The Construction of National Identity and its Challenges in Post-Yugoslav Censuses

894 Social Science Quarterly
TABLE 3
Census Results from Subotica (Vojvodina, Serbia), 1991–2011
1991 2002 2011
Serbs 22,463 14.94 35,826 24.14 38,254 27.02
Croats 16,282 10.83 16,688 11.25 14,151 10.00
Hungarians 64,274 42.77 57,092 38.47 50,469 35.65
Bunjevci 17,527 11.66 16,254 10.95 13,553 9.57
Yugoslavs 22,486 14.96 8,562 5.77 3,202 2.26
Unknown 419 0.30 168 0.10 563 0.40
Undeclared 1,747 1.16 6,470 4.36 11,815 8.35
Regional 126 0.08 706 0.48 2,067 1.46
Total 150,266 148,401 141,554
percent of the population was Yugoslav, nearly twice the number in Vojvodina as a whole
(8.39 percent) and nearly five times the number for all of Serbia (3.24 percent). Unlike
elsewhere, the number of Yugoslavs did not collapse in the first census after 1991, as still
5.77 percent identified as Yugoslavs in 2002. At the time of this census, more than 10
percent of all Yugoslavs in Serbia lived in Subotica, which had a population of less than 2
percent of Serbia. At the same time, inhabitants not identifying with a national identity,
or choosing a regional identity, rose, amounting to nearly 10 percent of all respondents
by 2011 (see Table 3). Although Subotica experienced significant population shifts after
1991—including the emigration of Hungarians and Croats due to nationalist pressures and
the immigration of Serb refugees from Croatia and Bosnia—the rise of the “undeclared” is
clearly tied to the strong presence of Yugoslav identity. The rise of undeclared citizens in
2011, and the decline of Yugoslavs, suggests that many former Yugoslavs have chosen not
to identify with the dominant national categories, a pattern repeated in Montenegro, as we
shall see next.
The Bay of Kotor includes three municipalities of Montenegro bordering the Adriatic
Sea, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. A region with a large Croat and Serb community,
it also has a strong seafaring tradition, and had a large naval base in Yugoslav times. Nearly
50 percent of all Montenegrin Yugoslavs lived in these three municipalities. As research on
Yugoslav identity has noted, individuals were prone to identify as Yugoslavs if they lived
in a mixed Serb-Croat region (Sekulic, Massey, and Hodson, 1994; Isailović, 2011). After
1991, the number of self-identified Yugoslavs declined, shrinking to less than 1 percent. At
the same time, we note a marked rise of those citizens who refused to declare their national
identity. These citizens account for around 9 percent in both the 2003 and 2011 censuses
(see Table 4). Though not all Yugoslavs rejected the national categories after 1991, we
can see a clear pattern, as the share of those refusing to declare is nearly twice the level as
elsewhere in the country.
As a result, we can link the relatively large share of undeclared citizens (see Table 2) to the
pre-1991 category of Yugoslavs. This is not to argue that citizens switched automatically
from one to the other but, rather, that with the disappearance of Yugoslavia, individuals
were deprived of a ready, non-ethno-national, identity category to choose from, increasing
the attractiveness of the undeclared category. The third case highlights that this identity
shift is, however, not universal in the post-Yugoslav context.
A third region with a large number of Yugoslavs in 1991 was Slavonia, the Croatian plain
that stretches from the outskirts of Zagreb to the Serbian border. Here, because Serbs and
Croats lived in mixed villages and towns, there was much intermarriage and a large number