ABSTRACT
This chapter examines why the potential for re-articulating Serbian-Albanian relations through the egalitarian language of Yugoslav socialism was never realized. The experimental character of Yugoslav self-management socialism produced instability and challenges to its own legitimacy, inducing the political elite to resort to the strategy of the “discursive reduction” of protest movements. We show that this elite, ideologically challenged by the Kosovo protests of 1968, 1981 and 1988, used media discourse to reduce the social dimension of the revolts to a mere expression of nationalism. We propose a tentative theoretical model explaining how the strategy of discursive reduction induced various social groups to gradually renounce even the possibility of articulating their experiences of injustice in the social key, so that their demands ultimately seemed incompatible with socialist Yugoslavia.
