Pieter Troch

The Yugoslav national idea was the ideological cornerstone that substantiated the formation of a Yugoslav state in 1918 and sustained that state throughout the short twentieth century. Still, the scholarly literature has remained silent about the precise definition of Yugoslavism and its concrete impact on the region's modern history. " Nationalism and Yugoslavia: Education, Yugoslavism and the Balkans Before World War II " offers the first meticulous study of Yugoslavism as a state ideology and a category of practice in the nationalising interwar Yugoslav Kingdom. The book specifically looks at the state's nation-building policy in the domain of education, offering a much-needed compensation to the focus on the country's economic and political history. It relates Yugoslav nation-building aspirations from above with signals coming from below, an approach which remains rare for the Yugoslav case and East European history in general. The institutionalisation of Yugoslav nationhood from above is investigated through a study of legislative acts, curricula and canonical writings. The responses from below are unveiled through an in-depth study of the way mediatory social actors in the domain of education engaged with the state's nation-building policy. Attention goes out to textbook authors, publicists, local authorities and representatives of Yugoslav teachers, cultural-educational associations and Yugoslav religious institutions. The main argument of the book is that the state's nation-building policy appropriated codified Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian national identities and stressed the common national character of Yugoslav Orthodoxy, Catholicism and Islam to make sense of Yugoslav nationhood. The strength of this approach was that it allowed for various sub-national approaches to Yugoslav unity, as apparent from textbooks used in the country. The responses from below, however, indicate that the exclusionary use of Yugoslav nationhood in the attempts of the nationalising Yugoslav state to establish absolute state control was led to the growing divergence between Yugoslav nationhood and other categories of collective identification available, especially Croatian national identity and religious identities.

This chapter contributes to urban studies of conviviality from and within the perspective of the Balkans. It argues that some of the difficulties related to analysing the concurrence of convivial encounter and racialised division speak to the Eurocentric character of studies of conviviality in super-diverse cities in the Global West. The chapter provincialises urban theorising on conviviality and related concepts through a thick historical analysis of the sociospatial composition of Mitrovica in Kosovo, an exemplary divided city in the Balkans. Instead of approaching the city as a regionally distinctive and not quite European case of ethnic division, the chapter identifies various modes in which conviviality and division are co-constituted in Mitrovica’s modern history. After a brief introduction of the case study, the chapter analyses bottom-up transgressive practices in the contemporary divided city to present a critical reading of conviviality studies. The chapter then engages with memories of everyday multiculture in post-Ottoman Mitrovica. Drawing on insights from Ottoman urban studies, it shows that conviviality functions as a constitutive part of urban systems of inequality, hierarchy and exclusion. The chapter finally applies these insights to analyse concomitant processes of conviviality and ethnic boundary-making under socialist urbanisation.

This article provides a business history of the medium-sized wood processing enterprise Kosmet Šper, established for local development purposes in weakly-developed socialist Kosovo. It explores business reorganisations undertaken by local political elites and management aimed to align the enterprise’s continued operation with socialist Yugoslavia’s market-oriented economic reforms of the 1960s. The first part of the article scrutinises these interventions and argues that the locus of ultimate political decision-making shifted to the units of the federal state. The second part of the article looks at the increasing authority transferred to professional managers in return for keeping the underperforming enterprise running. This led to a paternalistic style of management, but the legitimacy of the management remained subject to overlapping challenges of function, ethnicity, and origin. Part three explores the labour force fluctuations caused by the shift of responsibility for the performance of the enterprise to internal production failures.

The inclusion of symbolic resources related to South Slav Muslim collective identity in the educational material of the interwar Yugoslav state reveals a growing sensitivity for South Slav Muslim religious identity. The integration of these symbolic resources within Yugoslav nationhood took place along the broader pattern of the parallel nationalisation of the various religious traditions among the Yugoslav population. Intellectual representatives of South Slav Muslims repudiated the concretisation of this template for two related reasons. First, definitions of Yugoslav nationhood were informed by an overarching division between Occident and Orient. Consequently, South Slav Muslims occupied the hybrid position of an oriental element within the essentially Christian Yugoslav nation. Second, the state’s nationalities policy assumed the Serbian ‘tribal’ affiliation of South Slav Muslims, which again carried certain religious claims with it. Representatives of South Slav Muslims rejecte...

