Zala Pavšič, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow
Democracy Institute
Central European University, Budapest
PavsicZ@ceu.edu
Voices of the Defeated: Friendship Narratives in the Disintegration of Yugoslavia
This paper is based on my postdoctoral project in which I investigate how the brotherhood and unity policy affected sociability patterns in Yugoslavia and how these patterns transformed as a consequence of the rise of nationalism and the war in Yugoslavia.
The idea of brotherhood and unity was a special policy in socialist Yugoslavia that was introduced as a means of bonding the six republics. For that very purpose, the government promoted the experience of multi-ethnic cooperation and communication. With the rise of nationalism and the disintegration of the country, however, multi-ethnic ties became problematic and marked with friction rather than mutual understanding. Even more so, wartime public narratives depicted multiethnic sociability as something impossible and as a feature which should be avoided.
In my research, I focus especially on narratives of friendship among people who faced the disintegration of the country and its aftermath as peace activists and people who tried to defy the emerging nationalism by advocating multiethnicity and by nurturing their pre-war connections and values. This approach allows me to address the forms of harassment as well as emotional distress people were facing when experiencing the shift from a multi-ethnic nation to ethnically homogenous nation states. In this respect, the concept of defeat plays a significant role in my project: both in the sense of Nathan Wachtel’s The Vision of the Vanquished (1977) as well as Giovanni Levi’s appeal for microhistory to give a voice to the defeated . At the Copenhagen conference, I will present a paper on texts written by (post-)Yugoslav intellectuals who voiced their protests against war and nationalism through narratives of non-belonging, betrayal and friendship.