[Redux] Collective Nostalgia

Yugonostalgia as a collective emotion is a sentimental longing for a positively remembered past of the former country and life in it. Why and how does it arise? What are its positive and negative effects? And what are its implications?

A redux of Episode 80 and the second in the “Nostalgia” series. 

With Anouk Smeekes and Borja Martinović (Utrecht University).

Listen: “[Redux] Collective Nostalgia” (Episode #133)

Bonus Extras: “[Redux] Collective Nostalgia” (Episode #133)

Ad-free version of “[Redux] Collective Nostalgia” (Episode #133).

Transcript: “[Redux] Collective Nostalgia” (Episode #133)

PETER KORCHNAK: This and every other episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to episodes ad-free and have access to extended and bonus episodes.

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[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide Peter Korchnak.

Today we continue the Nostalgia series here on Remembering Yugoslavia  with a redux of Episode 80, “Collective Nostalgia.” 

Enjoy.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: Yugonostalgia has made multiple appearances on this podcast, so much so the podcast itself has been labeled yugonostalgic despite being anything but (this goes to show that from a certain standpoint a mere glance at yugonostalgia or Yugoslavia can sometimes be labeled or should I say confused with the object of that study). 

Yugonostalgia provides endless fascination for me, particularly in its role as a driving force behind the persistence of memory of the former country, both there and abroad.

Now I’ve tended to look at yugonostalgia on the subjective, individual level. But nostalgia can be experienced at the group level as well. 

When I first started investigating nostalgia, a decade plus ago, I was surprised just how much scholarship there was out there about it. Teams of psychologists, particularly in the UK and the Netherlands devoted their entire careers to studying the phenomenon, which had in fact seen an ascendance in recent years. 

The Ipsos Global Trends Survey in 2016 showed that feeling nostalgic for one’s country of the past is a widespread sentiment in many countries across the world; in most countries, more than 50 percent of the population would like their country to be the way it used to be (whatever that means).

One of these intrepid nostalgia explorers is Anouk Smeekes, associate professor of social psychology at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on prejudice and intergroup relations, and more specifically for our story today on historical understandings of national identity in relation to collective emotions and intergroup relations. 

ANOUK SMEEKES: Nostalgia in this body of work is considered an emotion defined as a sentimental longing for a positively remembered past. So it’s basically looking at the past through these rose-tinted glasses and basically longing for these positive memories of the past. 

Generally, scholars agree that the most important trigger of nostalgia is a feeling of identity discontinuity. And this basically refers to the feeling that a sense of identity is disrupted in an unpleasant way. So when people experience a sense of disconnection between their identities of the past and the present, and this disruption is unwanted. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In the former Yugoslavia, the disruption, or one of them anyway, was the breakup of the common country and, on another level, the end of socialism.

ANOUK SMEEKES: So it’s basically the idea of unwanted change in identity that is seen as the most important trigger of nostalgia. And the reason is that emotions are functional for people. So in the case of nostalgia, it’s seen as an emotional coping mechanism to deal with such feelings of unwanted change, so the feelings of identity discontinuity. So a sense of identity continuity is essential for people to have a sense of identity in the first place. The function of nostalgia is seen as restoring this sense of identity continuity. 

In longing for this positive remembered past it also becomes clear for people which aspects of their identity they value, which aspects of their identity they find important, and hence which ones they actually want to protect and maintain in the present and future. So in that sense, nostalgia also helps to buffer threats to discontinuity of identity and it helps to sort of reestablish or regain a sense of identity continuity. 

PETER KORCHNAK: If your identity, or an important building block of your identity, was being Yugoslav and that is taken away, your identity may crumble around that missing piece. To restore or rebuild that identity, you may experience longing for the time the identity building block was still there. This longing helps you reconnect with that past period and bring it into the now and carry it into the tomorrow. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The emotion of nostalgia, helps people deal with change, deal with disruption to their lives helps re- establish continuity. Now, on the flip side, there are there are critics of nostalgia or critics of people who feel nostalgia, saying that this is basically just kind of a weakness and an expression of an inability to deal with the reality. They use that in a negative sense, denigrating sense. Listeners of the podcast will know that I’m referring to people who use “Yugonostalgic” as an insult. 

