Socialist Serbia's Narratives: From Yugoslavia to a Greater Serbia

Abstract

The essay surveys various attempts of Serbian intellectual and political elites to define Serbian national goals in relation to a socialist Yugoslavia. I suggest that even though rhetorical devices and policies applied throughout the entire socialist period have appeared to be the same (e.g., that all Serbs should live in one state), different contexts in each of the subperiods of socialist Serbia and Yugoslavia yielded entirely different results (e.g., in favor of Yugoslavia, or in favor of a Greater Serbia). In the paper, I identify four distinct, yet interrelated, Serbian national discourses: conservative–socialist, socialist–reformist, national–liberal, and xenophobic nationalist. They are evaluated in relation to official Yugoslavism in the early 1960s and Serbian reformist policy of civic nationalism in the late 1960s to early 1970s, debates over the 1974 Constitution, and, finally, Serbian intellectual and political responses to the Yugoslav political crisis in the late 1980s to early 1990s. These moments have been chosen because of their particular relevance for understanding the mutations of Serbian national discourse in the former Yugoslavia.