Review: The Origins of Contemporary Serb Nationalism: Yet Another Case of "trahison des

clercs?"
Reviewed Work(s): 'Saviours of the Nation': Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival
of Nationalism by Jasna Dragović-Soso
Review by: Aleksandar Pavković
Source: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 82, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 79-88
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies
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SEER, Vol. 82, No. I, Januay 2004

Review Article
The Origins of Contemporary Serb Nationalism:
Yet Another Case of trahison des clercs?
ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC

Dragovic- Soso, Jasna. 'Saviours of the Nation'.' Serbia's In

and the Revival ofNfationalism. C. Hurst & Compa
ix + 293 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. f35.00
THE phrase 'saviours of the nation' refers to those Serb intellectuals
who, in the mid- I98os, publicly espoused the cause of the Serb nation
which was, in their view, in danger from its traditional enemies.' For
Jasna Dragovic-Soso, they were neither the saviours of the Serb nation
nor the villains of the later wars against the alleged Serb enemies. Yet,
in the course of their debates over the recent history and political
fortunes of the Serbs they helped to construct a nationalist political
platform which the Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic then
successfully used to mobilize large segments of the Serb population in
support of his regime and its policies.
Dragovic-Soso's is the first book-length study of the recent revival of
Serb nationalism. Her story of the revival starts in the late I960s with
the rejection, by a few Serb dissident intellectuals, of the Communist
party policy to devolve sovereign state powers from the federal organs
to the six republics and two provinces of the Yugoslav federation. They
argued that this policy, finally codified in the I974 Yugoslav constitu-
tion, divided the Serb nation among four semi-sovereign states
federal republics in which they lived, and thus denied them a
homeland that other nations enjoyed in socialist Yugoslavia. But, like
intellectual dissidents elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in Belgrade they
failed to offer any alternative to the Communist constitutional blue-
print: their primary aim, as dissidents, was to undermine the regime's
claim to legitimacy and not to propose alternatives to it. As their main
tool of trade was the written word, their primary concern, as elsewhere
in Eastern Europe, was freedom of expression or, rather, the lack of it.
Following the death of the paramount Yugoslav Communist leader
Josip Broz-Tito in I980, dissident intellectuals in Belgrade and

Aleksandar Pavkovic is Associate Professor in Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney,

and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia.

i Their intellectual and political opponents in Belgrade referred to the more prominent
among them, ironically, as 'the fathers of the nation'.

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80 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM

Ljubljana established committees for the defence of the freedom of

thought and expression and set up journals independent of the regime.
However, in I985, the concern of many Belgrade dissident intellectuals
shifted to the defence of Serb national rights, which they believed to be
under systematic attack from the Yugoslav Communist party and from
Albanian nationalists in the province of Kosovo and Metohija. In
Dragovic-Soso's view, this marked a momentous shift from the
universal and liberal to the narrow nationalist agenda and from the
rhetoric of universal political liberties to a rhetoric of Serb victimization
by other national groups.
Her book attempts to explain how this shift occurred and how it
affected Serbian politics in the late I 98os. For this purpose she offers a
analysis of nationalist discourse and the debates among leading
nationally-minded Serb intellectuals which, in its scope and thorough-
ness, is unrivalled in scholarly literature to date. Several anglophone
scholars notably Nicholas Miller, Andrew Wachtel, Audrey Budding
and myself- have analysed various aspects of Serb nationalist
discourse.2 A few scholars from Serbia notably Olivera Mojsilovic
and Ivan Colovic3 have offered both analyses and incisive critiques
of that discourse, and in her unpublished doctoral dissertation,4 Audrey
Budding sought to find a common nationalist platform which, she
believed, Serb intellectuals presented as an 'ultimatum' to other
national groups in former Yugoslavia. But unlike most of her predeces-
sors in this field, Dragovic-Soso argues in a systematic and highly
persuasive manner, that the origins of Serb nationalist discourse need
to be sought in the context of the intellectual debates within which it
was deployed and constructed as well as in the context of dissident
responses to the Communist political framework of the time.
Dragovic-Soso's 'structural-contextual' approach assumes that any
ideological discourse, as a form of political discourse, consists of
attempts to conceptualize and to respond to salient aspects ('structures')

