Nations and Nationalism 4 (4), 1998, 511-28.

0 ASEN 1998

From Yugoslavism to Serbism: the

..
Serb national idea 1986-1996
ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC
Macquarie University

ABSTRACT. During the 1986-96 period, the intellectual debate on Serb national
goals was characterised by a previously unparalleled diversity of views. The draft of
the Serbian Academy’s Memorandum, which sparked this debate in 1986, advocated
an ‘integrative’ Yugoslav federation whose primary aim would be to foster Serbism,
that is, to facilitate Serb political and cultural unification. After 1988, the differences
between Yugoslavism and Serbism became obvious as advocates of Serb unification
rejected Yugoslavia as a costly mistake. In rejecting Yugoslavism, some Serb
intellectuals insisted on the regeneration of Serbia and its population, while others
argued for the primacy of the unification of all Serb-populated lands into one state.
The resulting diversity of views may be perhaps explicable by a persistent
disagreement among the intellectuals concerning the basis of Serb national identity, as
well as by their focus on an exclusivist and collectivist view of national goals; the
latter, it is suggested, is a result of the continuing use of the idea of Serb unification as
a part of the programme of Serb national liberation from foreign domination.

Although the intellectual origins of the idea of South Slav unification in one
state - Yugoslavism’ - are to be found in the Croat national revival of the
early nineteenth century, its last adherents are to be found among Serb
intellectuals. As a vision of state organisation, Yugoslavism, in its various
forms, remained a tenable view in the intellectual debate on the Serb2
national goals long after it has disappeared from the intellectual debates in
other ex-Yugoslav nations; only after the break-up of the multiconfessional
Yugoslav republic of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1993, was Yugoslavism finally
abandoned by its Serb intellectual advocates. Since then the intellectual
debate on the Serb national goals has been conducted almost exclusively
within the conception of a Serb nation-state; this idea of a Serb nation-state
is the ‘Serbism’ referred to in the title.3 However, this debate reveals that
Serbism, like Yugoslavism, takes different, often opposing forms. Even
without Yugoslavism, the continuing intellectual debate on Serb national
goals has been a contest of widely differing and often opposing ideas and
visions: the diversity of visions and ideas explored during this decade of
intense debate probably finds no parallel in any other period of Serb history
or, for that matter, of the history of other nations of former Yugoslavia.
512 Aleksandar Pavkovic

This article attempts to illustrate the diversity by briefly outlining the

main viewpoints in this debate, and to offer a tentative and partial
explanation of this relatively unusual diversity. For this purpose the article
is restricted to the debate among intellectuals - writers and academics -
disregarding the possible political impact of the debate.4 In spite of the wide
range of disciplines from which they come (creative writing, history,
linguistics, political theory, even chemistry) and their well-established
reputations, the participants in the debate in fact form a self-selected group:
only those who share the tacit assumption that it is a duty of intellectuals to
articulate the national goals of their nation and in this way help guide the
nation in the right path, have joined in the debate. Many other academics
and writers have shown no interest in any debate on collective goals or in a
debate on national - as opposed to more universal - social goals; they did
not participate in the debate, or if they did, it was only in order to blankly
reject it as a form of pernicious nationalism. The label ‘nationally minded
intellectuals’ is reserved in this article for the participants in the debate on
Serb national goals and their intellectual audience.
The debate has been conducted primarily in the form of a critical essay
combining an evocative with an evaluative function: it evokes the national
ideals of the past (often by alluding to various national legends and
momentous historical events) and then attempts to evaluate their realisation
in the past a n d o r present. In evaluating the achievement of national goals,
it offers a critical appraisal of the alleged national failings or flaws
combined, at times, with an invective against various alleged adversaries of
the Serb nation. The combined appraisal and invective yields general advice
as well as exhortation both of which are addressed to the nation at large.
The critical essay, combining in this way the features of a reflective literary
essay and a secular sermon, has from 1992 onwards been increasingly
supplemented and at times replaced with lengthy journal interviews which
address the same issues and offer similar advice and exhortation.

The beginning: the draft of the memorandum

It was neither a critical essay nor a lengthy interview but a draft of the
Memorandum of the Serb Academy of Arts and Sciences, leaked to the
communist-controlled press in September 1986, that triggered the contem-
porary debate on the Serb national goals5 After the death, in 1980, of its
communist ruler, Marshal Tito, the Yugoslav federation plunged into the
most severe economic and political crisis it had experienced since its
expulsion, in 1948, from the communist bloc controlled by Stalin. The
Yugoslav economy, fragmented into six ‘republican’ economies each run by
its local communist elite, was plagued by systematic mismanagement, a
huge burden of debt owed to Western lenders and a spiralling inflation
(Lydall 1989). In 1981 large riots broke out in its poorest region, Kosovo,
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 513

