[Redux] The Future of Yugonostalgia
What is Yugonostalgia and why does it exist? How does it manifest and how do different people experience it? And where is it headed?
A redux of Episode 71 and the first in a new “Nostalgia” series.
With Milica Popović (Austrian Academy of Sciences).
Listen: “[Redux] The Future of Yugonostalgia” (Episode #132)
Bonus Extras: “[Redux] The Future of Yugonostalgia” (Episode #132)
Ad-free version of “[Redux] The Future of Yugonostalgia” (Episode #132).
Transcript: “[Redux] The Future of Yugonostalgia” (Episode #132)
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.
Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join today.
[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.
The Remembering Yugoslavia project began with nostalgia and it has been suffused with the study of it. Over the course of 130 plus episodes of this podcast, I’ve dedicated a great amount of time to nostalgia for Yugoslavia. So much so I’ve been confused for a yugonostalgic.
The fascination with the phenomenon, the exploration of it and its causes and manifestations, has carried me to the next chapter of my lifelong learning. As a doctoral candidate of Balkan Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, I’m dedicating my research to the study of that particular kind of nostalgia that exists among the second generation immigrants from Yugoslavia to the U.S. and Canada. Call it second-hand nostalgia, historical nostalgia, or, my preferred term, postnostalgia, it’s my life for the next four years—and beyond.
And I’m excited to tell you I’ll be sharing my progress right here on the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast, in a new series titled simply Nostalgia. In each episode, we’ll dedicate time to different kinds and manifestations of nostalgia. It’ll be like a literature review in a podcast form.
The “Nostalgia” series will proceed in no particular order, except with the start. To kick things off, I’ve recut and remastered two past episodes on the subject of nostalgia. In the next episode we’ll learn about collective nostalgia, and today, you’ll hear a redux of an episode about yugonostalgia, with a lot of basics about nostalgia itself. It’s a little shorter than the original episode, number 71 if you’re counting, as I’ve cut the bits about nostalgia for socialism in Slovakia and a few others. All in all it’s a great introduction to the Nostalgia series.
Enjoy!
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: It took 300 years for nostalgia to morph from a disorder to a helpful emotion. In his seminal work, Yearning for Yesterday, published in 1979, Fred Davis separated nostalgia from homesickness and defined it as a longing for the past. In the nostalgic experience the discontents and anxieties of your life today trigger the yearning for the better times of yesteryear, yielding “a positively toned evocation of a lived past.”
Another school of thought sees nostalgia primarily as a mourning for the past. And the bittersweet view defines nostalgia as a happy-ish emotion mixed with sadness for an irretrievably lost past.
In any case, nostalgia acts as a psychological defense mechanism—“memory with the pain removed.”
For about a decade after I moved to America—for love—I was wrapped in a cloak of shapeless gloom that became heavier as time passed. “Nostalgia is a more precise term to describe the immigrant experience,” writes the Romanian-born professor Andreea Deciu Ritivoi.
The Polish émigré Eva Hoffman speculates that “exile is the archetypal condition of temporary lives” (indeed it is of our entire Western civilization since the expulsion from Paradise).
I was doubly exiled: An immigrant to a country of immigrants and a diasporan from a past country of perpetual diasporans. Nostalgia filled the gap between my past and present lives.
The questions led me back to Yugoslavia, to traveling and seeking and writing, all the way to the very moment we are sharing right now.
And the more I learned, the more the gloom lifted.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, “red nostalgia” gripped Central and Eastern Europe. Retrospection about the good life during state socialism helped people to cope with the dramatic and traumatic changes during transitions from socialism to capitalism, to channel discontent with their current situation, and to reconstruct their identity to replace the one demolished so effectively and so swiftly. Nostalgia flourished in that space between what had been and what was not yet in place.
The former Yugoslavia was no exception.
Yugonostalgia has come up time and again on the show; I’ve explored different facets of it with different guests, but it always felt like talking about a book without ever having read it. So today, I’m finally going to take a deep dive into Yugonostalgia.
[SOUNDBITE]
MILICA POPOVIĆ: There are so many different interpretations of what Yugonostalgia is.
PETER KORCHNAK: Milica Popović is a doctor of political sociology and Balkan studies from Belgrade. Born in 1982, she focuses on yugonostalgia, particularly among her generation, the so-called Last Pioneers. She identifies as Yugoslav.
Everyone has their own definition or at least an opinion of Yugonostalgia; it’s like a vessel everyone fills with their own ideas.
