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Review Article

Wendy Bracewell

The End of Yugoslavia and New National

Histories

Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War, New Haven, Yale

University Press, 1997; ISBN 0–300–06933–2; xiii + 338 pp
Jill Benderly and Evan Kraft (eds), Independent Slovenia: Origins,
Movements, Prospects, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1996; ISBN
0–312–09963 (hbk); 0–312–16447–5 (pbk); xxii + 262 pp.; $19.95
John Lampe, Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; ISBN 0–521–
46122–7 (hbk); 0–521–46705–5 (pbk); xx + 421 pp.; £40, £14.95

The assumption that contemporary political categories provide the

most appropriate frame within which to narrate the past has made
the nation and the nation-state into the organizing principle for a
great deal of modern history writing. This approach often works
on the principle of the collective biography: the nation is born,
emerges into self-consciousness, undergoes various vicissitudes, and
achieves maturity and fulfilment (or not, as the case may be) in inde-
pendent statehood. The nineteenth century, with its proliferation of
nationalisms and nation-states seeking legitimation in the past, was
the heyday of such national histories, but the national framework
continues to shape the writing of history. However, recent critiques
of the idea of the nation and of the practice of history have made
historians more wary of this conventional approach. Students of
nationalism have challenged the idea that nations are natural entities
with ancient lineages, seeing them instead as modern phenomena,
the product of specific socio-economic and political processes or as
‘imagined communities’ created through the discursive efforts of
intellectual élites (including historians). At the same time, post-
modern theorizing has highlighted the investments and implications

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of the meta-narratives historians use to find meaning in the past. It is

not just that narratives of national emergence and destiny are
connected to particular political interests, or that they are convenient
fictions created in the historian’s imagination as much as found in
the historical record, or that they exclude and silence alternative
visions of the past. They can also help to constitute the very entity
they claim merely to describe — a self-conscious national com-
munity. Still, although history in the national mode runs the risk of
falling hostage to its subject, there are reasons for historians to retain
a critical focus on the nation. One of the functions of history is, after
all, to explain how we got here. How else except through historical
analysis are we to make sense of the nation-state’s relations
with other forms of community, its diversity and its contemporary
ubiquity? Critical historical accounts of nation-building are also a
useful corrective to the continuing blandishments of nationalist
mythmaking. These issues are thrown into relief when dramatic
changes in the political sphere are echoed in the writing of history (as
has recently been the case in Yugoslavia and its successor states), but
are also more broadly relevant. The nation persists as a taken-for-
granted category of analysis for much European historiography,
often without critical attention to the assumptions that underpin it.
The Yugoslav case illustrates some of the problems of national
history, not just as produced for local consumption, but also in the
West. In recent years a plethora of works have been published for a
western audience describing and analysing the causes of Yugo-
slavia’s violent break-up.1 Many of these looked to the past, often
either advancing or contesting the notion that the conflicts were the
inevitable consequence of ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’. (These claims had
contrasting implications for the international community’s involve-
ment in the conflicts.) But the collapse of Yugoslavia has also
provoked more general historical reassessments, less immediately
concerned with explaining the causes of the war. A number of
authors have taken the occasion to re-examine the histories of indi-
vidual Yugoslav nations, regions or successor states, and to perform
a post-mortem on Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav idea.2 The three
books reviewed here provide overviews of Croatian, Slovene and
Yugoslav history for an English-speaking audience. They all stress
the need for an informed understanding of the past for an adequate
response to the present; and all of them address a number of
common themes, in particular the tensions between particular
nationalisms and the Yugoslav idea. But reading them together also
highlights some of the issues raised by putting the nation at the
centre of historical analysis.
Marcus Tanner’s Croatia: A Nation Forged in War began as an
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Bracewell, Yugoslavia and New National Histories 151