involving more than 20,000 Albanians who were demanding the elevation of
their province (constitutionally part of the federal republic of Serbia) to the
status of a federal republic, and of its majority Albanian population to the
status of a constituent nation of the Yugoslav federation. This was the
largest and most violent political protest in communist Yugoslavia since the
1944-5 Albanian military uprising in the same province. Suppressed, in
1981, by Yugoslav military and police forces with loss of life, Albanian
political protests continued on a smaller scale throughout the 1980s; and in
spite of repeated purges of its personnel, the Kosovo Communist Party and
its Albanian leaders proved incapable of halting continued Albanian
political unrest and the increased emigration of Serbs and Moritenegrins
from the province. In 1985 the Serbian Academy of Arts and Science
commissioned a committee, composed of well-known Serb writers, econo-
mists, philosophers, historians and linguists (most of whom were over sixty
years of age and had been regarded as dissidents), to draft a memorandum
addressing the causes of the continuing crises in Yugoslavia, and proposing
remedies. Their draft (which, in its final form, was intended for the highest
bodies of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia) offered, in its first part, a
wide-ranging and scathing, but essentially Marxist, critique of the economic
and social policies of the Yugoslav Communist Party since the early 1960s.
The second, shorter part, entitled ‘The Status of Serbia and the Serb(ian)
Nation’ argued that from the early 1960s the Serb nation was subjected to a
systematic economic, social and cultural discrimination throughout Yugo-
slavia (including a wide-ranging ‘genocide’ in Kosovo) and, rather vaguely,
proposed policies aimed at stopping and reversing this trend. As the original
source of the discrimination was the Communist International (Comintern)
classification of the Serbs as an ‘oppressor’ nation (MihailoviC and Krestik:
138)6, it is, the draft argued, necessary first ‘to remove the stigma of
historical guilt from the Serb nation’ and to allow the Serb nation ‘to
become a historical personality in their own right, to regain a sense of their
historical and spiritual being, to make a clear assessment of their economic
and cultural interests . . .’ (128). On a more practical level, the draft
repudiates the Yugoslav communist constitution of 1974 because it
partitioned the Serb nation among four ‘states’ (the federal republics with
Serb populations) and two provinces, and calls for a return to the
constitutional arrangements first enunciated at the communist-dominated
assembly, AVNOJ, in 1943, which aimed at the creation of an ‘integrative
democratic federation’. While the draft does not describe this type of
federation, in it the six Yugoslav republics would, presumably, lose the state
sovereign powers conferred upon them by the 1974 constitution and the
provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina would be legislatively subordinated to
the republic of Serbia. Within this, more centralised, structure the ‘Serb(ian)
people’s complete national and cultural integrity .. .’ (138) would, presum-
ably, be easier to achieve. The draft does not specify whether a new, more
centralised, political organisation of the Serbs throughout Yugoslavia would
514 Aleksandar Pavkovic

also be needed. However, it does acknowledge that other nations in

Yugoslavia may prefer other alternatives to an ‘integrative federation’,
including the abandonment of the common state of Yugoslavia, and urges
Serbia to prepare an alternative option of its own (which, however, it fails
to outline) (139-40).
The draft thus appears to suggest that the two Serb national goals, the
creation of a Serb nation-state and the unification of Serbs in one state -
both of which predate the communist take-over of Yugoslavia in 1945 -
may be achieved within the early communist blueprint of a Yugoslav
federation. The first goal, the creation of the Serb nation’s ‘own state, which
fought for and achieved a civil democracy’ (127), was at least partially
achieved in the pre-1914 parliamentary Kingdom of Serbia. The second, ‘the
national unity of the Serb nation’ (133), the Serbs were striving to achieve
for almost a century before the first South Slav state was created in 1918.
Although the two goals were not, in the draft, explicitly acknowledged as
Serb national goals, the 1974 constitution and various communist policies
were openly evaluated in terms of both (in particular, the second) goals and,
quite predictably, found severely wanting.
Thus the draft of the Memorandum appears to endorse both a federalist
version of Yugoslavism (the ‘integrative’ Yugoslav federation) and a rather
rudimentary form of Serbism (the integration of Serbs within a single state
structure). However implicit and rudimentary, this Serbism was, in 1986,
branded by the communist leaders and communist-controlled press in
Serbia and in other Yugoslav republics as a nationalist and reactionary
doctrine and any public debate of Serb national goals was banned. But in
1987 Slobodan MiloSeviC, the then president of the Serbian Communist
Party, purged the communist elite in Serbia which rejected the draft’s
Serbism, and in 1988 embarked on a mass mobilisation of the Serbs
(through a series of huge mass rallies in Serbia) in support of a platform
strikingly similar to that of the Memorandum draft: his purported aim was
also to reverse the alleged discrimination against the Serbs in Yugoslavia (in
particular, in Kosovo), to ‘reintegrate’ Kosovo and Vojvodina into Serbia
and to reinforce the Yugoslav federation (Cohen 1997: 236-53). In this
atmosphere of Serb national revival created by a systematic media campaign
and mass rallies, the debate on the Serb national goals flourished in Serbia
as never b e f ~ r e .The
~ new MiloSeviC regime also embarked on a media
campaign aimed at the delegitimisation of the previous, Titoist, communist
regime; as part of this campaign, formerly official Marxist doctrines came
under sustained attack in Serbian intellectual journals. Thus federalist
Yugoslavism, codified in earlier communist constitutions, came to be seen as
yet another legacy of the oppressive communist rule; in the Serbian press,
for the first time since the 1945 communist take-over, it became possible -
and even somewhat fashionable - to repudiate Yugoslavism in favour of
some version of Serbism.
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 515

