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Summary

The Youngest Yugoslavs is an oral history collection that gives its readers in-depth, varied perspectives on why Yugoslavia continues to resonate among its former citizens more than 30 years since the state collapsed amid war, genocide, and dislocation.

Abstract 

The Youngest Yugoslavs: An Oral History of Post-Socialist Memory is a collection of interviews with the last generation of Yugoslavs who lived in the unified state only as children. The volume showcases how these individuals remember their childhoods during the final decades of socialism and how they conceptualize the lasting impact of Yugoslav multinationalism on their lives. The collection gives readers the opportunity to explore why Yugoslavia continues to resonate so prominently among some members of the state’s youngest cohort. It serves as a major contribution to our understanding of the afterlife of unified Yugoslavia’s brief, though exceedingly dynamic, twentieth century.

Primary research question

How does the youngest generation of Yugoslavs, those born between 1971 and 1991, remember their childhoods during the final decades of socialism and conceptualize the lasting impact of Yugoslav multinationalism on their lives?

What the research builds on

Scholars have primarily studied older Yugoslav generations, those born after the First World War in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and those born after the Second World War in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In her recent study of generational memory, Palmberger found that the cohort born during the interwar years was least impacted by the Yugoslav wars and thus often expressed nostalgia for the general feeling of physical, social, and economic security that characterized the bulk of their adult lives in Yugoslavia. Comparatively, those born after the Second World War, approximately the age of the parents of the interviewees included here, lived through the dissolution of the state in midlife. Scholars have devoted attention to this generation’s struggles to adapt to the market economy and new national identities of the post-Yugoslav world. Historian Ljubica Spaskovska explains that they were ultimately ambivalent about the past because they faced great obstacles in rebuilding their lives and felt insecure about the future. Only a few studies consider the experiences of the youngest Yugoslav generation. They primarily focus on individuals who continued to live in the region and thus articulated their relationship to the past through the prism of the successor states. Palmberger conduced her fieldwork in Bosnia and found that members of this age cohort pitted their positive childhood memories in Yugoslavia against their dissatisfaction with lacking social, educational, and economic opportunities in present-day Bosnia. In her study of youth in Serbia, anthropologist Jessica Greenberg similarly writes that “people too young to have experienced ‘the good life’ in socialist Yugoslavia nonetheless compared their fortunes to those of their parents and older siblings.” While much of this youngest generation’s memory might be based on the imagined ideals of the Yugoslav past, scholars argue that the notion of what could have been nevertheless informed their visions for what could yet be in the successor states. Studies also demonstrate that, for some young adults in the region, remembering Yugoslavia became a way to signal a desire to overcome strained ethnic relationships, while, for others, it reflected an investment in socialist ideas like equality and solidarity. The Youngest Yugoslavs builds on existing scholarship to further highlight this generational group’s distinct engagement with the past, particularly by giving voice to its globally mobile members. The Yugoslav wars caused massive displacement of people, and conditions in the aftermath of state collapse drove many young adults to seek opportunities abroad. Everyone interviewed in this collection lived outside of the region at some point. Some emigrated during or after the Yugoslav wars, while others left for varying intervals in pursuit of education or employment. Some returned to the region, while others remained abroad. As a result, they remembered their childhoods and related to the Yugoslav past differently than individuals who had only experienced living in the successor states. The interviews in The Youngest Yugoslavs thus offer novel insights into the meaning individuals invested in Yugoslav socialism and multinationalism from without. Their collective voices broaden our understanding of this generational experience, and they give us a richer lens for exploring the impact Yugoslavia had on its youngest cohort of former citizens.

What the research adds to the discussion

In its focus on the global network of former Yugoslav citizens, this volume serves as an important resource for studying the role of diasporas on post-socialist memory. Migration out of the region precipitated the formation of place-based and virtual diasporic communities. Most existing scholarship studies the nationalization and, at times, radicalization of the new diasporas that mobilized individuals abroad in the interests of successor states or nations. Scholars argue that traumas such as civil war and displacement triggered the development of strong nationalist orientations in both place-based and virtual diasporas of the former Yugoslavia. However, the multinational Yugoslav diasporic communities that many of those interviewed in this volume mention have not yet been researched. The Youngest Yugoslavs offers readers a chance to consider how some globally mobile members of Yugoslavia’s youngest cohort engaged with one another abroad despite newly drawn or redrawn national lines at home. For some of the individuals interviewed here, these communities were integral to their sense of self as Yugoslavs or post-Yugoslavs, while for others they were peripheral touchstones of belonging. At the very least, most interviewees expressed an awareness of Yugoslav diasporic communities, rather than only those built around the national identities of successor states, which means that these communities invariably shaped how they conceived of the Yugoslav past. This volume ultimately shows that many globally mobile members of the youngest Yugoslav generation found immense value in the legacies of socialism and multinationalism. There are several common experiences that individuals identified as distinct inheritances of their former homeland. They spoke about having had a sense of belonging at the level of the neighborhood, the state, and the cultural community. They associated Yugoslavia with safety, well-being, and the promise of future opportunities. And they identified specific ideological pillars of former Yugoslavia’s society that continue to be relevant to their lives today. Their memories are markedly different from the nostalgia, often termed Yugonostalgia, of older generations. While the members of the youngest Yugoslav generation sometimes reminisced about certain aspects of their childhoods, they more often thought critically about the factors that led to the end of Yugoslavia and their lives in it. No individual included here expected Yugoslavia to reunite. Instead, they closely considered the potential futures that could have been but never were. Many held their connection to the past closely, and those with children were often eager to share it with them. The youngest cohort’s persistent engagement with Yugoslavia suggests that the state’s ideals continue to be compelling for those who lived in the region as much as those who resettled abroad. In doing so, they embraced the promises of their former homeland and asked if some of them could still be realized. The interviewees showed that Yugoslavia left a lasting impact on their lives and that it continues to be a compelling idea for their visions of the future.