1In this article I shall discuss a historical phenomenon called Yugoslavia. It is a country that no longer exists, and allegedly we are all well-aware of this. However, one could ask a direct witness about it: the singer-songwriter Andrej Šifrer, who used to sing at the time of its demise: “Kdo bo za pijačo dal, ko umrla bo država? [Who will buy drinks when the state is dead?]”¹

2After all, that is why we are celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the independent Slovenian state this year. Nevertheless, Yugoslavia still lives its virtual life, perhaps mostly because it does not actually exist in the political geography; it does not have only a single successor or pretender to its universal heritage; nor does it have a “nation” (neither tripartite, nor from the ranks of the nations and nationalities); although fifteen years ago almost 328,000 Yugoslavs were counted in the United States.² On the basis of the same source (a lecture by Tomasz Kamusella at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana³) we can add that even its unique language has been preserved in the virtual world, as the largest Wikipedia from our territories has been written in what is today the non-existent Serbo-Croatian language.⁴ At this point let me also mention the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito, who is often – in the general as well as professional public – presented as synonymous with the word Yugoslavia. Even he “has lived his virtual life” since as early as 1997, when he started disturbing the public from the servers of the Jožef Stefan Institute.⁵ Thus he lives regardless of reality and not always merely due to the concept of “Yugo-nostalgia”, which has in the recent years acquired an increasingly pejorative connotation, especially in the segment of the society which sees the second Yugoslav state especially on the basis of the traumatic events at the time of its establishment. However, perhaps these people can seek solace in the fact that “Yugo-nostalgia” is a typical example of retroutopia,⁶ i.e. nostalgia for something that has in fact never existed, at least not in the idolised form that might be painted today. We could also use the term retronostalgia; however, that is something completely different, as the Radio Student show with the same title underlines with its slogan: “We record, describe and deconstruct selected objects from our consumer past. Unfortunately, however, we cannot deny them.”⁷

3Many people associate this nostalgia merely with the political system, and we have to acknowledge, from what is today already a sufficient temporal distance, that it was unique and utopic in its complexity. However, also in terms of geography and culture we have been determined by Yugoslavia to the degree where we cannot simply overlook it on the occasion of the 25^th anniversary of the independent Slovenian state. Dejan Novačić is the curator of this non-existent state: he described the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in his well-known work SFRJ za ponavljače (SFRY for Repeaters, in the Slovenian translation SFRJ – moja dežela, or SFRY – My Country),⁸ while he developed the Yugoslav mental heritage in the book Emigrantska kuharica⁹ (Emigrant Cookbook, which explains how the aforementioned 328,000 Yugoslavs have been preserving their culture). In the introduction to the aforementioned “lexicographic study” Miha Avanzo asks himself: “Where do dead countries end up?”¹⁰ The answer is provided by Dubravka Ugrešić, who says: “that Novačić’s book is a humorous deconstruction of flowery words, and therefore it has a twofold effect. As we are reading it, we can calmly come to terms with our own past and at the same time forgive it with relief.” She also adds: “The value of this book lies in the fact that it is one of the first works to open the space for the revaluation of the past, and not the official past – that is up to historians – but the past of our own lives.”¹¹ And at this point I can think of two things:

1. In the last 25 years, in Slovenia the orphan Yugoslavia has lived in a tumultuous atmosphere, as our former/current actors have been unable to carry out this revaluation in a relaxed-enough spirit. Let me just refer to the recent interview with Stane Granda. “The journalist asked him how it is possible that the youth today – those who were born after the disintegration of Yugoslavia – talk about the fallen state with such a positive attitude. Granda answered that one of the reasons was the false upbringing that perpetuated a myriad of lies and half-truths. One of such lies is that once upon a time everybody had jobs. ‘Of course we all had jobs, but people often had nothing to do there,’ Granda refuted one of the most frequent blunders. He also reminded everyone to the hilarious processes involved in buying cars and a seriously limited freedom of speech. ‘These rights, whose acquisition represents a significant turning point... They do not mean anything to them, as they were born to this, this is their life. When they hear that jobs and apartments existed, it is naturally that they complain – even though I, for one, have never received an apartment, and I nevertheless had to contribute money to the housing fund.’ The historian claims that many lies remain, in judiciary as well as in the education system. In schools the lies are reflected in the selected topics. Granda illustrated this with the lessons in history, where the pupils learn when people in Slovenia started wearing jeans, but they do not find out that jeans had to be smuggled from abroad. ‘The former system was based on lies, and many of these lies remain present in the society,’ he stated and added that the various Yugo-nostalgic celebrations in the primary and secondary schools are also the result of the advanced age of the teachers, who are therefore perhaps also slightly demented.”¹²
2. Yugoslavia no longer exists and it should be the subject of historians. That is what my colleague Zdenko Čepič¹³ has frequently said in the recent years, and it is time that we actually get on with it – soberly and using the standard historiographic methodology. However, we have more or less intensively been doing this also in the last 25 years. And that, actually, is what I wanted to discuss.

