essentially different from the one it occupied in the German Democratic Republic (DDR) or the Soviet Union. If in the DDR anti-fascism was perceived through the lens of ‘a twofold victory over both fascism and Germany’ — in the Yugoslav context it was understood as a twofold victory over both external (German) and internal or domestic fascism, embodied primarily in the Ustaša and the Četnik movements. With the absence of the Soviet occupation, but with the pronounced civil war aspect, Yugoslav anti-fascism was what one could call an indigenous anti-fascism. However, Yugoslavia’s raison d’être revolved around plural state identities and multiple self-perceptions, all of which assumed almost equal importance and institutional protection: ethno-national, supra-national, socialist, antifascist, federal, non-aligned, anti-Stalinist, pro-Western.
After the end of the Second World War, socialist Yugoslavia was organized on the principles of an ‘ethno-territorial federation’ and it included ‘the newly enfranchised groups’ such as the Macedonians, the Bosnian Muslims and the Albanians, who ‘found their opportunities for access to the system’s rewards enhanced.’ When in the spring of 1967 in a piece of public opinion research respondents were asked: ‘In general, would you say that you are very satisfied, mainly satisfied, or dissatisfied with your family’s prospects for the future?’, 77% or more in every republic and province except Slovenia (where the percentage was 61%) answered that they were ‘satisfied’.
Hence, upward progress until the end of the 1970s and an improving quality of life in general strengthened the loyalty towards the state. Sociological research found “a small ethnic distance, much smaller than in numerous other, more developed countries.” A 1973 study by Rot and Havelka indicated an average acceptance of 5.61 (out of 7): the greatest acceptance was of Slovenes and Macedonians and the lowest of Bulgarians and Germans.
One should not, however, overlook the fact that Yugoslavia was a federation in permanent flux, undergoing several constitutional changes. Ever since WWII, Yugoslav authorities had intended to develop an original Yugoslav model of socialist federalism whose primary aim was to resolve the nationality problem, reconcile or level down disparate ethnic narratives from the past and promote a system of ethnic and social/economic justice. This particular system of conflict regulation and social integration through devolution, seeking to assure communal loyalty through the abandonment of nation building and the provision of far-reaching autonomy to the federal units provided for an intricate interplay and balancing acts of the ethno-national vs. the class paradigms.
As an illustration, the amended 1974 Yugoslav Constitution defined the federal republic as ‘a state based on the sovereignty of nations, the authority and self-management of working people and all workers…’ Although it enabled the Yugoslav citizens to have a single citizenship of the Federation, the republics were free to draft their own citizenship legislation, thus engendering a specific two-tier citizenship regime.
Hence, as of 1974 one could talk of Yugoslav supra-nationalism, in addition to Yugoslav federalism. The constitutional changes engendered a proper supra-national sphere which was clearly separated from the local republic-based socio-political contexts, but at the same time it was connected through subtle threads of communication with the narrower federal units.
A 1971 study on the political integration and attitudinal consensus in Yugoslavia provided valuable insights into what was that year’s addition to the Yugoslav census: the category of the Yugoslavs. The author argued that “these individuals may represent a new element within Yugoslav society” and that “the individual claiming a Yugoslavian nationality represents a unique citizen in that society.” The study concluded that 81% of this population completed at least a high school, 85% were under 45 years of age, 88% were atheists, and 70% were communists. Thus, it outlined patterns which would be addressed by subsequent studies: namely, that those choosing to declare a supra-ethnic belonging were mainly individuals of mixed parentage (“defensive Yugoslavism”), the urban, educated, young (“demographic Yugoslavism”), mobile strata.
In addition, Yugoslav sociology also took into consideration the category of “Yugoslav” as preferred national identification, or the so-called “latent Yugoslavism”. The noted “sharp rise in supra-nationalist sentiment” then talking about the younger generation of the last Yugoslav decade.
In the last properly conducted Yugoslav federal census in 1981, 1,215,000 people declared their nationality as “Yugoslav” — 4.5 times as many as in 1971. If compared to the numbers of the other nations and nationalities, the number of the declared Yugoslavs was higher than that of the Montenegrins, almost the same as that of the Macedonians, and only by 2% lower than that of the Slovenes and the Albanians.
The author of the report raised the question of “Who are these people?” and inferred that one should take into consideration the external circumstances at the time of the census (the Kosovo crisis and the supposed fears that the country might disintegrate), as well as the phenomenon of mixed marriages — or what he called “the natural process of amalgamation”. Although this sense of supra-ethnic belonging was conceived of, acted out, internalised, passed on and propagated in many different ways, it embodied an additional layer of identity as well as an additional sphere of interaction and convergence. From being purely political, “Yugoslav” gradually became a cultural and national identity, despite the often ambiguous policies of the state not to promote Yugoslavness as national belonging and to treat the very designation of Yugoslav as “nationally undeclared”. After the initial 1981 spontaneous “Yugoslav boom”, the 1980s saw an intensification of the debate over the Yugoslav identification: should it be treated as a declaration of one’s national belonging, or should it remain within its socialist political non-national frame? Often a subject of “stigmatization” in public discourse, “discredited” and “compromised” because of historical associations with interwar integral Yugoslavism, jugoslovenstvo and the ‘Yugoslav nation’ entered the centre stage of a prolonged battle of opinions and debates throughout the 1980s.
Referring to Article 170 of the Yugoslav Constitution which guaranteed the freedom of expression of one’s national belonging, a Montenegrin lawyer submitted an initiative to the Yugoslav Constitutional Court asking for the 1981 census to be annulled at the point which refuses the right to declare a Yugoslav identification in the sense of national belonging.
The numerous publications on the other hand, engaged with the elusive concepts of “Yugoslavism” and the “Yugoslav nation”, only to acknowledge the complexity of the notion and to conclude in line with what Predrag Matvejević observed – that it is easier to define what Yugoslavism is not, rather than what it is or what it should be.
Author of one of the more prominent studies on the meaning of Yugoslavism, he asserted that the type of Yugoslavism which has the Slavic heritage as its main attribute is outdated and hence proposed a more inclusive understanding of Yugoslavism with regard to Yugoslavia’s many non-Slavic nationalities and minorities. Matvejević claimed that there were many different types of Yugoslavism or reasons to feel/be a Yugoslav. Similarly, in 1987, Sergej Flere observed that Yugoslavism cannot be reduced to South-Slavish due to the fact that in the 1981 census 3,3% of those who spoke Hungarian as a mother tongue declared themselves as Yugoslav in the national sense.
