Saviours of the Nation: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism (review)

With the end of communism in eastern Europe, nationalism became the dominant political paradigm in almost every state that had not been ethnically homogenized earlier in the twentieth century (these exceptions being the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland). However, the Serbian variant has seemed to many to be especially virulent, giving rise to war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Few authors have bothered to investigate why many Serbs responded so aggressively to the changing conditions of communism's demise, relegating their actions either to the evil genius of President Slobodan Milosevic or to some kind of cultural pathology akin to the putative "eliminationist mind-set" that Goldhagen assigned to Germans.¹

Dragovib-Soso elegantly and quickly rejects such instrumentalist and culturalist arguments as inadequate (4–7), and instead focuses on "the specific political, ideological, social and economic circumstances in which contemporary Serbian intellectuals acted in order to explain their transformations and choices" (7). She analyzes intellectual life in the former Yugoslavia from the mid-1970s through the critical years of 1989 to 1991, when that state, the most prosperous and progressive socialist country in eastern Europe, became "the former Yugoslavia," the site of wars, ethnic cleansing, and impoverishment. Though Dragovib-Soso concentrates on the intellectual elite in Serbia, she is careful to analyze their actions in the context of increasing nationalist activities by other Yugoslav elites, notably those in Slovenia. The result is the best analysis available of how and why the Serbian elite turned from a commitment toward democracy and human rights to the usual exclusionary central European style of nationalism, which made compromise with other Yugoslav elites impossible and provided the intellectual justification for many of Milosevic's policies.

Methodologically, this study combines an ethnographic quality of interviews and description of context (similar to Verdery's work on Romanian nationalism) with a historian's eye for trends through time.² Many of the interviews were done in 1992, and Dragovib-Soso has turned to advantage the decade that it took for her to do the research. She does a thorough analysis of the ideological debates about the Serbian national situation that took place in the press from the mid-1980s through the start of the Yugoslav wars, in 1991. Having lived through these events and monitored them closely myself, reading Dragovib-Soso gives me the feeling that not only is her view correct ethnographically, representing well the ethos of the times, but it also makes the trends of the arguments more clear than they could have been to almost anyone at the time.

Dragovib-Soso shows the specifics of the "national problem" of Serbs, which was unique in Yugoslavia: The Serb population was partitioned into three republics, with a large "internal diaspora." The Republic of Serbia was itself partitioned into three parts, the "Autonomous Regions" of Kosovo and Vojvodina being outside of the authority of the Republic's government, yet holding veto power over that government's acts. This specific context certainly conditioned the response of Serb intellectuals to the possibility that the Yugoslav federation would fall apart. Yet Dragovib-Soso is also clear on the choice that many of the most prominent Serbian intellectuals made, of nationalism and conflict over democratization and compromise. The result was self-fulfilling tragedy. Having identified what Serbs had to lose were Yugoslavia to collapse, most of the most prominent members of Serbia's intellectual elite supported positions, and politicians, that brought about precisely the result that they feared, bringing tragedy to most Serbs and to many others in the former Yugoslavia.