4In the time of the Second Yugoslavia and its permanent reforms not very many truly Yugoslav/common things were created, despite significant efforts. If we can describe the Yugoslav social reality with precisely three truly common denominators – Tito, Yugoslav People’s Army and the blue team – than it is clear that Yugoslav historiography in the classic sense of the word did not exist. Large-scale common project did exist – from the History of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia/League of Communists of Yugoslavia to the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia – but we can nevertheless not talk about a common “Yugoslav historiography”.¹⁴ Extensive joint projects, where their contributors “nearly perished due to excessive workload” (I am quoting Zdenko Čepič, who would often tell an anecdote about a leader of one of the projects, Dušan Bilandžić), remained unrealised, “while the exploration of the Yugoslav nations” past started moving more and more often into the realm of journalism, artistic works and especially ‘pure politics”,¹⁵ as Božo Repe wrote. Sadly, most often that was where it remained. For the purposes of this contribution I have reviewed quite a collection of scientific publications, and under keyword “Yugoslavia” I have found quite a few peculiar ways in which this concept was used (sort of in the style of the permanent exhibition of the military museum at Kalamegdan, where the presentation of the Yugoslav military history started somewhere in the Iron Age). I have nevertheless found that in the middle of the 1980s a few reviews were written that may have partly opposed each other in their interpretations, but they still represent the basis for serious studies of the Yugoslav history (History of SFRY by Bilandžić,¹⁶ Yugoslavia 1918‒1984 by Petranović‒Zečević,¹⁷ and Nations, Yugoslavia, Revolution by Janko Pleterski¹⁸). Despite the differences, the common historiographic space did exist. In the Contributions to Contemporary History (Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino) scientific journal we can thus follow reviews of works from the territory of the former state until around the end of 1992 (due to the relatively long delay in publication). In the same year three works focusing on the Slovenian history also in the Yugoslav context were published (Assumption of Power by Jera Vodušek Starič,¹⁹ Slovenian Industry in the Clutches of Yugoslavia by Jože Prinčič,²⁰ and Liberalism by Božo Repe²¹). These were followed by quite a lengthy silence and we could say that the “republican historiography” with the purpose of strengthening the new state reality once again came to the forefront. However, the study programmes at the Department of History at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana managed to avoid this focus somehow. There we, the students, were still able to listen to lectures on the former common space, albeit under somewhat altered titles: for example, in 1991 the term “History of Yugoslav nations” was replaced by the collocation “History of South-East Europe”.²²

5In the time of its dissolution and throughout of the 1990s Yugoslavia was at the centre of the international attention, especially due to the Yugoslav Wars. At this moment a turning point took place in Slovenia, and after the significant growth in the 1980s the Slovenian-centric historiography was in full swing. After all, the flood of exclusively foreign works about Yugoslavia and its neuralgic former component parts led to the fact that my colleague and I, when we researched this issue years ago, would refer to the works of foreign (English-speaking) and Serbian authors much more often than the few Slovenian and Croatian authors. The publication of Pirjevec’s Yugoslavia in 1995, more than half of which is dedicated to the Second Yugoslavia, was an important reference point.²³ However, even this book was initially written for the Italian market, and only afterwards it was successfully published and well-received in Slovenia as well. Afterwards Jože Pirjevec wrote further works about the Yugoslav Wars and later also Tito. These were released in ideal publishing circumstances, but they did not transcend the importance of his book Yugoslavia, which therefore remains unsurpassed as the only synthetic work of this kind by a Slovenian author. In the words of Branko Goropevšek, “It is currently one of the few works written in the language of a small nation living under the Alps, whose contents do not stir up emotions in its readers and it is also not subject to sensationalism, which can often be claimed of similar political thrillers of this sort.”²⁴ Such thrillers are still in ample supply today. However, as I browse through the works of Slovenian historians I can establish that in Slovenia the new era of interest in the Yugoslav history in its broader context started after 2000 and after the change of the regime in the contemporaneous Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or Serbia. Slovenian historians finally regained access to archive sources, and in the interim a sort of a competitive spirit was formed, as in Serbia the Yugoslav history had been intensively dealt with, focused on in temporal and substantive stages, and often interpreted in a way which did not necessarily correspond to the Slovenian outlook on this period.²⁵ Since my active engagement in research, the Second Yugoslavia has become increasingly important. Symposiums were organised on occasions of major anniversaries of the Yugoslav state; a research project dedicated to this very issue took place at the Institute of Contemporary History (Položaj in vloga Slovenije v jugoslovanski državi po drugi svetovni vojni 1945‒1991 – Position and Role of Slovenia in the Yugoslav State after World War II 1945‒1991); several collections of scientific texts have been published; individual researchers have placed their works into a broader context; and the exchange of visits and confrontation of opinions with the researchers from other former Yugoslav territories has gradually become a constant.