Scholars of socialist cities often refer to the gap between the collectivistic ideology underpinning socialist urban planning and the centrality of the private in everyday life. Socialist urban planners and policy-makers maintained that the material basis of the socialist city would produce new social forms and moral values. This ideological starting point was reflected in collective property relations, the expansion of the public sphere, the uniformity of the built environment, standardisation of housing, and communal living in residential neighbourhoods. 1 Historical and anthropological studies of socialist urbanity in Eastern Europe have noted, however, that the collectivist aspirations of socialist urban planners did not materialise. On the one hand, the implementation of urban planning clashed with the material contingencies of pre-socialist cities, the prioritisation of heavy industry over urban development, and massive rural-to-urban migration. 2 On the other hand, the state's authoritarian control of the public sphere forced individuals to withdraw to private realms for individual agency and emotional investment. In actually existing socialist cities, the public and private were infused with diametrically opposing moral categories. 3

This article examines spatial patterns of socialist urban transformation in Mitrovica (Kosovo) from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s. During the initial phase of intensive urban development until the mid-1960s, the monopolistic position of the high-priority enterprise Trepča in financing and allocating housing in combination with the material and physical contingencies of the pre-socialist city led to compressed socio-spatial duality between the new socialist neighbourhood to the north of the Ibar River and the pre-socialist city on the south bank of the river. The reforms of 1965 strengthened the position of the municipality as the coordinator of market-regulated individual engagements in house construction.

The Sokol gymnastics movement was both in numbers and in spatial range one of the largest voluntary associations in interwar Yugoslavia. It was very active and visible, through numerous public activities at the local, regional, national and even international level, prestigious new halls and regular publications and media presence. In giving a historical overview of the Sokol movement against the background of interwar Yugoslav state-building, this article focusses on the politicisation and state incorporation of the association. During the 1920s, the Sokol served as a proxy for local and regional political struggles between centralist and decentralist parties in the Croatian part of the country. Under the Royal Dictatorship, the Sokol movement developed into a compulsory and state-controlled institution for physical and national education. This article argues that the incorporation of the Sokol movement in the state-controlled civil sphere was not a one-directional development. The Sokol movement itself made use of the central state’s predisposition towards state control over associative culture for internal institutional purposes. In the process, however, the social position of the Sokol movement transformed from a voluntary association that could mediate between state and society into an exclusive marker of loyalty to nation and state.

This article analyses the interconnection of socio-economic divisions and nationhood in Socialist Kosovo through a case-study of employment politics in the Trepça mining complex during the 1960s. The article first describes the shifting cadre politics in Trepça, which aimed to increase the degree of skills of the work collective and to address the dramatic under-representation of Albanians in management and specialist positions. It then analyses the departure of Serb and Montenegrin specialists from the enterprise and the internal dispute over the proportional relevance of socio-economic and national grounds for this trend. The second half of the article situates these developments against two levels of social division in the enterprise: vertical social divisions between manual production workers and specialist cadres and horizontal divisions at the top management level. The article argues that the divisions between low-skilled production workers and management personnel was not politically relevant. Such vertical social divisions were depoliticised and denationalised. The outspoken national dimension of cadre politics for specialist personnel and the pluralist tendencies in the management culture of Yugoslav enterprises during the late 1960s, on the other hand, nationalised and politicised the competition between a new generation of Albanian technically-schooled specialists and the predominantly Serb, politically-appointed managers in function.

The celebration of St Sava’s Day in schools during the interwar period expressed the policy of the Yugoslav state authorities to reconcile religious diversity among its population with national unity by highlighting the parallel national character of Yugoslav Catholicism, Orthodoxy and Islam. These celebrations, however, generated strong opposition from leaders of the religious communities in Yugoslavia. Crucially, the criticism was not directed against the Yugoslav national program in education as such, but revolved around the fundamentally different ontologies of the nationalizing state and religious thinkers. For the former, religious symbolic resources like St Sava served the purpose of the nation, for the latter the meaning of St Sava could not be detached from Orthodoxy. The divergence between religious thinking and the national program of the Yugoslav state authorities explains the parallel shift among religious thinkers in Yugoslavia away from Yugoslavism to the Croatian Catholic, Serbian Orthodox and Bosnian Muslim nationalisation of religion.

Croatian and Yugoslav national identity have been closely connected throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century. This article questions the assumption that Croatian national identification inherently opposed the Yugoslav nationalising efforts of the interwar Yugoslav state by means of a study of commemorative activities. In the commemoration of the millennial anniversary of the Croatian Kingdom in 1925, the Yugoslav level of national identity was activated as a complement to Croatian national identity. During the 1930s, commemorations of Matija Gubec and the Illyrian movement conveyed a mutually exclusive relation between Croatian and Yugoslav national identity. I argue that the dismissal of grassroots Croatian historical commemorations that were indifferent but not averse to Yugoslav nationhood in the integral Yugoslav policy of the authoritarian state during the 1930s curtailed the potential of these commemorations as vehicles for Yugoslav national identification and complicated the concurrence of Croatian and Yugoslav nationhood.