account of the war in Croatia, which he covered as a reporter for the

London Independent from 1988 to 1994. Conscious of the lack of
English-language histories of the area and convinced that Croatia
deserved separate treatment, both on its own merits and as a key
player in the Yugoslav drama, he expanded his account into a full-
scale Croatian history, beginning with the arrival of the Slavs in the
Balkans in the seventh century. The book is lively and readable,
especially in the last third of the work dealing with the 1980s and
1990s, where it is enlivened by Tanner’s own impressions of indi-
viduals and events. One of the virtues of the work is Tanner’s readi-
ness to confront some politically charged myths. He addresses the
issue of fascism and Ustaša atrocities in the wartime Independent
State of Croatia (often used by Croatia’s detractors to anathemize all
forms of Croatian nationalism), discriminating between popular
support for independence and attitudes to Ante Pavelić’s Ustaša,
and noting the extent of hostility to the regime. However, despite
a concern to redress what he sees as a pro-Serb bias in British
opinion (272), Tanner is not an apologist for Franjo Tudjman’s
Croatia, taking on a number of the tenets of contemporary Croatian
nationalism (noting the long-standing Croatian attraction to current-
ly unfashionable pan-Slav and Yugoslav projects, for example, and
criticizing official attempts to rehabilitate the Ustaša leaders as
flawed but patriotic Croats).
But Tanner is only partly able to hold nationalism at a critical dis-
tance. This is largely because of his approach to history, deeply in
debt to a familiar teleology of national self-realization. In spite of his
claim that the narrative deals with Croatia rather than the Croatians
(xii), the emphasis is squarely on the nation — already defined as
Croatian from its appearance in the seventh century and not chang-
ing much through all its struggles for freedom. The echoes of recent
scholarship on nationalism and nation-building in the ambiguous
sub-title (‘a nation forged in war’) do not resonate through the text
itself. As a result, the reader gets little sense of the obstacles to a
unified Croatian national identity, the means by which it was con-
structed, the alternative visions it has excluded and the different
forms it has taken.
Though the Croatian nation is the true hero here, much of the
narrative is organized around the personalities and actions of indi-
viduals. Many of Tanner’s vignettes are vivid and perceptive, though
he sometimes recycles the romantic myths of an older historio-
graphy, so that, for example, the tenth-century Bishop Grgur of Nin
is still celebrated here as a defender of the Slavic language and a
Croatian church, rather than the ambitious bishop involved in a
jurisdictional quarrel suggested by recent scholarship. (The author’s
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152 European History Quarterly Vol. 29 No. 1

command of modern historiography is patchy; here and elsewhere

major postwar Croatian and Yugoslav works have been passed
over.) Such a personalized approach can work well when Tanner
focuses on the intellectuals who formulated national programmes or
politicians whose activities can be used to frame key issues and
events. Even so, there is too little attention to the specific details of
his activists’ ideas and visions. Not only does this make it difficult to
grasp the evolution of national ideas (why various forms of Yugo-
slavism should have been attractive to the Croats; the ways Yugoslav
ideas contributed to Croatian national integration; whether the
nationalism of the Ustaša was a radical departure from earlier
Croatian ideologies), but it also paradoxically devalues the role of
individuals, giving the impression that they simply reflected an
enduring national struggle rather than actively influencing the form
such conflicts took. At the same time, the constant emphasis on great
men distracts attention from the social, political and economic
processes that shaped their sphere of action. Since Tanner only
rarely places his subject in a broader comparative context, whether
Yugoslav or European, the effect is to make the struggles of
Croatia’s heroes seem not just enduring, but unique.
In his conclusion, Tanner sums up the ‘historic questions’ that had
been settled by independence under Tudjman: ‘whether Croatia’s
fortunes would be decided in Belgrade, or in Zagreb alone; whether
Croatia was a region of a larger state, or a country in its own right;
whether Croatia was a land belonging to two nations — Serbs and
Croats — or Croats alone’ (300). Although Tanner is clear about the
costs of Croatia’s independence struggle and about the less attractive
aspects of the new state, he does not question a vision of history that
sees independence in a nationally-homogeneous state as the realiza-
tion of a ‘thousand-year dream’ (in a phrase repeatedly used by
Tudjman). His history does more to ratify this nationalist rhetoric
than it does to deconstruct it.
Independent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Prospects, edited by Jill
Benderly and Evan Kraft, includes a number of articles on Slovene
history, again beginning with the seventh century, though the
volume’s emphasis is on Slovenia’s role in the dissolution of Yugo-
slavia and its transition to independence. The authors include
Slovene participants in the independence movement and Slovene
and American academics; the subjects discussed cover Slovenia’s
economic and foreign relations prospects as well as aspects of its
past. Taken as a whole, however, the collection grounds the founda-
tions of the new state firmly in a national history.
This does not necessarily entail a view of the nation as an
immutable entity. One of the main themes running through the book
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Bracewell, Yugoslavia and New National Histories 153