Yugoslavism versus Serbisrn

The conflicts between the ruling communist elites of the Yugoslav republics
(in particular, those of Slovenia and Serbia) concerning the constitutional
structure of the Yugoslav federation greatly intensified during 1989 as the
media they controlled replaced its previous ‘socialist self-managing’ with an
openly nationalist, rhetoric. This culminated in the walk-out of the Slovenian
and Croatian delegations from the Yugoslav Communist Party Congress in
January 1990. Their walk-out not only thwarted MiloSeviC’s attempt to
recentralise the Yugoslav communist party but also marked the end of the
only pan-Yugoslav political force which was, until then, committed to a
common Yugoslav state. The coalitions of nationalist parties, brought to
power in Slovenia and Croatia in the April-May 1990 multiparty elections,
rejected any concept of a common Yugoslav state and, by seceding from
Yugoslavia in June 1991, effectively ended the experiment of South Slav
state unification begun in 1918. The end of the experiment, however, did not
put an end to Yugoslavism as a vision or an idea of a South Slav state.
Among Serb intellectuals this idea survived as a blueprint for a state which
would be a more ‘progressive’ or more ‘rational’ (or just more appealing)
alternative to the string of small, vulnerable and mutually hostile nation-
states which succeeded the former Yugoslav federation in 1992. Thus, in
1992, after the 1991 war between the Serb and Croat military forces in
Croatia, the Serbian writer Dobrica CosiC8 still envisioned a Yugoslav
federation as a democratic, pluralist and open society, ‘whose foundation
would be a free citizen’ and in which every Yugoslav nation would have
equal rights, including the right to freely enter and exit the federation. This,
however, does not apply to the six republics of the Yugoslav federation
founded by the Communist Party in 1945. As the Yugoslav Communist
Party drew the borders of these six republics accordinp to its own criteria
and goals, by destroying the communist social order, CosiC (1992: 217- 18)
argued, the basis for the republics’ borders has been destroyed as well. In
short, for CosiC, a Yugoslav federation is a preferred - although, he admits,
somewhat utopian - state blueprint only as long as it enables the realisation
of the ‘historical goal of the Serb nation - the unification of all Serbs in one
state’ (1992: 215). In spite of evaluating the Yugoslav state project in the
light of the Serb national goal, his federalist Yugoslavism allows for a
diversity of national interests and thus for a free exit from the federation of
any Yugoslav nation (but not of the federal units whose borders were
drawn by the Yugoslav Communist Party).
By contrast, integralist Yugoslavism regards the Yugoslav state as the
state of a Yugoslav nation composed of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes
(and by implication Macedonians and Bosnian Muslims); the disintegration
of the Yugoslav state in 1991 and the preceding disintegration of the
common Yugoslav nation was, on this view, the work of malevolent foreign
powers and ideologies. In his work on the creation of Yugoslavia, the
516 Aleksandar PavkoviC

Bosnian Serb historian, Milorad EkmeEiC (1989)9 claimed that the idea of
the unification of the South Slav lands in a single state was based on the
rationalist ideas of the eighteenth century, according to which language
forms the basis of the national identity of each nation. This rationalist
conception of the South Slav nation found its expression in the Yugoslav
idea of a single nation with three names (Serb, Croat, Slovene), consisting
of three tribes speaking three equal linguistic variants (EkmeEiC 1989: 11,
832ff.). Opposing the rationalist and linguistic criterion of national identity,
EkmeEiC argues, was a religious conception of a nation as constituted not by
its language but by its religion. According to the religious conception, there
are at least three South Slav nations: Croats (Roman Catholics), Serbs
(Eastern Orthodox) and Slovenes (Roman Catholics speaking Slovene).
Before 1918 this conception was supported by the Roman Catholic Church
and, after 1918, by the Soviet-controlled Communist International as well.
In accordance with their conception, both international organisations were
working on the dismemberment of the common Yugoslav state formed at
the end of the First World War. However, as a guiding idea of the Serb
national movement in the early twentieth century, the rationalist and
integrative Yugoslav idea was, in EkmeEiC’s view, a progressive and
emancipatory force. In the post-1918 Yugoslav kingdom, the idea lost its
emancipatory force (it was used to justify the status quo) and was,
consequently, defeated by religiously and Bolshevik-inspired separatist
nationalist ideologies. But in 1993 EkmeEiC argued that rationalist and
liberal ideologies still have a chance of prevailing, especially as the tide of
nationalism is receding in Western Europe (1993: 42-3). In this context, the
rationalist Yugoslav idea will, in the long-run, prevail too: the future is not
with narrow-minded and clerically based nationalisms, either of the Serb or
of the Croat variety. Only a year after this confident prediction of the
ultimate triumph of his ‘rationalist’ Yugoslav idea, EkmeEid, as we shall see
below, abandoned it in favour of a rather non-rationalist version of
Serbism.
In contrast to EkmeEid, the Serbian historian Radovan Samardiid’o
argued that central to the Serb national character is the Serb commitment
to Orthodoxy, encapsulated in the teachings of their first archbishop, Saint
Sava (c. 1175-1235) as well as their adherence to the oath of their canonised
prince, Prince Lazar, calling on every Serb to fight for the ‘golden freedom
and the honourable cross’ on the field of Kosovo. The revenge of the
Ottoman defeat of Prince Lazar at Kosovo in 1389 became a symbol of
Serb national liberation from foreign rule and oppression. Their pride in
this mission, Samardiic claimed, made the Serbs believe themselves to be an
exceptional nation; but their ‘insistent emphasis on being exceptional’
contributed to the neighbouring nations’ intolerance and hatred of the Serbs
(SamardiiC 1991: 172). In an attempt to overcome this, the Serbs abandoned
their traditional Serb patriotism for the Yugoslav idea - the unification of
all South Slavs into a single nation - and were, in consequence, left without
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 517