In view of the partially conducted 1991 census and the overall political developments in the disintegrating federation, Yugoslavism came to be identified with anti-nationalism in the ideological battle with the newly enthroned nationalist elites which sought to do away with the Yugoslavs and jugoslovenstvo as “supra-tribal phenomena”.
In order to grasp the notion of “layered” Yugoslavness or multi-level supra-nationalism, I propose a broad division along the lines of institutional/socialist vs. cultural/alternative supra-nationalism, while acknowledging the fact that different types, perceptions and understandings of Yugoslavism intersected at different points. Throughout the 1980s, manifestations of official Yugoslav supra-nationalism often overlapped or clashed with unofficial or progressive supra-nationalism. Showing supportive tendencies of a supra-national Yugoslav/cosmopolitan, even European cultural identity affiliations meant going beyond what was seen as a backward, “balkanised” obsession with ethnic belonging. Indeed, the recognition that much of Yugoslavia was less prosperous than the rest of Europe —an observation often reflected in Yugoslav popular culture —encouraged a Yugoslav identity as a reflection of hopes for greater integration into the European Community.
Yugoslav identification stripped of its ideological content seemed closer to this ideal than the narrower ethno-national identifications. Hence, by the second half of the 1980s, when the delicate socialist class-nation symbiosis began to be destabilised, the public space was prone to polarisation, due also to the nonexistent consensus on what Yugoslavism was, whether there is, or should be, a Yugoslav nation and what the relationship between Yugoslav institutional and cultural supra-nationalism was. The following sections look at the political and civil society initiatives which essentially sought to decouple Yugoslavism and socialism and pave the way for a new Yugoslav supra-national framework.
The union of myriad faces — envisioning democratic Yugoslavism from above
Considered late-comers to the nation-building and state-building projects of the region, the existence of the Bosnian Muslims (hereafter Bosniaks) and the Macedonians, their self-perception, historiography and perception by outsiders has been largely conditioned by and torn between their principal neighbours’ ideological, political, historical and cultural projects and symbolic geographies. Serbia and Croatia in the Bosnian case, and Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece in the Macedonian one were often the focal points towards which wavering loyalties gravitated simultaneously with state-sponsored projects of claiming, appropriating and labelling the territory and the peoples of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Macedonia as “ours” (Croat, Serb, Bulgarian or Slavophone Greek). Their eventual recognition as separate national groups and constituent nations within socialist Yugoslavia, as well as the envisioned insecurity outside of a stable Yugoslavia, largely shaped the attitudes of the Bosniak and the Macedonian political leadership upon the dissolution. Popular opinion supported the elites in their endeavour to preserve a reformed Yugoslav (con)federation.
While Slovenia along with Croatia pushed for further decentralization through the rejected proposal for an asymmetric federation and Serbia and Montenegro were reform-resistant and strongly opposed to anything less than a centralized federation, Macedonia and Bosnia- Herzegovina tried to balance between the two camps with their own, albeit belated, proposals. Even within the increasingly discordant Presidency, the Macedonian and the Bosnian and Herzegovinian members, Vasil Tupurkovski and Bogić Bogićević, assumed similar positions: neither supportive of the Serbian camp, nor of the Slovenian-Croat one, the two acted as negotiators/arbiters during the armed conflicts in Slovenia and Croatia. Their efforts and involvement enabled an exchange of many captured soldiers from all sides.
By the end of 1990, following the last Congress of the Yugoslav League of Communists in January of that year, each of the Yugoslav republics held internal parliamentary elections. Pinpointed as one of the crucial phases in the dissolution process, the republic-based elections should not have preceded the federal elections, or should have followed shortly afterwards. The Party of the Prime Minister Ante Marković (1924-2011), the Alliance of Reformist Forces of Yugoslavia [Savez reformskih snaga Jugoslavije] also ran, hoping that its real chance would come during the federal elections. It was in Macedonia and in Bosnia that the only pan-Yugoslav non-ethnic political option won a considerable number of votes — 19 and 13 seats respectively.
In Croatia the Party’s registration was deliberately hampered, while the Serb, Croat and Slovene leaderships, in a “panicky fear from Ante Marković”, managed to achieve the highest degree of unanimity in their strategy to undermine the reforms undertaken by the federal government and the supra-national platform it stood for. In spite of the public attacks and sabotage he suffered, in the spring of 1990, once the reforms started taking effect, the Prime Minister was by far the most popular politician in Yugoslavia, above the Slovenian, the Croat and the Serb republican presidents, with different polls showing percentages of support ranging from 81% in Macedonia to 93% in Bosnia.
In March 1991, the presidents of the Yugoslav republics began regular meetings — the so-called presidential summits. Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina held the mediating positions and lobbied for the preservation of Yugoslavia within a new political arrangement. This position had a pragmatic and practical dimension, since being numerically and economically inferior and ethnically more diverse and fragile, the two federal republics had an interest in advocating and securing a position of an equal partner in a larger political entity. “Our views were the closest to the Macedonian”, Alija Izetbegović recalled talking about the meeting with the Macedonian delegation in January 1991. He mentions that with Kiro Gligorov they “advocated the preservation of Yugoslavia, but significantly reformed.” As a last attempt to halt the deteriorating situation, on 6 June 1991 in Sarajevo, Izetbegović and Gligorov proposed the so-called Platform for the Future of the Yugoslav Community [Платформа за иднината на југословенската заедница].
A more optimistic view of the talks was also reflected in the media, which commented on the general agreement of the leaders that the Platform represented a good basis for further talks. The Platform contained six parts referring to: fundamental and basic civil rights, common economic interests, international/legal status and foreign policy, defence, structure and procedures of decision-making, and guarantees for the implementation of the agreement. More precisely, it proposed a formation of a Union or a Community of Yugoslav States, which would abide by all the European mechanisms for human rights protection and where only the territorial units/republics, not the nations or people, would have the right to self-determination and secession; a common market functioning by the rules of the European Monetary Union (EMU) and a currency tied to the European Currency Unit (ECU); the republics would be entitled to pursue their own foreign policies, and apply for membership of the UN although Yugoslavia would also retain its seat; professional defence forces with command staff proportionally reflective of the ethnic balance, and preservation of the territorial defence units.
The aim of the Platform was to avoid the extremes and the bloodshed, and to seek a rational way of escaping from the heated atmosphere where threats, weapons and ultimatums dominated, and to replace them by a calm democratic dialogue, rational approach and reasonable compromise.
Similarly, both presidents agreed that neither Bosnia and Herzegovina nor Macedonia would stay in a “crippled” Yugoslavia. As Izetbegović wrote: “This platform could have prevented the war, at the same time assuring that all Yugoslav peoples have their basic interests guaranteed […] Unfortunately, there was not enough political maturity, nor courage to accept it”.
