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Chapter 4 • Nicola Mai
the turn of the century, another synthetic vision of a Yugoslav nation
emerged along multicultural lines, claiming that a unified Yugoslav culture
should be created by combining the best elements of each separate southern
Slavic culture, in order to create a new culture that would be shared by
all and eventually replace the separate national identities. These arguments
were especially influential during the post-World War I reconstruction
period, but were later “overwhelmed by political developments in interwar
Yugoslavia, which generally worked to impose Serb domination on
the rest of the country” (Wachtel, 1998: 9). Finally, in the period following
World War II, the Yugoslav ideal re-emerged again in new forms. This
time, the separate national cultures were allowed to remain at the level of
folk culture, while the Communist State apparatus in each nation became
directly responsible for propounding and promoting a national culture in
conformity with the ideological requirements of social realism. It was partly
as a result of this that the Yugoslavian national identity was inefficient
in expressing a feeling of common cultural belonging that would also
enable the single national cultures to be expressed. While the cultural
resources of single national cultures were ignored, the ideological attempt
to introduce an artificial supranational identity and impose it from above
was destined to fail along with the apparatuses that produced and promoted
it. Moreover, the second articulation of a Yugoslavian cultural identity
can be seen as carrying a deep Serb nationalist bias, embedded and disguised
within it. As the Serbs controlled the omnipotent communist ruling
party after their role in the partisan war, they had taken it upon themselves
to reconfigure the national discourse and ideology in accordance with their
perceived sentiment of moral superiority. This collectivist supra-national
culture promoted and elaborated by the State cultural apparatuses and controlled
by Serbs in the name of their own moral superiority was destined
to be seen as both nationalistic and unappealing once the “themes of the
partisan war had played themselves out”. In fact,
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under pressure from the resurgent national cultures, in the early 1960s it
was decided that political and economic forces… would be sufficient to
hold the state together, and attempts to create a unified national culture
of any kind were to be abandoned (Wachtel, 1998: 9).
Therefore, from this perspective, the emergence of nationalism alongside
the collapse of communism should be understood in light of two parallel
processes. One was the delicate passage from a collectivist and homogeneous
cultural order, to an individualist, and thus heterogeneous one.
The second, was the rising feeling of (ontological) insecurity and (narcissistic)
frustration, related to the collapse of a social, cultural, psychological
and economic order that was based on fantasies of infallibility and moral