their ‘essential being’ (173). The prominent Serbian linguist, Pavle IviC,’ ’
argued that the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918 was the greatest adventure of
the Serbs, and by implication, their greatest historical error. At its creation
in 1918, Yugoslavia was populated by different nations on a course of
conflict and collision. Instead of Yugoslavia, IviC (1991: 191) argued, the
Serbs should have created, in 1918, a greater Serbia of all the lands in which
the Serbs were in a majority (possibly the Bosnian Muslim lands as well).
Once Yugoslavia was created, the Croat hostility to the common state put
the Serbs on the defensive, forcing them to lose sight of their principal
national goals and to sacrifice (in King Aleksandar’s coup d‘trar of 1929)
their main achievement, their parliamentary democracy and their reputation,
all in a vain attempt to preserve this state (IviC 1991: 185-9). Both Radovan
SamardZiC and IviC regarded the parliamentary democracy and constitu-
tional monarchy in pre- 1918 Serbia as the greatest political achievement of
the Serbs to date. While rejecting Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav idea as an
extremely costly mistake, both assumed that the unification of Serb-
populated lands into a single Serb state is the principal national goal of the
Serbs. This ranking of the unification of Serbs in a Serb, instead of a
Yugoslav, state as the principal national goal may be regarded as the
hallmark of Serb unificationism or broad Serbism.
Although Serb unificationism had offered a clear alternative to Yugosla-
vism well before the early 1990s, not all nationally minded Serb intellectuals
endorsed either of the two. A third viewpoint, which may be labelled narrow
Serbism or ‘Serbia first’ view, insisted on the demarcation of core Serbian
interests, as found in the state and people of Serbia, from peripheral
interests, those of the Serbs from Bosnia and Hercegovina and Croatia.
While not denying the legitimacy of the latter, the proponents of narrow
Serbism argue that the unification of all Serbs into a single state is not the
principal or overriding national goal of the Serbs. According to Danko
PopoviC, I2 the most outspoken proponent of the idea, the Serbian tradition
is to cherish one’s own state, Serbia, as one’s own home; his novels,
especially his most popular fijiga o Milutinu (Popovit. 1985) are fictional
reconstructions of this tradition. In this novel he traces the history of a
simple Serbian peasant family, whose men willingly go to war to fight and
to die while their womenfolk are left at home to suffer whatever fate the
government of the day assigns to them. The Serbian peasant willingly dies
and suffers for what he perceives to be the defence of his state; the Serbian
and Yugoslav governments of all political hues have exploited his simple
patriotism for the sake of various grandiose political projects which have
only brought the Serbian peasants unending suffering. The first such
grandiose project was the creation of Yugoslavia in 1918; this was followed
by the anti-Axis military coup of 27 March 1941 which brought the defeat
and Axis occupation and then, in 1945, communist terror and dictatorship.
Popovic‘s impassioned essay ‘Na M~ravarna’’~ was published in January
1993, in the midst of savage war in Bosnia-Hercegovina which, after the US
518 Aleksandar Pavkovid

and EC recognition of the republic’s independence in April 1992, erupted

between the Bosnian Serb forces, armed by the former Yugoslav federal
army and supported by Miloievid’s government, and an alliance of the
Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat forces, supported by the government of
the newly independent Croatia. The avowed aim of the Bosnian Serb
leaders was to unite the parts of Bosnia-Hercegovina under their control to
Serbia; the avowed aim of the leaders of the Bosnian Muslim-Croat alliance
was to keep the republic (including its Serb-populated parts) united and
independent.
In his 1993 essay Popovid endeavours to expose yet another grandiose
and suicidal project into which the simple folk of Serbia are being drawn -
the attempt in 1991-2, by the (ex-)communist Serb politicians and officers,
to use the Serbs from Serbia to fight for them in Croatia and Bosnia-
Hercegovina. These same politicians and officers, during Tito’s rule over
Yugoslavia, abandoned their homes and the remaining Serbs in these two
republics and came to Serbia - as members of Tito’s communist apparatus -
to suppress the Serbs in Serbia. These very same people, in 1992, demanded
of the Serbs in Serbia whom they oppressed all this time, to liberate their
long-abandoned homes from Croats and Muslims. This call, claims
PopoviC, is the last in the series of suicidal calls made on the Serbs from
Serbia to fight for causes which are not their own. Instead of heeding them,
the Serbs should concentrate on their own spiritual regeneration and the
preservation and improvement of their own state, the only state which they
have - that of Serbia. Serbia, he writes, has not yet recovered from the
enormous human losses and spiritual damage brought about by the earlier -
and failed - grandiose projects of the First and Second World Wars. ‘In the
euphoria of gusla-celebrated victories [after the wars, A.P], home-tending
Serbia has been ignored: its homestead, its wealth, its quality of life, both
spiritual and material, have all been ignored’ (PopoviC 1993: 23).

Narrow Serbism versus Serb unificationism

As various mediation attempts by the EC failed to stop the fighting in

Bosnia-Hercegovina, in May 1992 the UN Security Council imposed severe
economic sanctions on Serbia and Montenegro in an attempt to halt their
aid to Bosnian Serbs. Despite these sanctions and continued EC-UN peace
negotiations with the warring parties, the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina
continued until September 1995, when, after a quick conquest of the Serb-
held territories in Croatia bordering on western Bosnia, the Croatian army
and the Bosnian Muslim forces, armed by the US government and trained
by retired US oficers, conquered large areas of western Bosnia. During
their Bosnian campaign, NATO aeroplanes and artillery systematically
bombed Bosnian Serb military installations throughout the republic. This
joint operation led to the exodus of around 450,000 Serbs from Croatia and
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 519