Furthermore, the Bosnian President was the only one of the republics’ presidents who took part in the Roundtable of the Government and the Opposition [Okrugli sto vlasti i opozicije] initiated by UJDI. As late as January 1992, at the Sixth session of the Roundtable, Izetbegović advocated the viability of the project of a new Yugoslav union of independent states, as one of the last attempts to prevent the spread of conflict into Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The federal elections the Prime Minister hoped for never happened and the attempt to establish a Yugoslav Community on the model of the European Community (EC), or to conduct any type of a federal referendum where the Yugoslav citizens could have their say on the future of their state, failed. As Woodward concludes, “Yugoslavs found their individual citizenship reduced to that of their republic, and were given no choice in the matter.”
The presidential summit in Sarajevo was the last one to take place. The EC stated that the Platform was an excellent basis for solving the Yugoslav crisis, while the Bundestag in a project-resolution on Yugoslavia recommended continuation of the negotiations between the republics on the basis of the proposed Platform by Gligorov and Izetbegović.
All of the presidents of the Yugoslav republics, the members of the federal Presidency, the federal government and the EC foreign ministers met at the first session of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia in The Hague on 7 September 1991. Although seriously weakened, the Federal Executive Council [Savezno izvršno veće/vijeće (SIV)] was still in existence and potential solutions still lay open on the negotiating table. Gligorov reiterated the Macedonian position —a peaceful solution of the Yugoslav crisis and reformation of Yugoslavia as a union of independent states. The following day, Macedonia held its independence referendum, but it took the Arbitration (Badinter) Commission of the Conference another ten months to proclaim that the SFRJ no longer existed. 49
“Ovo je zemlja za nas” — the pro-Yugoslav civic front
Although during the recent history of the (post-)Yugoslav region it was the supposed voluntarism of the masses that was used to legitimise the actions of the political elites, it is rarely recalled that the referenda questions in Croatia and Macedonia had the “Yugoslav” option explicitly embedded. The referendum question in Macedonia read: “Are you for a sovereign and independent Macedonia with the right to join a future alliance of independent Yugoslav states?”
In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, those who voted “yes” at the independence referendum were in fact voting for “a sovereign and independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, a state of equal citizens, the peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina — Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and members of other nations — living in it.” Likewise, in Croatia, the absolute majority voted for a “sovereign and independent state, which guarantees the cultural autonomy and all civil rights to the Serbs and the members of the other nationalities in Croatia [that] can join a union of independent states with the other republics (according to the proposal of Republic of Croatia and Republic of Slovenia for the resolution of the state crisis of the SFRJ)”. The majority of Yugoslavs never envisioned an absolute polarisation, armed conflicts and genocide and termination of all contacts as a solution to the political and economic crisis.
Lost in the “Babylonian nightmare” — the voices of the intellectuals
The Yugoslav democratically, anti-nationalist and reform-minded intellectuals gathered in UJDI which held its first meeting in January 1989. It was legally registered on 17 April 1989 in (then) Titograd, Montenegro’s capital, with the Republic’s Secretariat for Internal Affairs as an association of citizens for the advancement of democratic processes. Predrag Matvejević, one of the founders, recalls how the new ruling elite, the communists-turned-nationalists prevented the registration of the Association in Zagreb, Belgrade, Ljubljana and Sarajevo: “we managed to do it in Titograd, aside, on the margins.” UJDI had branches in all the Yugoslav republics and the members of its Council were well-known intellectuals, professors and writers from Belgrade, Priština/Prishtina, Ljubljana, Skopje, Sarajevo and Zagreb. Branko Horvat, a Croatian intellectual and renowned economist, the ‘spiritual father’ of UJDI, Nebojša Popov, Žarko Puhovski, Vesna Pešić, Gajo Sekulić, Rudi Supek, Abdulah Sidran, Ljubiša Ristić, Koča Popović, Dubravka Ugrešić, Mirjana Ule, Tibor Varadi, Shkëlzen Maliqi, Ljubomir Cuculovski, were some of the eminent Yugoslav left-wing or liberal intellectuals active in UJDI. Many of them were associated with the Praxis School and were outspoken critics of some of the totalitarian traits of the Yugoslav regime. Even before their formal convergence in UJDI, some of them were involved in the drafting of the 1987 “Call to the Yugoslav Public for Different Constitutional Amendments” advocating the substantive democratisation of Yugoslavia through party pluralism, an independent judiciary and civil rights, which was eventually endorsed by 6,000 signatories from the entire country. Some UJDI members preserved their roles of prominent civic, anti-war and human rights activists in the post-Yugoslav context.
In its Manifesto, UJDI outlined the reason for its establishment and argued that there was no other movement which was both Yugoslav and democratic: “We are not an alternative movement. To have an alternative means to have at least two possible solutions. For Yugoslavia there is no alternative to any other solution but radical democratisation.” UJDI proposed a concrete programme of political reorganisation of the state into a democratic federation and emphasised the “limitations of seeing Yugoslavia simply through national divisions.” UJDI stressed the dangers of the emerging nationalist hysteria and the “retrospective historical argumentation”: “To those who were brought up in the warrior’s and epic tradition, such views [democratic alternative] might appear soft […] [The language of] violence and destruction must be replaced by deep principles and persistence.”
Because of their stands which were highly critical of the mainstream nationalist political ideologies, UJDI was constantly under attack: in Croatia and Slovenia they were regarded as Yugoslav or Serb unitarists, while certain political circles in Serbia accused them of being Croat Ustašas — under the pretext that the initial “U” in the acronym stands for that.
Through its subsequent activities — most prominently the Pre-Parliament and the Roundtable of the government and the opposition, UJDI attracted many (mainly civic) political parties and anti-war organisations. Despite its engagement with political issues, UJDI never intended to become a political party. Yet, once the situation began deteriorating after 1990, the Belgrade branch led by Nebojša Popov entered the political scene.
The initial activities of UJDI focused on the reform of the legal and the political system of socialist Yugoslavia. A Yugoslav Pre-Parliament [Pretparlament] was established in June 1990, assuming an “advisory status” and representing a potential mechanism for the adoption of a new federal constitution which would set the country on a new legal and political basis:
UJDI, following its Manifesto, is arguing for initially approving one amendment to the present constitution which would allow the establishment of the Constitutive Parliament, and secondly, for a new electoral law based on which the elections for the Constitutive Parliament would be conducted.
It was envisioned that the change of the constitution and the adoption of a new one would be confirmed at a federal referendum by the majority of Yugoslav citizens and the majority of federal units.