2 N. Miller, 'The Non-conformists: Dobrica Cosic and Mica Popovic', Slavic Review, 58
1999, 3, PP. I 68-87; A. B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation. Literature and Cultura
Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford, CA, and London, I998; A. F. Budding, 'Systemic Crisis and
Nationalist Mobilization: The Case of the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy', Harvard
Ukrainian Studies, 22 (special volume, 'Cultures and Nations of Central and Eastern Europe
Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk'), I998, pp. 49-69; A. Pavkovic, 'From Yugoslavism
to Serbism: The Serb National Idea, I 986- I 996', Nations and Nationalism, 4, 1998,
pp. 5I3 -28.
3 0. Milosavljevic, 'Upotreba autoriteta nauke: Javna politieka delatnost Srpske akade-
mije nauka i umetnosti (I986-I992)', Republika, 7, 1995, 119-20, pp. i-xxx (reprinted in
English as 'The Abuse of the Authority in Science', in N. Popov (ed.), ne Road to War in
Serbia. Trauma and Catharsis, Budapest, I999, pp. 274-302) and I. Colovic, Politika simbola,
Belgrade, I997 (published in English as Politics of Identitj' in Serbia. Essays in Political
Anthropology, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth, New York, 2002).
4 A. F. Budding, 'Serb Intellectuals and the National Question', unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Department of History, Harvard University, I 998.

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 ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC 8i

of political reality as well as attempts to respond to the opposing or

different views presented in the context of political and intellectual
debate. The following two 'structures' loom large. The first is the
Yugoslav semi-confederal constitutional structure of six republics and
two provinces which allowed the Communist political elites of the two
sub-federal units, Vojvodina and Kosovo in Serbia, to block any
decisions at the level of their federal unit -Serbia or of the Yugoslav
federation. The Serbs were the largest single national group left, within
this structure, outside its putative homeland state: some three million
were living outside Serbia (not including these two provinces). The
second was the enforcement (through the Communist-controlled
judiciary and through the Communist Party) of an official interpreta-
tion of Yugoslav history which ignored or minimized the history of
mass murder and extermination during the Second World War. The
largest number of the victims of the policy of extermination and
eviction pursued by the Croat Ustasha regime and other Axis forces in
Yugoslavia was, again, found among the Serbs: an estimated 400,000
to 500,000 (p. io8). Following Tito's death in I980, the Communist
Party enforcement of the official version slackened and, as a result, a
number of academics and men of letters, either already known as
dissidents or new converts to the anti-regime cause, set out to persuade
the reading public of its falsity. The dissident revisionists' accounts,
according to Dragovic-Soso, dwelled in particular on the following two
themes or topoi: first, the conspiracy of the Moscow-based Communist
International (or Comintern) and its agent in Yugoslavia, the Yugoslav
Communist Party, to split up and subjugate the Serb nation. Still
following the Comintern policy in the late I 96os, the Yugoslav
Communist leadership imposed the above semi-confederal structure
on Yugoslavia, and, secondly, the victimization thesis: that since I941
the Serb nation had been continuously a victim of 'genocidal' policies
of its Catholic, Muslim, Nazi and Communist enemies. This second
topos thus linked the Croat Ustasha massacres of the Serbs during the
Second World War with the alleged genocide of the Serbs perpetrated
from I 967 onwards by the Muslim Kosovo Albanians.
But, according to Dragovic-Soso, it was another structural element,
the alleged violence of Albanians against the Serbs in Kosovo that
provided in i985 the final impetus to the shift towards nationalist
political discourse. In May I 985 an alleged Albanian rape of a Kosovo
Serb man widely reported in the Serbian media (the 'Martinovic affair')
appeared not only to confirm the revisionist victimization thesis but
also provoked a call for urgent political and police action to protect the
Serb population in Kosovo from Albanian violence. This call, first
issued in the 'Petition of 20I6' in I985, organized by a grassroots
movement of the Serbs from Kosovo, by the end of i985 appeared to

