Home is where the heart is. Home is where you feel safe, where your family and your kids and partner are. Home is where you feel accepted, acknowledged, and established. Recognized, respected, relaxed. Home is where I am. Wherever I live, I feel at home. I can establish a home wherever I go. Home is where I was born and raised. There is only one home. My home does not exist anymore, I moved so many times, but I will never feel at home anymore. My home is lost forever.
These are some of the answers from the people I talked to who had to leave their homes in the former common state of Yugoslavia due to the war. Some came directly to Ljubljana, while others moved several times before ending up in Slovenia. Some for a longer, some for a shorter period. I share their feelings, as I have experienced exile as well. I was born in Mostar and lived in Sarajevo, which I left in 1984 during the Olympics. I lived in Belgrade until 1999, when, during the NATO bombing, I moved first to Maribor and then to Ljubljana. I also had to create my own home several times.
I belong to the generation of 1974, a momentous year in Yugoslav history. It is marked by the proclamation of Tito as lifelong president and the adoption of a new and the last Constitution of the socialist state, which strengthened the decentralization and federalization processes. The specificity of my generation is that we travelled even without moving – born in one country, growing up in another or several others. The dissolution of Yugoslavia deeply marks my generation. We were exposed to starting our adult and professional lives during the transition period within newly founded ex-Yugoslav nation-states. Born during what was already often referred to as a period of Yugoslav crises, we grew up with the promise of a very different life than the one we faced. While we were raised in line with the ideology of brotherhood and unity, in the process of a socialist Yugoslavia was dispersed, the only ideologies we were left with were the toxic mixture of banal ethno-nationalisms and wild neoliberalism.
Yugoslavia was not a classical nation-state but rather «A project, idea and political and social experiment» (Jović 2023) based on the values of non-alignment, antifascism, anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism. Shaped by the ideology of self-managed socialism, it was never a democracy in the dominant understanding as parliamentarism (“bourgeois political system”). Unlike the representational system, which presents the existing, Yugoslavia was based on the idea of creating a new, utopic, not yet existing world. The transformation process of the existing presupposed the permanent revolutionary progression, which would lead to a state of equality. The primary carrier of political identification was not class, nation or ethnicity but working people. That is why creating a homogenous Yugoslav nation in the traditional sense was never encouraged. Yugoslav identity was always plural and in the making through multilingualism, regional and local development and the high autonomy of republics and provinces. That is precisely why Yugoslavia, according to Dejan Jović, “withered away” (2009). Although the newly formed nation-states were created precisely based on the principle of self-determination right guaranteed by the constitution, they paradoxically built their new nationalist identities on strong anti-Yugoslavism. The key ideological tool of new political elites of the (post)Yugoslav countries was to label all those freely expressing their critical positions against the new anti-Yugoslav mythologies as Yugonostalgics.
«Precisely because of the elusive nature of nostalgia, the authorities in the new states of former Yugoslavia have coined the term Yugonostalgia and given it an unambiguous meaning. The word is used as political and moral disqualification: the Yugonostalgic is a suspicious person, a ‘public enemy’, a ‘traitor’, a person who regrets the collapse of Yugoslavia (and hence the collapse of communism, and communism is ‘Serbo-Bolshevism’!), a Yugonostalgic is the enemy of democracy. The term ‘Yugonostalgia’ belongs to the new terminology of war.» (Ugrešić 1998)
With the dissolution of the country, the revisionist discourse became mainstream. What was once the hegemonic socialist Yugoslav memory narrative was replaced with a new pseudo-democratic post-socialist anti-Yugoslav memory narrative. One of the current examples that continues this trend is a text written by M. Kasapović (2023), which condemns Yugonostalgia as being blind to the fact that Yugoslavia was the most unsuccessful European country of the 20th century, which bloodily collapsed twice in the seventy years of its existence. She characterizes the idea of post-Yugoslavianism as an unsustainable ideological construct, which, due to ideological and political beliefs, professional interests or an intellectual trend, is driven by nostalgic intellectuals, artists, cultural and NGO workers, who mainly originate from the intellectual diaspora, which was created by the emigration from the newly formed countries after the breakup of Yugoslavia.
But, as exposed by D. Markovina (2023) this kind of discourse reveals a symptom of the fear of Yugoslavianism as such and of any critical requestioning of reality. It recreates the rooted reflex from the nineties, according to which the only meaning of the modern nation-state is exhausted in rejecting any Yugoslav heritage and post-Yugoslav context (i.e. Yugocomunizem symptom). Instead, he claims that the true legacy of Yugoslavia and its success should ultimately be measured by how it influenced its citizens’ lives. Yugoslavia, in general, has changed in just a few decades to such an extent that it has jumped several centuries in such a short period of time. It lifted a whole generation out of poverty, urbanized and modernized the country, enabled the vertical mobility of society, educated people en masse and built most of the public infrastructure we still use today.
