[BRIEF NOTE] Yugoslavias That Never Were

[rfmcdonald]

I'm rather envious of nhw for his recent visit to Slovenia. You see, I'm something of a Slovenophile, as I blogged this spring. There's something about Slovenia--the successful struggle of the folk against Germanization and Italianization, the rapid mdoernization, the relatively peaceful assertion of independence and subsequent Europeanization, the prominence of Laibach--that attracts me.

As much as I like independent Slovenia, though, nhw's suggestion to a Slovenian acquaintance that it was possible for Yugoslavia to have remained united is rather attractive. Last spring, I read the interesting anthology Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918-1992 by Dejan Djokic (reviewed here (PDF format) at The Global Review of Ethnopolitics). The various essays included in this anthology tend to make the point that Yugoslavia was never particularly united. Capital and labour markets in different regions were only imperfectly integrated, the nature of the relationship of the different component ethnic groups to wider Yugoslav society and to the Yugoslav state was never settled, and the initial motivation for creating Yugoslavia conflicted (Serbs wanted a larger nation-state, Slovenes and Croats wanted protection against a rapacious Italy). Despite all of these problems, though, a real Yugoslav community did exist up until 1992, and the truth of the old maxim of nation-building that in order to form shiny new nation-states one first has to destroy older multinational communities was bloodily shown.

Every year or so, posters on soc.history.what-if periodically compare Spain and Yugoslavia, wondering what it would have taken for Yugoslavia to successfully follow Spain's successes in moving from an isolated one-party dictatorship towards a successful multi-party capitalist democracy embedded in western European political structures. (And conversely, what it would have taken for Spain to fall apart in a bloodbath of ethnic warfare, but that's a separate subject.) Certainly Yugoslavia was worse off than Spain: It was a much younger state, its period of massive violence was ethnicized in a way generally lacking in Spain, its single-party-dictatorship was strongly embedded in national life and resistant to change, its geopolitical situation was more tenuous.

But the dissolution of Yugoslavia wasn't inevitable. Yes, Yugoslavia might have been a one-party Communist dictatorship with serious problems in every sphere of life; Yugoslavia was also a country that enjoyed a significant degree of integration with western Europe, that was technologically advanced and rather prosperous by central and eastern European standards, that was socially reasonably liberal and even enjoyed a modest degree of political pluralism. Dragan Antulov's entertaining Just Another September 1939 ISOT timeline, imagining what would have happened if Yugoslavia as it existed on 1 September 1985 was transported back in time 46 years, demonstrated just this. Any society subjected to such a change where--as Dragan wrote--Trotsky's life could be saved thanks to a controversial music video was modern enough to manage the breakthrough to happy consumerist late-modern democracy made by Spain a decade earlier, and by Soviet-occupied central Europe just a few years later.

Just as France needn't have fallen in 1940, so might the (no longer Socialist and) Federal Republic of Yugoslavia have survived to the present day. We've no idea what would have been, but we can gain hints by taking a sort of negative impression based on what did happen: the millions of people who wouldn't have been driven from their homes, the sophisticated economies which wouldn't have collapsed, the polities blighted by war and nationalist exceptionalism, yawning gap separating Slovenia from Greece that now exists inside the European Union.

Yugoslavia wasn't so different from Us; Yugoslavia shouldn't be seen as being an Other. Yugoslavia was just unlucky.