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82 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM

overshadow all the Belgrade dissidents' previous political and human

rights concerns. The exclusive focus of dissident intellectuals on the
alleged violence by Albanians in Kosovo alienated their fellow
dissidents in Slovenia and in Croatia (who regarded this as a sign of
blatant nationalism) and stopped any further dialogue with Kosovo
Albanian intellectuals. While isolating Serb dissidents from their fellow
dissidents in Yugoslavia, their agitation for political action to protect
the Serbs in Kosovo not only raised their public profile through
increased exposure in the official media, but brought their nationalist
programme as well as their mobilizing potential to the notice of
Communist leaders including Slobodan Milos'evic. By espousing their
nationalist program Milos-evic not only mobilized a huge number of
non-intellectual and non-Communist Serbs in support of his regime,
but, as Dragovic-Soso shows, also successfully neutralized the new
political parties founded, in I990, by some of the former dissident
intellectuals.
This is, in a very crude outline, Dragovic-Soso's explanation of how
Serb nationalist discourse came to dominate the political life in Serbia.
It is highly plausible and is based on meticulously collected textual
evidence. In spite of this, a few doubts come to mind. First, the topos of
continuous victimization by vicious and cruel foreign occupiers has
been a principal topos of Serbian nationalist narrative since the First
Serbian Uprising against Ottoman rule in I 804. Its current version
that since I 94I the Serbs have been victimized by Catholics, Muslims,
Nazis and Communists was developed in royalist Serb circles during
and after the Second World War. Its apparently sudden appearance in
the early I98os in print in Serbia was, in part, a result of post-Tito
slackening of Communist Party control and not a new development in
Serb nationalist discourse or revisionist historiography. Its principal
propagators among intellectuals in Serbia had come to espouse it well
before the I98os. Secondly, in I985, it was the regime media and not
the dissident intellectuals and the Kosovo Serb grassroots movement
that brought to public attention the issue of Kosovo Albanian violence
against the Serb population and of the resulting Serb emigration from
Kosovo. This was part of a concentrated effort by the Communist
regime in Serbia (led by the Stambolic family) to bring the Kosovo
province under its control and a thinly veiled admission that its
previous policy of reliance on the Kosovo Albanian Communist leaders
had failed to bring the growing Albanian separatist movement under
control. In publicizing the lawlessness and violence in Kosovo, the
Serbian Communist regime also presented to the Serb intellectuals
as well as its wider constituency a problem that could easily deflect
their attention from other political and economic problems. And, as
Dragovic-Soso's own analysis of the petition of 200 Serb intellectuals of

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 ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC 83

January I986 shows (pp. 128-30), a large number of dissident

intellectuals readily obliged: the momentous shift in the dissidents'
focus to the defence of Serb national rights in Kosovo was then, at least
in part, a result of tactical maneuvering by the Serbian Communist
leadership. Third, for many liberal and neo-Marxist intellectuals, the
defence of the Serbs in Kosovo was just a matter of defending universal
human rights and values in one's own country, not a shift from a
liberal/neo-Marxist/humanist agenda to a nationalist one.5 The fact
that many liberal and neo-Marxist dissidents were, in January i986,
ready to sign a petition incorporating the discourse of national
victimization and genocide does not indicate their endorsement and
continuing support of the nationalist political agenda that came to
dominate political life in Serbia in the late I 98os.
In short, there are grounds for doubt that in the period of I 985-89 a
majority or even a substantial number of Serb liberal or neo-Marxist
dissident intellectuals abandoned their previous political principles or
views in favour of a Serb nationalist platform couched in the traditional
terminology of Serb victimization. The widespread resistance by
Belgrade intellectuals to illiberal and undemocratic forms of Serb
nationalism during the rule of Slobodan Milosevic testifies to the
persistence of liberal and universal humanist views among the Serb
'critical intelligentsia'. Contrary to Dragovic-Soso's principal thesis,
perhaps there was no significant or momentous shift among Belgrade
dissident intellectuals from universal and liberal to narrow nationalist
principles.
There is, however, no doubt that in January I 986 a large number of
prominent Serb historians, artists, actors, poets, literary critics, novel-
ists, scholars and scientists as well as several retired senior military
officers signed an appeal to the assemblies of Yugoslavia and of Serbia,
calling for protection from Kosovo Albanian violence by the Serbian
and Yugoslav state authorities of the Serb population.6 A large number
of the signatories later publicly endorsed, in one form or another, the
project for the political unification of all or most Serbs in one state. The
great majority of the signatories, prior to the mid- I98os, avoided all,
including dissident, political involvement and, by the i 99OS, some of
them reverted to political inactivity. In my opinion, it was the political
mobilization of the formerly politically inactive intellectuals in support
of these two political platforms that created the impression that in the
late I98os 'most Belgrade intellectuals' supported a Serb nationalist

This is how Stevetozar Stojanovic, a prominent neo-marxist Praxis philosopher explains

this shift in his rambling The Fall of Yugoslavia: Why Communism Failed?, Amherst, MA, I
pp. 31 3-26. Dragovic-Soso does not refer to any of his works.
6 The appeal has been recently reprinted in Iinjizevne novine, 55, I5 January-Is Marc
2003, pp. 8o 89.