Still, anti-Yugoslavism, which has been manifesting itself as an unavoidable common denominator for all policies of ex-Yugoslav countries, has also been indirectly strongly supported by European tendencies. In the context of several European declarations and resolutions condemning and remembering “victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes”, revisionist efforts in ex-Yugoslav countries were legitimized, and Ustashe and Chetnik movements were fully revived as legitimate ideologies and forces in World War II, even more so as victims of the Yugoslav “totalitarian communist regime”. The ex-Yugoslav space was even renamed to follow revisionist tendencies and to avoid any references to a common past. We now inhabit Southeastern Europe, or the Western Balkans, or simply “the Region”. Historical revisionism worked hard towards erasing any mention of Yugoslavia, unless it represented the Dark Ages, in order to discredit any positive memories or even reflections on the socialist Yugoslav period. In such circumstances, Yugonostalgia emerges through Svetlana Boym’s concept of counter-memory (2001), understood as memory created in public spaces without state control and control of dominant discourses of political elites, and as such, is being translated into reflective nostalgia (ibid.).
The fact is that more than 30 years since the violent dissolution of socialist Yugoslavia, the talk about this country is still highly emotionally charged and situated in the registers of passion, pain, sentimental recollections, or nostalgia, as exposed by T. Petrović and A. Hofman (2023) As a positive emotional attitude of people towards (their) socialist past, Yugonostalgia is partly reduced to consumerist and consumption practices and relationships. But it is never just passive, unreflective, restorative commodification and fetishisation of lost socialist world objects and symbols. The sensory memories of the former Yugoslavia deeply connected to the material traces of socialism play a much more important, reflective and politically relevant role, as emphasized by T. Petrović and J. Mlekuž (2016). Understood in this way, Yugonostalgia can also be active and political.
«That kind of nostalgia would primarily mean the legitimization of mourning for Yugoslavia in intellectual circles. So, it is permissible to mourn Yugoslavia and its real, productive and still important achievements, some of which are directly written into today’s world crisis of capitalism, such as equality, the right to work, health care, gender equality and so on.» (S. Slapšak 2008)
Seeing politics in the post-Yugoslav space unravel as a continuation of war by other means, Yugonostalgic memory narratives can become “by definition, subversive, anti-system and emancipatory” (M. Velikonja 2011). As a “retrospective utopia” (ibid.), it can also be a dissident discourse and a strategy of resistance against current injustices on the one hand and against condemning the past and compulsory amnesia on the other. Moreover,
«Nostalgia, as a discursively constructed set of ideas, should be seen and interpreted as part of an ideology that enables individuals and groups to establish and argue their positions and status in a given social and historical circumstance.» (Petrović 2010)
T. Petrović asserts that today’s revisionist and banal understanding of Yugonostalgia is actually denying individuals any possibility to be taken seriously (2012), so denying Yugonostalgic subjects of any political subjectivity. On the contrary, understanding the importance of the affective and the emotional aspects of the memory of socialism can be crucial for the political subjectification of postsocialist subjects in the present day. The political element of nostalgia is revealed in moving from passive sentimentalism to the (possibility of) articulated resistance. As a meta-national narrative, Yugoslavism enables us to transform Yugonostalgia for the future into Yugoslavism that acts in the present (Popović 2021). Today, Yugoslavism, as a meta-national identity, is difficult to grasp within our traditional concepts of nation, does not represent an ethnonational community nor demand a nation-state to be (re)created, yet persists as another layer of people’s identities. In that sense, Yugonostalgia can doubtlessly be one of the kernels of resistance against dominant ideologies and practices, such as ethno-nationalism and neo-liberalism. This makes nostalgia a practice with a mobilizing, legitimizing, and even an emancipatory character. (ibid.)
So, Yugonostalgia can basically present a political program which builds on the values of socialism as the ideology of radical equality based on the ideals of modernity, the Enlightenment and multiculturalism (Markovina 2015). This value, exactly, wants to be recreated by the new post-Yugoslav left (Štiks 2015) or, as some would put it, “partisan left” (Kirn 2022). The rise of the left-wing movements throughout the (post)Yugoslav space and their enhanced cooperation is embedded in investigative reflection into how “it was once” to establish the new political ideas for how it “can be once again”. But the most important thing is that remembering Yugoslavia can revoke the idea of bringing progress and hope back into the political field of (post)Yugoslavia. In a time where right-wing and centre political choices remain embedded in the concepts of nation-states and ethno-national vision of the world, the new left-wing positionalities turn to internationalist Yugoslav reflections. And in the time of dystopia, it can bring us revoking faith in the utopian rethinking of a better world (2019). So, it is not possible to distinguish home from the heart. But it is important to know where the heart is and to listen to it very carefully.
Lana Zdravković is a researcher, publicist, political activist, and artist. Her work focuses on political engagement, radical equality, and the praxis of the militant subject. She is affiliated with the Peace Institute for Contemporary Social and Political Studies and co-founded the KITCH Institute of Art Production and Research. Her artistic interests include the neo-liberalization of art, political performance, pornography in art, and kitsch and trash art.