is that it was the failure of the Yugoslav project, rather than

separatist aspirations, that led to Slovene secession and indepen-
dence. This argument requires attention to the various formulations
of Yugoslavism (centralist or federated; predicated on convergence
or on diversity), and to the Slovene experience of Yugoslavism. The
authors tend to downplay Slovene contributions to Yugoslav ideas
and political culture and to stress instead Slovene reactions, but their
analysis helps to reveal Slovene national identity as historically con-
stituted, shifting and relational, rather than reflecting any national
‘essence’. As a result, not only Slovene independence but also
modern Slovene identity can be seen as intimately tied up with
Yugoslavism. There are several excellent essays on other non-
national political identities and their part in the ‘Slovene Spring’
(particularly by Gregor Tomc, on the politics of punk; Vlasta Jalušič
on feminism; and Tonči Kuzmanič on the workers’ movement).
Discussion of the interplay of these other forms of identification with
nationalism conveys a sense of the Slovene nation as polyphonic
rather than monologic, constituted by a variety of voices, sometimes
ambivalent, contradictory or ironic in their relations with the nation.
Still, one of the points that emerges strikingly from these accounts is
the way a national discourse subsumed other perspectives, even if
only temporarily, as Yugoslavia broke apart. Slovene national iden-
tity may have been contingent and constructed, but its political
effects were no less real and powerful for that.
For most of the authors in this volume, Yugoslavia failed because
of a coercive insistence on homogeneity, whether supranational (in
the form of Yugoslav unitarism) or ‘majoritarian’ (in the form of
Serbian political hegemony), that denied Slovene national rights and
thus forfeited Slovene loyalty. Independence was thus an inevitable
choice since it was only through the nation-state that the population
could achieve self-realization as modern, democratic and European
— and as Slovenes. This interpretation requires the suppression of
other pasts (and futures). Dimitrij Rupel notes that the Slovene
aspiration for independence was characterized as ‘a-historical’ in the
Yugoslavia of the late 1980s; here, in contrast, it is the Yugoslav
project which is so dismissed. Independent Slovenia is treated as the
culmination of a historical trajectory grounded in the nation; history
remains destiny.
John Lampe’s Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country is
a sophisticated attempt to escape from the seductions of nationalist
history in tracing the origins and fate of Yugoslav political unifica-
tion. Lampe calls his work an ‘inquest’ on Yugoslavia and the
Yugoslav idea, but he is wary about re-evaluating Yugoslavia solely
in the light of its bloody demise. He sets his approach against ideo-
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logically-anchored certainties: if Yugoslavia was not the inevitable

product of South Slav aspirations to convergence (as in official
Titoist historiography), neither was it ‘an artificial creature whose
deformities made collapse inevitable’ (as some nationalist accounts
would have it), nor was it inevitably compromised by ‘age-old
antagonisms’ (4). It is the forces that united or divided the Yugoslav
peoples, rather than their separate histories, that Lampe concentrates
on. The scope is broader than the title might suggest: while an
account of a united South Slav state’s 70-year search for viability is
at the centre of the work, the first three chapters trace the prehistory
of Yugoslav union from the migrations of the Slavs to the First
World War, and a final chapter details the end of Yugoslavia.
Lampe marshals a long sweep of time and complex events into an
elegant and detailed narrative, built on a wide selection of recent
western and Yugoslav scholarship.
Lampe’s main argument is that both the first and the second
Yugoslavia were underwritten by ‘modernizing motives’: the promise
of representative government and the potential for economic integra-
tion, reinforced by increased security against external threats.
However, these ‘state-building rationales’ were challenged by ‘three
romantic nineteenth-century ideas for the creation of a unitary
nation-state — Great Serbia, Great Croatia, and a Yugoslavia
founded on the assumption that at least Serbs and Croats, and
possibly all South Slavs, were one ethnic group’ (8). Yugoslavia
failed to develop ‘a sense of common citizenship’ that could override
competing national loyalties, but it was not until external events (the
Second World War and the collapse of the Communist regimes in
1989) intervened, Lampe argues, that nationalist ideas could break
Yugoslavia apart.
The way this argument is developed through a focus on structures
which facilitated or hindered the processes of modernization reflects
Lampe’s considerable strengths as an economic historian (though the
attention to the economic context sometimes overwhelms the politi-
cal dimension, notably in the discussion of the period after 1968).
The approach to national ideas, the second axis of his analysis, is less
sure-handed. He treats the South Slav nations as essentially modern,
first constructed through the ideological efforts of nineteenth-
century élites, building on ethnic communities, but ultimately
invented and arbitrary. (He is not consistent in this, however, some-
times insisting on the primacy of historical origins, as when he
identifies the seventeenth-century Ragusan Rudjer Boskovic as a
‘Catholic Serb’, for example.) For Lampe, the power of state and
national ideas lies above all in their promises of modernization, and
it was the ideas for a wider South Slav union that offered most in this
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Bracewell, Yugoslavia and New National Histories 155