The centre of legitimacy should be shifted from the past to the present and the future. The main and most acceptable source of legitimacy would be a successful and democratic solution for the basic problems of the individual and the common existence […] If our goal is democracy, then only democratic means suit such an aim.
Similarly, the Sarajevo-based professor, Gajo Sekulić, argued that it was indispensable to agree upon and establish “a minimum of democratic procedure” or “minimal rules of the game” both in case of an agreement on a new Yugoslav community or a consensual dissolution. However, “If the new regulations on how to create a new Yugoslavia or how to separate are agreed exclusively by the new fathers of the nations, making us hostages of our nations…if we accept that, it will not contribute to the peaceful resolution of the Yugoslav crisis, it will create elements not of a civil war — we are still not capable of one, but elements of religious, ethnic war.”
By mid-1991, UJDI and the Pre-Parliament were still calling for elections for the Federal Chamber of the Yugoslav Parliament. However, the fact that these well elaborated, concrete proposals came as early as the first half of 1989, (at almost the same time as the economic reform programme of Ante Marković), reveals the existence of a widespread awareness among the intellectual and the federal political circles that something had to change, both nominally and structurally.
The federal government led by the Prime Minister Ante Marković was the only political subject on the volatile Yugoslav political scene in 1990 and 1991 which pursued a similar political agenda and a discourse of appeasement, democratisation and anti-nationalism. In many ways, UJDI’s and Marković’s visions overlapped and in the second half of 1990, Marković asked for a meeting with the UJDI leadership. During the four-hour meeting he underlined the gravity of the overall situation in Yugoslavia and asked for the support of UJDI for his Party — the Alliance of Reformist Forces. UJDI declined any potential coalition, but extended support for Marković’s programme. However, the main remark UJDI conveyed to Marković was that his party, being the only one that offered substantial economic policy, lacked a political platform and a clear vision on the future status of Kosovo.
In mid-1991 there was further approximation between UJDI and the Federal Government as the Pre-Parliament and the Government were designated as “organisers” of the Sarajevo-based Round Table. Envisioned as the platform for the peaceful resolution of the Yugoslav crisis and for the negotiation of the terms for the constitution of the new Yugoslav polity, the Round Table did not manage to attract the real decision-makers among the republic elites whom UJDI often denounced as war-lords and embodiments of a new totalitarian ideology. Once violence was unleashed in July 1991, the initiatives of UJDI related to the Round Table and the Pre-Parliament which were sent to the republic elites, more often than not encountered a “wall of silence”. The two camps spoke entirely different and mutually exclusive languages. In essence, it was an old, resuscitated conflict between liberal, leftist urban intellectuals and a conservative, nationalist populist political elite, whose core was held by former functionaries of the Yugoslav Communist League. Many UJDI activists and affiliated intellectuals pointed to the Party functionaries as the real culprits for the de-legitimisation of the entire socialist idea and project, by arguing that those who called themselves communists were the ones who actually betrayed that very idea or that Marxism lost its subversive potential and was perverted into an apologetic thought.
In contrast with the exaltation of the ethnic, a notion UJDI insisted upon, was that of the “citizen”, constantly warning of the danger of replacing the collectivity of the socialist working class with that of the nation, the ethnic or the religious group and claiming that this collectivist spirit, blind for the individual, would lead to a new kind of totalitarianism. UJDI envisioned Yugoslavia as a country “as well as of its citizens”, not only of its constituent nations and nationalities. As the President of the Macedonian branch of UJDI and philosophy professor Ljubomir Cuculovski argued in an interview in November 1989:
So far it has been insisted upon abstract categories — in our Yugoslav case, the nations. This led to our communicating less and less as a human with another human, but more and more as a Macedonian with a Croat, a Croat with a Slovene… We are still not familiar with the category of people, not in the sense of ethnos, but in the sense of demos […] Thus, if we strive to constitute political subjects, that is citizens, who look beyond their national boundaries, we will avoid the danger of exclusive national parties…
Likewise, the draft electoral law was explicit in that “political parties based on a nation instead of on a political platform represent retrogression in political life and, in the Yugoslav context, a source of dangerous irrational conflicts”. Yet, UJDI was aware that the national principle could not be ignored in the Yugoslav context as it was one of the pillars of the federation. Thus, they envisioned a bicameral federal Parliament consisting of a Federal Chamber, or a Chamber of Citizens (whose members would be elected at pan-Yugoslav federal elections) and a Chamber of the federal units (based on the principle of the sovereignty of the nations/federal units, with members elected on local/republican elections).
In the context of Macedonia, the UJDI branch organised two public conferences and issued statements which were also relevant for the narrower Macedonian political sphere. On 20 September 1990, UJDI-Skopje voiced its stand on the interethnic relations in the republic, opposing some of the proposals for banning the Party for Democratic Prosperity of the Albanian minority and underlying that no previously approved minority rights can be revoked: “The answer to the challenge we are facing today can only be a democratic Macedonia where rules political, national and religious tolerance”.
It was in Bosnia-Herzegovina that UJDI had the most widespread support and largest membership body. In June 1990, UJDI’s Executive Council discussed the option of the Bosnian branches running in the upcoming elections because of the specific situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the growing polarisation and ethnicisation of politics. Thus, the Bosnian branches of UJDI, along with the Social-democratic Union of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the SSO — Democratic Union (future Liberal Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Democratic Party formed the so-called Democratic Forum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, despite the social, intellectual and political relevance of UJDI’s ideas and activities, they eventually failed in their endeavour to engender a new civic-minded, democratic Yugoslav community. This was also due to their initial decision to stay out of the political arena which led the Association to assume an elitist and detached outlook that could not resonate with the wider Yugoslav public.
Some of UJDI’s members were also among the founders of the Yugoslav European Movement [Evropski pokret u Jugoslaviji]. At a ceremony at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade in March 1991, in the presence of Ante Marković, the federal Vice-Prime Minister Živko Pregl, foreign ambassadors and around a hundred participants/members, they elected Belgrade lawyer Srđa Popović as a President of EM-Yugoslavia and Shkëlzen Maliqi (UJDI member) from Kosovo was among the elected Vice-Presidents. The Dutch ambassador addressed the assembly, while the Yugoslav Minister of Foreign Affairs, Budimir Lončar, underlined the actual and the symbolic value of EM-Yugoslavia. In an interview for the Macedonian daily newspaper Nova Makedonija, Popović concluded: “We are dismantling the country we live in. All of us. From different parts and in different ways, but we still have not completed this enterprise […] There is a feeling among the people, at least here in Belgrade, that the militant nationalist projects have no future. The people are fed up. Every day someone hits their head, or their stomach, this TV is no longer possible to watch, those newspapers are impossible to read, those quarrels are impossible to listen to […] And I really think that the people have had enough of it. At the beginning maybe it was a little fun because all of that was forbidden for a long time, but now we realise the actual cost of it. ”
Srđa Popović, who also worked as a human rights lawyer defending political dissidents like Doric Ćosić and Franjo Tuđman, went into exile in 1994, embittered with his former clients’ use and abuse of nationalism and power: “In Yugoslavia I never advocated a political programme except the broad ones of modernisation, democratisation, and ties with the European Community […] I was against secessionism from the very beginning. I thought that Yugoslavia was an idea that made sense.”