In the most general sense, “collective nostalgia is a bittersweet emotion that reflects sentimental longing for valued aspects of the past of one’s group.” It is a multilayered, emotional story we tell ourselves of bygone, irretrievably lost times that were better than today. It is less about what was than about what is; the past is but a distorting, romanticized mirror to the present.
Yugonostalgia then is a longing for positive aspects of socialist Yugoslavia. That is, not necessarily for the state or the regime or socialism per se, but rather, as Maja Maksimović writes, for “a certain mix of characteristics, values, and objects connected to that period, such as military strength, international reputation, economic welfare, prosperity, unity, solidarity, social security, friendship, cultural cooperation, geographical space, or even consumer products.” It is oriented toward “unfulfilled dreams, lost opportunities, and elusive ideals of the socialist Yugoslav past;” in other words, it’s about what people miss today rather than what they miss from yesterday. End quote.
Interpretations of yugonostalgia converge on these themes. An outlier is Ana Petrov who has defined Yugonostalgia as a kind of love. Quote: “If nostalgia was seen as a condition in which a person can suffer because of the loss of home…then yugonostalgia appears to be a similar kind of contemporary post-socialist condition in which one can be madly in love with their homeland. [T]he desire to return home is…realized in loving what was left of Yugoslavia: the culture, the music, the people.”
MILICA POPOVIĆ: There are three main manifestations, so to say, of yugonostalgia.
One is, of course, the term used as a discursive strategy of the new nationalist, neoliberal elites in the post-Yugoslav countries, which are trying to mark as negative any kind of reflection on the socialist Yugoslav times, whether that reflection is positive or even just neutral.
PETER KORCHNAK: After 1991, simplistic discursive revisionism, where everything that came before was bad and everything that is now is good, aimed to legitimize the new ethnonational, neoliberal regimes. This revisionism, which the late Dubravka Ugrešić called the “confiscation of memory,” still takes on a number of forms: the erasure of or omitting to mention socialist heritage and its modernizing accomplishments, in textbooks, museums, or the media; presenting Yugoslavia as an aberrant and failed experiment; renaming streets and public spaces; damaging, demolishing, or removing monuments; labeling the regime as totalitarian; equating Partisans and Chetniks as anti-fascists; calling Yugoslavia the prison of nations; and the label “yugonostalgic” used to mark adherents to the old order, who are seen as reactionary losers and immoral traitors and enemies of the new order.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: The term itself, Yugonostalgia, showed up for the first time in 1992 in the weekly Globus in Hrvatska. It was a term coined by Slaven Letica, a journalist. And in an article published under the title “Croatian Feminists Rape Croatia.” And it was a direct attack on five Croatian novelists, activists.
So the term Yugonostalgia was coined with a clear mission to denigrate and to erase anything, any serious discussion, dialogue, reflection on the socialist Yugoslav times.
PETER KORCHNAK: Yugonostalgia connotes all non-negative references to Yugoslavia. This is how, for example, an article about this podcast labeled it “yugonostalgic”, even though it is anything but, or why I’ve been called yugonostalgic merely because I sometimes listen to Yugoslav-era rock from the 1980s.
There are surprisingly few polls across former Yugoslavia tracking people’s perception of that disappeared country and its breakup. A 2016 survey by Gallup showed that perceptions regarding Yugoslavia’s breakup vary by former republic, by ethnicity, and by age. Perhaps as could be expected, the citizens of Serbia, politically dominant in the former Yugoslavia, rue Yugoslavia’s demise the most, at 81%, and Croatia’s and Kosovo’s the least, at 23% and 10%, respectively. Also as can be expected, older people, of near-retirement and retirement age, feel the most harmed by the country’s breakup. This and other polls and research reflect a sense of loss among the citizens of the former Yugoslavia. It’s only a short road from here to nostalgia—and to labeling all those wounded souls yugonostalgic.
After Yugoslavia’s disintegration, even the name of the old country was erased.
Broadly, Yugoslavia turned into Southeast Europe turned into Western Balkans; and, of course, it’s always the Region or, naši or ovi prostori (our spaces, these areas).
MILICA POPOVIĆ: And then the second kind of manifestation of yugonostalgia is the moment where yugonostalgia becomes this very intimate container for all the cognitive dissonances of people who still remember Yugoslavia, for all the ambivalent, ambiguous kind of positions towards the socialist Yugoslav past, and the very positive ones which are in direct conflict with a mainstream hegemonic memory narratives on Yugoslavia.
