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BOJAN BILIĆ, PHD CANDIDATE • UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON SCHOOL OF SLAVONIC AND EAST EUROPEAN STUDIES
16 TAVITON STREET • WC1H 0BW • LONDON UK • [email protected]
Bojan Bilid
Contentious Socialists: Recovering the Main Precursors of
(Post-)Yugoslav Anti-War Engagement
(Post-)Yugoslav anti-war initiatives have remained surprisingly under-theorised in spite of their importance fo
understanding the developmental trajectories of both the national and regional civic scenes. This knowledg
lacuna is reflective of the broader trend of marginalising (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement in East Europea
sociological scholarship. The field of Yugoslav studies has recently been inundated by nationalism researcwhich concentrates on the newly create “nation-states” an rarely consiers the trans-national nature of th
phenomena accompanying the painful process of Yugoslavia’s issolution.
This chapter shows that the (post-)Yugoslav anti-war initiatives did not appear immediately prior to the arme
conflicts in a social and political vacuum. Rather, these undertakings — which invariably appreciated the cultura
and linguistic affinities that characterise the Yugoslav space — appropriated the already existing activis
networks developed throughout the second half of the 20th
century. In this regard, Yugoslav civic activists neve
questioned the principles of self-management socialism. The vast majority of (post-)Yugoslav anti-wa
protagonists — especially those related to the 1968 student protests and Yugoslav feminism — acted on th
basis of clearly articulated leftist positions. Their ideology, in other words, did not differ from the politica
programme of the Yugoslav authorities. The principal objective of their engagement was to reduce the cleavagbetween the reality of living conditions, social inequalities and restricted freedoms, on the one hand, and th
officially propagated — and often distorted — images of welfare and justice, on the other.
Yugoslav civic engagement has been characterised by a tension between the necessity to be based on a regiona
(Yugoslav) model and the difficulty of putting such a model into practice. In the context of strongly competin
nationally-bounded activist narratives which are nowadays embedded in fundamentally important foreig
financial channels, the post-Yugoslav anti-war activists and human rights defenders could not have managed t
wriggle out of the “leaer iscourse” which pervasively covers post-Yugoslav political culture. Often stretche
between the unapproving public which consiers them ‘traitors’ (or, increasingly, technocrats) an the resistin
state, the activists have spent a lot of energy on trying to coordinate their own personal ambitions, internapower struggles and personality idiosyncrasies. Their political charge and the potential for establishing a new
democratic counter-culture (at least among those who might have seen this as their long-term goal) hav
dissipated into a myriad of projects favouring urban and highly educated English speaking employees whos
technical skills go way beyond those of their (ex-activist) employers. These activists have, thus, not only misse
many opportunities for an intervention into social reality, but they have even perpetuated the power mode
which they set out to critique.
Forthcoming in 2012 in Towards Open Regionalism in South East Europe, edited by Paul Stubbs and Christoph
Solioz (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft | Southeast European Integration Perspectives, vol. 6).
http://www.ceis-eu.org/publications/books/02.htm