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84 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM

program.7 But these newly mobilized intellectuals, together with the

already 'established' dissidents of nationalist orientation do not, on any
count, form the majority of Belgrade intellectuals. In any case, no
empirical evidence (at least to my knowledge) has been presented in
support of the view that most Belgrade intellectuals, by the mid- I98os,
were supporters of a Serb nationalist program. Without any supporting
evidence, Dragovic-Soso reiterates this commonly held view (p. 230).
But how was the mobilization of so many previously politically
inactive intellectuals achieved? This question, which Dragovic-Soso
does not address, calls for further research. Perhaps in trying to find an
answer one can start with the hypothesis of the intellectuals' family
background. Almost all of the well-known dissidents of nationalist
orientation came from families who lost their members and/or their
property in wartime Croat Ustasha or in Yugoslav Communist terror
(or sometimes in both). It is possible that a large number of the newly
mobilized intelligentsia in the I98os come from families who suffered
in the same way: for them their own family histories attested to the
truth of the victimization thesis. Another, complementary hypothesis
worth examining is that the victimization account of recent Serb
history was the only account (spread in Yugoslavia until I 970s by wor
of mouth) which rivalled the already undermined official Communist
version of history.
Dragovic-Soso's explanation of the rise of Serb nationalism raises
another, related question: why did the Belgrade intellectuals, of liberal
and/or neo-Marxist orientation, not suggest a credible alternative both
to the victimization account and to the official Communist version of
recent Serb history? One reason was, perhaps, their lack of interest in
the historical legitimization of the regime. For them the regime was
illegitimate primarily because it was not true to either neo-Marxist or
liberal-democratic principles and not because of its falsification and
misuse of historiography. As Dragovic-Soso shows, liberal dissidents,
such as Kosta Cavo'ski, questioned the legitimacy of the internal federal
borders which the Yugoslav Communist party imposed in I946 and a
few neo-Marxists (such as Ljubomir Tadic) subscribed to the Comin-
tern conspiracy theory. But in the I 980s they left the historical question
to their fellow dissidents of nationalist orientation. If this is correct, the
victimization account of recent Serb history perhaps won widespread
support among intellectuals simply by default in the absence of any
credible rival to the discredited official Communist account.

7 In addition, intellectuals of non-nationalist orientation were not given much prominence

in the regime-controlled mass media while intellectuals of nationalist orientation featured
prominently both in the press and on television. This certainly gave the impression that
most intellectuals espoused the nationalist cause.

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 ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC 85

This cannot be said, however, of the political platform proposing to

unify all or most Serbs in Yugoslavia in a Serb nation-state. Throughout
the I98os this platform still had a credible rival or rivals in numerous
projects for a reformed Yugoslavia. The Draft Memorandum of the
Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences of I986 harked back to the
project of a 'democratic and integrating' federation of early Communist
Yugoslavia and, in I 988, the most influential Serb intellectual dissident,
the novelist Dobrica Cosic, offered a fairly detailed proposal for a
reformed democratic and federal Yugoslavia.8 All these projects,
however, required that other Yugoslav nations or at least their political
elites consent to share Yugoslavia with the Serbs as their common state.
In contrast, the Serb unification project appeared not to depend on the
will of anyone else but the Serbs: they, it was assumed, could unite in a
common state by their own political will. However illusory this
assumption later proved to be, in the mid- i98os the Serb unificati
project must have appeared both as innovative and excitingly new, in
contrast to the worn-out Yugoslav project, strongly associated with a
failing Communist regime. And yet many Serb intellectuals of liberal
and neo-Marxist orientations as well as substantial segments of the
Serb population preserved their faith in a reformed Yugoslavia until
June I99I when Croatia and Slovenia, under their non-Communist
governments, unilaterally seceded from Yugoslavia.
Failing to acknowledge the prolonged attraction of Yugoslavism to
Serb intellectuals, Dragovic-Soso shows no interest in it as a rival
programme to the Serb unification project.9 She notes that the Draft
Memorandum of I986 calls for a democratic Yugoslav federation but
argues that this is only a democratic and Yugoslav 'veneer' because it is
'very difficult to envisage how a common state is possible with nations
who are perpetrating "genocide" or plotting to "oppress" the Serbs'
(p. i 8 I). 10 But this observation ignores one of the principal implicati
of a democratic Yugoslav federation, based, as most Serb intellectuals
envisaged it, on the 'one man-one vote' principle: in such a federation
the Serbs would be in a relative majority and thus in a position to
prevent any oppression, let alone genocide, of their own population. A
democratic Yugoslav federation was thus envisaged as a protection
against the oppression of the Serbs. Dragovic-Soso is certainly right to