from western Bosnia and forced the Bosnian Serb leadership to accept the
peace settlement negotiated by the US government in Dayton, Ohio in
November 1995. The peace settlement created two entities in Bosnia-
Hercegovina, the Serb Republic and the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina
(the Bosnian Muslim and Croat entity), whose borders mirrored, with
several adjustments, the military frontline in September 1995. The central
government of Bosnia-Hercegovina was composed of representatives of the
three constituent nations, Bosniacs (the official name, adopted in late 1993,
for Bosnian Muslims), Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs; its powers were
restricted and did not include either common defence or law enforcement
(PavkoviC 1997: 178-93).
While Popovic‘s 1993 essay no doubt reflects a mood brought about by
the isolation and hardship imposed on Serbia by the UN sanctions, his
interview published in February 1996, after the 1995 Dayton peace
agreeme,,:s, reflects the feeling of a humiliating defeat of the Serbs by the
US-supported Muslim and Croat forces. In his view, the political
programme of the ‘unification of all Serb lands’ (his quotation marks)
experienced a complete debacle with the 1995 exodus of Serbs from Croatia
and parts of west Bosnia. This did not affect public opinion in Serbia very
much because, in his view, ‘public opinion in Serbia endorsed this
programme with ease and with even greater ease it got over its demise’
(PopoviC 1996: 16). This fickleness of the public in Serbia does not, he
argued, free it from its share of responsibility €or the defeat of the Serbs:
not only the ruling politicians and the leading intellectual proponents of
Serb unification - ‘the fathers of the nation’ as he mockingly called them -
but the Serb people themselves are responsible for choosing the representa-
tives and leaders who led them to a disastrous defeat, the defeat of ‘the very
spirit of the Serb nation’.
In spite of this, not all is lost - the Serb part of Bosnia may still be
united with its ‘hive’, Serbia, in the future; but to achieve this it is necessary
to imitate the pragmatic policies of the wise Nikola PaSiC, the prime minister
of the Kingdom of Serbia (and, later, of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes), and to wait for the right circumstances (PopoviC 1996:
17- 18). PopoviC’s pragmatic approach to Serb unification clearly shows that
he rejected only those Serb unification programmes which recklessly sacrifice
Serbia and its interests for those of the Serbs from outside Serbia.
While the prolonged war in Bosnia-Hercegovina did not significantly
affect Popovic‘s ‘Serbia first’ approach, it led the Bosnian Serb EkmeEiC to
abandon Yugoslavism as a blueprint for a future state: ‘The existing civil
war .. . as its principal consequence has the destruction of the foundation of
the unity of the Yugoslav peoples. The prospects for a life in a common
state have vanished, at least for the foreseeable time’ (Ekmet5iC 1994: 17).
Yet in abandoning Yugoslavism, EkmdiC retained his earlier disregard for
any separate interests of Serbia, the interests which PopoviC so fondly
cherishes; Ekmet5iC‘s post-1993 Serbism subordinates all Serb interests to the
520 Aleksandar Pavkovik

overriding need for Serb unification in one state. The main distinguishing
feature of his Serbism is the belief that the will of the Serb nation to unite in
one state and its perseverance in this cause will ultimately - but not
necessarily immediately - result in the desired unification. Because of this
romantic belief in the existence of a collective political will and perseverance,
I shall label it Romantic unificationism. Like other romantic, nineteenth-
century unificationist visions, Serb Romantic unificationism also postulates
the existence of a centre or ‘hive’ of the nation which expresses the national
will and which unifies the fragmented nation around it. In the nineteenth
and early twentiethth centuries, it was generally accepted that this hive was
the Kingdom of Serbia. As expressed by the Bosnian Serb poet, Gojko
Djogo, the belief in Serbia as the hive or mother of the Serbs has in 1994
become an almost mystical belief:
This war [the war in Bosnia-Hercegovina 1992-4, A.P.] was conducted and won by
the western Serbs. They waged war for the whole of Serbdom. For their homes and
properties, for their sacred objects and tombs, for the Orthodox faith and for the
great Serbiju. And their Serbiju is not only Serbia and Montenegro, the Serb
Krajinas and Hercegovina. Serb@ is a metaphor. This utopian land has been
cradled in the centuries-old blindness of the blind [the guslars, A.P.], on the strings
of the gusla and on the laps of the widows. Serbvu is the hive and the Great
Mother. They had always been giving ‘a drop of their blood for a drop of her milk’.
In this eternally outstretched hand of the western Serbs towards their Mother, there
is something of a love of an orphan. Someone who has a mother cannot fully
understand this love. The people from Sumadija [the central part of Serbia, A.P.] do
not understand what Serb@ is . . . (JanjiC 1994: 160)

While not all advocates of Romantic unificationism would endorse this view
of a utopian mother, they all share a vision of united Serbdom achieved
through the heroic perserverance in the Serbs’ will to unite; the unification is
thus the matter of their ‘historic perseverance’ (EkmeEik 1994: 17).
However, a few liberal political theorists, younger than EkmeEik, reject
this view of Serb unification as a matter of ‘national will’ and ‘historic
perseverance’. In their view, to be labelled here Liberal unificationism, Serb
unification is not an end in itself but a means for the achievement of the
‘internal and external freedoms’ of the Serbs. Whereas the achievement of
freedom of both kinds is the principal national goal of the Serbs, their
unification in one state, they argue, is their only way of achieving these
freedoms:

Not only the past but also the more recent historical experience (in the twentieth
century) [of the Serb nation] clearly indicates that its physical existence and
its .maintenance of cultural and religious identity could be guaranteed only by its
national State .. . The only answer [to these problems] which could guarantee
its existence in its historical space, was contained in the decision to remain in the
Same state, that is, to fight for a new form of national unity in a state. (SamardiiC,
1995: 246-7)
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 52 1

