Yugo Utopia

Cultural Dynamics
http://cdy.sagepub.com
Scenes From the Last Yugoslav Generation: The Long March from
Yugo-Utopia to Nationalisms
Zala Volcic
Cultural Dynamics 2007; 19; 67
DOI: 10.1177/0921374007077270
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Volcic: The Last Yugoslav Generation 67
S C E N E S F R O M T H E L A S T Y U G O S L AV
G E N E R AT I O N
The Long March from Yugo-Utopia to Nationalisms
ZALA VOLCIC
University of Queensland, Australia
ABSTRACT
This article explores various aspects of how young Slovenian and Macedonian
intellectuals, belonging to the last Yugoslav generation, articulate their (new)
spaces of belonging and identity. I look at their Yugoslav memories and
address a relatively straightforward question: how was the former Yugoslav
community imagined, interpreted, represented, rejected, accepted and in what
ways has this image of community been reappropriated and reimagined by
the informants? From the narratives, my informants appear to identify with
the former Yugoslavia as a multicultural space, a civic space that was based
on a common socialist and pluralist culture, with its collective myths and
rituals. However, as I suggest, Yugoslav identity starts to appear as a strange
feeling of belonging, whereby that which has been familiar becomes suddenly
and inexplicably alien. Furthermore, the concept of national identity seems
to replicate and recycle the very supranational Yugoslav logics it wants to
oppose.
Key Words identity Macedonia memory narratives nationalism
Slovenia Yugoslavia
Introduction
In February 2003, a new Slovene shopping market Mercator was officially

opened in Belgrade, Serbia. There you can find the Fructal brand fruit juice
from Slovenia that was famously boycotted in Serbia at the end of the 1980s.
The Dalmatian hams come from Croatia, while Macedonia supplies dry
red wine. Montenegro declares its presence with fish fresh from the Adri-
atic. While shopping in Belgrade’s Mercator, I would hear statements like
19(1): 67–89. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007077270] http://cdy.sagepub.com

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)

68 Cultural Dynamics 19(1)
‘Former Yugoslavia is still in my heart’, or, ‘You can see how we all like to
shop for Slovene products now. The bad days are over.’
By now, Mercator has opened its stores in all the former republics of
Yugoslavia. Huge and kitsch commercial billboards throughout the former
countries, torn by wars, read ‘Friends Forever’—denoting all the former
Yugoslavs. Mercator launched an aggressively commercial PR campaign,
relying on fantasies and images from the past. It seemed as if the former
Yugoslavs were condemned to seek the historical past through their own
consumer/commercial images and stereotypes.
All collective identities are relatively fluid constructions rather than eter-
nal essences—they are discursively constructed, subject to rewriting. Seen
thus, identities are not completely consistent, stable and fixed, but are rather
fluid constructions, generated differently in different contexts. Their political,
cultural creation is an active, dialectical process that involves the evolving
construction and reconstruction of a sense of self-identity. The construction
of a collective identity also involves active strategies of inclusion and exclu-
sion whereby the boundaries of a given collectivity are controlled.
Most major works on boundaries, identifications, production of subjec-
tivities, collective identities, narratives, and nationalism engage with Anderson’s
Imagined Communities (1991), and the ways in which the building of Euro-
pean nation states was intimately connected to the rise of print and capital-
ism. A nation is imagined as a community stretching through time, with its
own past and own future destiny; it is imagined across space, mobilizing
the people of a particular territory. Because nations not only have to be
imagined, but also have to create their own histories, or interpretations of
themselves, Said (1978) argues that they are ‘interpretative communities’
as well as imagined ones. Different communities are imagined, interpreted,
represented, memorized and narrated differently. Said sees any community
as simultaneously a material, geographic space and a narrated, abstract ideal
community. In order to be(come) a coherent imagined community, its mem-
bers must yoke together both complementary and contradictory concepts of
space—geographical space, legislative space and narrative space.
By now Anderson’s idea of the imagined community has become rather
commonplace with regard to theorizing citizens’ felt sense of belonging to a
place or a country. More recent work has taken up the idea of an envisioned
community as providing a means of self-identification and has offered fur-
ther theories about the ways in which this envisioning might take place.
The notion of an imagined community has been successfully appropriated
for larger collectivities. Thus, Anderson’s ‘imagined community’ exists not
just—or even primarily—at the level of the nation state. The assumption
that there is some sort of homogeneity within nation states may be legiti-
mate when one nation state is compared with others; there are similarities of
feeling, for instance, among Slovenes which distinguish them from Italians.

But this becomes more problematic under closer examination—beyond or

within the state itself there are differences from one region or even city to
another or among social groups and ethnic minorities beyond or within the
state’s imagined community. The nation state’s imagined community exists
as a legal and formal entity for many of its citizens, and this definition tells us
much about governing, but very little about a range of other imagined and
real communities. Is it possible to expand the notion to the former Yugoslav
community? I think the notion has been usefully applied to larger groups
than nation states, but again one has to be careful about the way in which
that exercise is undertaken. The question of a community is a question of
a similarity, and an imagined unity, which attempts to override all internal
differences, inequalities, and divisions. The historical importance of creat-
ing an imagined community within the former socialist Yugoslavia was an
attempt to unify all differences around the multilayered model of national
rights, which included a peculiar mixture of suppression and compromise.
The model was called ‘brotherhood and unity’—it was based on the Partisan
anti-fascist struggle and it attempted to disaggregate differences of region,
gender, religion, nationality, class, in order to unify those differences on a
supranational level.
However, in what way, if at all, did such a binding happen in the case
of former Yugoslavia? And further, what happens to cultural identity and
memory when borders and states disappear? This article explores how and
to what extent particular identifications have gained or lost significance. In
particular, it argues that there has existed something like a Yugoslav imagi-
nary—a Yugoslav culture, a supranational Yugoslav identity or a Yugoslav
mind, as remembered, felt, and defined by my informants, young Slovene and
Macedonian intellectuals, belonging to the last Yugo-generation. The overall
aim here is to help generate some useful concepts, notions and memories
that might contribute to the understanding of the complex ways of identity
remembrance in former-Yugoslav cases. People in every locality in former
Yugoslavia can relate stories of how their lives were lived under socialism.
Indeed, in their beliefs about their ‘belonging’ to particular social spaces,
many of my informants recount compelling visions of Yugoslav culture and
belonging. Importantly, while this research also explores how and to what ex-
tent certain forms of identification have gained significance after the collapse
of Yugoslavia, I do not want to fall into a trap of an idealist Yugo-nostalgic
mode of presenting Yugoslav culture, as narrated by my informants. How-
ever, one needs to be open to the possibility that national identifications do
not always and for everyone alike offer the strongest identifications. I follow
here anthropologists who have started to explore the lives and discourses of
identities in the context of former Yugoslavia (e.g. Bowman, 1994; Denich,
1994; Denitch, 1994; Hayden, 1993; Ramet, 1992). In particular, Bringa (1995),

