8/3/2019 Contentious socialists: Recovering the main precursors of (post-)Yugoslav anti-war engagement

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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 • BOJAN.BILIC.09@UCL.AC.UK 

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