ANOUK SMEEKES: If you just look at it in a very general way, nostalgia is a universal emotion. It’s experienced by everybody, and also on often even on a daily or weekly basis. And if you look at just look at it as sort of cherishing fond memories of the past, you can, of course, also see the positive sides of it. By sort of holding on to positive aspects of the past, you can also see why it’s important for people, why it can foster a sense of mental health and well being in difficult times. 

If you just look at it from the perspective of an individual who can sort of use nostalgia to cope with difficulties, unwanted change or other types of difficulties related to your personal lives and your identities, then this really showcases sort of the positive side of the emotion. 

PETER KORCHNAK: On the personal level, there are, as you’ve pointed out, positive effects and positive uses, positive implications of nostalgia. But what about negative ones on the personal level? What harm, if any, can nostalgia do?

ANOUK SMEEKES: There’s a lot of research on this. The vast majority of studies really shows that, in general, it has positive implications for mental health and wellbeing. 

However, there are some exceptions to this. For example, there are studies showing that for habitual worriers, so people who tend to worry a lot, that for these people, nostalgia may not be so beneficial for their mental health and well being. So there are certain groups of people who can cling on to the past in a way that that doesn’t really help them in the present. 

We talked about the definition of nostalgia, right, as this sentimental longing for a positively remembered past. But inevitably, there’s also a sense of loss related to nostalgia because the past no longer exists. So sometimes people also talk about nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion because it’s a combination of longing for something positive but also a sense of loss, right, so realizing that this positive past is over and that it will never come back. This bitterness aspect of nostalgia is something that can be seen as also a little bit more negative. So if people really focus on this loss aspect, right, so the positive past is no longer there, this could also result in less positive implications for wellbeing, so to say.

PETER KORCHNAK: If you no longer feel connected to the past versions of yourself, to who you were in the past, feelings of nostalgia for that past can become painful reminders of how things were and what you left behind. These recollections and feelings in turn hamper your ability to move on and deal with the present. 

In the former Yugoslav context, you know, nostalgia tends to be viewed as something those lefties feel for that bad socialist country. We, the righties, are not, not the guilty of feeling nostalgia for anything. And of course, in the American context, “make America great again” is a perfect, perfect slogan for the restorative kind of nostalgia. 

So speaking of, do you ever in your in your research—I don’t think I’ve seen that—do you make the distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia that Svetlana Boym has used or established as a kind of an important distinction of the two nostalgias. So basically, what the soldier is trying to achieve and what its effects are on the other individuals.

ANOUK SMEEKES: I’m a little bit critical of this distinction, to be honest. 

Of course, when you talk about this restorative nostalgia that is often also seen in the political radical right discourse. So the idea that you not only long for the past, but that you also want to bring back the past. Of course, you can say, well, this is a specific form of nostalgia. So simply longing for the past is not the same as also sort of wanting to reconquer the past in the present. So in that sense, I would say yes, it’s definitely a specific type of collective nostalgia, or actually that this could also be the case for personal nostalgia. 

With the reflective nostalgia, I’m a little bit more critical towards it because we really define nostalgia as an emotion that pertains to this longing for the past. And simply thinking about the past or reflecting on the past is not something that I would label as nostalgic. This is where I’m critical of the concept, because I think a lot of people label thinking about the past or talking about the past immediately as nostalgic, but that’s not the way we understand it. So nostalgia is really about the emotional experience of longing for the past but not that’s not the same as reflecting on the past. So I think, in that sense, reflecting on the past is, of course, good and helpful and can also be constructive but it’s not nostalgia, necessarily.

PETER KORCHNAK: In addition to being subjective and individual, nostalgia can be experienced at a group level as well. This doesn’t mean a group of people has feelings as a group. Feelings remain individual, your own, of course. 