“Good evening, Yugoslavia!” — the YUTEL Republic
The “federalised” and highly decentralised Yugoslav media space easily fell prey to the local political elites. The Macedonian daily Nova Makedonija in March 1991 published the main coinages and expressions which both the Croatian and the Serbian media used to portray Milošević and Tuđman, thus illustrating the emerging irreconcilable public narratives. The Croat media labelled Milošević as Stalinist, someone who enflames the hysteria, as a bank robber, an authoritarian populist, a destroyer of AVNOJ Yugoslavia and an initiator of Srboslavia. The Serb media on the other hand referred to Tuđman as an inheritor of Ante Pavelić, a newly enthroned Croat ban, someone who dreams of an Ustaša-like independent Croatia and who is elected by the West and the Catholic Church. The media did not fail to notice that even Hitler came to power through multiparty elections. As part of the national hysteria of self-glorification, the Serb media spoke of Milošević as a representative of the entire Serb people, the man who restored dignity to the Serbian people, a modern and democratically oriented politician. Similarly, the Croat media portrayed Tuđman as wise, dignified, his missions as lending importance to the Croat political ideas and each of his appearances as having political, psychological and even economic importance.
At this early stage, however, the different ethnic media instigated a discursive and symbolic war: “The problem was not just in their inaccurate and dangerous interpretation of some evens, but also […] in their stronger and stronger ruthless falsification of reality […] Serbian politicians, intellectuals, and journalists of those years were paradigmatic ‘instigators of hatred.’”
UJDI’s newsletter Republika, which was initially funded primarily by UJDI’s member and the prominent sociologist Rudi Supek from his French pension of a Resistance fighter, was one of the several independent media in the late 1980s and the early 1990s (along with Borba, Vreme, B92, Feral Tribune) which battled hate-speech and pursued independent reporting and support for the anti-war groups and civil opposition.
In March 1991, a change in the Law on Information which made the Bosnian Parliament responsible for the appointment of directors and editors of “Radio Television Sarajevo” and the daily Oslobođenje outraged Bosnian journalists and intellectuals. This represented a clear attempt to put the media under state control of the then ruling nationalist parties and to undermine any attempt at independent journalism. Around 5,000 protesters gathered in front of the Bosnian Parliament, demanding that the Minister of Information and his deputy resign. The young journalists from the Naši dani youth magazine carried a funeral wreath dedicated “to free information”.
This contextual set-up is important for understanding the role and meaning of YUTEL. In the memory of many Yugoslavs, YUTEL is the last connecting thread running through the already fragmented political, cultural and media space. The first federal television station was established as a project of the federal government which was constantly refused media coverage of its activities by the republic-based media. In this sense, Yugoslavia was probably the only country in the world where a republican Minister of Information was more powerful than the federal Prime Minister. Moreover, led by high professional standards, primarily with the commitment to preserve objectivity and a tendency to “equate Croatian ‘separatism’ with Serbian ‘extremism’”, Sarajevo-based YUTEL aimed to speed Yugoslavia’s passage to democracy. Goran Milić, Editor-in-Chief, recalled: “We believed that Yugoslavia could only survive as a reformed, democratic country, based on equality and a market economy. We agreed that it was not our role to support any of the conflicting nationalist policies. Besides our support for democratic reform, the only agreed upon editorial line was an anti-war position.”
The main broadcasting centre was based in Sarajevo and YUTEL entered the media space on 23 October 1990. Good evening, Yugoslavia! was the greeting which would set off the evening news during the next year and a half of YUTEL’s existence. As a proof that YUTEL aimed for editorial independence and did not give any privileged treatment to the federal government, Milić cites the fact that TV Ljubljana soon asked to transmit their programme and YUTEL started showing Slovene stories subtitled in Serbo-Croatian: “Our audience there reached 45 percent of the TV audience, even though they were recording us and showing us at 11.30 at night. Only Sarajevo and Skopje ever broadcast us live”. While the Bosnians and Herzegovinians had a real interest in opting for the editorial balance of YUTEL and its anti-war discourse with an estimated regular audience there ranging from 60-80%, the people in Macedonia, not having any direct involvement in the Croat-Serb conflict, primarily saw YUTEL as a good quality novelty, a change in the traditional ‘one TV and radio per republic’ media space and a reporting platform which seemed the most acceptable at a time of rising rivalries and violence.
However, with a very small staff of only 50 (compared to the thousands employed by the state republic media) by the end of 1991, it became virtually impossible for YUTEL to continue its balanced reporting. As Milić recalls: “We understood little by little that YUTEL was like trying to have a single television station for Hitler, Stalin and Churchill, broadcasting for all three in one language, or in one language with subtitles, putting Himmler on screen, then cutting to Churchill, and then saying ‘And now the football results.’ It was impossible.”
As in the case of Marković’s reforms, YUTEL would arguably have made a big difference had it come at least several years earlier. In spite of its great potential, it was initiated too late. The local political elites and media services were already too powerful and Belgrade and Zagreb did everything to prevent YUTEL from functioning normally. After all, in the memory of many Yugoslavs who lived to witness the dissolution, YUTEL remains the last ‘uninfected’ space which as late as April 1992 tried to put the former colleagues and present warring parties on a telephone line together. Like UJDI, the independent media recognised the replication of authoritarianism and the danger of the establishment of a new political reality which was democratic in nothing but name.
In a series of mass popular peace protests and concerts from 1990 until 1992, some of which were strikingly captured in the photographs by Sarajevo-born and Paris-based photographer Milomir Kovačević, the “ordinary people” — Bosniaks, Serbs, Croats, Yugoslavs, are captured carrying Yugoslav flags, portraits of Tito and slogans which called for sanity: “Nations of all republics, get serious”, “Primitives of all nations, fuck off”, “We will live together”, “Primitives from the Parliament, go home to your villages”, “Workers — yes, warriors — no!”, “Down with the nationalists”, “For Yugoslavia”, “Peace, brother, peace.”
