ABSTRACT
In this chapter I would like to narrate the Yugoslav story as a tragedy that is
strewn with misapprehensions. Yugoslavia was not a nation in the sense given to
that word since the French Revolution: it was never really a ‘community of
citizens’, and yet its concept was not artificial. The modern nation, with a political
identity, was built on the ethnic community, characterized by cultural and
historical affinities. In western Europe, political unity had been established well
before the emergence of modern nationalism, but in the eastern part of the
continent, ethnic communities developed without turning into political commu-
nities. Each new so-called nation, as it emerged, wanted to coincide with a
territory and to blend its population into a whole so as to constitute a nation-state. Yugoslavia extended across a zone of fault lines, but also of passageways and
crossroads. In the 19th century a source of unity came to be seen in the speech and
way of life of the South Slav populations, but for as long as empires existed, the
Yugoslav idea remained a unifying ideology, not an identity, subject to a variety
of interpretations. When that dream came true at the end of the First World War,
the articulation of several South Slav identities was already well advanced, yet the
founders of the Yugoslav state wanted to treat them as subgroups of one nation-
an ideal or an illusion? In spite of differences and problems, because Yugoslavia
was generally seen to be the most reasonable framework for the coexistence of its
related ethnic groups, the Yugoslavs went on searching for a viable political
solution for over 70 years, from crisis to crisis. The Second World War brought to an end what has since been called the ‘First
Yugoslavia’—with occupation, dismemberment and civil, ideological and ethnic
strife, as the conquerors destroyed the state and set its components against each
other. However, the outcome of the war led to a ‘Second Yugoslavia’, because the
defeat of Nazism destroyed those movements that had sought to solve the
problems of ethnic differences by withdrawing into tribalism under foreign
protection. The Communist Party of Yugoslavia under Tito reunified the country
as a federation of related ethnic communities, but wartime wounds went unhealed
in the certainty that communism would cauterize them. The social revolution was no less radical than the political revolution. Its
climax was not reached until the 1960s when the challenges to central control by the wartime revolutionaries’ generation had become such that a redistribution of power was called for. What happened then was that sovereignty was distributed to regional leaderships, in what amounted to a feudalization of party rule under the paramount suzerainty of the ageing dictator. From the 1970s the regime degenerated into a coalition of local oligarchies, which allowed the majority ethnic
group to assert itself in every constituent unit as a way of finding a new legitimation.