But if you think of yourself as belonging to a group, that group becomes part of your identity, part of your self, and acquires social and emotional significance. If you feel you belong to a country or to a nation, that sense is an important part of your social identity. Emotions you feel because you’re a member of a group are collective emotions. If events like your country’s disappearance affect your group, which of course they do, you’re going to feel collective emotions about it.

ANOUK SMEEKES: Collective nostalgia is not something that is necessarily only experienced by whole groups or whole societies. It can actually also be experienced by individuals on the basis of their social identity or their group identity. So for example, when you watch TV and you see images of the past of your country, this could evoke feelings of collective nostalgia, even though you’re sitting alone, right, in front of the TV. So it’s a collective emotion that can be experienced individually, so that’s important. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Nostalgia as a collective emotion springs from your shared identity as a member of a group; Yugonostalgia, its social aspect, to be more accurate, is a collective emotion rooted in being a Yugoslav.

You have been focusing on collective nostalgia, particularly national nostalgia, which you define as “a combined sense of loss and longing for fondly remembered national homes of the past that is experienced on the basis of one’s national in-group membership.” Can you differentiate these two types of nostalgia? I mean, beyond the obvious that one is individual one is one is collective, maybe the dynamics of them and how are they similar? How is personal and group-based nostalgia similar? And how are they different in their dynamics and their effects in their implications for policy or for the real world?

ANOUK SMEEKES: So for personal nostalgia it’s about your personal past, your unique memories, for example, your unique childhood experiences. 

 For collective nostalgia, it’s about your group and the memories you have of your collective past, so the past that you share with your your fellow group members. So it concerns a longing for objects, periods, or events from your collective past. 

In terms of their consequences, they are different. Because what we see in studies is that where personal nostalgia is relevant for understanding all kinds of, let’s say, individual-level processes, so mental health and wellbeing, it’s the collective nostalgia that matters for understanding group processes and intergroup relations. So how people think about their own group, and how they think about relevant outgroups, and also for understanding the way this emotion is used by politicians and how this could affect people’s political attitudes and behavior. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Smeekes’s and her colleagues’ research has shown that collective nostalgia as a group-based emotion first motivates group members to do things that would help them bring their group’s past, which they inevitably idealize, into the not-so-great present. They also share a yearning to uphold or return to the group’s core values, which again were somehow superior to today’s. Group members then may feel a kind of moral responsibility to keep the group alive, and they act accordingly. People who are Yugonostalgic may wear clothing that shows what they value and what group they belong to; they may listen to music from the Yugoslav period to keep it alive and share in their appreciation of it; they may attend events that commemorate the defunct country’s holidays. 

Collective nostalgia then acts as, quote, “a balm for the distressed social identity in that it provides a route and root to protect the future.” 

You’ve explored collective nostalgia as a national nostalgia where the us is a nation in our case, in the case of this podcast, let’s say Serbs or Croats, but as you already pointed out, collective nostalgia can also emerge in groups in which people are connected on a different basis—a shared past experience and norms and values as in for example, again, in our case, Yugoslavia. So that that feeling of nostalgia is for a collective past for that group, for that community to which people belong, and the motivation is to then perpetuate that community so that that continuity is ensured. 

Could you speculate on similarities and differences between nostalgia in ethnonational terms, again, let’s say Serbs and Croats, and nostalgia for a country that doesn’t exist anymore, in our case, Yugoslavia, that had a supranational or at least non-ethnic identity, kind of an umbrella identity. 

ANOUK SMEEKES: Any group context is relevant for studying nostalgia. It’s safe to say that nostalgia will exist in any type of group or community. Because it’s such a universal emotion, and especially for groups that have somewhat longer history, there will always be experiences of nostalgia, because it also has a meaning-making function: by understanding the past, by longing for the past, it also becomes clearer for people what actually what is our group identity, what binds us and holds us together, so in that sense, I think you could you could study it in all kinds of communities. 

Regardless of the group identity at stake or even the content of specific collective nostalgia, the function of the emotion is similar at, let’s say, the group level, right. So we see that it functions as a restorative mechanism when groups face changes to their identity, the continuity of their identity, and indeed it functions as a mechanism that helps people to restore the identity continuity of their group. 

