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How successful was the promotion of a collective Yugoslav identity?
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Student number: 680032205How successful was the promotion of a collective Yugoslav identity in the former Yugoslavia
between the years 1981-1991?
The dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and its subsequent brutal ethnic conflicts in Croatia and
Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s has been thoroughly analysed from a multitude of angles
by historians and social scientists endeavouring to pinpoint the cause of the brutal disintegration.
The historiography of Yugoslavia has mainly focused on the roles of nationalism and ethnicity in the
breakup of the state, somewhat neglecting the importance of Yugoslavism and the part played by
anti-war movements in late 1980s society. With 1.2 million people out of a population of 22.4 million
having defined themselves as Yugoslavs in the 1981 census, it is important to analyse how successful
the promotion of a Yugoslav identity was and who defined themselves as Yugoslavs.1 The focus on
identity remains relevant today with tensions between Serbia and Kosovo as well as lingering
frictions between nations of the former Yugoslavia. Tensions between Serbia and Montenegro
recently resurfaced when new laws were passed requiring religious communities with property to
produce evidence of ownership before 1918 when Montenegro was an independent nation.2 This
law is directed against the Serbian Orthodox presence in Montenegro and can be seen as a recent
example of how national identity in the Balkans remains relevant.
The death of the influential Yugoslav statesman Josip Broz Tito in 1980 incited widespread
predictions of disintegration due to the importance of his personal image and ideology in creating a
collective ‘Yugoslav consciousness’.3 The uncertain political and economic climate of Yugoslavia
during the early 80s saw historians such as Ivo Banac focus on the viability of Yugoslavia as a nation
in his 1984 book The National Question in Yugoslavia.4 Political scientists such as Steven L. Burg and
Michael L. Berbaum used data found from Yugoslav surveys and censuses to create tables predicting
the factors that created a sense of Yugoslav identity in 1989.5 With the disintegration of Yugoslavia
and resulting ethnic conflict in Croatia the year 1992 saw historical travelogues from BBC
correspondent Misha Glenny and British correspondent Mark Thompson of the Slovenian magazine
Mladina, both of which focused on how the war was developing as they travelled across Yugoslavia.
The bulk of historiography however came during and after the violent ethnic conflict in Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1994 with books from insiders such as Mihailo Crnobrnja a senior official of the
former Yugoslav government and Susan Woodward a member of the UN operation sent to provide
humanitarian assistance. Finally, due to the increasing access to archives of the former Yugoslav
nations, more recent works from the 21st century have engaged in more detail the education system,
the media and the army, all of which were focal points of promoting and undermining Yugoslav
identity during the 1980s.
Before discussing how historians have approached the promotion of Yugoslav identity it is important
to note that histories that focused on the viability of Yugoslavia as a nation inherently relate to
identity in the sense that the multicultural structure of Yugoslavia itself is questioned when
1
Paul Lendvai, ‘Yugoslavia Without Yugoslavs: the roots of the crisis’, International Affairs, 67, 2 (1991), 251-
261 (p. 253).
2
https://www.euronews.com/2019/12/28/hundreds-protest-in-serbia-against-new-montenegro-church,
[accessed 1 March 2020].
3
Viktor Meier, Yugoslavia: a history of its demise, trans. by Sabrina Ramet (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 2.
4
Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: origins, history, politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984).
5
Steven L. Burg and Michael L. Berbaum, ‘Community, Integration and Stability in Multinational Yugoslavia’,
The American Political Science Review, 83, 2 (1989), 535-554.
, emphasis is placed on inter-ethnic relations between Croats and Serbs for example. A prime instance
of this can be seen through the ancient hatreds and clash of civilizations arguments. George F.
Kennan and Robert Kaplan both argued that the use of brutal violence during the Yugoslav wars was
a Balkan phenomenon.6 Kennan stated that ‘aggressive nationalism’ seen in Yugoslavia was the
result of tribal ancient hatreds between the Serbs and Croats.7 American political scientist Samuel
Huntington argued in a similar vein that the historical fault lines between Islam, Orthodox
Christianity and Catholicism were to blame for the current ethnic conflicts.8 Susan Woodward
dismissed the ancient hatreds argument as avoiding the real problem in Yugoslavia, the breakdown
of political and civil order.9 V. P. Gagnon Jr also challenged the claim of deeply felt ethnic hatreds
instead arguing that Yugoslav elites at the end of the Cold War in an attempt to cling to power
sought ‘political homogeneity’ rather than ethnic homogeneity.10 Jasna Dragovic-Soso explored the
role that Serbian intellectuals played in the collapse of Yugoslavia from a structural contextual
approach, considering the conditions in which nationalism rose to prominence throughout
Yugoslavia.11 Accepting the primordial hatreds argument would reject the notion of a collective
Yugoslav identity ever existing as Croats and Serbs deep-rooted hatred for each other would prevent
populations from unifying.
Another frequent approach from historians such as Ivo Banac and Christian Axboe Nielsen has been
to argue that the failure to promote a unified Yugoslav identity stemmed from the first Yugoslavia of
the interwar period. Nielsen argued that King Aleksander, the Serbian monarch of the Kingdom of
Yugoslavia failed to create a unified Yugoslav nation and helped incense interethnic tensions through
the use of coercion and surveillance against political enemies.12 Banac claimed that Croat and Serb
national ideologies were incompatible forwarding a determinist argument that a collective Yugoslav
identity could never form.13 Both Banac and Nielsen agreed that the dominance of Serbs in the first
Yugoslavia discredited future attempts to impose a Yugoslav identity and that Tito’s suppression of
nationalism failed to solve the national question. Andrew Wachtel and Aleksander Pavkovic on the
other hand argued that the only way of unifying the country’s diverse national groups was through
the creation of a unifying national Yugoslav ideology.14 Wachtel asserted that Yugoslavism was
abandoned by Yugoslavia’s political elites during the 1960s facilitating the rise of separate national
cultures that would in the future lead to the disintegration of Yugoslavia.15 Pavkovic blamed the
6
Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: a journey through history (London: Papermac, 1994).
7
George F. Kennan, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New
Introduction and Reflections on the Present Conflict (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace, 1993), p. 11.
8
Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, Foreign Affairs, 72, 3 (1993), 22-49.
9
Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: chaos and dissolution after the Cold War (Washington: Brookings
Institution, 1995).
10
V. P. Gagnon Jr, The Myth of Ethnic War, Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2004), p. 9.
11
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, ‘Saviours of the Nation’: Serbia’s intellectual opposition and the revival of nationalism
(Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
12
Christian Axboe Nielsen, Making Yugoslavs: identity in King Aleksandar’s Yugoslavia (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2014).
13
Ivo Banac, The National Question in Yugoslavia: origins, history, politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1984).
14
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, ‘Why did Yugoslavia Disintegrate? an Overview of Contending Explanations’, in State
collapse in South-Eastern Europe: new perspectives on Yugoslavia’s disintegration, ed. by Lenard J. Cohen and
Jasna-Dragovic Soso (West Lafayette, Ind: Purdue University Press, 2008) p. 8.
15
Andrew Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 229.
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