The politicized polarization of Montenegrin society around the question of Montenegrin statehood in the context of the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, finally leading to Montenegrin independence in 2006, is accompanied by a remarkable identity change toward a clear division between Serbian and Montenegrin nationhood. I situate this development within the long-term interference between Montenegrin and Serbian categories of identification in elite articulations of national identity in Montenegro during the twentieth century. In the early twentieth century, the Montenegrin and Serbian categories were concurrently available for national identification in the context of political modernization in the country. Reflecting the lasting political and broader societal relevance of nationhood during the Yugoslav twentieth century, diverging interpretations of the relation between both categories of nationhood have continuously substantiated political divides in Montenegro. One part of the political spectrum subordinated Montenegrin regional identity to Serbian nationhood, the other part attached increasingly far-reaching political demands to Montenegrin national identity while maintaining a sense of Serbian national identity in the domain of culture and ethnicity. In the course of the Yugoslav twentieth century, the complementary relation between both categories of nationhood was challenged by exclusive definitions of Serbian and Montenegrin nationhood, a development which has to be related to the continuous questioning of relations between various concurring categories of national identity available in Yugoslavia. The current institutionalization of Montenegrin nationhood in independent Montenegro and the development toward clear-cut Serbian and Montenegrin mono-national identities is leading to the regression of multiple nationhood among the broader population.

Studies of nationhood in interwar Yugoslavia generally refrain from considering dynamic relations between different levels of collective identity available in the state. Inspired by scholarly studies which have pointed at the compatibility of national and sub-national identities, this article examines interaction between definitions of Yugoslav national ideology and Serbian collective identity in textbooks published in Belgrade. In textbooks of the 1920s the imagination of Yugoslav unity reflected the structure of Serbian national identity as it had been defined in pre-First World War Serbian textbooks, providing few possibilities for other viable sub-national definitions of Yugoslav identity. After the establishment of the Royal Dictatorship in 1929 textbooks reshaped Serbian collective identity by embedding it in a more openly defined Yugoslav whole to which different sub-national traditions could contribute. Thus, contrary to its programmatic insistence on the homogeneity of Yugoslav identity, the dictatorship’s educational policy created opportunities for multiple sub-national interpretations of Yugoslav unity.

Although the Yugoslav national idea took a prominent place throughout the interwar period as an underlying ideological principle for the Yugoslav state, various interpretations of the idea coexisted in the political and cultural sphere. This article examines how Yugoslav national identity was defined in elementary education curricula for language, history and geography. Although linguistic unity was considered one of the fundaments of Yugoslav national unity, no far-reaching measures were taken to set a uniform Yugoslav standard language. Slovenian was treated as a separate language, and different dialects and alphabets within Serbo-Croatian were accepted. Curricula for history stressed the similarities and parallels between different ‘tribal’ – Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian – histories and reinterpreted symbolic resources, which had already been linked to Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian national histories, as common Yugoslav national symbols. The core elements around which this Yugoslav synthesis was constructed, were deduced from Serbian state history. Finally, the curricula for geography attempted to replace the traditional historical regions with neutral geographical entities. After some flawed attempts during the 1920s, the geography curriculum of 1933 adopted the new administrative division of Yugoslavia in banovinas. For each of the subjects under scrutiny a different strategy was adopted, but in all cases there remained considerable overlap between Yugoslav national identity and established definitions of sub-national collective identities available among the South Slavs.

The common point of interest uniting the contributions to this volume is the transformation of collective identity within the context of broader societal transformation that took place in Central and Southeast Europe between 1989 and 2010. The work is focused on discursive constructions of collective identity in speeches delivered at and print media covering national holidays. The analyses invariably confirm that identity discourse used on the occasion of national holidays was subject to frequent and drastic changes and controversies, indicating the salience of national identity as a category of practice for elites during societal transformations. Although the academic relevance of the articles is beyond dispute, the volume as a whole lacks an overarching framework. The authors apply a broad array of methodological approaches within discourse analysis. At times this complicates the analysis and the argument of the separate articles and the volume as a whole. The same applies to the introduction by Liljana Šarić and Karen Gammelgaard, which reads like a series of thoughts and lacks a concise definition of methodology and concern. Additionally, most of the contributions remain restricted to a descriptive account of the instability of interpretations of national holidays by press and politicians, and no overarching findings or further research questions are attached to the different case-studies. Nevertheless, a number of shared findings are evident. A first group of essays focuses on the profoundly changing interpretations of national holidays in the region since the fall of Communism. Marko Soldić clarifies how in Macedonia, Ilinden has gained new relevance and meaning to make sense of the country's internal and international situation. Soldić also points out that the two major political parties appropriated Ilinden in support of their political agendas, establishing parallel interpretations and commemorations. Alexander Bielicki studies homilies delivered at the Slovak national pilgrimage on Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows Day to show that the languages of religion and nationhood were closely intertwined in the late Communist period and mid 2000s. However, the content of the intertwining changed drastically, contingent on the socio-political position of the Catholic Church in Slovakia. Gammelgaard studies presidential addresses delivered on 28 October by Czechoslovakia's last Communist president and the three presidents of the Czech Republic after 1993. She too concludes that the discursive construction of Czech national identity changed considerably depending on the political context. A second, more in-depth and stimulating theme in the essays revolves around