Then what that continuity means, so which values, which traditions are to be continued, that all depends on the particular collective past you are longing for, the particular group that you are focusing on.

And in the case of Yugoslavia, the ethnonationalist or the exclusionary forms of nostalgia that we also see in the Western European context in the rhetoric of populist radical right parties, that this is a form of national nostalgia that can really result in polarization, and, let’s say, outgroup hostility, so hostility towards other groups, because it’s often of course, related also to the ideology of, of ethnonationalism. and about this idea of also national purity, right. And if you see this in the context of nostalgia, it often refers to a longing for a past when it was just us, when the community was still culturally or ethnically homogeneous. And, of course, this exclusionary way of looking at the past also tends to foster opposition to groups that are seen as not part of this positive past, or sometimes even portrayed as the ruiners of this past. 

But of course, if you talk about the identity of Yugoslavia, so the Yugonostalgia, so actually longing for an identity that was superordinate, right, so it was actually kind of a multicultural identity where a lot of groups were brought together, and this identity was also defined by fighting for or having as an ideal, this sort of harmonious intergroup relations. And what we see in our research is that when people long for this type of identity, that this has more positive consequences for thinking about other ethnic groups. In that sense, nostalgia can also have positive consequences for intergroup relations.

[SOUNDBITE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: A few years ago a research study of the former Yugoslavs in Australia that Smeekes was part of proved just that. 

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: I had this idea that it would be actually quite interesting to examine intergroup relations between immigrant groups that originate from the same conflict region because I was wondering whether coming to a new country would for these groups mean that they would gravitate more towards each other because they still share some cultural background and history from the region where they originate, or whether they would actually transfer their conflicts abroad. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The study’s lead was Smeekes’s colleague at Utrecht University, Borja Martinović. An Associate Professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science, Martinović studies group identities, immigrant integration, and intergroup relations in multi-ethnic societies. She hails from Rijeka, where she was born in 1981.

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: Because I come from Croatia, well then from former Yugoslavia, because when I was born, it was still Yugoslavia, I wanted to focus on those groups. And I knew that these minorities were quite substantial in Australia. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Whereas the estimated 50 to 70 thousand people from the former Yugoslavia who are not named Branimir Štulić get quite lost among the 16 millions residents of the Netherlands, the ex-Yugoslav diaspora of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian ancestry or origin comprises about 1 percent of Australia’s total population. They’re also concentrated in the provinces that have Sydney and Melbourne as capitals, and unlike in the Netherlands where they are much more dispersed or assimilated, in Australia they tend to stick together and organize around their respective temples. 

About a decade ago, with some grant funding in her pocket, Martinović set out across the globe to see how ex-Yugoslavs in Australia are getting along.

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: I went there in the hope of reaching about 1,000 participants, so I thought, maybe 300-something per group, and then I would have Croats, Serbs, and Bosniaks. But in the end, I only reached 90, which is really little. And that’s maybe an interesting learning experience from this whole endeavor. People were not that willing to complete the surveys. And they were all very kind to me, they took me out for dinners and drinks, and we discussed things. And then I would give them a survey, and in the end, I received very few surveys back. So that was for me a surprise because I was thinking as being an insider, I would probably be able to connect with them. But I was by Serbian participants and Bosniak participants still maybe seen as an outgroup member, whereas Croats were reluctant to complete the survey because they didn’t like the idea of being part of a larger research on groups from former Yugoslavia – they were saying, “Well, we are Croats, we don’t really identify with as Yugoslavian, so we don’t want to be part of this research.” 

PETER KORCHNAK: The research study was a special experience for Martinović.

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: Because I come from the region, the study was actually particularly interesting for me, and also it was an emotional process. That’s something that I had experienced here for the first time because mostly I do research among, for instance, Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands and I don’t really associate with those groups so there’s always a distance as a researcher, you can maybe look at it more objectively. But here during this research, I also cried at some point, because I received emails that were, I thought, rather aggressive, either accusing me for [sic] being too Croatian or accusing me for not being Croatian enough, because I’m trying to do research on former Yugoslavs, so that meant that I was a bad Croat. 