regard. The Yugoslav idea was successful to the extent that it

achieved this goal (and Lampe details the unitary state’s accomplish-
ments and failures).
However, this functionalist approach tends to downplay or ignore
other aspects of nationhood: the conflicts, contradictions and
reversals inherent in constructing national identities; the diverse
forms they can take; the emotional commitments they can engender.
In particular, the focus on material interests and structural con-
ditions deflects attention away from the explicit ideological content
of the various national ideas, and their political implications and
consequences. There is also little attention to changing and contra-
dictory understandings of Yugoslavism, and the relationships
between Yugoslavism and the separate national ideas (not just those
of the Serbs and Croats, but also of the other Yugoslav peoples).
This hinders any consistent analysis of the evolution of national
allegiances and nationalist politics. (It is symptomatic that Lampe
writes in terms of ‘regional disputes’ in the first Yugoslavia and of
‘ethnic politics’ in the second, rather than treating both as manifesta-
tions of the same processes and discourses.) It also makes it difficult
to understand the failure of an over-arching Yugoslav idea and the
fragility of any shared sense of citizenship. The fact that Yugoslavia
was ultimately unable to deliver on its promises of economic
modernization and representative government does not in itself
explain the triumph of the separate nationalisms. Was it just that the
Yugoslav peoples didn’t see what was best for them? Were the
separate national ideas too long entrenched, too politically useful,
too personally meaningful? Was it that the Yugoslav project could
always be seen as an expression of particular national interests,
rather than their negation? These questions might have been better
answered by an approach that focused more directly on nations and
national identities, while still retaining a critical distance; that gave
more attention to the nation as a discursive formation, and especially
to the power it had to shape the possible forms of identity and politi-
cal activity.
If the approach to national history followed by Tanner and some
of the contributors to the volume on Slovenia illustrates the dangers
of essentializing the nation, Lampe’s work shows some of the advan-
tages of problematizing the nation. It also hints at the pitfalls of a
reductionist approach that treats the subject largely in terms of
modernization. One of the questions raised by the history of Yugo-
slavia and its violent demise is that of why some ideological con-
structions — and not others — possess the imagination so forcefully?
We need a history that gives full weight to the socio-economic
context shaping national identities and nationalisms, but that also
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156 European History Quarterly Vol. 29 No. 1

examines the ways that meanings and commitments, not always

reducible to rational calculation, are attached to these constructions.
The problem for the historian writing in this vein is to avoid both
essentialism and determinism; to historicize the nation, without
making it the purpose and meaning of history, but also without dis-
missing its scope and potency. The attempts to produce new histories
in the wake of the Yugoslav disaster may highlight these issues, but
historians of the former Yugoslavia are not the only ones confronting
them.

Notes

1. Western accounts are surveyed in Gale Stokes, John Lampe and Dennison
Rusinow with Julie Mostov, ‘Instant History: Understanding the Wars of Yugo-
slav Succession’, Slavic Review 55, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 136–60 and James Gow,
‘After the Flood: Literature on the Context, Causes and Course of the Yugoslav
War’, Slavonic and East European Review 75, no. 3 (July 1997): 446–84.
2. Among those not discussed here are Tim Judah, The Serbs: History, Myth
and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (New Haven 1997); Noel Malcolm, Bosnia: A
Short History (London 1994); and most recently Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short
History (London 1998).

Wendy Bracewell

is Senior Lecturer in History, School of

Slavonic and East European History,
University of London. Recent publications
include The Uskoks of Senj: Piracy, Banditry
and Holy War in the Sixteenth-Century
Adriatic (New York 1992, trans. Zagreb
1997).