in her influential study of the Bosnian ethnically mixed village of Dolina, ex-
amined how villagers of different ethno-religious communities perceive each
other. She told how ethnically mixed village families are seen to form their
identity according to their own experiences and perceptions, in interaction
with other members of neighbouring groups, and in relation to official state
definitions. Godina (1998: 410) argues that the rise of nationalisms happened
because of ‘reorganization within an identification matrix’, and she points to
the transformations in the status of national identifications.1 Devic’s work
(2000), while describing the emergence of anti-war initiatives in the former
Yugoslavia, points to the anti-war activism that was a mobilization of the
most articulate segment of a widespread, all-Yugoslav, urban, cosmopolitan
and non-ethnonationalistic cultural identity.
Rethinking Memory
Scholars in many disciplines have focused on how a sense of the past can
inform groups’ politics, religion, art and social life. The importance of mem-
ory is taken for granted, but the functioning of memory in any particular
context is still disputable (see Kuhn, 2000). Collective memory, as a concept,
was coined by the French philosopher and sociologist Halbwachs and he
separates individual from collective memory, the latter being constructed
by a particular group. The key idea is that human memory is influenced by
a variety of factors (Lowenthal, 1985: 193), one of which derives from a
particular social arena in which humans are situated when they remember
the past (Halbwachs, 1992). Halbwachs emphasizes how social processes
influence both people’s personal memories of their own lifetime, and also
their shared, collective memories of the past. Additionally, collective mem-
ories partially shape the reality that enables people to imagine the world in
which they live. Margalit (2002) develops two different types of collective
memory: ‘shared memory’ and ‘common memory’. In this model, a com-
mon memory is an aggregate notion that allows individuals to remember a
specific, commonly experienced event. A shared memory, however, is more
than just an accumulation of individual memories, since it is about commu-
nicating and sharing it. In that way, a shared memory is an active process
by which a vision is preserved. Many scholars (Bell, 2003; Margalit, 2002;
Renan, 1991; Smith, 1999) point to how it is through ‘shared memory’ that
any community produces and reproduces itself, and how the production
and reproduction of communities depends upon a dialectics of collective
remembering and forgetting.2

Notes on Methodology: The Last ‘Yugo’ Generation and its

Memories
The generation born in Yugoslavia from the beginning of the 1960s to the
middle of the 1970s, in the so-called era of Tito, has specific characteristics.3
This generation grew up in socialist Yugoslavia of the 1980s and associates
those days with brotherhood and unity, multiculturalism, multilinguism
and common supranational Yugoslav culture; further, it has a precise
memory of the time and place of Tito’s death. As some Slovene scholars
point out (Debeljak, 2004), prompt anyone over 25 about the Yugoslav
past and they will immediately talk about how respected Yugoslavia used
to be, how wonderful the summers were on the Croatian coast, how easy
it was to travel without a visa, how shopping trips to Trieste were common
and how often it was the music that mobilized young people. Generally,
to this generation, as Bringa writes (1995), difference in nationality
was just one of the many differences between Yugoslavs. The former
Yugoslavia of the 1980s for this generation was a place of freedom, good
life, creative education, travel and a high standard of living. Globally, the
former Yugoslavia at the time was a part of the progressive non-aligned
movement, and was strategically important as a buffer zone between the
First and Second Worlds.
Not only did this generation grow into social and political maturity dur-
ing the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the creation of
economic markets, it also experienced wars in the region. Members of this
generation witnessed the radical social and political speed with which the
political and economic changes took place: processes and events such as the
collapse of socialism, the rise of nationalisms, the wars, economic reforms,
to mention just a few.
Between the months of October 2004 and July 2005 I spent a total of four
months in Slovenia and Macedonia, and conducted over 30 interviews, with
some later follow-ups on the internet. Additionally, drawing on my ethno-
graphic fieldwork in the region since 2001, the backbone of this particular
work is a series of in-depth interviews, conducted in Slovenia (specifically
in the university towns of Ljubljana and Maribor) and Macedonia (in the
capital city of Skopje). My informants were active in a number of public
spheres, such as those of university, media, art, and civil society.4 I also inter-
viewed many people who worked in NGOs and civil society institutions, as
well as politicians and academics. Much to my surprise, it was rather easy to
obtain interviews on the topic of memories of former Yugoslavia. It was as
if people wanted to talk about it, as if they were eager to ‘get it out’. I would
start with one person and a snowball effect would ensue, aided by the fact
that my informants live and work in very tightly knit communities. This is es-
pecially true in both the NGO sector and communications (media) industry.

I conducted all of the interviews face to face in Slovenian and/or Serbian

languages. The interviews were semi-structured. My questions covered a
range of topics, such as biographical background, and thoughts about the
current political situation. Although I did have an interview guide/question-
naire, I seldom relied on it. My goal was not to get through as many ques-
tions as possible, nor to find answers to fit any predetermined categories. I
allowed my subjects the space for personal reflection, flow of disconnected
statements, intimate memories and digressions. We most often met in cafés,
occasionally in their offices, sometimes in their homes. Many times, even
with a tape recorder in hand, the interviews felt more like social visits—aid-
ed by the fact that people generally had an easy-going attitude about being
interviewed and frequently other people joined in.
Specifically, textually orientated Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is
employed here for the analysis of empirical data. CDA is based upon the
assumption that ‘language is an irreducible part of social life, dialectically
interconnected with other elements of social life, so that social analysis and
research always has to take account of language’ (Fairclough, 2003: 2). For
CDA, ‘texts are sensitive barometers of social processes, movements and
diversity, and textual analysis can provide particularly good indicators of
social change’ (Fairclough, 1995: 209).
Conducting research on Slovenian and Macedonian Yugoslav memories
has some serious flaws, but also important challenges and advantages. If
Slovenia, as the industrial north of former Yugoslavia, is considered to be
a somehow (rarely questioned) homogeneous national community, Mace-
donian national questions can be seen as a conflict between different
nationalistic opposing viewpoints and ideologies, all of which reify nations,
national cultures and national identities, project them far back into the
past and treat them as eternal and natural (i.e. Slav Macedonian, Albanian,
Greek). Slovenia has escaped the tragic events of the former country, entered
the EU on 1 May 2004, and has been, in a common-sense discourse, defined
as ‘a success story’ in political and economic terms. On the other hand, the
Macedonian economy is in need of economic growth. Thus, Macedonian
diplomats have been negotiating Macedonia’s EU integration process for the
last eight years. The fourth anniversary of the Ohrid Framework Agreement
in August 2001 also marked the completion of the formal implementation
phase of the peace deal, which ended the fighting between ethnic Albanian
armed groups and the government.
At the beginning of this research it was my hope that it would be pre-
cisely the differences between Macedonia and Slovenia that would give this
research a particular comparative angle and strength to analyse in depth the
common Slovenian–Macedonian memories of former Yugoslav times. How-
ever, I discovered that there are no real differences between the memories