I finally managed to get more participants once I decided to split up the survey really into three separate ones. So for the Croatian participants, I would say, this is research on Croatians in Australia but I’m conducting similar surveys with also Serbs and Bosniaks. So when I split it up like that, people were more willing to take part they saw themselves as part of the Croatian group. So just using this label “Yugoslavian” already caused some resistance and making it more group specific increased participation. 

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s possible that Martinović’s sample skewed toward people who identify more strongly with the Yugoslav identity or feel Yugonostalgia more than those who identify along ethnic lines because they would be more willing to complete a survey about these issues. But Martinović says the results of the study are meaningful nevertheless. 

In the study, Martinović examined how often people interact with those from other groups, that is the frequency of interactions between Serbs and Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats, and Croats and Bosniaks and vice versa, while correcting for differences between social and less social people. 

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: What we found here is that those who identify more with the Yugoslavian identity tend to be more nostalgic and therefore also have more relative outgroup contact. But those who identify more with their ethnic group, so with Croats, with Serbs, with Bosniaks, tend to assign more guilt to other groups for the conflict that took place in former Yugoslavia and therefore avoid contact with those outgroups. And these are two processes whereby two different types of identity, the ethnic one and the more superordinate, Yugoslavian one, via different types of emotions, Yugonostalgia and guilt, can result in contrasting effects on contact. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslavs were more nostalgic and, regardless of their own ethnic identity, interacted more with people of different ethnicities. Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs tended to stick together within their own ethnic groups.

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: So it’s not necessarily that people who identify as Yugoslavian don’t have contact with their own group. So they still have more contact with the ingroup. But compared to low Yugoslavian identifiers, they tend to have more outgroup contact.

Usually, when people answer these questions, they think of relatively regular contact and not bad incidents that can happen. So with similar scales in many other studies, we usually find that this is related to less prejudice. 

Maybe I can provide some anecdotal evidence. Because one of the main entries that I had into this target population was through a football club, or soccer club. So in Australia, you have like, really these soccer clubs for and by Croats, for instance, and then, you know, those are not mixed. But there was this one club, that was a club of amateurs, a relatively small group. There were actually Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, and this one Dutch guy. But what I did is I went to several of their practices, and I got to know them all. And it was interesting to see because, sometimes, when something went wrong on the football field, they would also bring up these ethnic differences and say, “Oh, you’re doing this, you’re Serbian. So that’s why you do it.” But somehow they didn’t really mind. So they were all laughing about it. And it went in all directions. So it’s not only from Croats towards Serbs, but also the other way around. Yeah, and it was also context where they would sometimes become aggressive because somebody did something that they shouldn’t have. 

But at the end, everyone would still stay there close to the field and then they would bring lamb from the cars and drinks, beer and these kind of things, maybe some rakija, I don’t remember. And then everyone would sit there and eat together and laugh. So it was actually just from that one setting if I had done only an ethnographic study, like a more anthropological type of research and only studied that one group, I would have reached, I think, different conclusions than what I reached by looking at all these groups from different parts of Australia by sending surveys to different people. 

On a more structural level, these groups seem to be quite separated because, like institutionally, there are Croatian clubs, Croatians hanging out places, but also sports clubs and religious places, etc. And the same holds for Serbs and for Bosniaks. And because it’s structured like that, of course, people tend to segregate into these clubs, and maybe that’s why there isn’t that much contact. But once you bring them together, then I guess due to this shared culture and history, etc, still some kind of friendship and synergy emerges. And I thought that that was quite interesting to see.

PETER KORCHNAK: So it will be interesting to study, not just the effect Yugonostalgia on intergroup relations, but the effects of football, lamb, and rakija on these relations?

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: Yes, very much so. 

