Yugoslavia Archives - Not Even Past

Yugoslavia in the Shadow of War: Veterans and the Limits of State Building, 1903-1945 by John Paul Newman (2015)

The end of the First World War in Europe signified the dissolution of the old empires, the creation of new states, and the triumph of liberal democracy and the parliamentary system. However, this triumph lasted only around a decade. By the end of 1920s and early 1930s, authoritarianism and dictatorship had replaced both liberalism and parliamentarism.

John Paul Newman uses the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes as a case study to discuss the failed liberal experiments in the successor states of interwar Eastern Europe. The Kingdom was found in 1918 under King Peter, and after 1921 under his son Alexander, of the Serbian Karadjordjević dynasty. Although the new state was a result of the panslavist dream of unifying all the South Slavs of the Western Balkans, its name proved to be a very unfortunate idea, as it did not signal the replacement of local nationalisms with a new national identity.

Newman constructs his study around the various veteran associations, their mobilizations and their remembrance and commemorations. Through documents, newspapers, and memoirs, Newman analyzes the political use of remembrance and Serbian, Croatian, and Slovene veterans’ remobilization after the war. For Newman, the veterans’ reluctance to leave the war experience behind led to the defeat of liberalism by authoritarianism. Belgrade’s official policy of “liberation and unification” viewed the period between 1912 and 1918 as a whole and praised the Serbian veterans and their allies that fought during the First Balkan War (1912-1913) against the Ottoman Empire, the Second Balkan War (1913) against their former ally, Bulgaria, and the First World War (1914-1918) against Austria-Hungary, Germany and Bulgaria. The Balkan Wars led Serbia to annex parts of the ex-Ottoman territories of Kosovo and Macedonia, while the Great War allowed Serbia to be unified with Montenegro and the ex-Austro-Hungarian territories of Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Vojvodina. According to the official policy, it was the acts of Serbia and its army alone that liberated the South Slavs of the Western Balkans. The “liberation and unification” policy excluded the rest of the South Slavs from its remembrance and commemorations. They were viewed as just passively waiting for their Serbian liberators.

Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Maria of Yugoslavia in 1933 (via Wikimedia)

This Serbian “culture of victory” alienated all those South Slavs who as subjects of Austria-Hungary had fought under its army and had instead cultivated a “culture of defeat.” Such contradictions were even stronger for those who participated in the Austro-Hungarian campaigns against Serbia or those Slovenes, who fought against Italy, an Entente and Serbian ally, and its expansive designs into the Slovenian territories of Austria-Hungary. Both opposing cultures negated and undermined the idea behind a unified South Slav state in the Western Balkans.

Newman analyzes successfully how these conflicting cultures undermined the new state and nation building. The officers who served in the Austro-Hungarian Army were reluctant to join the new armed forces, where the official policy excluded them from the system of promotions. On the other hand, Serbian officers neither wanted their defeated ex-enemies to join them nor the official remembrance of the war to be abandoned, as it offered them pride and promotions. Similarly, new Kingdom’s welfare programs and land reform did not satisfy the veterans and ex-members of the Austro-Hungarian Army faced constant discrimination.

The Serbian Army enters Zagreb, 1918 (via Wikipedia)

As Newman demonstrates, the inability to improve their economic well-being quickly disillusioned Serbian, and other, veterans with the new state as well. Even more, Serbian veterans blamed parliamentarianism for the government’s failure to provide for them and viewed it as slow, corrupted, and ready to betray their legacy. Many Serbian and Croatian veterans also started gravitating towards fascism and right-wing revisionism. Nevertheless, cases of cooperation between ex-enemies were not rare. People like Captain Lujo Lovrić, a panslavist Croat volunteer in the Serbian army, who became blind during the war, were used by the regime to propagandize South Slav union and its social policies to the disabled veterans, but those policies were not enough.

Newman overall succeeds in explaining a failed nation-building project through a group of people who were mobilized and politicized during the Great War and could not accept the new state of affairs. Newman’s thorough analysis clarifies the catastrophic impact of divisive cultural and social policies in a divided society. As the crisis deepened King Alexander presented to the Serbian veterans the institution of monarchy as the Kingdom’s unifying symbol. In this way he secured their support, which proved crucial for the establishment of his dictatorship in 1929 and constituted his effort towards a new nation and state building project, Yugoslavia.

Also by Charalampos Minasidis on Not Even Past:

Review of The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton

Restless Youth: The CIA, Socialist Humanism, and Yugoslavia’s 1968 Student Protests

By Aleksej Demjanski

The 1960s saw an explosion of student activism across the globe. This increase in youth movements for social change was so influential that U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson had the Central Intelligence Agency illegally monitor student movements both at home and abroad. After some investigation, the CIA produced an over two-hundred-page report, titled “Restless Youth,” which discusses their findings on the activities of students and student groups in the United States as well as nineteen other countries across Asia, Africa, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe.

vietnam_war_protesters-_1967-_wichita_kans_-_nara_-_283625

Students in Kansas protest in 1967 against the Vietnam War (via Wikimedia Commons).