of Slovenian and Macedonian informants about former Yugoslavia. Thus,

the recurring memories are very similar, they follow the same logic and de-
note similar events, and in that, the clusters do not differ. It is therefore nec-
essary to wonder why the difference of (political and economic) contexts is
not reflected in differences of memories. It seems reasonable to point here
to the common memories of everyday life and culture that resonate strongly
regardless of the two now different countries and contexts.5 The article will
show, however, that there is a difference between the memory of Yugoslavia
as a state, as a political construction or ideological utopia on the one hand,
and on the other, as a cultural space and an everyday reality (linked with
childhood and warmth).
Some Background: The Dialectics of Identity in Former Yugoslavia
The historical idea in forming Yugoslavia was that the Slavs who lived
between the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea were in a way connected by a
common language and culture. It was indeed a political engineering project,
and Yugoslavia, according to its ‘engineers’, promised to go beyond the
contradictions of nationalism and ethnic groups. Thus, socialist Yugoslavia
was created by six different nations or republics, and ‘Titoism’ was imagined
and founded on the assumption that economic and political homogenization
would lead to the creation of a pure workers’ state (Vasovic, 1995).6 That
is why a political culture was composed of several nations (narod), within
a federal state system possessing institutions that prevented domination by
any one national group. Yugoslavia was recognized as having six nations or
republics. In essence all Yugoslavs had a Yugoslav federal, supranational
identity but also an older, national identity. For Tito nationalism expressed
a political-economic will to power through which ‘one society aspires to
dominate, exploit or despoil the others’ (in Ramet, 1992: 55). The former
Yugoslavia therefore worked to dissolve national aspirations7 through, on the
one hand, devolving economic power to the community level where workers’
collectives would mobilize around aspirations for economic good and, on the
other hand, breaking up the political power blocs of the dominant republics
through the creation of new republics.8 In terms of linguistic elements, there
was a common language called Serbo-Croat. In Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro
and Serbia, this language was dominant in the public spheres. In Kosovo,
Macedonia and Slovenia, children learned the Serbo-Croat language, but
Albanian, Macedonian and Slovene were official languages.

Surveying Former Yugoslav Identity
The question as to what extent the idea of a former Yugoslav identity was
accepted by the country’s populace during the period 1945–91 remains open.
One answer can be found in surveys on the expression of Yugoslav and national
belonging. Immediately after the Second World War, surveys included catego-
ries for different nationalities, but there was no Yugoslav option. At the end of
the 1950s, public discussions started over what it meant to be a ‘Yugoslav’. The
concept offered different interpretations from various political and national
perspectives, but as Sekulic (1997a) argues, there was a gradual strengthening
of supranational ‘Yugoslavism’, with the emphasis being placed on Yugoslav
working-class unity. It was the 1961 survey that finally introduced the notion
of a ‘Yugoslav’ as a possible expression of identity. Officially the category of a
Yugoslav was reserved for ‘persons without a national commitment’ (Petrovic,
1983). In 1961 1.7 percent of people declared themselves as Yugoslavs, with a
decrease to 1.3 percent in 1971 (Cohen, 1993).9 In 1981 a higher proportion
than ever before of the multinational population of Yugoslavia chose to de-
clare themselves as Yugoslav when asked about their ethnic identity, but this
still only accounted for 5.4 percent of the population.10 In 1991, on the eve of
the Yugoslav dissolution and war, the proportion of self-proclaimed Yugoslavs
declined to 2.2 percent, around 700,000 people (Sekulic, 1997b).
Identification as a Yugoslav was strong in particular circles, such as in
mixed families, in military circles (Yugoslav army) and in the pan-Yugoslav
cultural scenes.11 Large numbers of those who declared themselves ‘Yugo-
slavs’ belonged then to urban centres and ethnically mixed regions—the
younger and more urbanized had a tendency to identify as Yugoslavs.12
Overall, the prevailing viewpoints about the former Yugoslavia in my in-
formants’ narratives hold that supranational Yugoslav identity was about im-
mersion in a world of multiplicity, and implicated them in the dimension of
embodied cultural experiences. Most of them also claim that it was through
a combination of suppression, compromise and charismatic personality that
Tito managed to control nationalisms during his reign (1945 – 80). In the
words of one of the informants, ‘Yugoslavia was six nations, five languages,
four religions and one Tito.’ Everyone recalls the slogan in which Yugoslav
ideology was epitomized: ‘After Tito, Tito!’13
Although the former Yugoslavia was a country that went through some
radical economic crises, there were no images of citizens queuing up for
milk or bread. As a journalist in Maribor put it, ‘Yugoslavia and Yugoslavs,
we have always enjoyed a specific status in Europe as a country which has,
yes, been socialist, but has remained independent in foreign policy, relying
on its leading role in the non-aligned movement.’
In the words of a Skopje film director:
Western popular culture was very accessible: books, films, music, comics, toys . . . We were
inspired by punk music . . . and watched American television shows. But I do think that