PETER KORCHNAK: The causation between feeling Yugoslav and feeling Yugonostalgic isn’t a hundred percent certain, but—

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: —if you identify with a particular group, you look at the world through a particular lens. And that’s why identifying with the Yugoslavian category would be related to stronger feelings of Yugonostalgia. So if you don’t see yourself as a Yugoslav, then you cannot really long back for the past of your group, because you don’t see yourself as belonging to that group. 

But indeed, it could be the case that those who have a lot of contact with other subgroups would just by interacting with each other, maybe become more yugonostalgic. They could also become less Yugonostalgic because they might feel that, through this interaction, they actually are kind of reconstructing the good old Yugoslav times. So maybe they will not feel that, you know, they they miss that. I don’t know, that’s just a speculation. 

But the way we argued for this here was that those who view the world like to the extent that they see themselves as Yugoslavian and kind of put on this Yugoslavian lens, they would feel more nostalgic and that’s why they would reach out more to other subgroups. 

PETER KORCHNAK: So you found that stronger identification with Yugoslavia or the former country improves relations between these or among these subgroups, let’s say, of that superordinate or supranational identity. So that’s of course a positive outcome or positive finding in that a collective emotion or collective feeling brings people together or at least does not drive them apart. 

Now, in your paper, you say that in the context of these groups from the former Yugoslavia, nostalgia could improve intergroup relations. So you are finding that this kind of nostalgia is actually good in the sense of improving relations among these, these former Yugoslavia, or people from the former Yugoslavia, regardless of their ethnic identification.

BORJA MARTINOVIĆ: So this is also a tricky question, because going back to what we had discussed about the nature of the survey, I would not even use the word improve, because it implies causality. 

What we found here is that those who are more Yugonostalgic are the ones who also tend to have more contact with other groups. This could be a bi-directional process. 

But what is also maybe important to mention here is that the level of Yugonostalgia really differs per group. So the fact that Yugonostalgia, more Yugonostalgia is related to more contact might sound a little bit too optimistic, because if you look at the average scores that we found, then you see, for instance, that among Croats this emotion of Yugonostalgia is actually quite low. So on a seven-point scale from not at all to very much, they only score about 2.5, which is on the no side, right, so they don’t feel Yugonostalgic. The ones who feel a little bit more Yugonostalgic, or a little bit less not-yugonostalgic are the ones who tend to have a little bit more contacts with other groups. 

But if you look at Serbs and Bosniaks, we see that there the levels Yugonostalgia are much higher, so around five on a seven-point scale. And again, it’s not a representative survey, but from the ones that I have managed to interview here, Serbs and Bosniaks tend to be more Yugonostalgic than Croats. 

One of the reasons for this, I mean apart from the whole history and the differences between these groups on the territory of former Yugoslavia and the fact that Croats were in general often a bit more nationalistic and less in favor of Yugoslavia as a federation, what we are dealing with here in Australia is also a particular group of Croatian immigrants. A lot of Croats came to Australia even before Yugoslavia fell apart. So those were the people who were maybe on average even more nationalistic than the rest of the Croatian population, and they’re the ones who didn’t like the regime and left during that regime. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Immigrants and refugees are especially likely to be nostalgic; in the new environment the feeling of nostalgia, triggered by music, say, or food, becomes a central part of their collective identity. It was my own feelings of nostalgia that got me on the path leading to these words.

The feeling of collective nostalgia helps these immigrants and refugees both to evaluate their own group more positively and motivates them to seek out contact with or company of fellow group members. 

A segment of ex-Yugoslavs in Australia feel nostalgia for their disappeared country and their life in it and seek out the company of their former Yugoslav compatriots, regardless of their ethnic identity, with whom they had shared life there.

All good and fine, and maybe even beneficial for wellbeing and relationships. But Smeekes has identified an important negative effect of collective nostalgia.

PETER KORCHNAK: Collective nostalgia, as you point out, makes people feeling more aware of what connects them of what binds them as a group, let’s say, a nation, in this case, or Yugoslavs, the supranational identity. But that same longing also emphasizes how we are different from them. So that feeling of nostalgia both creates a sense of attachment to my people and creates boundaries and jeopardizes relationships with other people who are outside of those boundaries, let’s say other national groups or in a lot of research that I saw from you, immigrants. So can you elaborate on this mechanism of collective nostalgia? And what are the implications of these negative facets of it?