8 See D. Cosic, 'Jugoslavija drzava izneverenih oeekivanja', Ajciz'evne novine, 15

December I988, reprinted in Srpskopitanje-demokratskopitanje, Belgrade, 1992, pp. I73-86.
9 In this she does not differ from most scholars writing on recent Serb nationalism. For a
brief examination of Yugoslavism among Serb intellectuals in the late I 98os see A. Pavkovic,
'Yugoslavism's last stand: The utopia of Serb intellectuals', in D. Djokic (ed.), Yugoslavism.
Histories ofa Failed Idea, London, 2003, pp. 252-68.
10 This statement also appears to contradict her later observation that 'the Memorandum
still relied on reform and recentralization of the federation [of Yugoslavia. A.P.] to fulfil the
Serbian national goal of "all Serbs in one state"' (p. 192).

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86 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM

call the Draft Memorandum 'a repository of all the various strands of
the new Serbian nationalism' (p. i8i). But as her own analysis of the
document indicates, it is also a repository of a variety of differing and
mutually incompatible political views. One such view was a somewhat
nostalgic but nonetheless genuine Yugoslavism.
While one single theme in the mid-ig8os the defence of Serb
national rights mobilized so many Belgrade intellectuals politically,
this did not bring to an end a variety of other debates among them. For
example, in the early I 980s liberal intellectuals (the most prominent of
whom was the literary theorist Nikola Milosevic) launched a systematic
and scathing critique of Marxism. In the late I98os these theorists
turned their attention to the Praxis neo-Marxists (of Serb, Croat and
Slovene nationality) who in turn vigorously responded to their attacks.
This campaign against Marxism was an attempt to mobilize the Serb
(and Yugoslav) intelligentsia for a liberal democratic political pro-
gramme which at the time studiously eschewed any nationalism. Both
Yugoslavism as the idea of a reformed Yugoslav state and
liberalism had, by the late I98os, become alternative foci of political
and ideological debates among Belgrade intellectuals, the debates
which are left unexplored in Dragovic-Soso's book.
As Dragovic-Soso notes, Milosevic's advent to power in I987 led to
the lifting of almost all previous intellectual taboos and the end to the
enforcement of the official Communist ideology in Serbia. This greatly
contributed not only to an extraordinary intensity and breadth in
intellectual debates but also to the wholesale abandonment of Marxism
by the Serb intelligentsia: by I990 almost all the remaining Mtarxist
theorists in Belgrade had 'converted' to some form of liberalism.
Among the newly converted former Marxists were Dragoljub Midu-
novic, Nebojsa Popov, Latinka Perovic, Zagorka Golubovic, Miladin
Zivotic, Vesna Pesic, Svetozar Stojanovic and Zoran Djindjic, the
future Serbian Prime Minister. Together with the 'old-time' liberals,
Nikola Milosevic, Kosta Cavoski, Leon Kojen and Vojislav Kostunica,
the future President of the last Yugoslavia, they became the most
consistent and, ultimately, the most effective opponents of the illiberal
Serb nationalist programme and of Slobodan Milosevic's rule. While
in the I 980s some liberals called for a liberal and democratic unification
of the Serbs in one state, other liberals opposed any such project on the
grounds that it could not be carried out without the consent of other
national groups in the former Yugoslavia.
Dragovid-Soso acknowledges the anti-nationalist stand of a few
Belgrade liberal intellectuals but fails to explore the context of
intellectual debates within which the liberal critique of Serb nationalism
arose. In a sense, this is quite understandable. Nationalism in Serbia
was revived in the context of a series of debates about Serb and