The ‘external freedom’ is thus freedom from foreign rule: the achievement
of this freedom was the main national goal of many European nations
throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Western European
nations achieved it by the end of the nineteenth century, but, Kosta CavoSki
(1995: 273) argued,14 for the Serb nation, dispersed throughout the territory
of former Yugoslavia, this is still a major but unattained national ideal.
Internal freedom consists of legally guaranteed and enforceable political
and civil liberties, including those of democratic, multiparty elections, the
freedom of the media, and freedom from arbitrary and personal rule. In
CavoSki’s (1995: 272) view, these internal freedoms were fully guaranteed
and operational only in the short period of Serbian history between 1903
and 1914, during the reign of Peter I KaradjordjeviC. For him the ‘personal
regime of Slobodan MiloSeviC’ and its arbitrary rule is the main culprit for
the failure of the Serbs to achieve their internal freedom after the collapse
of communism in Eastern Europe (CavoSki 199% 274). The main internal
obstacle to political unification is, according to Slobodan SamardiiC (1995:
249), the absence of genuine popular consensus and of generally accepted
rules of the [political] game; this is the result of the ‘plebiscitary Caesarism’
of the MiloSeviC regime. This regime had no interest in seeking a genuine
popular consensus on the strategy of national unification and the
opposition parties in Serbia and Montengro have no political power to do
so. Under these conditions, the ruling MiloSeviC regime had not con-
structed a clear strategy of national unification and had lurched from one
extreme to another, finally leaving the Serbs outside Serbia to their own
fate.
For external freedom to be achieved, it is necessary, the two liberals
argued, for an effective multiparty system and parliamentary rule to be
established; this would, in turn, lead to a consensus constructed by
democratic means (for example, by convening a Constitutional Assembly of
the united Serb lands and promulgating a new constitution). They argued
that the failure to achieve internal freedom for the Serbs has led to their
failure to achieve external freedom, that is, freedom from foreign rule in a
Serb national state. Liberal unificationism is the only contemporary
approach to the question of Serb national goals which posits this necessary
link between liberal democratic institutions and national unification.
In addition to the two versions of Serb unificationism and its opposite,
narrow Serbism, a fourth approach, which we shall call Cultural integru-
rionism, emerged in the mid-l990s, in the general framework of Serbism.
This view is elaborated in a lengthy interview with Dobrica CosiC, published
in 1995, in which he also explained that he had abandoned his earlier
Yugoslavism for Serb unificationism ‘[Blecause the Croats, Slovenes,
Macedonians and Muslims, have, in a most convincing manner, been
proving for a long time that they do not want to live in a common state
with the Serbs: finally they proved it’ (NikoliC 1995: 257). The ‘final proof’,
this passage suggests, was the Bosnian Muslims’ alliance with the Croats
522 Aleksandar PavkoviC

against the Serbs during the 1992-5 war in Bosnia-Hercegovina. In the

interview CosiC qualifies his Serb unificationism by arguing that, under
adverse circumstances, the preservation of Serb national identity and not
political unification should the primary national goal of the Serbs:
With the carve-up of Yugoslavia, the very foundations of the national whole [of the
Serbs, A.P.] were destroyed . . . With good reason, one saw and still sees salvation in
the creation of the new state in which the whole Serb nation will be found: not all
the Serbs, but the majority ethnic regions of the Serb nation . . . While fighting for
such a state, at the same time we had to offer alternative state and political forms for
some parts of the Serb nation; in these alternative forms the identity of the Serb
nation and its sense of belonging to the whole, would be still preserved . . . I have,
therefore, advocated a national policy with several solutions. (NikoliC 1995: 261)

According to this ‘policy of historical compromise’ (as he called it), if

international factors prevent the creation of a state incorporating all the
regions of former Yugoslavia in which Serbs are in majority, then at least
some guarantees should be found that Serbs remaining outside the Serb
national state would preserve their sense of belonging to the Serb nation.
Cultural integrationism is thus clearly demarcated from unificationism at
any cost: the preservation of national identity should take precedence over
political unification under the circumstances in which the latter is not
achievable. Liberal unificationism rejects this view on the ground that Serbs
cannot gain basic ‘internal’ (that is, political and civil) liberties in a foreign
state: for the advocates of Liberal unificationism, the preservation of
national identity is no substitute for the achievement of internal or external
freedom. Moreover, liberals like Slobodan SamardiiC doubt the possibility,
in the late twentieth century, of preserving national identity in a foreign
state. As he puts it (SamardiiC 1995: 246), why did the Germans in 1990
have to unify in a ‘classical state-forming manner’ and yet much smaller
nations, such as the Serbs, must experiment with other, less classical, but
more ‘postmodern’ ways of preserving its national identity (such as having a
‘special status’ in a foreign state)? The Germans, he argued, in 1990 simply
followed the ruling paradigm of all Western democratic nations, the
paradigm of nation-state. There is no reason why the Serbs should not
follow this paradigm as well.
Even before he openly abandoned Yugoslavism, in 1993 CosiC singled
out the problem of Kosovo Albanian political unrest as one of the most
serious obstacles to the Serb political and economic regeneration: ‘KOSOVO
will be to Serbia a malign cancer which will economically exhaust it, restrict
its development and threaten its temtory by demographic expansion’
(NikoliC 1995: 157). His preferred solution to this problem is secession of at
least a part of Kosovo, under Albanian rule, from Serbia. In 1996 the
president of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Aleksandar
DespiC,IS in his report to the annual general meeting of the Academy,
argued for a similar solution:
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 523