PETER KORCHNAK: Yugonostalgia can be subjective, experienced on the level of individual memories and recollections, and collective or cultural, manifesting in images, symbols, products, events, and so on in the public space. The two often overlap: people attend Day of the Republic or Day of Youth commemorations, dance at Ex-YU parties, listen to yugo rock, wear apparel with socialist symbols or even Tito himself, frequent yugo-themed cafes…
Svetlana Boym distinguished between two types of nostalgia. Reflective nostalgia is all about the longing for the lost home and time. It is wistful; it plays with the past as it processes it and brings it forth in a critical, comparative fashion; it can be ironic and humorous, as when people dress up in Pioneer uniforms. The vast majority of yugonostalgics feel reflective nostalgia.
Restorative nostalgia seeks to recreate and reconquer the lost homeland and era. It’s serious, it knows the past, and it aims to reconstruct it in the present day. Like the Trumpsters in the US, the nationalists across the post-Yugoslav space all feel restorative nostalgia.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: And then the third manifestation would be this resistance strategy in the political field. Which is this point where yugonostalgia from all the potential of being a resistance strategy that many of authors before me have reflected upon, as Mitja Velikonja, Tanja Petrović, I think a lot of people who have already participated in the podcast—and how does it actually really translate into political activity?
PETER KORCHNAK: Mitja Velikonja distinguishes between passive and active nostalgia. The first type is apolitical, asocial, contemplative, sentimental, melodramatic, inert, introspective, with practically no social ambitions or impact whatsoever. Passive nostalgia is consumerist, for example by reviving old brands, say Bajadera or Cockta; aestheticized and objectified with retro and vintage stuff, memorabilia, or museum exhibitions; popularized through festivals, exhibitions, and other events; infantilized, reduced to stories from childhood and youth; spectacularized by highlighting major past achievements, say in sports; as well as banalised, focusing on small everyday details of life back then.
By contrast, active nostalgia uses the past to antagonise the present, it is involved in political and social movements; it is concerned with the idea of a different future and is fighting for it. Active Yugonostalgia is first a counter-narrative, a counter-memory, a subversive resistance strategy expressed in opposition to ethnonationalism and neoliberalism dominating the political and media landscapes. It defends the past, disses the present, and in a way describes the future.
To paraphrase Velikonja, where passive nostalgia makes for teary eyes, active nostalgia enables people to raise “a clenched fist.”
It is precisely through this political dimension, writes Popović, that “we can identify the nature of nostalgia.” It is the politics of yugonostalgia that enables its classification, indeed this very podcast episode.
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: What people remember, the content of nostalgia, does indeed depend on a few factors. First, their generation (there’s a reason why I ask every guest to state the year they were born).
MILICA POPOVIĆ: As every memory, as every memory narrative, different generations have different stories and different memories. So for every generation, there was so to say a different Yugoslavia to remember.
PETER KORCHNAK: Popović explored Yugonostalgia on the generation of the Last Pioneers, people like herself, born between 1974 and 1982.
Generation here stands to mean a cohort of people with a certain collective identity marked by participation and socialization in the same events and realities that formed their identity. For the Last Pioneers, it was the Pioneer oath and various rituals imparting the values of brotherhood and unity, but I could also add 80s music or the wars of dissolution to this. They see themselves as a lost generation, who helplessly watched their world go down in flames and are still sorting through the wreckage.
Popović found the cohort commonly remembering happy, ethnic identity-free childhoods in a diverse country with a beautiful sea; life in a safe, secure, relatively abundant, and reasonably well-functioning state that was their home. They share the values of solidarity; anti-materialism; meritocracy; modesty; freedom; critical thinking; social equality and justice; brotherhood and unity; antifascism; and women’s emancipation. These were the things they learned while living in Yugoslavia.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: They were referring to Yugonostalgia as just sadness for a normal life, and that there is nothing political in it. But with the way I kind of see it was truly how political the definition of what a normal life is. And what a normal life constitutes is fundamentally the way we think as political beings. Because the way we understand which elements need to be satisfied for us to consider our life normal are actually where we stand on the political spectrum.
PETER KORCHNAK: Popović found that the Last Pioneers (and this may be the case for all of us), think of normality through a political lens. Access to education and health care, freedom to travel abroad, solidarity and equality and druženje (socializing across borders), peace and stability, owning a house and a summer home, indeed, “having a chance” in life that they had during Yugoslavia is what normality still means to them. They’re not yugonostalgic, they just want a normal life.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: One of the interviewees said, “Well, actually, yugonostalgia doesn’t exist. Yugonostalgia is what they say you’re doing only when you start talking about a decent health care system or a decent housing system.”