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 ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC 87

Yugoslav history, Yugoslav constitutional foundations, the legitimacy

of Yugoslav Communist rule as well as about Marxism and liberalism.
Dragovic-Soso chooses to focus on those debates or aspects of the
debates which appear to be most salient to the genesis of the Serb
nationalist program later espoused by the Milosevic regime. In this
process, she is led to neglect the debates which contributed to the
genesis of political programs opposing the nationalist programme and
Milosevic's rule. A more comprehensive account of Belgrade intellec-
tual debates in the i980s would not, necessarily, focus on the rise of
nationalism but would explore their variety and their interaction."
Her book, of course, does not aim at a comprehensive account of this
kind and, therefore, its neglect of non-nationalist intellectual debates
does not detract from its value.
No account of the genesis of the recent Serb unification project
which I dubbed 'Serbism'12 can, however, ignore the debate
between Serb and Slovenian dissident intellectuals in the mid-ig8os.
While Belgrade neo-Marxists had long established links with their
counterparts in Ljubljana, from i984 on, Dragovic-Soso claims, all
attempts by Belgrade dissidents to establish common dissident organ-
izations with their Slovene counterparts for the defence of freedom of
thought and speech met with failure. As she points out, by the mid-
I980s the Slovene dissidents concluded that Yugoslavia no longer
offered a framework for their political action and their focus likewise
shifted to a nationalist program for Slovenia's independence. Their
shift, she argues, was not a reaction to Serb nationalism and the
Belgrade intellectuals' obsession with the plight of the Serbs in Kosovo
but an independent Slovenian development. At the two successive
meetings of Serb and Slovene critical intellectuals in autumn I987, she
argues, their irreconcilable differences on the future of Yugoslavia
became obvious: to the Slovene vision of Yugoslavia as a space for
cooperation among separate national communities 'only in areas in
which it was absolutely necessary' (p. 21 I), the Serb intellectuals
responded by asking their Slovene interlocutors to come clean as to
whether they wanted to be part of Yugoslavia or not. The Slovene
rejection of Yugoslavia, Dragovic-Soso suggests, had made Serbism a
much more plausible political alternative. Serb nationalism, as she
argues in her conclusion, did not develop in isolation but in a dynamic

" For a succinct account of some aspects of their interaction see M. Subotic, 'Od kritike
do rezignacije: postsocialistieka melanholija', Filozofija i drustvo, 3, 1991, pp. I95-209, and
A. Pavkovic, 'Intellectual Dissidence and the Serb National Question', in A. Pavkovic,
H. Koscharsky and A. Czarnota (eds), Nationalism and Postcommunism. A Collection of Essays
Brookfield, VT, and Sydney, 1995, pp. 12 I -41.
12 See A. Pavkovic, 'The Serb National Idea: A Revival, I986-92', Slavonic and East
European Review, 72, I994, 4, pp. 440-55.

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88 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM

relationship with other nationalisms in former Yugoslavia; her account

of the Serb-Slovene intellectual and political debates is an excellent
case study of this dynamic relationship.
Dragovic-Soso's account of this intellectual debate and of the parallel
transformation of Slovene and Serb nationalist discourse from a
dissident to a dominant political discourse is probably her most original
and most valuable contribution to the scholarly literature on recent
South Slav nationalisms. Her general outline of the structural and
contextual framework of the genesis of recent Serb nationalism, while
building on the work of other scholars (which she acknowledges), offers
the most systematic and coherent analysis of this process to date.
Throughout the book she maintains an admirable detachment, so rare
in recent scholarly writing on former Yugoslavia. Yet she does not hide
her disappointment with the Belgrade intellectuals' abandonment of
an internationalist stance for a narrow nationalist one, which she
regards as yet another case of the 'trahison des clercs' (p. 2). Her
judgement of the Belgrade intellectuals, like some of her other
observations in the book, raises a few questions which require further
exploration. One of them is, surely, how widespread was the 'trahison'
among Belgrade intellectuals as compared to their Ljubljana, Zagreb
or Sarajevo counterparts? And why is it that so many intellectuals from
these centres in the former Yugoslavia do not see their espousal of their
respective nationalist causes as a betrayal of their earlier principles?
Her well-written book thus invites us to ponder on the moral complexity
of the issues she discusses and to raise questions which await further
research.

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