In Sarajevo, the last big protest gathering around 100,000 people, where the citizens voiced their anti-war and pro-Yugoslav stands took place on 5 April 1992. As a Sarajevo citizen and a participant in these events recalled: “We occupied the Parliament, made that circus, naively thinking our opinion matters to someone […] And then, in front of the “Holiday Inn”, they started shooting at us”.
As a response to the events in Croatia and Bosnia, the Belgrade-based Centre for Anti-War Action [Centar za antiratne akcije] organised a street protest entitled “Solidarity with the citizens of Dubrovnik” in October 1991, while the Civil Resistance Movement [Civilni pokret otpora] staged a street performance Black Ribbon [Crni flor] in June 1992, devoted to the citizens of Sarajevo. Ana Dević’s observation that “anti-war activism […] was a mobilisation of the most articulate segment of a widespread, all-Yugoslav, urban, cosmopolitan and genuinely non-ethno-nationalistic cultural identity” thus resonates with the aforementioned, often subjective perception of the Yugoslav capital cities as bastions of anti-war resistance, cosmopolitanism and anti-nationalism.
Conclusion
This article examined the years preceding the Yugoslav dissolution, trying to recover individuals and initiatives within the anti-nationalist and anti-war camp, which have remained marginalized in sociological and historical accounts. While the political elites were primarily driven by pragmatic motives, calculating that numerically and economically inferior Bosniaks and Macedonians would be able to preserve their relative security and prosperity within a larger polity, the extra-institutional actors were guided by a mixture of motives, including a personal history of dissent and struggle for democratisation. The special attachment of the Bosniaks and the Macedonians to the Yugoslav project is understandable when taking into account the historical circumstances related to their nation-building projects, in particular their position of being surrounded by stronger neighbors who have historically laid claims both over the territory they inhabit and in different ways questioned their separate national identity. These two communities, which for the first time in their history achieved a status of equal and recognised political partners and separate national and cultural entities, almost simultaneously developed the Yugoslav identity alongside their ethnic/national layers.
In this article, I argued that the reformist initiatives within the political and intellectual camps sought ways to deconstruct and redefine the Yugoslav supra-national framework by decoupling Yugoslavism and socialism through downplaying the ethno-national paradigm and advancing proposals for democratic Yugoslavism which would have engendered a new political and cultural framework transcending the strictly socialist/AVNOJ heritage as a founding myth.
Concrete reform programmes came too late to be able to influence or change the state of affairs. By 1991, the state-controlled media were able to instil sentiments of fear and threat and to influence and polarise public opinion. Many Yugoslavs were socialised in a system which from 1974 onwards functioned as a de facto confederate arrangement and promoted ‘Yugoslav socialist patriotism’ rather than a sense of Yugoslav belonging. The political scene was fragmented along ethnic lines during the 1990 republic parliamentary elections and never received a chance to patch itself up along ideological lines at the envisioned federal elections. Moreover, the resorting to symbolic and physical violence as a means for achieving political goals by nationalist elites and various hard-liners within the Yugoslav People’s Army, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and eventually in Bosnia-Herzegovina dealt the decisive blow to the project of democratic Yugoslavism.
Ultimately, the camp led by the leftist or liberal Yugoslav intellectuals lacked concrete political grounding and support from the existing republic elites — many of whom were recent converts to ethno-national authoritarianism and because of their background as communist functionaries were also experienced navigators of the late Yugoslav political arenas and deeply entrenched into networks and positions of power. While acknowledging the centrality of the ethno-national paradigm and the Serb-Croat-Slovene axis, this chapter reinforced the argument that there were viable alternatives upheld by a large number of Yugoslav citizens. The last Yugoslav years of anti-war contention and anti-nationalist activism are a story which should be (re)told and not forgotten.
This research was originally conducted as part of an MA degree course in Central European History at the Central European University in Budapest. I am grateful to Professors Florian Bieber, Balázs Trencsényi and Jo Shaw for their advice and support. The article was published in a book Resisting the Evil: [Post] Yugoslav Anti-War Contention, Bojan Bilić and Vesna Janković, Eds. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012).
Otvoreni magazin is publishing this article with the permission by the author.
Literature and notes:
1.Vojka Smiljanić-Đikić and Velimir Visković, “Why Sarajevo Notebooks?” in Vojka Smiljanić-Đikić (ed.), Best of Sarajevo Notebooks 18 (Sarajevo: Mediacentar, 2007).
2. Rada Iveković, “Za Radmilo, Biljanu i Marušu, 26.6.1991 Paris”, in Biljana Jovanović, Maruša Krese, Radmila Lazić, Rada Iveković, Vjetar ide na jug i obrće se na sjever (Belgrade: Radio B92, 1994).
3. Jasna Dragović-Soso, “Why Did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? An Overview of Contending Explanations” in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragović-Soso (eds.), State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (Purdue University Press, 2008).
4. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) along with the Comintern played a crucial role in the overall emancipation of the Bosniaks and the Macedonians and their eventual recognition as separate and equal nations within Yugoslavia – with the significant difference that the Bosniaks did not get their recognition until 1968, while Macedonia entered the Yugoslav socialist federation as a constituent nation. Regardless of the extent of ideological framing of the national question by the Comintern and the Yugoslav Communist Party, the elites which remained in (Vardar) Macedonia after 1918 saw the materialisation of their ideas for Macedonian autonomy and full-scale emancipation possible and likely within the Yugoslav framework. In the Bosnian context, because of the Serb-Croat-Muslim triad as the differentia specifica, the Yugoslavist platform of the KPJ found the most fertile ground: it denounced “tribal chauvinisms” and stigmatised the Serb and Croat medieval and feudal-style nationalisms and at that moment seemed the most progressive and promising political and ideological basis on which to solve the Bosnian knot, all the while preserving the compactness of the historical Bosnian territories.
5. For a thorough analysis of the fragmentation of Yugoslavia’s intellectual elite in the 1980s see: Jasna Dragović-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’ — Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (London: Hurst & Company, 2002).
6. Josip Glaurdić’s The Hour of Europe: Western Powers and the Breakup of Yugoslavia (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 2011) is among the rare scholarly accounts which dwell at greater length on the “Yugoslav options” as embodied primarily in the economic policies of the federal government. However, remaining within the realm of mainstream economic-political developments and reiterating that “it was also a plan destined for failure from the first day of its implementation” (p.65) or that “Marković’s program was therefore doomed to fail” (p.120), the author does not engage with the wider political, intellectual or popular (support for) pro-Yugoslav platforms.
