Declare yourself Yugoslav

This article first appeared in the Yugobulletin newsletter.

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It was a seemingly straightforward ask.

As the 2022 census (“Popis 2022”) launched in Serbia five weeks ago, the nonprofit People’s Movement – Yugoslavs plastered the country with the poster advising their fellow citizens:

WE EXIST
DECLARE YOURSELF
YUGOSLAV

This is neither a drill, nor an elaborate prank.

The Movement, which has been around since 2019, promotes the “heritage of the Yugoslav idea and socialist values.”

One of its leaders, Djordje Škorić, told the Vojvodinan news portal Autonomija that the Movement wants to “promote the idea of Yugoslavia,” including its culture, as something that can both unify people of the former state and offer some catharsis for how it ended.

The census campaign came almost out of nowhere—as all effective guerrilla campaigns do. Its stated aim is to (re)establish the National Committee of Yugoslavs and obtain national minority status within the country. Ironically, if these objectives are met, the government of Serbia would by law finance the spreading of Yugoslavism.

It’s unclear what’s behind these instrumental objectives, i.e. what the campaign’s ultimate goal is, but perhaps that’s beside the point. The campaign achieved great public visibility for its cause and became a hot topic for a few days.

In their rhetoric, the Movement and its representatives tend to focus on what they’re for, rather than what they oppose. In the bulk of its narrative posts on Facebook, Movement activists highlight the positives of that disappeared country.

More importantly, the Movement is not out to maintain memories of a better past. Škorić told the BBC the Movement does not have pensioners among its ranks. “We want to tell a different story,” he said. “Our movement isn’t yugonostalgic, we’re concerned with the present and the future.”

The media, both in Serbia and in other former Yugoslav republics, pounced on the story.

“Even though Yugoslavia no longer exists,” wrote the daily Danas, “people who consider themselves Yugoslavs do.”

BBC‘s Serbian service explored the campaign on the backdrop of yugonostalgia; the article was reprinted in a number of major Serbian media outlets, including B92, Danas, and Politika (Belgrade), 021 (Novi Sad), Južne Vesti (Niš) as well as Oslobodjenje in Sarajevo. In the article, I got to tell the story of the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast.

The Declare Yourself Yugoslav campaign also unleashed a huge storm on the pre-Musk Twitter. Two camps immediately formed and lobbed 280-character missiles across the Serbian-Yugoslav border. I’ll spare you but you can be sure it was a veritable shit show, with the Serbian nationalist side triggered into a rage that only highlighted the fragility of their identities.

Meanwhile, the only three of 69 questions on the census questionnaire that were voluntary had to do with faith, mother tongue, and national identity ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But as always in Serbia, the best part were the jokes:

• Why did you declare yourself Yugoslav on the census? Because I’m falling apart.
• The number of Yugoslavs is rising in the same ratio as the number of Martians is falling – a reference to past censuses when people defiantly declared anything but Serbian;
• The only number that will decline is Serbia’s population – the Yugoslavs’ response to estimates their count will follow the downward historical trend (see below), while Serbia’s overall population too will continue its downward spiral.

The highest number of Yugoslavs was recorded in the 1981 census both in Serbia (441,941 citizens, or 4.7 percent of the republic’s population) and across the country (1.2 million, or 5.4 percent of the country’s total population, a 446 (!) percent growth from the 1971 census).

Yugoslavs have been disappearing across the board ever since.

In Serbia’s last census, in 2011, 23,303 citizens of Serbia, or 0.3 percent of the population, declared “Yugoslav” as their nationality. Most Yugoslavs in Serbia lived in Belgrade, 8,061 or 35 percent, and another 26 percent lived in Vojvodina’s three largest cities.

The causes for changes in the number of “Yugoslavs” in Serbia vary across the decades and across constituent republics and provinces but I hear an echo from the 1980s: dissatisfaction with and repudiation of nationalism.

Indeed, if the Movement explicitly rejects anything it’s nationalism, fascism, and generally the extreme-right ideologies.

The other irony is that “Yugoslav” is a supra or non-national identity, something Škorić et al acknowledge and appreciate but don’t necessarily seem to find contradictory.

We will know how many Yugoslavs there are in Serbia when the country’s Statistical Office begins to release the census results, supposedly at the end of November and thru May 2024.

But only if we’ll be able to see them through the smog.