October 4, 2007
Vanished Countries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 AM EST The homepage of this website always notes a few of each day’s anniversaries and links to a Wikipedia page containing a list of many more. If you followed that link yesterday, you learned that it was the anniversary of the creation of the kingdom of Yugoslavia, which is potentially misleading; what happened on October 3, 1929, was that a state called the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, formed on December 1, 1918, changed its name to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. “Yugoslavs” means “South Slavs,” which implies a common identity, an implication that in retrospect seems like a pious and wishful hope, although it seemed real enough when I was a young man. In 1929 Yugoslavia was troubled by particularly tense relations between its largely Orthodox Serbian plurality (just under 45 percent of the population in 1921) and its strong and militant largely Catholic Croatian minority (22.5 percent in 1921). The tensions did not subside with the change of name, and The kingdom of Yugoslavia disintegrated when the Germans invaded it in 1941. The cruelty of the German occupation (and the massive atrocities committed by the forces of the Croatian fascist state established by Germany) provoked an extremely energetic partisan movement led by Josip Broz, who became famous under his Communist Party code name, Tito. Tito, the only European partisan leader of the Second World War whose forces are thought to have more or less liberated their own country, in 1943 proclaimed what was variously known as the Federal People’s Republic of Yugoslavia, the Democratic Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, etc. Tito’s proclaimed state survived various attempts to destroy both him and it. Soon after the war Tito broke with Stalin, and he became something of a hero to many in the West. His rule was initially quite brutal, but serially seeing off both Hitler and Stalin was widely conceded to be a remarkable feat. One letter to Stalin apparently read “Stop sending people to kill me. If you don’t stop sending killers, I’ll send one to Moscow, and I won’t have to send a second.” As one American statesman declared at the time, Tito might be a bastard, but he was our bastard now. By 1970, when I visited Yugoslavia, Tito was admired for many reasons, probably more than he should have been admired for, but his apparently indisputable achievements included having built a fairly prosperous and relatively liberal Communist state. And there was not only a state called Yugoslavia; there seemed to be Yugoslavs. In 1970 I sat among them in a restaurant in Rijeka, eating a three-course state-subsidized meal that cost one dinar—eight and a half cents—and admiring the Yugoslavs who sat around me. Tito died in 1980, and Yugoslavia survived him by little more than a decade. At the end of the Cold War, the Republic of Yugoslavia collapsed in protracted, ugly, and brutal wars of secession, and eventually became what are now the separate states of Bosnia and Herzogovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Croatia; Bosnia and Herzogovina is itself divided into mutually-hostile regions, and another state, Kosovo, may yet emerge from what was once Yugoslavia. The disintegration began on June 25, 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence; on June 5, 2006, Serbia and Montenegro both declared theirs, in the wake of a plebiscite. I am pretty sure that Yugoslavia is the only country I have ever visited that subsequently disappeared; at least as painful, and just as shocking, is that what seemed to be a nationality disappeared with it. Poland disappeared between 1795 and 1918, but Poles didn’t, and as a result, Poland could be resurrected. Yugoslavia disappeared, and “Yugoslavs” disappeared with it, probably forever. Had Yugoslavians always been a fiction, an identity enforced first by Serbian military power, than by Tito’s power, and finally, and briefly, by fear and inertia? I don’t think so—I think Yugoslavia could have gone either way—but I could easily be wrong. In either case, the history of a name, Yugoslavia, reminds us that while we are very frequently told that federal structures are the rule in Europe, and will increasingly be the rule elsewhere, and that nation states are a thing of the past, none of this is necessarily true. And proclamations about the direction history is inevitably taking should be met with the gravest skepticism.
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