Yugoslavia: twice built, twice destroyed. The picture of a love-hate relationship – can’t live together, much less apart. There’s a rather odd sort of resentment and even more awkward attraction at work here. The greater the differences, the stronger the intimacy, they say. If a good dose of differences is lacking, they should be created, invented, blown out of proportion, and translated into an axiom.
Let’s go back to the beginning, shall we? The first Yugoslavia was born in the aftermath of World War I, more than 100 years ago, in 1918. It was a kingdom, with a unitary system of government and vast cultural and economic differences among different parts of the state – some had been territories of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, others under Ottoman rule for centuries. It was a multinational, multireligious, multilingual, fascinating, and exciting place, producing a superb, critical intellectual elite. It wasn’t democratic or economically successful; its roads, industry, and attempts at urbanization left much to be desired, and it failed to secure mass literacy or resolve the national question. The Serbs were a dominant majority, ethnically and politically, and others complained that the degree of autonomy they had enjoyed under the Habsburg monarchy had plummeted. The history of the kingdom was largely accompanied by political violence and dictatorship.
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia disintegrated with barely a fight, shortly after a German-led attack in the spring of 1941. The people were caught in a nightmare of war and interethnic bloodshed. A communist revolution, spearheaded by Tito and his Partisans, went hand in hand with the successful resistance to the Nazi occupiers by Tito’s forces. These emerged triumphant from the war, as they had proven perfectly able to gain massive support, liberate the country, create the fundamentals of new, communist authorities, and win over the leaders of the Allies, which might have been more difficult than everything else. Fighting against all the enemies, they were fighting for a second Yugoslavia.
And they made it. They didn’t wait for the war to end to proclaim the new state, heralding the birth of a new Yugoslavia in 1943. Historians believe that it was precisely the Yugoslav platform that made it possible for them to defeat not only the occupiers but also the nationalist movements that surfaced across ethnicities, eager to use the global conflict to build their own nation-states, as big and ethnically homogenous as possible. In creating the new state, the communists relied on principles that were the exact opposite of those on which the Kingdom of Yugoslavia had rested. The second Yugoslavia was a federal republic. It was urbanized, modernized, industrialized, and more literate, and it addressed the bitter national questions of the past by creating republics and provinces for all its peoples, promoting the ideal of “brotherhood and unity” along the way. Yet it wasn’t democratic or economically efficient either, and the rule of law, free elections, freedom of the press, and independent institutions certainly weren’t the ultimate paradigms it strived for.
To learn more about the fascinating history and lasting legacy of the Yugoslav era, get the digital edition of City Less Ordinary.
Author: Dubravka Stojanović
Photographs: Museum of Yugoslavia