ANOUK SMEEKES: What we see in our studies, but also something that you actually see in in the rhetoric of populist radical-right parties who use national nostalgia, is that it tends to foster processes of social categorization or in simple terms, us versus them thinking (distinctions). And in the case of national nostalgia, we see that it tends to foster us versus them distinctions based on the past. So by portraying the past as glorious, longing for a past that was better, it of course also becomes clearer for people who was part of this past and who was not. In this way it tends to foster exclusionary understandings of nationhood based on the past. So people tend to distinguish between old timers, so those people who were part of the cherished past, and newcomers, so people who came later and were not part of the past. 

And this is one of the reasons why nostalgia tends to have more destructive consequences for intergroup relations and tends to also result in outgroup hostility, because people feel that these newcomers are actually not part of the nation. And therefore this tends to result in, for example, anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors in the Western European context. 

And this is also something that you see in the rhetoric of populist radical-right parties who of course, have very strong anti-immigrant standpoints, they also have very exclusionary ideas about national identity, right, so ethnic nationhood is at the key of their ideology. And they often use also sort of national nostalgic frame to mobilize people for these exclusionary standpoints, right. So by portraying our national past as as glorious because it was still ethnically or culturally or religiously homogeneous, this very much triggers this us versus them thinking and thereby actually mobilizes people for their exclusionary standpoints. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Collective nostalgia depends on what group you use as an anchor of your social identity. Whether you’re Yugoslav or you’re Serb, Croat, or Bosniak will determine how you define your ingroup and outgroup, who you see as members of your ingroup and your outgroup, and consequently how you see those groups’ members. 

What’s more, that nostalgia will also emphasize the differences between in and outgroups and, consequently, elevate the values of the ingroup and reject those of the outgroup. Of course, as Martinović’s study showed, if you’re Yugoslav, all the ethnic identities, Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks, are part of your ingroup, whereas if you’re a Serb, Croats and Bosniaks are outsiders and vice versa.

ANOUK SMEEKES: If you think of the idea of Yugoslavia as an identity, but also the way I think the republic functioned at the time and the ideology behind it was very much related, of course, to what what we could nowadays call almost like a multicultural approach, where the idea is that different groups can coexist and live harmoniously next to one another. 

If you think about what are people nostalgic for in this Yugonostalgia, this is one aspect of it, right? So the idea that there’s a longing for harmonious intergroup relations and harmonious coexistence. And of course, if that’s something you long for, it’s also quite logical that you would have more contact or are willing to have more contact with groups let’s say outside of your own ethnic group because you think that groups or you actually long for the idea that groups can coexist. 

We actually found that people can be nostalgic for very different things when it comes to their country. So some people actually long for a time when their country was more open and tolerant of cultural and religious diversity, and for these people, nostalgia actually translates or their national nostalgia translates into more positive attitudes towards relevant outgroups. 

That relates to the idea of Yugonostalgia, which is actually a form of more openness-focused national nostalgia. 

Also, in relation, for example, to political orientation, where we see that people with more progressive left-wing political orientation are actually experiencing more openness-focused nostalgia, whereas the conservative right-wing people are more likely to long for this, let’s say, homogeneity or closeness focused nostalgia.  

Of course, Yugoslavia no longer exists anymore. So it’s something that comes from the people. 

But even though that might be the case, it’s still part of common discourse. There’s the media, right, so people can share their ideas on all kinds of social media channels or it becomes a discourse in a way, right. And in that sense people can also be affected top down, I would say, because I think of also the younger generations who may not even have been alive at the time, but they can still very much be influenced by their parents or their grandparents, or anything they read about this ideal version of the past that is portrayed. In that sense, it can also work top-down, that it still influences the people because it’s of course part of collective memory and collective memories are passed on from generation to generation. 

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, embeds, links, sources, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. 

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Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!