Thoughts on Saviours of the Nation by Jasna Dragovic-Soso

Essentialist views accounting for the rise of nationalism in the Former Yugoslavia have taken a myriad of paths. Whether they be the return of ‘ancient hatreds’ ingrained in the people, the economic decline during the 1980s fuelling social discontent, the fall of communism more generally in the east, the actions of political actors wishing to consolidate power and using any tool at their disposal, or others.

However, if we are to understand how nationalism forms as an ideology, as opposed to a movement as it often becomes, then there have been few analyses of the role of academics in Yugoslavia, and Serbia specifically, in how they (re)constructed and projected Serbian nationalism during the 1980s. Jasna Dragović-Soso goes further than the usual sign posting of events, such as the leaking of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She describes how nationalism developed among the intelligentsia, and traces its origins from the 1950s when they originally formed as an opposition movement to the regime that subsequently called for human rights and democracy in the immediate post-Tito era. She observes how many of these opposition intellectuals, a potential political alternative championing the human rights causes of Serbs in Kosovo, mutated into nationalists and became neutered as the ‘opposition’ when their cause received acceptance and promotion in the social and political realm. It was this capitulation that allowed Milosević to gain a tighter grip on power during the 1990s, and suffocate any building of a political alternative.

Miroslav Hroch’s Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe is clearly an influence in Dragović-Soso’s work. Although his empirically backed theory is indicative of novel nationalist movements, his three-stage process of nationalist mobilisation is evident in this book as its accounts for the re-emergence of Serbian nationalism in the 1980s. It is the first stage, the 'heightened cultural awareness of national distinctiveness among intellectuals and the literati' that Dragović-Soso captures superbly.

The example of Serbia in the 1980s must be viewed in the context of the history of Serbian nationalism. It had existed and thrived before, and had been a leading element in the struggles of the first Yugoslav state. The inability to challenge official historical thought during the Tito era meant that Serbian history was both petrified and silenced. It sat alongside other nationalisms, historic and new, that bubbled under the surface in a similar manner during the second Yugoslavia. The Croatian Spring that ended the liberal period in academia in the 1960s, was followed by a liberal period in Serbia, whilst the crackdown ensued in Croatia. Slovenia gradually liberalised and reached its zenith in the 1980s. These environments set the scene for how the republican intelligentsia’s interacted and began to diverge in their outlook. Dragović-Soso’s hones in on the situation in Kosovo and the subsequent split between the Serbian and Slovene intellectuals as the two occurrences that allowed the intelligentsia in Serbia to move from being a political alternative to one in the keeping of Milosević.

Kosovo came to the fore in the early 1980s following years of disgruntlement regarding the now majority-Albanian’s demand for republican status. Violence and civil disobedience resulted in a brutal crackdown. The Serbian intelligentsia championed the desire for human rights to take precedence in Kosovo, which rested mostly on the situation experienced by the Kosovan Serb population. But Dragović-Soso emphasises that the key issue was about human rights, and had the support from other republican intelligentsias. This was also a manoeuvre by the Serbian intelligentsia to show that they could critique the existing regime and pose alternatives. Prior to this, the intelligentsia debated the revision of official Partisan history, therefore rocking the foundations of the myths of the establishment of Socialist Yugoslavia in 1944. In tandem with this, the wider demand for democratisation emerged, whether that would result in internal party pluralism or multi-party pluralism.

It was following this that certain individuals within the formal institutions of the intelligentsia – the Writers Association or the Academy of Sciences and Arts – began to bring forth arguments that put Serbian history and identity as a solution to the demise of the Socialist Yugoslav regime. Past events such as the Serbs being eternal victims of others and renegotiating the numbers of Serbs killed during WWII struck a nerve during the topical issue of Kosovo and the plight of the Serbs there. The infamous ‘Memorandum’ was seen as the fusion of these ideas with the wider alternative programme sought in opposition to the current regime.

But how did this Memorandum make the leap to the political sphere? Dragović-Soso plays down the direct link to the growing power of Milosević, and critiques the timing of events. She points out that Milosević had no part in the Memorandum’s writing or leaking, and actually dismissed it as ‘Serb chauvinism’. It wasn’t until a year later that he espoused themes from it. So the intelligentsia were still acting independently of party politics in 1986. Moving from the document itself, the authors themselves provided the link. Dobrica Ćosić and Mihailo Marković were two of the main writers who would eventually go on to become political leaders in the 1990s under Milosević’s newly created Socialist Party of Serbia. The document itself caused a public sensation and fed into public discourse on the issue. I do not share the same view that Milosević could not have known about it, as he socialised in similar elite circles in Belgrade. Instead I feel he allowed it to play out in the public arena first to test the waters, and then come in with his own version of it sometime later.

Parallel to these events were the relationships between the republican intelligentsias. The one relationship singled out is that between the Serbs and the Slovenes. Slovenians were at one with the Serbs on the issue of Kosovo at the beginning and, separately, both moved towards developing their own renewed sense of national identity and history. However, in Slovenia this also went in tandem with democratisation in society (for example youth organisations being able to criticise the regime), but this did not occur in Serbia. It got to a point where Slovenians began to criticise the situation in Kosovo in opposition to the claims of their Serbian counterparts. Slovenes stuck to human rights and democratisation as fundamental ideals. The Serbs stuck to them only in the context of protecting the Kosovan Serbs.

The Slovenes experienced their national renewal coming about through democracy. Serbs saw theirs coming about through Milosević. Dragović-Soso concludes that the Serb intelligentsia for the most part chose the nation over democracy after Milosević sang a similar tune to the Academy’s Memorandum.

One question that Dragović-Soso fails to account for is how the regime in Serbia allowed the proliferation of dissent to occur in regime-controlled institutions. Although partially explained under the general ‘liberal’ period that followed Tito’s death, it is not explained why the regime acted leniently towards these individuals and their work. Did personal relationships exist between middle and top ranking regime officials and the intelligentsia, particularly on the Belgrade scene, which meant rebukes were mild ‘slaps on the wrist’? Or was the weakness of the regime so much so that they did not have the ability to instil conformity as they had done in the past? It is plausible that some in the regime wanted this dissent grow to in order to bolster their hand in the wider political games being played during the period to consolidate personal power.

What Dragović-Soso delivers is an in-depth account of the leading players in the intelligentsia and their institutional bodies in Serbia, and how their critical thinking in the 1980s turned from human rights and democracy to nationalism by the 1990s. Once this project was taken up by leaders wishing to direct the future of Yugoslavia, the dissident intellectuals who would have been natural alternatives to the regime, instead made a choice and became co-conspirators in promoting Serb nationalism they originally, perhaps naively, articulated.