we were so much better off than the West or the East. Yugoslavia was open to the world . . .
All this created creative conditions to study, to work, to be critical . . . Yugoslavia has
always enjoyed a specific position in the 1980s —as a kind of buffer between the East
and West. (emphasis added)
Both the death of Tito in 1980 and the collapse of the Yugoslav economy
during the 1980s seriously challenged the Yugoslav imagined community
and its identity (see Guzina, 2003). The remainder of this article is divided
into two main parts. In the first part, I deal with the Yugoslav memories in
my informants’ discourse that point to the former Yugoslavia as open, mul-
ticultural, but a kind of utopian pastiche. In the second part, I focus on an
issue of recycling of Yugoslav identity markers.
Identity Markers of the Yugoslav Socialist in the 1980s
From the narratives of Yugoslav life that I collected, it transpires that people
did not always simply and straightforwardly argue in favour of a Yugoslav
identity, but that Yugoslav memories nonetheless always triggered strong
feelings and intense memories. I found a broad variety in the ways that my
informants remembered the Yugoslav times, and I am putting forward a
rather simple argument here: from the narratives themselves, most of my
informants identify with the former Yugoslavia as a cultural space, a civic
space that was based on a common Yugoslav socialist culture, myths and
rituals, ‘that were all ideologically bittersweet, and seductive’. In such an
atmosphere, it is a cultural everyday space that is employed in most of my
informants’ narratives.
First, former Yugoslav identity is remembered and narrated as an open
one, as culturally rich, full of possibilities, enjoyment, and excitement, as
a space in between two opposed global blocs at the time, as a place of the
non-aligned movement. In this account, positive aspects were emphasized,
such as cultural diversity, the multicultural slogan ‘brotherhood and unity’,
anti-fascism and resistance and Tito’s leading role in the Movement of Non-
Aligned Countries. In these memories, Yugoslavia promised freedom, open-
ness, progress, development, modernization, multiculturalism and pluralism.
For example, some of my informants describe it in the following superlative
terms. According to a radio journalist in Maribor:
I clearly have an idealized version of the 1980s and the Yugoslav era. In my memory,
this period is like a paradise . . . I don’t know really how to describe it clearly . . . it is
like, everything was perfect, I mean, I know it wasn’t . . . but, for me, emotionally, it was
beautiful, nice, spiritually and culturally rich, cosmopolitan . . . We travelled all around
the country . . . visiting friends and relatives.
A politician in Skopje observed that:

Yugoslavia was a wonderful creation of people who spoke similar languages and had
some basic similarities . . . they lived together in peace and with rights not afforded

them while living under some world power’s domination . . . Yugoslavia was prosperous,
and unique. It could have served as an example for Europe. For example, the EU is an
economic supranational entity, with no real identity, while Yugoslavia was a cultural
one . . .
These quotations give some sense of how the remembered space of the
former Yugoslavia was an idealized one of warmth, democratic potential,
understanding, diversity and multiculturalism. It presents itself as an ideal
childhood home, as a secure, warm, safe and intimate space, full of sweet
feelings. Upon a closer look, an analysis of the meaning of Yugoslav space
throws up basic terms of home: security, comfort, intimacy. ‘I felt at home in
Yugoslavia . . . it was like living with the difference. I was always and every-
where accepted, welcomed . . .’
The second cluster of memories and interpretations of Yugoslavia com-
mon and prevalent in my informants’ narratives, however, was the un-
derstanding of Yugoslavia as a kind of a false, utopian entity, as a kind of
perverted dream creation. In many of the current memories, more among
Slovenian informants than Macedonian, Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’
beliefs were seen as a large-scale ideological discursive project with an aim
to create ‘a not really real’ collective identity across all South Slav lines, and
a slogan of ‘brotherhood and unity’ gets rejected as an ideological com-
munist entity. According to a Ljubljana lawyer, ‘I should say that there is
something wrong about the way we lived in Yugoslavia. Many Slovenes . . .
including me . . . viewed Yugoslavia as a prison for us, a state that postponed
out independence’ (emphasis added). A writer in Skopje said that:
It was indeed a foolish idea from the start. History has shown that such artificially made-
up countries . . . Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the USSR . . . only survived as long as their
people were kept under iron-hand dictatorships. In the case of Yugoslavia, one only
has to look back at what happened during the WWII period, when Serbs, Croats and
Albanians were basically killing each other with such brutality that it even horrified
the Italian fascists, to realize that this so-called country had no long-term future
whatsoever.
Such sentiments about Yugoslav identity always point to its hidden, pervert-
ed and even dangerous side. They reflect upon Yugoslavia as a political con-
struction, even as an ideological utopia. In a way, it metaphorically appears
as an uncanny entity in the Freudian sense. Freud uses the notion of the
uncanny (1963: 56–63) to refer to those experiences that are ‘undoubtedly
related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror’. Yugoslav
memories are able to arouse a feeling of the uncanny in a particularly strong
way—insofar as the notion of the uncanny denotes something beautiful, fa-
miliar, warm, seductive, and repulsive, frightening and unfamiliar at the same
time. In this sense, Yugoslav identity is remembered as an uncanny feeling
of belonging, whereby that which has been familiar becomes suddenly and
inexplicably strange and alien, but this is then the strangeness of that which
is most familiar. Yugoslavia is remembered as something terrifying which

is at the same time strange and familiar. Furthermore, it remains a cultural

home which is not home anymore. This ‘uncannyness’ of Yugoslavia—if you
will—is strange precisely because it cannot be adequately explained, and it
always poses itself in the lines of a possible return.
Thus, it is at this point of the discussion that I want to introduce the
concept of ‘identity markers’ (Hall, 1992). Identity markers are defined as
those characteristics which are perceived to have cultural importance either
as a signal to others of one’s identity, or which might be employed by the
individuals in support of specific identity claims. To put it simply, what iden-
tity markers do my informants use while defining former Yugoslavia? I do
recognize that there are indeed contradictions, tensions, and hidden con-
nections among them. This requires an understanding of, for example, the
educational dynamics, material reality and high culture in former Yugoslavia,
that have all shaped these identity markers. I intend to raise problems and
show their existence. In what follows, some of the main markers of memory
of the Yugoslav identity are briefly introduced, and located, as they were
narrated by my respondents. These emerged from the analysis itself and
were not in any way preconceived categories. These are: Yugoslav educa-
tion: we’re Pioneers; different Yugoslav rituals and Tito in the memory;
Yugoslav rock’n’roll; sports and the Yugoslav army; Yugoslav consumer
products; and pan-Yugoslav media and film.
1. Yugoslav Education: We’re Pioneers

Former Socialist Yugoslavia brought up the memories of the Yugoslav edu-
cation, where students were all inculcated in the ways of ‘brotherhood and
unity’ while participating in the communist Pioneers, civil defence exercises
and school trips to other parts of Yugoslavia. Generally, in Yugoslav edu-
cation there was a strong emphasis on the multicultural and multiethnic
Yugoslavia. Its diversity was, often in exaggerated terms, imagined, narrated
and created in songs, poems, literature, theatre and schools. According to an
anthropologist in Skopje, ‘In Yugoslavia, we were taught in all the schools
around the country that we were Tito’s Pioneers, the Yugoslavs. We were
learning about the Yugoslav geography and history, literature, different cul-
tures . . .’ As my informants recall, in schools, students saluted the Yugoslav
flag, replayed key commemorative dates and socialist heroes, and sang pa-
triotic songs.
2. Different Yugoslav Rituals and Tito in the Memory