The report broadly details the general trends of how the “restless youth,” particularly university students, engaged in a range of anti-establishment activism such as university occupations, street marches, and sit-ins. The CIA report analyzes what issues caught the attention of students, whether they organized ad hoc or within existing organizations, how many students were attending universities, how they connected with other social groups, how they transnationally exchanged ideas, and what ideas inspired them to action. Overall, the report argues that many of the students turned to activism because of their frustration with the socioeconomic and political status quo and that they demanded more from their universities, communities, and governments.

The CIA report also notes that many students, mostly American and European, were inspired to protest by “Marxist social criticism” and the writings of C. Wright Mills, Frantz Fanon, and especially the American critical theorist and sociologist Herbert Marcuse. This Marxist social criticism, also known as Marxist or socialist humanism, stresses the importance of Karl Marx’s early writings and the need for a critical praxis directed against capitalism as well as against traditional Soviet or statist Marxism. Herbert Marcuse was a proponent of socialist humanism and significantly collaborated with the most well-known Marxist humanist philosophical movement of the time – Yugoslavia’s Praxis School.

herbert_marcuse_in_newton_massachusetts_1955

Herbert Marcuse in 1955 (via Wikimedia Commons).

The members of Yugoslavia’s Praxis School were prominent professors in the Faculties of Philosophy at both the Zagreb and Belgrade universities who supported Yugoslavia’s protesting university students in 1968. The CIA report has an entire chapter dedicated to the student movement in Yugoslavia, yet, this eleven-page section oddly makes no mention of the Praxis School and the support its members gave to Yugoslavia’s protesting university students. The report clearly makes the connection between Herbert Marcuse, Marxist humanism, and student protests, but it fails to make the broader connection to the socialist humanist Praxis School of Yugoslavia and its affiliates who joined university students in protest in the summer of 1968.

How could the CIA have missed this? Although the authors considered student activism to be a growing threat and a “worldwide phenomenon” fueled in part by this particular philosophical discourse of socialist humanism, they didn’t seem to be interested in the leading socialist humanist movement of the time, despite its influence on students in Yugoslavia and beyond. The Yugoslav government, on the other hand, didn’t miss this connection and became extremely interested in the Praxis School. Although the movement wasn’t pro-capitalist or anti-socialist, the Yugoslav leadership still viewed it as a threat due to its criticism of the ruling party – the League of Communists of Yugoslavia – for not fulfilling its promises to create a more just socialist society. Similar views toward student protests were taken by the authorities in nearby countries: in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring and in Poland. The Czechoslovak government also monitored its growing student movement and produced its own report which noted the students’ criticism of Czechoslovak socialism.

The student occupation of the University of Belgrade (via The Modern Historian).

Following the student occupation at Belgrade University in June 1968, the Yugoslav authorities quietly cracked down on dissenting students and professors. The main target was the leading cohort of the Praxis School, professors in the Faculty of Philosophy at Belgrade University. Slowly, but surely, eight professors from Belgrade – Mihailo Markovic, Ljubomir Tadic, Miladin Zivotic, Zagorka Golubovic, Dragoljub Micunovic, Nebojsa Popov, Triva Indjic, and Svetozar Stojanovic – were removed from their professorships at the university. The Yugoslav authorities claimed that the professors were the “ideological inspiration” and “practical organizers” of the student demonstrations and university occupation and as such needed to be stopped at all costs. They had become too influential and were improperly educating students with ideas that the Yugoslav socialist system of “self-management” was flawed. Aside from being sacked from their university positions the professors also lost financial support for their research and funding for their publication, the Praxis journal, was essentially cut. Although the Belgrade professors didn’t organize the protests, their Marxist humanism consciously or unconsciously provided the intellectual platform for students to criticize the Yugoslav system. The CIA was never able to put these pieces of the puzzle together and failed to capture this source of student discontent both at home and abroad.

CIA Report, “Restless Youth,” Intelligence File, National Security File, Box 3, LBJ Library.
Additional Sources:
Mihailo Marković and R. S. Cohen, Yugoslavia: The Rise and Fall of Socialist Humanism: A History of the Praxis Group. (2005)Paulina Bren, “1968 East and West: Visions of Political Change and Student Protest from across the Iron Curtain,” in Transnational moments of change: Europe 1945, 1968, 1989, P. Kenney and G. Horn, eds. (2004)

Great Books on Women’s History: Europe

Not Even Past asked the UT Austin History faculty to recommend great books for Women’s History Month. The response was overwhelming so we will be posting their suggestions throughout the month. Since today is International Women’s Day, a celebration that began in Europe, we will begin with some terrific book recommendations on women and gender in Europe.

In no particular order:

Philippa Levine recommends:

Alison Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (2008)

In a brilliant reading of the great modernist novelist Virginia Woolf, Alison Light compares the absence of servants in Woolf’s published fiction with the constant references to them in her correspondence with friends and family. Woolf was still employing servants at the moment when what had been a veritable army of available female domestic labour began to shrink as women rejected the constraints of such work and sought better paid and less intimate work elsewhere. In detailing Woolf’s fraught relationship with her long-time live-in servant, Nellie Boxall, with whom she fought constantly, Light reveals the class and gender tensions that continued to shape British culture in the early twentieth century in elegant prose and with really sharp insights. A fantastic read!