6The second issue involves the evaluation of the Yugoslav experience and is discussed in the third part of this contribution. Many people have focused on Yugoslavia in various contexts and times. Their evaluations differed and were sometimes even conflicting, so that the readers sometimes even felt that these assessments were made under the influence of the constant requirements of daily politics, as the events from the times of Yugoslavia and its disintegration are still present not only in the parliamentary discussions, but also in the main TV news programmes and lately even in the crime sections in the press. Perhaps this indicates that we, as a society, have still not got over the dissolution of the “marriage”. Many authors were also quite unoriginal. For example, if we look at one of the formulations from the conclusion in Silvo Kranjec’s book Kako smo se zedinili (How We Have United) of 1928, we can soon establish that a formula exists for a successful ending of every text about the Slovenian national decisions:

“Thus our unification was acknowledged and confirmed in the international agreements, where we Slovenians were mentioned for the first time. After long centuries of foreign yoke we have joined the family of free nations as an equal member... /...This very formation of our current state teaches us that it is impossible to vanquish an educated and honest nation and that no man can permanently separate what God has joined together.”²⁶ (underlined by J. H.)

7From a myriad of opinions I have extracted the records of three Slovenian historians who wrote about this topic constantly and through a lengthy time period: Janko Pleterski, Božo Repe and Dušan Nećak.

8The following quote from Dušan Nećak’s article 70 let Jugoslavije – obletnice in prelomnice (70 Years of Yugoslavia – Anniversaries and Turning Points) of 1989, written on a similar occasion as we are celebrating today, shows how thoughts depend on the circumstances and how much easier it is to observe the historical circumstances from an all-knowing position thirty years later.²⁷

“In 1988 the ‘point zero!’ of the general Yugoslav development was reached. Only through domination of rationality over emotions and, I hope, because of the realisations stemming from historical experience – that only a democratic Yugoslavia is a homeland of all nations and nationalities under the condition that everyone in it feels nationally and socially safe and equal and that it is strong only in so far as its constituent parts are strong – an explosion has, for now, not taken place. If we can keep learning from historical experience, it shall also never happen”.²⁸

9The same author appeared at a very interesting colloquium entitled Jugoslavija – zgodovinska nuja ali zmota (Yugoslavia – a Historical Necessity or Mistake), which indicates that the question of evaluating the Slovenian experience in the former state despite the professed historiographical love or the need for temporal distance was an important social issue. Here, well over five years later, Nećak said:

“From all of the above it is nevertheless clear that Yugoslavia was a historical necessity also for the Slovenian nation. It was an unavoidable historical transference in which the Slovenian nation had matured to the degree where it was able to undertake the formation of its own sovereign state. With its own nation Slovenians received an opportunity to decide independently about its own destiny and future. We must also assume the responsibility for every decision about the potential new, old, or ancient integrations.”²⁹

10The very title of the symposium attests to the spirit of the times. Božo Repe stated: “We historians focused on Yugoslavia from the viewpoint of a done fact. It is simply our job. We were looking for traces of logical developments from the Yugoslav idea until the creation and functioning of the state.”³⁰ Quite a few years later he went on to add:

“The today’s Slovenian outlook on Yugoslavia, especially the political outlook – and this is partly true also of historians – stems from the theory that Yugoslavism was a kind of a provisional solution, something that helped Slovenians overcome the difficult times until they were able to return where they belonged: to the so-called ‘Europe’.”³¹

11From the today’s distance, when we have been dwelling in the so-called Europe for quite a while and when this historical goal has been achieved, this issue is not at the forefront anymore. Especially if we think of what is today a very popular (and populist) comparison between the mastodonically bureaucratic but politically weak European Union, whose members include states on very different levels of development, and Yugoslavia. At this point we can refer to the well-known thought of the last Yugoslav President of the Government (or President of the Federal Executive Council) Ante Marković, who saw Yugoslavia as a convoy of ships in which the last ship, i.e. Kosovo, was seven times slower than the rest. Thus Božo Repe removes Europe from the forefront in a university textbook:

“Circumstances have forced Slovenia to leave Yugoslavia: the increasing gap between Yugoslavia and the developed countries, but primarily the inability of Yugoslavia to democratise and modernise itself as well as ensure the national rights to its nations. It was this combination of liberal ideas and national feelings that created enough mass energy in Slovenia to allow for the envisioned goals to be carried out.”³²

12Naturally, he also adds the international context that made this possible. To the following empty phrase – the so-called thousand-year dream – we should also add the following finding from the aforementioned textbook:

“Despite its constant dissatisfaction Slovenia believed in the Yugoslav state. It invested extraordinary amounts of energy in its existence and its system, and the Slovenian political and economic elites had significant influence in the state leadership already in the First, but even more so in the Second Yugoslavia. Therefore nobody thought of seeking any solutions outside of Yugoslavia until the very end of the 1980s.” When I said something similar in a radio broadcast on the occasion of the referendum about the independence of Slovenia, the journalist just gaped at me in wonder.³³

13However, the point of this contribution lies elsewhere: not so much in the interpretations, but rather in the context in which this chapter of the Slovenian history should be explored. Already Janko Pleterski discussed this at the Maribor symposium, where he talked about the plundering of history³⁴: “Only a comprehensive, unplundered history can be the proverbial bough on which one can sit. No matter whether the tree from which this bough grows was once called the Habsburg Empire, yesterday Yugoslavia, or today simply Europe.”³⁵