7. Nebojša Popov used this and the subsequent (“Babylonian nightmare”) metaphor alluding to the Tower of Babel in a 1991 text, part of a larger study “How to Prevent a Total War?” Sabrina Ramet pursued the biblical story which “bears a certain allegorical resemblance to the story of Yugoslavia” in her study Balkan Babel: the Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević. In the realm of popular culture, the Slovenian band Miladojka Youneed released the album “Bloodylon” in 1990.
8. Dan Diner and Christian Gundermann, “On the Ideology of Antifascism”, New German Critique 67 (1996).
9. Alexander J. Motyl, ‘Thinking about Empire’, in Karen Barkey and Mark von Hagen (eds.), After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building (Perseus, 1997).
10. Francine Friedman, The Bosnian Muslims: Denial of a Nation (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).
11. Steven L. Burg, Conflict and Cohesion in Socialist Yugoslavia: Political Decision Making Since 1966 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).
12. Bora Kuzmanović, “Social distance towards individual nations (ethnic distance)” in Mladen Lazić (ed), Society in Crisis — Yugoslavia in the Early ‘90s (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 1995).
13. “As an idea, federalism points us to issues such as shared and divided sovereignty, multiple loyalties and identities, and governance through multi-layered institutions.” As cited in: Richard Simeon and Katherine Swinton, “Introduction: Rethinking Federalism in a Changing World”, in Karen Knopp et al. (eds), Rethinking Federalism: Citizens, Markets, and Governments in a Changing World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995).
14. Viktor Knapp, “Central and Eastern European Federations: Communist Theory and Practice” in Karen Knopp et al. (eds), Rethinking Federalism: Citizens, Markets, and Governments in a Changing World (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1995).
15, Sabrina Ramet, Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia 1962-1991 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
16. For a comprehensive analysis of the Yugoslav and the post-Yugoslav citizenship regimes and other related phenomena, please consult the results of the University of Edinburgh based research project on the “Europeanisation of Citizenship in the Successor States of the Former Yugoslavia” (CITSEE)
17. Gary K. Bertsch, Nation-Building in Yugoslavia: A Study of Political Integration and Attitudinal Consensus (Sage Publications, 1971).
18. Duško Sekulić, Garth Massey and Randy Hodson. “Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia”, American Sociological Review 59 (1994).
18. Sergej Flere, “Vojvođanska omladina, jugoslovenstvo i stavovi prema etnosu”, Ideje —časopis za teoriju suvremenog društva 2-3 (1987).
19. Andrew B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Stanford University Press, 1998).
20. Ana Dević, “Anti-War Initiative and the Un-Making of Civic Identities in the Former Yugoslav Republics”, Journal of Historical Sociology 10 (1997).
21. Slobodan Stanković, “Yugoslavia’s Census — Final Results”, Radio Free Europe Background Report, 10 March 1982, Open Society Archive (digital archive).
22. The six South Slavic nations (narodi) were the constituent peoples of Yugoslavia, while with the 1963 federal Constitution the term “nationalities” (narodnosti) replaced the previously used “national minority” (nacionalna manjina). The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution which granted the status of autonomous province to both Kosovo and Vojvodina and an equal representation on federal level, insisted on the equality of all nations and nationalities, defining the federation as “a socialist self-managed democratic community of working peoples and citizens and equal nations and nationalities” (art. 1).
23. Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia were the republics in which this increase was most prominent. In Croatia, the 1971 census recorded 84,118 “Yugoslavs” (1.9% of Croatia’s total population), while in March 1981 their number rose to 379,057 (8.2%). In Bosnia-Herzegovina the number of “Yugoslavs” rose from 43,796 to 326,280 —i.e. 7.91% of the total population in that republic. Out of the 271,326 “Yugoslavs” in Serbia proper (excluding Kosovo and Vojvodina), 162,127 lived in Belgrade alone.
24. Nikola Dugandžija, Jugoslavenstvo (Beograd: NIRO Mladost, 1985).
25. Maksim Korać, “Jugosloveni su nacija”, Omladinski pokret (mart 1987).
26. Nikola Dugandžija, Jugoslavenstvo (Beograd: NIRO Mladost, 1985); Prvoslav Ralić, Jugoslovenstvo danas i ovde (Beograd: OOUR Borba, 1986)
27. Dušan Ičević, Jugoslovenstvo i jugoslovenska nacija (Beograd: IRO Naučna knjiga, 1989).
28. Predrag Matvejević, Jugoslavenstvo danas: pitanja kulture (reprint) (Belgrade: MVTC, 2003).
29. With regard to India, Khilnani argues that federal arrangements were assumed to embody the idea of a “layered Indianness”. See: Suni Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Penguin, 2003). In the Soviet post-WWII context, Juliane Fürst identifies a similar phenomenon by referring to it as “multiple notions of Sovietness”. See: Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation: Soviet Post-War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
30. Mitja Žagar, “The Collapse of the Yugoslav Federation and the Viability of Asymmetrical Federalism” in Sergio Ortino, Mitja Žagar and Vojtech Mastny (eds.), The Changing Faces of Federalism: Institutional reconfiguration in Europe from East to West (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
31. Dejan Jović, “The Slovenian-Croatian Federal Proposal: a Tactical Move or an Ultimate Solution?” in Lenard J. Cohen and Jasna Dragovic-Soso (eds.), State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration (Purdue University Press, 2008).
32. Interviews with Vasil Tupurkovski and Bogić Bogićević (April 2009). “Tupurkovski and Bogićević at Talks in Zagreb”, Nova Makedonija, 3 April 1991.
33. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy – Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: The Brookings Institution, 1995).
34. Erol Rizaov, “Паничен страв од Анте Марковиќ”, Nova Makedonija, 30 March 1991.
35. “Case Slobodan Milošević – transcript 23rd October 2003 – testimony of witness Ante Markovic”, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
36. Alija Izetbegović, Sjećanja –autobiografski zapis (Sarajevo: Šahinpašić, 2001).
37. Platform for the future of the Yugoslav community”, in Документи за Република Македонија 1990-2005 (Skopje: Faculty of Law Iustinian I, 2008).
38. Kiro Gligorov, Македонија е сè што имаме (Skopje: Kultura, 2002).
39. “Prilog IIe: Magnetofonski snimak”, in Gajo Sekulić, Individuum i nasilje (Sarajevo: Rabic, 2006).
40. “Opinion No. 8 of the Arbitration Commission of the Peace Conference on Yugoslavia” in Snjezana Trifunovska (ed), Yugoslavia through Documents: from Its Creation to Its Dissolution (Dodrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1994).
41. Between 1991 and 1993, the five-member “Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia” (consisting of presidents of the Constitutional Courts of EC states, presided over by the President of the French Constitutional Council, Robert Badinter) delivered 15 opinions related to legal issues arising from the Yugoslav dissolution. The “Conference on Yugoslavia” was convened at the initiative of the EC in August 1991.
