Brotherhood Was Not Enough

The regimes in Eastern Europe are not the only ones that crumbled under the weight of dissent and their own inadequacy. by Tihomir Loza 19 November 2009 Even though you couldn’t tell from media coverage in the region and internationally, 20 or so years ago communism collapsed in the former Yugoslavia, too.

The 20th anniversary of the momentous events of 1989 in Eastern Europe has been rightly framed mostly in celebratory terms. But there are very few things to celebrate in this regard in the former Yugoslavia.

The main action of 1989 was indeed elsewhere. The stumbling of the Yugoslav League of Communists in the late 1980s and its definitive end in January 1990 fade into near insignificance when looked upon against the backdrop of the fall of the Berlin Wall or the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia or indeed the overthrow of the Ceausescu regime in Romania.

Yet it would be wrong to say that Yugoslavia was one of those countries that the collapse of communism just happened to. While the weakening of the Communist Party’s authority was linked to wider trends of the era, the Yugoslavs could be said, possibly to the same extent as the Czechs or Hungarians, to have brought down their own one-party state themselves. Except that in Yugoslavia the endeavor was less about the party and more about the state itself.

After 1948, Yugoslavia was no longer in the Soviet orbit. But as a mid-size country in a sensitive spot whose distance from Moscow was to a significant extent bankrolled by the West, Yugoslavia was very much part of the Cold War order. It is even possible to argue that Yugoslavia owed its continued existence as a country, and certainly much of its stability, to that order. Indeed, the internal dynamic that would eventually bring the federation down had been set in motion long before anyone predicted the collapse of the Eastern bloc. This dynamic went as far as what many now view as its logical conclusion only once the Cold War ended.

In other words, it can and often is argued that Yugoslav internal conflicts over national identity and sovereignty had been simmering and sometimes exploding – as in Croatia in 1971 or in Kosovo in 1968 and 1981 – for decades, while the regime was strong enough to suppress those conflicts and allow greater freedoms than in the rest of the communist world exactly because of its strong external position. Does it therefore make sense to ask whether the communist Yugoslavia – as opposed to the one that existed between the world wars under fractious Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian domination – was just a freak geopolitical occurrence made possible through transient circumstances? Wasn’t the six-republic South Slav federation, bent on forging “brotherhood and unity” among its “constituent peoples” and many minorities, really just a one-off Leninist fantasy, an “artificial creation,” as it has often been argued, or, more to the point, an ethnic carnage waiting to happen, with its population dulled into temporary obedience by relative prosperity and freedom to travel?

After all, doesn’t the nature of opposition to the Yugoslav regime prove this? Dissent was nearly always about nationalism rather than universal issues of freedom. While opposition to communism in the rest of Eastern Europe often produced larger-than-life figures fighting for greater freedoms, the Yugoslav dissident scene was peopled by nationalists masquerading as dissidents.

 A STRONGER GLUE THAN OPPRESSION

Such takes on the former Yugoslavia, of which there have been many in the past two decades, are far from the whole story and sit somewhat at odds with a number of hard facts. Unlike in much of the rest of Eastern Europe, Yugoslav communism was homegrown. Yes, Tito started as a Soviet man and his partisans received a lot of support from the Allies and Stalin toward the end of World War II, but what made them ultimately successful was their popularity.

Yugoslav communists were popular not so much because they promised greater workers’ rights – even though they designed a system guaranteeing, at least on paper, unprecedented rights to those in work – but rather because they promised to solve on an equitable basis the country’s ethnic issues, an area where the first Yugoslavia and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires had largely failed, often with tragic consequences.

Broadly speaking, their proposition was to make everyone equal, if not immediately, then in a gradual process of national emancipation. To the extent that it worked, it did so because the Yugoslav Communist Party meant business and because the people played ball. Did the people cooperate because they were coerced? The party did use oppressive means where politics failed, but the idea that the internal peace that Yugoslavia enjoyed for decades was merely a function of that oppression is laughable to any former Yugoslav citizen over 40 averse to memory editing. The policy of “brotherhood and unity” worked because the masses had come to own it.

It may have ultimately failed not because the problem it promised to solve was inherently insoluble on the principles the communists laid out, but because they offered little else. While they did make great advances in some social areas, such as health, education, or gender equality, they reduced politics to issues of ethnic equality and national sovereignty. Even more so, they made no attempt to provide a democratic framework for debating and deciding all sorts of political issues, including ethnic.

Some current trends of cooperation among the peoples and republics they sought to unite may also suggest that, far from being quixotic, the Yugoslav communists’ mission made sense, at least in principle. The region is, of course, still burdened by levels of interethnic prejudice not found anywhere in today’s Europe.  As a state, Yugoslavia is gone and few even among those who feel “Yugonostalgic” harbor any hopes of its resurrection as a state. Yet, there have been many signs in recent years that Yugoslavia is re-emerging as a state of mind for a growing number of people.

This is true in culture and business in particular, but increasingly so of many other walks of life as well. And we are not talking mere regional cooperation here, for the former Yugoslavia’s constituent parts don’t interact much with the rest of the region. Nor is it only a matter of linguistic or cultural proximity limited to Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Montenegrins, and others old enough to speak the former federation’s lingua franca. In fact, some linguistic trends have been driven by youngsters who don’t or barely remember Yugoslavia. For  example, helped by the advent of new media, slang travels from one part of the region to others with ease, much to the annoyance of language puritans.

There is no obvious reason why in Macedonia culture coming from the rest of the former Yugoslavia should be more prominent than that from Bulgaria. This is even more puzzling considering that the Macedonian language is actually closer to Bulgarian than to Serbo-Croatian. Nor is it obvious why young Slovenes and Croats should flock to Belgrade in search of entertainment and culture, something their parents didn’t do in such numbers, instead of, for example, going to slightly closer and just-as-exciting Budapest.

A look at the region’s media reveals what can only be termed mutual fascination among former Yugoslav groups. This fascination takes negative and positive forms, with the balance now undoubtedly and gradually being tilted toward the latter. While we can’t know what it all may mean for stability and future development, it is probably not too early to say that less than  years 20 after its collapse Yugoslavia is re-emerging as something less than a state but more than a mere region. That’s not what either the communists or the nationalists had in mind, but it may be what an increasing number of people will find just right.