This book focuses on one of the most remarkable phenomena of World War II: the mass participation of women, including numerous female combatants, in the communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance. ...Drawing on an array of sources - archival documents of the Communist Party and Partisan army, wartime press, Partisan folklore, participant reminiscences, and Yugoslav literature and cinematography - this study explores the history and postwar memory of the phenomenon. More broadly, it is concerned with changes in gender norms caused by the war, revolution, and establishment of the communist regime that claimed to have abolished inequality between the sexes. The first archive-based study on the subject, Women and Yugoslav Partisans uncovers a complex gender system in which revolutionary egalitarianism and peasant tradition interwove in unexpected ways.
By looking through the prism of the West's involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, this book presents a new examination of the end of the Cold War in Europe. Incorporating declassified documents ...from the CIA, the administration of George H.W. Bush, and the British Foreign Office; evidence generated by The Hague Tribunal; and more than forty personal interviews with former diplomats and policy makers, Glaurdić exposes how the realist policies of the Western powers failed to prop up Yugoslavia's continuing existence as intended, and instead encouraged the Yugoslav Army and the Serbian regime of Slobodan Milošević to pursue violent means.
The book also sheds light on the dramatic clash of opinions within the Western alliance regarding how to respond to the crisis. Glaurdić traces the origins of this clash in the Western powers' different preferences regarding the roles of Germany, Eastern Europe, and foreign and security policy in the future of European integration. With subtlety and acute insight,The Hour of Europeprovides a fresh understanding of events that continue to influence the shape of the post-Cold War Balkans and the whole of Europe.
The Yugoslav state of the interwar period was a child of the Great European War. Its borders were superimposed onto a topography of conflict and killing, for it housed many war veterans who had ...served or fought in opposing armies (those of the Central Powers and the Entente) during the war. These veterans had been adversaries but after 1918 became fellow subjects of a single state, yet in many cases they carried into peace the divisions of the war years. John Paul Newman tells their story, showing how the South Slav state was unable to escape out of the shadow cast by the First World War. Newman reveals how the deep fracture left by war cut across the fragile states of 'New Europe' in the interwar period, worsening their many political and social problems and bringing the region into a new conflict at the end of the interwar period.
Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the ...regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism. The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Restoring the voice of the working class in history, Musić presents Yugoslavia's workers actors in their own right, rather than as a mass easily manipulated by nationalist or populist politicians. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.
Even before Tito's Communist Party established control over the war-ravaged territories which became socialist Yugoslavia, his partisan forces were using football as a revolutionary tool. In 1944 a ...team representing the incipient state was dispatched to play matches around the liberated Mediterranean. This consummated a deep relationship between football and communism that endured until this complex multi-ethnic polity tore itself apart in the 1990s. Starting with an exploration of the game in the short-lived interwar Kingdom, this book traces that liaison for the first time. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, it ventures across the former Yugoslavia to illustrate the myriad ways football was harnessed by an array of political forces.
This book is about the process of Americanization of Yugoslav culture and everyday life during the sixties. After having fallen out of the Eastern bloc, Tito turned to American backing. In political ...spheres distance was carefully guarded, yet in the realms of culture and consumption the Yugoslav regime was definitely much more receptive. For Titoist Yugoslavia this tactic turned out to be rewarding. It stabilised the regime internally and gave it an image of openness in foreign policy. The book addresses the link between cultural diplomacy, culture, consumer society and politics. The main argument is that both culture and everyday life modelled on the American way were a major source of legitimacy for the Yugoslav Communist Party, and a powerful weapon for both USA and Yugoslavia in the Cold War battle for hearts and minds. Vučetić explores how the Party used American culture in order to promote its own values and how life in this socialist and capitalist hybrid system looked like for ordinary people, living in a country with communist ideology wrapped in capitalist form. The book offers a careful reevaluation of the limits of appropriating the American dream. The analysis raises doubts toward both the uncritical celebration of Yugoslavia’s openness and the exaggerated picture of its authoritarianism.
Drawing on visual materials (film, art, graffiti, street-art, public advertisement, memorials), the essays of this collection offer detailed views on the cultural and political dynamics that preceded ...and emerged in the wake of the Yugoslav conflicts of the 1990s.
The Yugoslav break up and conflict have given rise to a considerable literature offering dramatically different interpretations of what happened. But just how do the various interpretations relate to ...each other? This ambitious new book by Sabrina Ramet, an eminent commentator on recent Balkan politics and history, reviews and analyses more than 130 books about the troubled region and compares their accounts, theories, and interpretations of events. Ramet surveys the major debates which divide the field, alternative accounts of the causes of Yugoslavia's violent collapse, and the scholarly debates concerning humanitarian intervention. Rival accounts are presented side by side for easy comparison. Thinking about Yugoslavia examines books on Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo which were published in English, German, Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian, and Italian, thus offering the English-speaking reader a unique insight into the controversies.
Making Yugoslavs Nielsen, Christian Axboe
Making Yugoslavs,
2014, 20141015, 2014, 2014-10-15, 2014-11-05
eBook
Christian Axboe Nielsen uses extensive archival research to explain the failure of King Aleksandar's dictatorship's program of forced nationalization in the interwar era.
Yugoslavia was unique among the communist countries of the Cold War era in its openness to mixing cultural elements from both socialism and capitalism. Unlike their counterparts in the nations of the ...Soviet Bloc, ordinary Yugoslavs enjoyed access to a wide range of consumer goods and services, from clothes and appliances to travel agencies and discotheques. From the mid-1950s onward the political climate in Yugoslavia permitted, and later at times encouraged, a consumerist lifestyle of shopping, spending, acquiring, and enjoying that engaged the public on a day-to-day basis through modern advertising and sales techniques. InBought and Sold, Patrick Hyder Patterson reveals the extent to which socialist Yugoslavia embraced a consumer culture usually associated with capitalism and explores the role of consumerism in the federation's collapse into civil war in 1991.
Patterson argues, became a land where the symbolic, cultural value of consumer goods was a primary factor in individual and group identity. He shows how a new, aggressive business establishment promoted consumerist tendencies that ordinary citizens eagerly adopted, while the Communist leadership alternately encouraged and constrained the consumer orientation. Abundance translated into civic contentment and seemed to prove that the regime could provide goods and services equal to those of the capitalist West, but many Yugoslavs, both inside and outside the circles of official power, worried about the contradiction between the population's embrace of consumption and the dictates of Marxist ideology. The result was a heated public debate over creeping consumerist values, with the new way of life finding fierce critics and, surprisingly for a communist country, many passionate and vocal defenders.