Different rituals were a part of the ideological machinery in former
Yugoslavia, introduced in order to engineer the creation of Yugoslav
subjects. The ritual of the Youth Day is one example—it was impossible to
be a Yugoslav and to be unaware of this day. Each year, on 25 May, a relay of

Yugoslav youth ran through the country with a white baton, symbolizing the
country’s unity. It was a moment that exemplified Anderson’s phrase about
the confidence that the members of a community should have in each other’s
continued existence. Participation in this ritual allowed the participants to
imagine and connect themselves back to the envisioned common cultural
history and across the space. Through the symbolic meaning of this day, this
generation affirmed their membership of the Yugoslav imagined community.
According to a Ljubljana journalist, ‘it was the Youth Day that I enjoyed,
and it made me think of how diverse Yugoslavia is. I just always remember
thinking how lucky it is to live in Yugoslavia!’
The death of President Tito on 4 May 1980 marked the beginning of an
essentially new stage in the political life of the Yugoslav society. For the
majority of my informants, the day when the news about Tito’s death was
reported represented a very clear point of beginning of something new. ‘Tito
was considered to be the guardian of the country’s peace and stability, and
now he was gone.’ In the interviews, everybody had a story to share about
Tito and his role in creating Yugoslavia. A PR executive in Skopje showed
me an essay she had written about Tito when Tito was in the hospital in
Ljubljana just before his death: ‘It is difficult really to express how much we
love you, dear President Tito. You show us how to live, and how to respect
each other.’ An actress in Skopje said that:
The day when Tito died . . . is stuck in my memory. The coffin was travelling by the train
from Ljubljana to Belgrade. People all over Yugoslavia were queuing to wait for the
coffin to drive by. And almost all the politicians from all over the world came—from the
West to the East—Margaret Thatcher and Brezhnev, Kim Il Sung . . . and they gathered
to mourn.
3. Yugoslav Rock
In almost all of the narratives of my informants about Yugoslavia, a spe-
cific song was recalled and sung—the title is ‘Yugoslavia’, and the words
are: ‘Dance to rock’roll, all of Yugoslavia, everything before you folds and
unfolds . . .’ Without a doubt, an important marker of the former Yugoslav
identity is music, known in the region as Yugoslav Rock. Consequently, Yu-
goslav rock culture was the representative symbol in identifying Yugoslav
times in the 1980s. An actor in Ljubljana pointed out that:
For me, Yugoslavia was all about the Yugoslav rock’n’roll. Do you remember ‘Mi smo
ljudi cigani, sudbinom prokleti’, ‘We are gypsy people, cursed by fate’ . . . or ‘Balkane,
Balkane, Balkane moj, budi mi silan i dobro mi stoj’ . . . ‘Balkans, Balkans, Balkans of
mine, be mighty for me and stand strong.’ All these lyrics are strongly engrained in our
generation . . . they still represent identification among the youth. Rock music was the
only way of holding Yugoslav people together and not tearing them apart . . .
Yugoslav bands, such as Elektricni orgazam, Bijelo Dugme, Idoli, Sarlo

Akrobata were seen as the cultural links between different nations. It is

perhaps useful, in this connection, to point out that my informants recall

those ‘golden years of Yugoslav rock and roll’ that offered them something
Yugoslav, an identity of Yugoslavia, a rich mixture of ‘music, smart lyrics,
travelling to concerts, and hanging out’.
4. Sports and Serving in the Yugoslav Army

To the question, when did you feel the most like a Yugoslav?, most of my
male informants responded that it was during the army times and different
sports events. According to an art historian in Skopje, ‘during the Olympic
games and other international sports competitions, I was elated to be so
unproblematically supporting Yugoslavia. I don’t remember ever feeling so
undivided about anything else.’
5. Yugoslav Consumer Products

Importantly, memories of different products of the former Yugoslavia reso-
nate very powerfully in almost all of the interviews I had. Most of the names
that my respondents would cite are: Gorenje (TV sets), Kras (chocolates),
Zastava/Jugo cars, Podravka Vegeta (herbs), Jetrna pasteta (paté), Cocta
(Yugoslav version of Coca Cola), Radenska, Slovenijales (furniture).
6. Yugoslav Media
Finally, some of the informants cited pan-Yugoslav media, films, and TV
shows as important in providing and mobilizing Yugoslav identity. These
media addressed the members of various nations as Yugoslavs and could
shape their attachment to a common Yugoslav space. These pan-Yugoslav
media, such as the daily Borba (Struggle), the news agency Tanjug, Radio
Yugoslavia and the short-lived TV station Yutel attempted to address and
frame the members of different nations as Yugoslavs. Different Yugoslav
films, created in former Yugoslavia, also provided a strong ‘glue’. Who Is
Singing Out There? is seen as by far the favourite Yugoslav film. One sees
here how a process of remembering and retelling identity markers in fact
involves a number of memory products—pictures, media scenes, videos and
so on. The activity of remembering, or what Kuhn (2000: 186) has defined as
identity ‘memory work’, is an ‘active practice of remembering which takes
an inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction
through memory’.
This entire section might be read as an attempt to provide evidence for
the existence of a Yugoslav imagined community. The Yugoslav imagined
community not only existed, but continues to trigger strong and detailed
memories that are all about cultural life for this particular generation. But

my research also suggests that because the Yugoslav state started to be

framed and perceived as a weak supranational creation, the version of iden-
tity that it sustained became unstable.14 However, that does not necessarily
mean that the Yugoslav community has been erased and has disappeared
all together. Thus, the above explored landscape of Yugoslav memories not
only recalls the former Yugoslav culture, but at the same time also becomes
a contemporary site of negotiation, recycling, appropriation and contesta-
tion. To a certain degree, a particular pattern of identity markers was rep-
licated in the descriptions of national identities—national identity is first
about culture, its rituals, history; in short, it is about the everyday symbolic
life-world. This set of ideas and memories is centred on the idea of appropri-
ation. When my informants spoke of the main markers of national identity,
they followed a similar pattern of description, and used definitions similar to
the description of Yugoslav identity. In a way, they were replicating (or even
recycling) Yugoslav identity markers, while employing and then presenting
them as national ones. All of the main markers of national identifications
are first cultural ones, and point to the fact of the uncannyness of Yugoslav
identity.
The Uncanny Yugoslav Identity
No doubt, if Yugoslav identities and loyalties were felt rather strongly by

