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

880 Social Science Quarterly
national, religious, and linguistic identities. In addition, the post-Yugoslav censuses also
shed light on identities in flux, particularly the response of citizens to four challenges.
1. State dissolution: With the dissolution of Yugoslavia, one source of identity disappeared
and forced people to reconsider their identity.
2. New nation-states: All states that have emerged from Yugoslavia define themselves,
either implicitly or explicitly as nation-states containing one or several nations. Thus,
individuals must relate their identity to the larger dominant categories.
3. Reifying national identities: The conflicts in former Yugoslavia reified ethnic identities
through violence and political arrangements that emphasize ethnicity in institutions.
Thus, belonging to a nation matters, both symbolically and in terms of specific
political entitlements.
4. Emergence of new categories: With the dissolution of the Yugoslavian state and emergence
of new states, old categories have been largely abandoned (e.g., Yugoslavs,
Muslims), or had their meanings changed, while new categories have been adopted
(e.g., Bosniaks). A key question is the degree to which these changes, the result of
top-down processes, have been accepted.
Census results and national identity have been politicized in the context of the dissolution
of Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars. Census results have justified territorial claims,
ethnic exclusion, and worse. Thus, we are able to explore peacetime censuses taken in
a highly politicized context. All countries explored here have a similar historical legacy
of census taking and the categorization of identities during Yugoslav times, allowing for
cross-country comparisons.
Rather than just mapping out the controversies over the census, this article maps out
different ways in which citizens chose not to adhere to the predominant or desired identity
categories, and argues that while those “not fitting in” varies greatly across the region,
overall they constitute a significant and neglected community that does not fit into the
easy ethno-nationalist matrix. Thus, rather than just understanding the census as a site of
contestation between the state and minority groups or kin states, this article brings in the
citizen, who might or might not follow the arguments of either the state or respective ethnonational
community leaders. Here, we argue that the creation of categories and linking
particular forms of identity is not just a feature of state policy, but is also the product
of ethnic entrepreneurs who seek to impose varying levels of control on their respective
communities. Although results vary across the region, it emerges that, often, citizens follow
neither the state categories, nor those given by their supposed ethno-national leaders.
Historical Background
Until the end of the 19th century, the two dominant empires in Southeastern Europe,
the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, viewed their subjects not through the
lens of nationhood, but religion. The first Ottoman census was taken in 1830–1831, and
as a result of the difficulty in modernizing the census, the Ottoman Empire was unable to
conduct its second complete census until 1905–1906. The empire categorized its citizens
according to the recognized religious communities, while ethnicity or nationality remained
unknown (Shaw, 1978). The first census in the Habsburg Monarchy dates to the mid-
18th century and, by 1880, censuses were held regularly every 10 years. The Habsburg
Monarchy, while challenged by competing nationalisms, only asked about religion and the
language used by the citizens, and not their mother tongue (Van der Plank, 2012).