And I think that it’s really the generation of the Last Pioneers who’s going to be able to kind of break the pattern and at least bring additional ideas to the fore in the political arenas of the post-Yugoslav countries.
PETER KORCHNAK: The Last Pioneers’ yugonostalgic memory is anti-nationalist—in opposition to the dominant discourse in their countries—and, strongly favoring socioeconomic equality—they’re against neoliberalism and its capitalist excesses.
In fact, their Yugoslav identities often don’t even contain Yugoslavia, past or potentially resurrected; they simply bring portions of their old identities from that time and place it into today’s context. They simply don’t want who they are and where they’re from to be erased; they want it recognized [that] Yugoslavia existed and had both positive and negative sides. Their country did not disappear, but rather it’s a ruin. They embed their Yugonostalgia, the memory and idea how things were, in the present as how things can be done better or how can they be once again. Less nostalgia for the past and more borrowing from the past in search of solutions to the problems of the present.
As Popović puts it in her dissertation, this generation “transforms the memory of the Yugoslav cause into a memory of a (post)Yugoslav cause, bringing back the idea of progress and hope into the political field of (post)Yugoslavia.”
And if the right-wing sees the world divided into ethnonational states, the left favors an international[ist] world brought together around a set of ideas they know from that former country. In addition to the generational dimension, Yugonostalgia’s other dimension is political.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: Especially the question of certain types of Yugoslavism, the Yugoslav identity were much more connected to the generational positionality. And then, of course, especially the Yugonostalgia as a resistance strategy, the serious reflections about the socialist Yugoslav system is, of course, more embedded in the political positionality as such.
Especially when we were discussing the childhood of the last Pioneers, one hundred percent of the interviewees have depicted a happy childhood, and through that a very positive image of socialist Yugoslavia.
And only in the moment when we would start discussing the war years and the dissolution years [was] where the cognitive dissonances would appear, especially in the cases where the political positionality was actually primarily negative towards the socialist past, the interviewees from the right-wing spectrum, would start finding various discursive strategies to reconcile these opposing, so to say, narratives. One of the strategies was kind of keeping Yugonostalgia as this very intimate feeling and sentiment. For example, people would say, “Yeah, but you know, actually, the repression was horrendous, but it was just me and I was lucky and my family was lucky that we didn’t experience it.”
PETER KORCHNAK: If generation and political orientation were the two main factors behind the content of yugonostalgia, where people were from, that is what successor country they lived in, mattered much less. Popović’s Croatian, Serbian, and Slovenian subjects showed similar generational and political characteristics.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: What I wanted to underline as well was that actually these memories of childhood in the narratives were always strongly connected also with social and political values. So it wasn’t the fact that these childhoods were happy because those were the childhoods; they were in the interpretation of my interviewees happy because those were the childhoods in socialist Yugoslavia. And that is a very important distinction to make.
[SOUNDBITE]
MILICA POPOVIĆ: There is, of course, a lot of mix up with different other terms. Very often, also Yugoslavism was kind of mixed with what we call Yugonostalgia. So in a way, my research wanted to give back the legitimacy to Yugoslavism, and to claim that Yugoslavism is still an empirical phenomenon which exists in the post-Yugoslav space, and is different, even if interconnected to yugonostalgia as such.
PETER KORCHNAK: Yugoslavism is contained within Yugonostalgia. It is based on linguistic, cultural, and economic proximity of the Slavic peoples in the former Yugoslavia. It is non-exclusive: you can be both Serbian and Yugoslav or Croatian and Yugoslav. It’s both multiethnic and anti-nationalist: though its supranational nature does not look too kindly on ethnonationalism, it’s compatible if not parallel with other identities. And it is non-oppositional, it lacks a resistance element: you can be a Yugoslav anti-communist or an Orthodox Yugoslav.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: There might not be anything nostalgic about Yugoslavia, but there is a set of important values that socialist Yugoslavia brings upon and that’s antifascism, internationalism, solidarity, and socialism.
PETER KORCHNAK: The political and social identity of the Last Pioneers, especially the left-wing ones, was built on their childhoods in Yugoslavia and is a response to post-Yugoslav ethnonationalism and neoliberalism.
And if that’s the case for people who only spent their childhoods in Yugoslavia, I can only imagine what people who spent most of their lives during that period must think and believe.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: Different people are nostalgic for different things. But what all the interviewees agree upon—and I am afraid not only the interviewees, I think that anyone who works in the post-Yugoslav region knows that this is a widespread sentiment—is actually the negative present.