this particular last Yugo generation, so too were the feelings of confusion
from the end of the 1980s. Overall, the majority of my Slovenian inform-
ants ambivalently but gradually started to regard the national community
as a collective whole—as their own ‘new’ identity. Macedonian inform-
ants followed this path of nationalization as well, though not so rapidly,
dramatically, radically and clearly. First, what are of particular interest
in all their narratives are the assumptions these contain about the natu-
ralness and universality of national identity revealed in statements that
‘everybody’ possesses a sense of belonging to a national group. These are
rooted in the belief that national identities are something collective that
none of us can avoid and escape and, further, that one is born into a na-
tion. Responses included references to ‘Being Slovene is in my genes’, ‘We
are part of the Slav Macedonian family’, ‘We share the same values and
traditions’.A quote from an interview with an actor in Skopje is illustra-
tive: ‘My memories provide me with warm feelings for Macedonia—there
was something traditional there—through my grandparents, and parents
. . . their blood . . . blood is blood, you know’. Such an understanding of
relationships between identity and nations partly coincides with the ar-
guments of various scholars dealing with nationalism in Yugoslavia that
seem to agree that Yugoslavia never succeeded in becoming a melting pot,

moulding previously separate nations into one Yugoslav nation (Banac,

1995: 118; Djilas, 1995: 85).
Furthermore, according to my informants there were numerous histori-
cal social events fuelling the processes of redefining themselves in more na-
tionalist and essentialist terms. They recall different social, economic and
political encounters that helped to trigger and shift the sense of belonging
from Yugoslav to national identity. A comprehensive investigation of these
encounters is both beyond the capacity of the modest length and focus of
this paper, and indeed irrelevant to it. Instead, what I aim to do is to draw
attention to a common memory of transformations that was the process
of relabelling and renaming public spaces, streets and monuments in Slov-
enia and Macedonia. In addition, Harvey’s work (2000, 2001) has led me
to recognize the importance of geographical conditions in understanding
social life. He shows how space can be made to hide consequences from
us, how relations of power are inscribed into the spatiality of social life and
how human geographies are filled with politics and ideology. The physical
space in general represents a set of cultural practices through which the
configuration of the conceptual may be discerned. By reading the physical
space and its associated implications for modes of representation and social
interaction, we are able to ‘understand’ the cultural understandings of space
as well. Historically, Harvey writes, hardly any major political change has
gone by without being inscribed into the urban space via street-naming or
monument-building. For example, one of the main roads in Ljubljana, the
capital of Slovenia, was renamed from Titova into Dunajska cesta (Vienna
Street), thus bringing the city to different space and time dimensions: those
of the Habsburg Empire. As a Ljubljana writer claimed:
I am happy that my environment was becoming more Slovenian. No more other South
Slavic languages . . . only Slovenian. And a bus on Dunajska Street would now take me
back home. Forget Tito and [his] Titova Street. Titova was never really a serious path to
anywhere, anyway. (emphasis added)
In the Macedonian context, the informants talked about the space of

Carsija—an old Ottoman part of Skopje that has changed considerably since
the collapse of Yugoslavia in that it is now considered to be an Albanian
space, an Albanian market. Slav Macedonian informants would map the
Carsija’s conceptual domain, and in their narratives its range of meanings
included images of criminal activity, darkness and lack of control, all of
which are generally associated with the Albanian population (see more in
Brown, 2003).
Such political ‘reframing’ of space, as a tool of domination, in a way as-
phyxiates whatever is contained within it. All of this also points to the idea
of how our thinking about living is shaped by the nation-state framework.
But it would be too simplistic to conclude that national identity is a fairly

passive entity by which my informants are now bound culturally and social-
ly to the nation state. It should be understood as a more openly interpreta-
tive process whereby individuals remember, employ, borrow and negotiate
who they are. In that sense, the individuals’ sense of identity is remembered,
shared and recreated in the process of everyday life, in the cultural field.
At the same time, then, Yugoslav identity provided a space of multiplic-
ity, and implicated its citizens in the dimension of embodied but diverse
cultural experience. For my informants, the belonging to the supranational
had a different connotation than belonging to the nation. In these narratives
the limitations (which are both intellectual and imaginative) of any national
identity have to do with a way of belonging that tends to consider cultural
complexity in terms of disorder and loss of coherence. The nation regards it-
self in terms of singularity, as a unified and coherent whole—nationals con-
nected together in a single cultural and political body. Discussing national
identity, a Ljubljana economist argued that:
Yugoslavia . . . For me . . . it was the country of my childhood, of diverse landscapes, and
music, and food. It offered more air to breathe . . . it had more space to dance . . . you
know what I mean? We are just too small now, we, the Slovenes. Too small, this country
is . . . Too homogeneous, it is as if we are all the same—Catholic, and . . . kind of Austrian
Slavs. It is a strange process going on . . . because societies are becoming more nationally
fragmented, while at the same time they are exposed to the homogenizing effects of the
liberal market and capitalism . . . of course, on some level, and for some people, that’s
just great . . .
A Maribor politician claimed that:

I don’t have enough air here in this country. It is as if I cannot breathe, and I get suffocated,
because it is so small. Not enough space for creativity, diversity, and originality . . . if
compared to Yugoslavia, where yes . . . the difference inspired us all . . .
Furthermore, many point out how national culture is actually a mixture

of past Yugoslav cultures. A radio journalist in Skopje argued that:
I was brought up as a Yugoslav, within a Yugoslav community, with Yugoslav culture, and
with products . . . well, Macedonian culture . . . is just hard to explain, but actually, there is
no real difference between Yugoslav culture and Macedonian culture. It is worse . . . we
are smaller now, and totally marginalized, and no one gives a damn about us.
Furthermore, a writer from Skopje claimed that the recreation of national

identity required no less culturally ideological work than the formation
of the former Yugoslavia after the Second World War. ‘Socialist Yugoslav
school projects, with their stories of partisan heroism and the “brother-
hood” of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bosnians . . . are now being replaced
by textbooks promoting new stories of Macedonian national heroes and a
national homeland.’
In this sense, Freud’s notion of the ‘uncanny’ can be helpful here again,
while analysing these transformational processes. Yet I use the notion

of uncanny in a metaphorical way, rather than solely in a comprehensive,

explanatory way. The past (Yugoslav) experiences—initially very familiar
and strongly felt—are not lost, and they constantly return. The uncanny
Yugoslav identity lies in a particular uncertainty—while it gets borrowed
and appropriated, ironically, by ‘new’ national identities. In the words of a
Skopje painter:
You ask me to compare Yugoslav culture with a Macedonian culture . . . I would have to
use pretty much the same characteristics, such as the use of history in uniting us vs. them;
the music; sport events . . . well, before we had good Serbian basketball players, now we
have mediocre Macedonian ones . . . so, actually, we just became smaller than we used to
be, and we’ve homogenized ourselves even more. You know, I find it interesting that in
the West, nation states were engaged in establishing a supranational union, the EU that
we all want to belong to so hard. At the same time, the existing supranational Yugoslavia
was slowly but violently collapsing.
A Ljubljana lawyer claimed that:

