yugoslavias implosion

CHAPTER 1
Serbian nationalism
and the remaking of
the Yugoslav Federation
A HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE: FROM THE
NAČERTANIJE TO THE MEMORANDUM
The phenomenon of Serbian nationalism cannot be understood
merely by studying the history of the “second Yugoslavia,” the
socialist state founded in 1943 that was formally dissolved in 1991. The
roots of Serbian nationalism run much deeper. They run, indeed,
back to the beginning of the nineteenth century—to the foundation
of the modern state of Serbia. The main pillar of Serbian nationalism
is the medieval Serbian empire of the fourteenth century, the
most powerful Balkan state of time, which Serbs not only glorify but
also wish to resurrect in the form of “Greater Serbia,” a patriarchal,
Orthodox, ethnically homogeneous state. The fact that this ambition
is wholly unrealistic has not affected its ability to inspire fervid devotion
among many Serbs. The efforts of Serbia’s political and military
elites in the past two centuries to rebuild the medieval empire
have caused recurrent conflict with the other states and peoples that
share the same territory. This, indeed, was the principal cause of the
wars in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia—created to allow southern Slavs
to coexist peacefully but which Serbian nationalists regarded as an
opportunity to reinvent medieval Serbia—broke bloodily apart.
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ChApter 1