We stand at yet another historical crossroads at which we have to chose between

two possible roads to the future: one is to insist on Serbia’s territorial integrity,
which leaves no room for a new secession. The other is to accept the Albanians’
aspiration to form their own independent state through secession of a part of the
Serbian territory. (TANJUG 1996)
In view of his concerns for the Albanian take-over of political power in
Serbia, it is clear from his speech that DespiC favoured the second solution,
KOSOVO’S secession from Serbia. In a brief essay, published in 1996, DespiC,
had already argued that the demographic expansion of the Albanian
population in Kosovo jeopardised any gains from the struggle for Serb
unification:
The struggle for preserving the whole territory on which our nation has lived from
time immemorial - from Kosovo and Metohija, across the river Drina, up to the
rivers Una and Velebit - has taken today such tragic and bloody forms; the results
of this struggle are directly jeopardised by an acute population recession [in Serbia,
A.P.]. (SaratliC 1996 85)
As a result of this population recession, in twenty to thirty years the Serbs
in Serbia will represent a ‘minority of active population’ and will be put in a
position ‘to fight in their own country for their “minority rights” ’. The shift
of population in favour of the Albanians will be reflected in a shift of
political power in Serbia: in a democratic society, the parliament and the
whole of government reflects, as he put it, the ‘national structure of the
population’. DespiC concluded that ‘the demographic problem is the first
existential problem of the Serb nation’ (SaratiliC 1996: 86). In giving it this
ranking, DespiC is clearly endorsing a version of narrow Serbism: for him
the priority is no longer the struggle for unification but the preservation of
the majority rule of Serbs in Serbia itself.
Unlike Popovic‘s narrow Serbism, which appeals to the traditional Serb
loyalty to their own state, this version of narrow Serbism appeals to rational
self-interest in preserving the existing Serb nation-state. This is the ground
on which Liberal unificationism and narrow Serbism can perhaps meet: one
could easily argue that a rational and quick solution to the problem of
Kosovo Albanians’ separatism is a prerequisite for the achievement of both
external and internal freedoms of the Serbs and is, thus, part of the liberal
agenda as well.

Why the diversity?

The typical themes of nationalist discourse - liberation from foreign

oppression (whether political or cultural), cultural integration, political
unification, moral and spiritual regeneration (the recovery of genuine
national values) and gaining of individual freedoms - frequently form the
foci around which a comprehensive and inclusive national vision or
524 Aleksandar Pavkovid

programme is constructed. The Slovenian national programme discussed in

Nova Revija in 1987 - which was articulated partly in response to the Serb
Memorandum - provides an example of an inclusive and comprehensive
national programme incorporating all of the above themes but focusing
principally on national independence (PavkoviC 1997: 90-2). In cases such
as this, the principal differences among various viewpoints are found in
their political orientation (for example, conservative versus liberal view-
points) while generally recognised national goals - such as cultural and
political unification and independence - are not openly contested.
In contrast, in the recent debate on Serb national goals each of the above
themes provided a focus for a distinct idea or vision of the desirable Serb
national goals. No intellectual position examined in this article succeeded in
integrating most of the above themes into an inclusive conception of
national goals. Even authors such as CosiC and PopoviC, who attempt to
present a broad conception of national goals in their literary works and
articles, offer mutually opposing views on national goals as well as on
national values that are in need of ‘recovery’.
The apparent ‘fragmentation’ of the Serb national idea obviously reflects
a diversity of intellectual and political traditions as well as of personalities
engaged in the debate. But, apart from this, it reflects the persistence of
unresolved but fundamental issues and of styles of argument which impede
the construction of an inclusive conception of national goals. One of the
most fundamental issues - the grounds for and the nature of Serb national
identity - appears still to be unresolved. The former Yugoslavists consis-
tently reject any religiously or historically defined Serb identity as ‘retro-
grade’ or ‘non-rational’ while the advocates of both Serb unificationism and
narrow Serbism (for example, Radovan SamardiiC and Danko PopoviC)
define Serb identity in terms of its historical - medieval and later royalist -
achievements as well as Serb religious affiliation. Since the question of
national identity stands at the heart of any conception of national goals and
values, the absence of consensus on the question of national identity
precludes any consensus on the whole range of related issues.
The persistence of Yugoslavism may be explicable, in this context, by the
desire to construct a ‘modem’, relatively ahistorical and non-religious
definition of Serb identity that would avoid any reference to the medieval or
royalist segments of Serb history. For this purpose, the following, utopian
type of argumentation proved to be most suitable: first, an ideal social or
constitutional arrangement is constructed (often with no regard to the
current needs or interests of individuals or groups) and, then, any
alternative conception is dismissed as falling short of the proposed - ideal -
standard. The ideal in such cases is derived from fairly abstract, non-
national ideologies which profess a faith in progress and/or social equality.
This style of argumentation, inherited from various forms of Marxism
popular in former Yugoslavia, is highly exclusivist both in intention and in
effect: it aims at excluding national goals and values (such as those of
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 525

patriarchal and royalist Serbia) which are ideologically incompatible with

the ‘progressivist’viewpoint of its advocates.
The exclusion of ideologically undesirable goals and values is, of course,
not restricted only to the legacy of Marxism. Narrow Serbism, in its original
form based on a patriarchal set of attitudes and lifestyles, envisages the
nation and its state as an extended family homestead. This collectivist
approach excludes, at times apparently unintentionally, anti-collectivist and
modemising values and goals such as those of liberalism. Thus both the
patriarchal and the above utopiadMarxist approach to Serb national goals
exclude - in varying degrees - individualistic liberal values and liberal
conceptions of national goals. The idea of Serb political unification, as a
project of Serb national liberation, also supported an exclusivist and
collectivist conception of national goals.
The political unification and cultural integration of the Serbs, in all of the
above highly diverse conceptions of these goals, have consistently been
justified by the need to resist any form of foreign domination and to achieve
national liberation from foreign oppression. This was and still is an idea of
national liberation from foreign subjugation. In the period 1945-91, the
foreign oppressors were primarily non-Serb communist rulers of ex-
Yugoslavia (such as Tito and Edvard Kardelj) while, from 1991 onwards,
they came to include dominant national groups (such as the Croats and
Bosnian Muslims) in the newly formed states as well as the foreign powers
that aided them. As the disintegration of former Yugoslavia hastened
during 1991, the governments of the European Union states and of the
United States rejected any programme which would have led to a political
unification of the Serbs outside Serbia with Serbia, and failed to support
any proposals for Serb cultural integration in various newly independent
states. This opposition of foreign powers, in the view of Serb unificationists,
demonstrated that political unification and even cultural integration of the
Serbs threatens the foreign powers’ designs for the subjugation of the Serbs.
Politically united Serbs, in the view of any Serb unificationist, obviously
present the best defence against any foreign domination. Foreign opposition
to the idea of Serb political unification thus only confirmed its national
liberation credentials and facilitated the continuing focus on the collectivist
goals of national liberation from foreign domination. In 1991, to many
nationally minded Serb intellectuals the first priority appeared to be, like
many times in the past, the defence of the collective of the nation; other,
noncollectivist goals (for example, civil and political freedoms) had to wait
for the liberation from foreign oppression. Moreover, since the foreign
govemments opposing Serb unification or cultural integration were liberal
democracies, the liberal ideals to which these govemments appealed,
obviously could provide no viable framework for the realisation of Serb
national goals.
As we have seen, only a group of younger and committed liberals
challenged this view by arguing that political unification and individual
526 Aleksandar PavkoviC