I am a Yugo-nostalgic . . . but there is one and only one reason why I miss Yugoslavia,
and why I am happy to have grown up in Yugoslavia . . . Yugoslavia really moved beyond
simply mixing people and became a place, at least in the 1980s, where the fact of difference
was accepted, and celebrated. There was openness to otherness, and I loved the fact that I
travelled to Serbia on school trips and had my first kiss with a Serbian girl . . .
To conclude, the crucial questioned relation here was the connection between
memories and the significance of identities on one hand and why and how
people accept these identities and further remember, transform and reshape
the prior feelings of belonging on the other. It is thus to the origins of the
changed feelings that we must turn in order to situate any understanding of
the reappropriation, with the caveat that the following discussion is meant to
be suggestive, not exhaustive. This approach was inspired by Buck-Morss’s
(1977) summary of Adorno’s argument that history takes on meaning
‘only in relation to the present, and then only as a critical concept which
demystifies the present’ (1977: 168). Thus, demystifying the feeling of an all-
powerful and strong national identity means considering its articulations
not in isolation, but in relation to the historical and social context. Thus,
there is a complex view of matters at play here—I insist that the national
should not be understood as erasing or writing over the Yugoslav one, as
suggested by some (see more on this in Godina, 1998). What one sees is
the morphing of Yugoslav identity characteristics into national ones. I
emphasize rather that the national appropriates and recycles the Yugoslav
so that the nation begins to have various different (Yugoslav) meanings.
The following quotation made by a philosophy PhD student, from Maribor,
Slovenia, captures beautifully this ambiguity and paradox:
Yugoslavia . . . lives on . . . I mean, not only metaphorically . . . like, in our hearts . . . but
literally. Just think of the Slovene rituals, they are very similar to the Yugoslav ones.
Youth day or the national day . . . we celebrate our nation, as we celebrated Yugoslavia

in the past . . . You know . . . my Yugoslav memories define me . . . and I understand the
world though my socialization in Yugoslavia.
Conclusions
My approach in this article was to understand the meanings, the issues and
the tensions surrounding the memories of former Yugoslavia by considering
them from a critical theory vantage point, which includes an analysis of the
memories, discourses and assumptions about the central issues, as narrated
by the last Yugoslav generation. The article aimed to offer an examination
of the former Yugoslav identity and how it relates to a national ‘expropria-
tion’. The goal here was to suggest a framework for thinking about some of
the mechanisms whereby a specific generation came to reconstruct, negoti-
ate and remember.
One of the arguments of this article is that instead of the problematic
downplaying of differences within Yugoslavia, we need to understand that
much of the spirit of the flavour of life in Yugoslavia was characterized pre-
cisely by the very existence of national differences within. Yugoslav identity
was about immersion in a world of multiplicity, and implicated its citizens
in the dimension of embodied cultural experience. The belonging to the su-
pranational had a different connotation than belonging to the nation—the
nation defines itself in terms of singularity, as a unified whole, and does not
allow for diversity. The Yugoslav supranational identification, on the other
hand, allowed for multiplicity, plurality, and openness. Within the Yugoslav
framework, the relation between solidarity and diversity has become one
of the key issues—it seems that, according to the memories, the Yugoslav
space provided the possibility to live everyday life differently and more pro-
ductively. In this sense, Yugoslavia as a supranational entity continues to
serve as a model for thinking in different ways about questions of cultural
pluralism.
Importantly, my informants’ memories are shaped and created by
thoughts and wishes of the specific moment. As Young (1993) pointed out,
the concept ‘collective memory’ should be replaced by ‘collected memory’,
because societies can only ‘remember’ through the memories of the individ-
uals that compose them. And these shared Yugoslav memories are crucial
for the present identity of any social group, including the last Yugo-genera-
tion. Also, Yugoslav ‘shared memories’ (Margalit, 2002) are an important
communicative connection-chain for this generation, and they partially
shape the reality that enables my informants to imagine the world in which
they live. The Yugoslav imaginary then still works as a way in which my
informants imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others,
the fears and expectations that exist and the expected representations.

A variety of informants pointed out that a sense of Yugoslav-ness had

not necessarily been incompatible with a simultaneous sense of, for exam-
ple, Slovene-ness or Serbian-ness and a whole range of other positions. With
such variety in the remembered Yugoslav experience and Yugoslav culture,
I believe that there are good reasons for critically analysing depictions of
Yugoslavia as an artificial entity of primordial national communities under
the Titoist hard hand. This image of the former state as ‘the prison of the
nations’ is the dominant representation among nationalist politicians and
their hard-line followers, and should be dismissed. However, we also need to
question those who now depict the former context as an ideal multicultural
place, where national differences did not exist at all or were blended into a
feel-good Yugoslav melting pot.
This article has argued that the memories, views, feelings, definitions of the
former Yugoslav community now generally render themselves in the form
of a collage that comes to be remembered as a beautiful and even utopian
past. Crucially, there is a difference between the memory of Yugoslavia as
a state, a political construction or ideological utopia on the one hand, and a
cultural space and an everyday reality (linked with childhood and home) on
the other hand. Similar to Freud’s analysis of the uncanny, Yugoslav identity
‘is a word, the meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence,
until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich’ (1963: 201). In other
words, the politics of Yugoslav identity have not been eliminated but trans-
formed and borrowed from within the context of historical global dynamics
and political and economic transnational forces. To conclude, this research
also points to how the national appropriates the Yugoslav in such a way that
the nation continues to have various different (Yugoslav) meanings.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank the Center for Advanced Study, Sofia, Bulgaria, and
Roles, Identities and Hybrids Fellows, 2004/2005.
NOTES
1. Related to the focus on the role of ethnonational identities and the state is the
recognition of state discourses as constitutive of national identities. Through an
investigation of former Yugoslav states’ government discourses, and specifical-
ly, their new constitutions, Hayden (1998) argues that the state plays a crucial
role in the nationalization and ethno-ization of populations. While looking at
different practices that define the boundaries of national and ethnic identities,
and with that citizenship, he contends that the boundaries of the state are not
merely territorial, but are a function of the state’s discursive authority. In his