42. “Одлука за распишување на референдум во Република Македонија, Скопје, 6 август 1991” in Документи за Република Македонија 1990-2005 (Skopje: Faculty of Law Iustinian I, 2008), p. 152.
43. “The Referendum on Independence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, February 29 – March 1, 1992”, Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe.
44. The referendum questions read as follows: 1) “Jeste li za to da Republika Hrvatska, kao suverena i samostalna država, koja jamči kulturnu autonomiju i sva građanska prava Srbima i pripadnicima drugih nacionalnosti u Hrvatskoj, može stupiti u savez suverenih država s drugim republikama (prema prijedlogu Republike Hrvatske i Republike Slovenije za rješenje državne krize SFRJ)? 2) “Jeste li za to da Republika Hrvatska ostane u Jugoslaviji kao jedinstvenoj saveznoj državi (prema prijedlogu Republike Srbije i Socijalističke Republike Crne Gore za rješenje državne krize SFRJ)? 93,24% voted for the first and 5,38% for the second option. See: “Izvješće o provedenom referendum”.
45, Branko Horvat, “The Association for Yugoslav Democratic Initiative” in Dejan Đokić (ed.), Yugoslavs – Histories of a Failed Idea (London: Hurst & Company, 2003).
46. On UJDI in the Croatian context see: Mila Orlić, “Od postkomunizma do postjugoslavenstva: Udruženje za jugoslavensku demokratsku inicijativu”, Politička misao 48/4 (February 2012).
47. Branko Horvat, author of The Political Economy of Socialism published in English in 1982, advocated market socialism and was equally critical of the negative economic practices in socialist Yugoslavia as of those in post-communist Croatia during the rule of Tuđman. In addition, he was nominated for The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences (Nobel Prize in Economics).
48. Nebojša Popov, “Vojno ili civilno rešenje jugoslovenske krize”, in Gajo Sekulić, Individuum i nasilje (Sarajevo: Rabic, 2006).
49. Ljubomir Cuculovski, Сведоштва и коментари (Skopje: Kultura, 1999).
50. UJDI won one seat in the Serbian Parliamentary elections in December 1990.
51. Gajo Sekulić, Individuum i nasilje (Sarajevo: Rabic, 2006).
51. Interview with Ljubomir Cuculovski, President of UJDI-Skopje (April, 2009).
53. “Osnovna poslovnička pravila okruglog stola vlasti i opozicije u Jugoslaviji”, in Gajo Sekulić, Individuum i nasilje (Sarajevo: Rabic, 2006).
54. Nebojša Popov, “Za autoritet civilne vlasti”, in Gajo Sekulić, Individuum i nasilje (Sarajevo: Rabic, 2006).
55. Enes Osmančević and Medina Delalić, “Bosanska inicijativa”, Valter 24, 9 February 1990.
56. Stojance Nikolov, “Интервју: Љубомир Цуцуловски —Тажен е и трагичен сиот социјализам досега”, Студентски збор 1099, 2 October 1989.
57. Ljubomir Cuculovski, Сведоштва и коментари (Skopje: Kultura, 1999).
58. Neven Anđelić, Bosnia-Herzegovina: the end of a legacy (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
59. Slobodan Drakulić, “Srdja Popović: en exiled Yugoslav speaks”, Peace Magazine, March/April 1994
60. AVNOJ stands for the Antifascist Council of the People’s Liberation of Yugoslavia [Antifašističko Vijeće Narodnog Oslobođenja Jugoslavije], the supreme legislative and executive representative body during WWII, whose second session on 29 November 1943 is considered constitutive for socialist Yugoslavia.
61. Svetlana Lukić, “Responsibility of the Media for Creating war and Peace: the Case of Serbia” in Mirjana Vojvodić (ed.), Not in My Name (Niš: Centre for Civic Initiative, 2008).
62. Bojan Bilić, “Islands of print media resistance: ARKzin and Republika”, this volume. See also: Ivan Torov, “The Resistance in Serbia” and Sven Balas, “The Opposition in Croatia”, in Jasmina Udovički and James Ridgeway (eds.), Burn This House: The Making and Unmaking of Yugoslavia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
63. Milomir Kovačević Strašni, “Željeli smo samo mir (Sarajevska sjećanja)”, photo exhibition, Art gallery of Bosnia-Herzegovina, 29.02-25.03.2012.
63. The Croatian Ministry of Information did not allow YUTEL to be registered in Croatia. Under public pressure and once YUTEL gained widespread support and an increased number of viewers, Croatia granted a provisional license at the beginning of 1991. Moreover, YUTEL’s work was constantly undermined by the Serbian and the Croatian authorities, and both Belgrade and Zagreb broadcast YUTEL only after midnight.
64. Mark Thompson, Forging War: The Media in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina (London: Article 19 – International Center Against Censorship, 1994).
65. Kemal Kurspahić, Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace (Washington DC: US Institute of Peace Press, 2003).
66. For analyses of the rural-urban dichotomy in the Yugoslav context, see: Xavier Bougarel, “Yugoslav Wars: The ‘Revenge of the Countryside’ between Sociological Reality and Nationalist Myth, East European Quaterly XXXII/2 (June 1999): pp.157–75; John B. Allcock, “Rural-Urban Differences and the Break-Up of Yugoslavia”, Balkanologie, 6 (2002) 1-2, pp. 101–25. On perceptions of urbanity and antinationalism in the post-Yugoslav context see: Stef Jansen, Antinacionalizam: etnografija otpora u Zagrebu i Beogradu (Belgrade: Biblioteka XX Vek, 2005) and Stef Jansen, “Cosmopolitan Openings and Closures in Post-Yugoslav Antinationalism”, in Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco (eds.) Cosmopolitanism in Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
67. Narodi svih republika, uozbiljite se!, Primitivci svih nacija, jebite se!, Živjećemo zajedno, Primitivci iz skupštine GO HOME u svoja sela, Radnici-da, ratnici-ne!, Ua nacionalisti!!!, Za Jugoslaviju, Mir brate mir. The latter is a verse from the well-known anti-war song “Slušaj ‘vamo” [Listen!] by the Belgrade anti-war initiative/band “Rimtutituki”. For more on the youth and rock peace events see: Ljubica Spaskovska, “Stairway to Hell — the Yugoslav Rock Scene and Youth during the Crisis Decade 1981-1991”, East Central Europe 38 (2011).
68. It is worth noting that, once the armed conflicts became imminent, some supposedly anti-war activist groups appropriated the mainstream nationalist discourse. Fragmentation within the Croatian women’s/feminist activism scene.
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