yugoslavias implosion

ought to be “defined on the basis of citizenship, not on the basis of
ethnicity.” 67
In October 1985, the Belgrade group (with Ćosić at its head)
debated the fate of Yugoslavia with Slovenian intellectuals grouped
around the Nova revija magazine. The Slovenes stressed:
We [Slovenes] are looking for our own solution to ensure our autonomy,
and it is only on that basis that we’re going to work out our attitude
to Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav idea is of secondary importance for
Slovenia. The party ideology cannot articulate Yugoslavia’s prospects.
It seeks to preserve the status quo and to perpetuate it. … We wish to be
in Europe, we want Europeanization for Serbia too. We expect Serbia
to resist Asiatic totalitarianism. The Serbs must solve the Albanian
problem first of all. That’s the road to de-Balkanization and Europeanization.
It’s a traumatic problem, but it must be solved because
it is threatening Yugoslavia, so Serbia can’t Europeanize before the
Kosovo problem is solved. European traditions must be at the root of a
reform of Yugoslavia. That’s the only way for the Serbs to renew their
national consciousness and to repudiate Bolshevism and Cominternist
traditions. 68.
For their part, the Serbian intellectuals’ scorned Slovenian ambitions.
Slovene writer Taras Kermauner was appalled by their suggestion
that “Slovenes should focus their language on writing lower,
populist literature which will with time change over to Serbian and
to use Serbian in public life and high culture.” 69 Kermauner said he
had figured out what lay in store for Yugoslavia. “The arguments
of the Serbian academics were as follows: the Slovenes cannot have
a state of their own because they are not up to it; the Croats cannot
have one because they are genocidal by nature; the Bosniaks
67 Mihajlo Marković, Društvena misao (Social Thought), SFRY Official Gazette, 1999 .
68 Quoted after Dobrica Ćosić, Srpsko pitanje – demokratsko pitanje, Beograd, 1992
69 Globus, 22 January 1996
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