study on Kosovo, Ger Duijzings (1999) has illustrated that ambiguous, diverse,
and plural ethnic identities are common phenomena in some former Yugoslav
areas. Rather than being fixed and static, these sociocultural entities are flexible
processes.
2. Bell (2003: 70) further claims that memory indeed ‘demarcates the boundary
between Them and Us, delineating the national self from the foreign, alien
Other’.
3. Josip Broz Tito was the premier and president of Yugoslavia from 1945 to
1980.
4. I focus here on ‘young intellectuals’ but I do not seek a precise definition of
who an intellectual is or is not—simply, to be an intellectual means to make
knowledge claims in the public sphere, to gain some degree of social attention
and to participate in social relations on the basis of this exchange of social
recognition. I view intellectuals as the ones who exert public influence through
their practice and works in the public sphere.
5. At the beginning of my research, I also expected that I would be able to
recognize the Eastern and the Western versions of their narratives, but the
connotations of West and East do not significantly penetrate the discourses
of the interviewed. Important to note here then is that the positioning of
Yugoslavia as neither-Eastern-nor-Western provided a strong symbolic capital
for Yugoslavs, and continues to do so. Particularly with the creation of the non-
aligned movement in the 1950s, the neither-Eastern-nor-Western positioning
became one of the main mantras of the socialist Yugoslav political identity.
6. These republics were Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia–Herzegovina, Serbia (with the
autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina), Montenegro and Macedonia.
Citizens defined themselves as belonging both to their own nation and to the
Yugoslav state.
7. There are, however, arguments on the Bulgarian and Greek side that, during
former Yugoslavia era, in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, authorities
there worked to foster a sense of Macedonian national feeling, creating a
literary language, and developing an official history that projected a separate
Macedonian national identity into the past.
8. Such as those of the Macedonians, Montenegrins and Muslims expressed in
the 1974 Constitution, when people in former Yugoslavia were defined in
ethnonationalistic terms.
9. This modest decline in self-identification as a Yugoslav for the country as a
whole in that period was primarily the result of a decline of Yugoslav identifiers
in Bosnia and Herzegovina (8.4% of the population in 1961 and 1.9% in
1971). According to Ramet (1992: 176 – 86) high Yugoslav self-identification in
Bosnia in 1961 occurred because Muslims refused to identify themselves with
dominant national groups (i.e. Serbs and Croats). The 1971 census was the first
to allow ‘Muslim’ as a nationality, and many Muslim Bosnians switched from
the ‘Yugoslav’ to the ‘Muslim’ category in 1971.
10. The remainder of the population identified themselves as Slovenes, Croats,
Serbs, Muslims, etc. (Sekulic, 1997a).
11. Again, it is difficult to equate the census data on the Yugoslav identity with
the sense of belonging that people had towards Yugoslavia. For many, it was

possible to have different layers of identity — e.g. they felt culturally Yugoslavs,
but ethnically Serbs.
12. At the same time, many scholars consider that Tito’s nationality policy in the
1960s and 1970s reawakened the nationalist ideologies that helped to destroy
Yugoslavia in the 1980s (see more in Banac, 1984).
13. This goes in line with Guzina’s argument when he writes that ‘there was never a
strong identification with Yugoslavism in a country with the same name simply
because there was never enough cultural and political imagination on the part
of the leading intellectuals (party ideologues) or ruling communist elites to
envision such a construct’ (2003: 91).
14. Also, there was a difference between Albanian Macedonian and Slav
Macedonian informants here: if Slav Macedonians shared a faith and a trust,
albeit ambivalently, with a Macedonian nationalization process, Albanian
Macedonian informants expressed their feelings in connection with a fear of a
potential exclusion from a Macedonian national imagined community space.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Zala Volcic is a Lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, University

of Queensland, Australia. She teaches mass communication theory, communication
for social change, and international communication. She is interested in the cultural
consequences of nationalism, capitalism, and globalization, with a particular
emphasis on international communication, media identities, and communication
for social change. She has published numerous books and articles, including ‘The
Machine that Creates Slovenes: The Role of Slovene Public Broadcasting in
Re-affirming the Slovene National Identity’, National Identities Journal; ‘The
Notion of “The West” in the Serbian National Imaginary’, European Journal of
Cultural Studies; ‘Mapping the Notion of “Terrorism” in Serbian and Croatian
Newspapers’ (with Karmen Erjavec), Journal of Communication Inquiry; and
‘Blaming the Media: Serbian Narratives of National(ist) Identity’, Continuum:
Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. [email: z.volcic@uq.edu.au]


Yugo Utopia

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Yugo Utopia

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Cultural Dynamics

The online version of this article can be found at:

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The Long March from Yugo-Utopia to Nationalisms

In February 2003, a new Slovene shopping market Mercator was ofﬁcially

19(1): 67–89. [DOI: 10.1177/0921374007077270] http://cdy.sagepub.com

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But this becomes more problematic under closer examination—beyond or

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Notes on Methodology: The Last ‘Yugo’ Generation and its

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I conducted all of the interviews face to face in Slovenian and/or Serbian

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of Slovenian and Macedonian informants about former Yugoslavia. Thus,

Some Background: The Dialectics of Identity in Former Yugoslavia

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Surveying Former Yugoslav Identity

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Identity Markers of the Yugoslav Socialist in the 1980s

A politician in Skopje observed that:

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is at the same time strange and familiar. Furthermore, it remains a cultural

1. Yugoslav Education: We’re Pioneers

2. Different Yugoslav Rituals and Tito in the Memory

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Yugoslav bands, such as Elektricni orgazam, Bijelo Dugme, Idoli, Sarlo

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perhaps useful, in this connection, to point out that my informants recall

4. Sports and Serving in the Yugoslav Army

5. Yugoslav Consumer Products

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my research also suggests that because the Yugoslav state started to be

The Uncanny Yugoslav Identity

No doubt, if Yugoslav identities and loyalties were felt rather strongly by

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moulding previously separate nations into one Yugoslav nation (Banac,

In the Macedonian context, the informants talked about the space of

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A Maribor politician claimed that:

Furthermore, many point out how national culture is actually a mixture

Furthermore, a writer from Skopje claimed that the recreation of national

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of uncanny in a metaphorical way, rather than solely in a comprehensive,

A Ljubljana lawyer claimed that:

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A variety of informants pointed out that a sense of Yugoslav-ness had

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Anderson, Benedict (1991) Imagined Communities: Reﬂections on the Origin and

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Zala Volcic is a Lecturer at the School of Journalism and Communication, University

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