Tracie Matysik and Yoav di Capua recommend:

Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg (2015).

A compelling book, that introduces the reader to the passionate life and convictions of Rosa Luxemburg. And the illustrations are beautiful, even moving. Along the way, you’ll get a good glimpse of the aims and challenges of revolutionary thought in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century.

Tatjana Lichtenstein recommends:

Janina Bauman, Beyond these Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto – Young Girl’s Story (2006).

In this book — part diary, part memoir — Janina Bauman tells the fascinating story of how three Jewish women escaped the Warsaw ghetto and, assisted by a small network of courageous and devoted Polish helpers on the “Aryan” side, survived the war in hiding and by passing as non-Jews.

Mary Neuburger recommends:

Jelena Batinić, Women and Yugoslav Partisans: A History of World War II Resistance (2015)

This book traces both the fascinating phenomena of women’s role in the largest resistance movement in Europe during World War II, and women’s postwar memory of the changes in gender roles caused by the war and the communist period that followed.

Andy Villalon recommends:

Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth.

The most moving memoir (male or female) to come out of the Great War. Highly readable and easily obtainable, this is the story of love and unfathomable loss by a woman who saw all of her close male friends, including her fiancé and her brother, slaughtered in the holocaust of 1914-18. The book also sheds considerable light on the trials women faced in pursuing an education during the decades just before the conflict. It is the story of the making of a great crusader for pacifism. I have read Testament of Youth several times and have never been able to avoid crying at various passages.

Miriam Bodion recommends:

Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (2007)

This thoughtful, often surprising work makes use of a broad array of sources, from theoretical works on gender to ancient and medieval rabbinic texts, to explore how medieval Jews thought about birth, infant care, and the raising of children.

Julie Hardwick recommends:

Judith Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism (2006)

A leading medievalist takes a brilliant, lively, provocative, and very accessible look at the persistence of gender inequality and insists we can only understand that pattern by looking back — well back. Her topics range from work to sexuality, and she makes a very important and compelling argument.

Co-Winner of April Essay Contest: They Would Never Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulic (2005)

by Daniel Rusnak

In They Would Never Hurt a Fly, Slavenka Drakulic follows the stories of the Hague War criminals from the former Yugoslavia. Drakulic argues that ordinary men transformed into war criminals gradually through intensifying rhetoric containing a perfect storm of prejudice, myth, propaganda history and culture. Becoming a war criminal is a process, she claims, that does not affect only those who are “predisposed” or “inhuman.” Indeed, anyone can become a war criminal under the right circumstances. Even well meaning, civilized people like you and me.

Ordinary people become monsters, Drakulic argues, through steady alienation of the “other” group. Individuals slowly grow accustomed to hatred and absorb it into their daily lives. It begins with trivial things like refusing association with the “other” ethnicity for fear of public ridicule and evolves to accepting – and even profiting from – the ethnic cleansing of an entire town: “This policy of small steps, of everyday decisions and concessions, of a collaboration on a much smaller scale.” Propaganda made neighbors enemies, demonizing one another over ten years. The psychological groundwork for genocide was already in the works long before the war, based on “prejudices and myths rooted in reality either in history of earlier wars or in cultural or religious differences.”

When asked why Serbians carried out war crimes, Bijana Plavsic, former President of Serbia, stated that it was blind fear of repeating the events of World War II saying, “In this obsession not to become victims ever again, we allowed ourselves to become perpetrators.” Such history of conflict is hard to forget. In addition, none of the leaders of the war could have ordered the things they did without the support of the people. Moreover, the collective culture, coupled with little personal responsibility resulted in no debate regarding the means to victory. The war criminals that transformed from innocent fishermen to mass killers, Drakulic argues, did not arise from nowhere — they came from an extraordinary historical and cultural context.

Drakulic continuously searched among the war criminals for a wild, bloodthirsty “look” or pathology that could explain how these criminals were non-human psychopaths capable of carrying out their horrific orders in the Yugoslav War. Instead, she found that the generals and soldiers were remarkably unassuming and articulate. Their stories includes very wrong moral decisions, but the extent and severity of their situation and indoctrination matched the crimes they carried out. In this sense, Drakulic positions the war criminals as victims to their extreme circumstances and historical context. Although the details regarding the war criminal’s biographies were clearly fictionalized to a certain extent, Drakulic conversely levies fair treatment regarding their atrocities.

UN Peace keepers collecting bodies from Ahmići, Bosnia and Herzegovina, April 1993 (Image courtesy of the ICTY)

They Would Never Hurt a Fly is a persuasive and controversial work that delivers an unconventional moral and daring historical perspective on the Yugoslav War. The book skillfully articulates a chilling and disconcertingly candid illustration of the war’s atrocities and their perpetrators. Although Drakulic does not identify with the war criminals, she ultimately disapproves of their non-human representation because it puts them in a classification in which we ourselves can never identify. They Would Never Hurt a Fly is most quintessentially a warning. Yugoslavs never thought there could be war criminals among them – but there were.

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