liberties are necessarily linked. They appear to be offering a broad

programme of national liberation of the Serbs both from foreign oppression
and from their own arbitrary and authoritarian government. Labelled here
Liberal unificationism, this programme is based not on pre-determined
historical goals but on liberal ideals; consequently, even if the historical goal
of Serb political unification is not achieved in the foreseeable future, this
does not detract from its appeal as a programme of national liberation. For
example, any international border or peace settlement in former Yugoslavia,
condoning a violent breach of the basic rights and liberties of the Serbs (for
example, their expulsion from the lands in which they had lived) is, in view
of these liberal ideals, illegitimate and should be reversed, if necessary, by
force. The least that this argument can suggest is that, in the absence of a
political unification of the Serbs, the debate on their national goals is far
from being finished.

Notes

1 Unification in one state does not, necessarily, imply the unification of South Slavs in one
nation. In the present article, the doctrine of national, as opposed to only state, unification is
called the ‘Yugoslav idea’.
2 In this article the adjective ‘Serb’ (in Serbo-Croat: srpski) refers to all Serbs, not only to
those originally from Serbia; the adjective ‘Serbian’ (in Serbo-Croat: srbijmski) refers to
Serbians from Serbia.
3 For an earlier shift from Yugoslavism to Serbism, see Budding 1997.
4 For the post-1945 political context of Serb intellectual debates on national goals and values,
see Miller 1997 and PavkoviC 1995.
5 For a brief discussion of the historical background of this debate, see PavkoviC 1994.
6 This is the first authorised edition of the draft of the Memorandum edited by two members
of its drafting committee. The text cited is from its authorised English translation.
7 For a highly critical discussion of the political activities of the Serbian Academy including
the Memoru@un, see MilosavljeviC 1995.
8 Dobrica CosiC (b. 1921), the creator of Partisan heroic realism in literature, was until 1968
one of the best known communist writers and a confidante of Tito’s circle. In 1968 he was
expelled from the Central Committee of the Serbian Communist Party for his warnings about
the rise of Albanian nationalism and the possibility of a Serbian nationalist backlash. In spite
of this, the series of his novels about a Serbian family caught up in the hventieth-century
turmoil was published by mainstream publishing houses and gained a wide readership (Cosif
1983 is an English translation of the first part of the series). In May 1992 he abandoned his
position of dissident to be elected the first president of the new Yugoslavia (Serbia and
Montenegro) by a parliament dominated by MilobviC followers (who, on MilobviC‘s orders,
dismissed him a year later). Although not a member of the drafting committee of the
Memorandum, he participated in its work (MihailoviC and KrestiC 1995: 15) and the
Memorandum draft reflects some of his Yugoslav federalism.
9 Milorad EkmGC (b. 1928), the author of several acclaimed historical monographs, in 1986
was a member of both the Serbian Academy and the Academy of Bosnia and Hercegovina, but,
unlike CosiC, did not participate in the drafting of the Memorandum. In the early 1990s he was
reputed to be an adviser to the Bosnian Serb political leaders; in 1992, after the outbreak of the
war in Bosnia-Hercegovina, the Bosnian Muslim police arrested him in Sarajevo and severely
beat h i up before handing h i over to Bosnian Serb authorities.
From Yugoslavism to Serbism 527

10 Radovan SamardiiC (1922-93), the author of well-known monographs on the history of

Dubrovnik and on Serbian historiography as well as historical novels, was a member of the
Serbian Academy’s drafting committee.
11 Renowned for his study of Serbo-Croat dialects and of the Serbian language, Pavle IviC
(b. 1924) was a member of the Academy’s drafting committee.
12 PopoviC (b. 1924) is the author of a series of popular patriotic novels about the life and
sufferings of Serbian peasants and their descendants who maintain a traditional, patriarchal
way of life. While his books have a wide readership, he does not enjoy the status of a
‘highbrow’ novelist such as CosiC, nor is he a member of the Serbian Academy.
13 ‘On the rivers Morava’ meani3g ‘in the very heart of Serbia’.
14 For his liberal views, Kosta CavoSki (b. 1941) was dismissed from his post at the Belgrade
Faculty of Law in the early 1970s, to be reinstated-after 1989. Apart from numerous works of
legal scholarship, he wrote a study of Karl Popper’s political philosophy and monographs
exposing the authoritarian techniques of Josip Broz Tito and of Slobodan MilokviC. Slobodan
SamardiiC(b. 1953), a senior research fellow at the Institute of European Studies in Belgrade, is
a liberal political theorist well known for his books on the nature of democracy and federalism.
15 Born in 1927, he is a well-known research chemist. He was not involved in the drafting of
the Memorandum.

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