Anti-War Initiatives and the Un-Making of Civic Identities in the Former Yugoslav Republics (original) (raw)

1997, Journal of Historical Sociology

This paper describes the emergence of anti-war initiatives in the former Yugoslavia against the background of the official nationalism of Communist elites and their post-1990 successors. The author argues that anti-war activism in the disintegrating state was a mobilization of the most articulate segment of a widespread, all-Yugoslav, urban, cosmopolitan and genuinely non-ethnonationalistic cultural identity. One of the reasons behind its easy suppression by the official rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity is its purely cultural stance and lack of experience in alternative forms of political organization. Dominant approaches to ethno-nationalism in former Yugoslavia are criticized for essentializing ethnic identities, and contrasted with some interpretive approaches that analyze the structural preconditions of ethno-nationalism as top-to-bottom projects of the ex-Communist middle-to-high ranking functionaries in search of legitimacy and forced to create a 'democratic electorate.' * * * * * Who am I? Born in Serbia, named Mirhad, from the marriage between the daughter of an Orthodox communist priest and the offspring of a Moslem noble family. I married a Slovak woman with whom I lived in Sarajevo. Who can I be, and who are my sons? I am a Yugoslav of a disappeared Yugoslavia, the same one that formed me, the one that is today deceased and does not care for the texts that historians will write about it. Yugoslavia is dead, but I am not... Many people call me bad luck, a trick of history, a killer of small peoples' rights... Nobody likes or needs us, a handful of right-less people who do not approve of any of the warring parties; as time goes by we will disappear, silenced by the historians of the victors. But for now, as long as we still exist, as the inhabitants of Atlantide, we should leave a trace on Earth, affirming our cultural identity. Not because we will, in the future, start a struggle for political unity, but because we should save, like a rare book, something that makes us different from anybody else-our cultural distinction. 2