All the memories, all the memory narratives are always in dialogue and reflection to our everyday present and in a way our memories, our response to what we are experiencing in present times. So in that sense, the memory narratives that we create and the identities we base on our memory narratives, of being Yugoslav, of being grown up in the socialist Yugoslav times, are also a sort of an answer to what has followed.
So I truly felt that somehow this generation in between, the generation of the Last Pioneers, was in a certain way forgotten. And that was the generation that was born in Yugoslav times, that gave the Pioneer sermon [sic], and when they started and entered their adolescence, their whole world crumbled, everything changed. There was a dissolution of the country, the war trauma. So for a very long period of time, they were growing into the adulthood through these very tumultuous times.
They were children, they were not truly understanding what was happening. As one of the interviewees said that there was a rupture of her becoming, from a bourgeois princess, she became a refugee.
And just about when the wars ended, it was time for them to actually enter the socioeconomic world and to enter the political world.
But at the same time also being faced with the absolutely catastrophic consequences of the newly recreated nationalist regimes and the neoliberal transitions in which today’s post-Yugoslav countries live in.
So I think that the fact, and on a much global scale, the moment when it has been proclaimed, that there is only one possible world in which we can live in that was the moment when actually the world truly did became totalitarian and erased the hope for any different futures to the humankind. And that was the moment where the past has started to provide the only inspiration and hope for something better.
[SOUNDBITE]
PETER KORCHNAK: Last year, a big article came out in The Guardian with the headline, “‘Everyone loved each other’: the rise of Yugonostalgia.” I was interviewed for that piece. The reporter did not pick the headline, which was toned down in the print edition to “Unity and brotherhood: thirty years from its disintegration, many hold affection for Tito’s state.”
Yugonostalgia may indeed continue to fascinate Western observers, including the Guardian’s editors, who, in classic Western-gaze fashion, quote unquote discover it years after its peak. From taboo to subversion to culture to commodity, the narratives of Yugonostalgia and of Yugoslavia as its subject continue to evolve.
PETER KORCHNAK: What do you see as the future of this phenomenon?
MILICA POPOVIĆ: I think on one side there is, or at least I hope, going to be a growing body of brilliant research on socialist Yugoslav times. And I think that that’s going to help us elucidate the complexity of what socialist Yugoslav society has been [sic].
In the political field, what is really important is exactly this shift of generations, the moment in which [the] last generations are taking up more and more space. A lot of people who were, for example, in 2017, 2018, when I interviewed them, at the time, they were maybe just members of parliament, simple members in their political parties, in the meantime, have, for example, came to leadership positions within their political parties. A number of social movements within which I have interviewed people have transformed into the political parties, which in some instances have won the municipal or city elections or have won some seats in the parliaments.
And this is also definitely changing the landscape in a certain way. And I think that it changes then and provides different angles to the mainstream discourses as such.
But I think that what is also very very important to kind of understand is how much of these reflections on the socialist Yugoslav times open avenues for different reflections on the new geopolitical structural changes or we can call them even geopolitical earthquakes that we are currently living in.
PETER KORCHNAK: As generations turn over, people who spent a greater portion of their lives in socialist Yugoslavia than those born later die out and with them Yugonostalgia—of their kind anyway. For every claim of Yugonostalgia rising there are plenty more that show yugonostalgia to be fading.
While Yugonostalgia has been with us since the late 1990s, in my estimation it reached its peak in the years after the Great Recession and has since been steadily integrating into the socio-cultural fabric.
And what’s generally labeled as Yugonostalgia is in fact a minor part of Yugoslavia’s memory. Different people assess that vanished country with different lenses and different goals, from political to commercial ones, while the rose-colored, warm-and-fuzzy feelings are both in decline and receding into the background.
MILICA POPOVIĆ: So I would say that it’s not nostalgia, Yugonostalgia itself that has evolved, but I would say that it was rather the generational change and evolution of societies as such, which helped us understand the multi facets of Yugonostalgia.
PETER KORCHNAK: As you can hear in the Inspired by Yugoslavia episodes, Yugoslavia also continues (and I believe will continue) to inspire artistic as well as commercial projects, many of which will cross, span, or outright ignore the current national borders.
And finally, the political aspect of Yugonostalgia will continue to find expression in fostering relations, if not solidarity, among the former Yugoslav nations. As Popović puts it, “Nostalgia for the socialist Yugoslavia could persist as long as it takes for the myth of the Golden Age to become reality.”
[SOUNDBITE]
[BACKGROUND MUSIC]
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, sources, links, embeds, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia.
Also at Yugoblok, listen to the ad-free version of this and every other episode. Become a member today.
Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.
I am Peter Korchňak.
Ćao!