1 My Yugoslavia1 By Maria Todorova, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “My Yugoslavia” is my way of sharing with the ones for whom Yugoslavia was an existential reality, their home for good or for bad, how a view from the outside was shaped. While it is an external view, it is not necessarily foreign: I would dare say, it is the view of an intimate stranger (or, less poetically, of a neighbor). This is not a research article and it does not pretend to add new knowledge or novel analysis. What it does do is illustrate my scholarly and personal engagements with Yugoslavia, a kind of Bildungsessay. When I was a little girl, of the four borders of my country, my favorite was the one on the right side of the map: the eastern border, the Black Sea, where we went every summer on vacation. But I did know that on the left side of the map was a country called Yugoslavia, and I was positively disposed to it, because from there came the chocolates “Kraš” that tetkica Božena would bring ever so often. She was a close family friend, born in Zagreb; she had moved to Sarajevo during the Second World War because she could not stand the Germans, and there she met and married a Bulgarian. We grew up with her daughter, who now lives in Canada with her Bulgarian husband. But that was pretty much all. Like most Balkan people at the time (and I think this pattern is very gradually beginning to be broken only in the last decade), I was least of all interested in my neighbors. I had started school in Austria, then spent time in Germany, and later attended an English school; this is where my cultural interests lay. The one exception was This is the revised keynote address delivered at the conference “Ex uno plures: Post-Yugoslav Cultural Space and Europe,” which took place at Columbia University, March 26-28th, 2010. 1 2 Greece. I had been weaned, like many of my contemporaries, on Greek mythology, and came from a mixed Greek-Bulgarian background, so sometime in high school I started learning Greek. My interest in the country almost dissipated, however, when I began dating Bulgarian boys, and my Greek grandmother told me solemnly that I should never forget that I was a “daughter of Pericles.” I don’t remember myself ever understanding the appeal of nationalism, but if ever there was a potential for developing some national pride in anything, this was the dire end of it. On top of it came my interest in the Ottoman Empire, and when I entered university, I began studying Ottoman Turkish. My interests thus gravitated in a southeastern direction. When I first visited Istanbul, I instantly fell in love with the city. I was aware that the people I was meeting there, who were all wonderfully educated and cultivated, were not your average Turk, but this gave me enough ammunition to fight all the profound anti-Turkish prejudices at home. When the first Congress of Balkan Studies was convened in 1966 in Sofia, I was still in high school. Coming from a historian’s household, I had already encountered all these silverhaired scholars, who came to our house from all over the world. I would regularly fall in love with some of them. Two in particular held my fancy for many years. Both were in their seventies: one, Anatolii Filipovich Miller, a prominent Russian Ottomanist, who sported a watch that had been given him by Atatürk, was like my third grandfather. The other one I held in a more romantic light. This was the Albanian Alex Buda, a historian and president of the Albanian Academy of Sciences, who had studied in Vienna in his youth and could recite Goethe by heart. As a result, Albania was for me the epitome of real intellectuals, and the few contacts I have had later with Albanian academics only confirmed this belief. This is significant, as it inadvertently inflected my first impressions of Serbian academics. At one of my earliest scholarly conferences, when I was a kind of debutante, nervous at presenting my work, and nervous at having left 3 behind a husband with two tiny children for a few days, my colleague at the panel was a young Serbian academic. I had clashed with him in the corridors, when he enlightened me in regards to my naiveté about Albanians, whom he believed were all savage and backward. But, of course, my measure of Albania was Alex Buda. But it became worse when, unsatisfied with my continuing naiveté, he asked me how my husband and children were faring without their mother? What were they eating? Canned food? No, I replied, I had actually prepared cooked meals that I had put in boxes in the deep freezer with a different menu for every day. That was already a crime. I heard a lecture about organic and freshly prepared food, and how he refused to eat anything but what his mother prepared for him from the farmer’s market. We parted, both of us firm in our negative impressions. For him, I was a naïve person (part of this post-war feminization of scholarship), and a failure as a mother, and my verdict of him was no less generous: he was a racist and a macho. To me this meant “oriental.” So, I nested orientalism in Serbia (avant la lettre) many years before I came to know Milica Bakić-Hayden, and many years before she had conceived of her felicitous and evocative concept. In my Balkan map, Turkey was western (because of the handful of fascinating intellectuals), and Yugoslavia was eastern. Even one of my earliest positive encounters with Yugoslavia was mediated through Turkey. I must have been nineteen, when, browsing in an antiquarian bookshop in Istanbul, I stumbled upon Milovan Đjilas’s Conversations with Stalin in Turkish (Stalinle konuşmalar, 1964) and bought it. It did not much improve my Turkish, but certainly whetted my appetite to learn more about Tito and why a broader Balkan federation did not materialize. My subsequent encounters with Serbian colleagues did not entirely disabuse me of my first negative impression until quite later, although I excluded women from my harsh judgment. Even there, the beginning was thorny. Olga Zirojević, the great Ottomanist, whose book 4 Carigradski drum od Beograda do Budima u XVI I XVIIi veku (1976) I had long admired, approached me after one of my comments at a conference, and told me that I was “vrlo vredna.” I was deeply mortified. The literal translation of “vrlo vredna” in Bulgarian is “exceedingly harmful,” in a word, a huge pest. Luckily, Olga saw me blush and gap for air, and the misunderstanding was diffused with lots of laughter, but it taught me never to arrogantly assume that I knew the language simply because it was the closest to my own. So when I did my next purchase of things Yugoslav, I made sure that it was in the original. But it was still mediated: I bought Ivo Andrić’s Na Drini ćuprija in the foreign-language bookshop in Moscow. My reallife introduction to inflation I also owe to another remarkable Serbian historian: the Ottomanist Bojanka Desanić-Lukać. We were in Hungary for a conference in the 1980s, and we had to pay our registration fee “in currency:” three dollars, no national equivalent. So Bojanka opened her large purse and started rummaging through a pile of paper which turned out to be dinars, until at the very bottom of her purse she fished out the three precious green banknotes, exclaiming: “Ovo su pare.” Nor were my impressions of Yugoslav, especially Serbian, males, entirely negative. One of the finest (of the very few fine Bulgarian feature movies) of the 1960s was a film adaptation of a novella by the great Bulgarian writer Emilian Stanev: “The Peach-Thief.” The story – about the First World War – was about a POW camp in Tîrnovo, in which a Serbian officer falls in love with the wife of the Bulgarian chief-of-garrison (and his feelings are reciprocated). At the end, when the camp has to be relocated, he decides to say a last farewell, and sneaks into the garden of his beloved trying to bring her peaches. He is shot by the guards, and the verdict is that this is simply a peach thief. It was a wonderful role – of the sophisticated, disillusioned, peace-loving, internationalist, and cosmopolitan Serb contrasted to the priggish, disciplined, and 5 boring Bulgarian military husband. The beautiful Nevena Kokanova was in the leading female role, and the Serbian officer was played by Rade Marković, who for a brief time became the dream of many Bulgarian women. Maybe because this was actually my first artsy encounter with Serbs, my first real life one was so very disappointing. It felt like a betrayal. I have to say, though, and this is my way of paying homage to one of the sweetest human beings that I have encountered, that when I was already in the United State and came to know closely the late and much missed Mita Đorđević, his warm and soft nature reminded me of the peach thief. All of this is the stuff out of which stereotypes are built. Why am I telling these unimportant stories without any seeming connection or purpose? Because they all shaped a perception or, rather, a stereotype, and because this is how stereotypes are formed. They revolve around true occurrences, but it is the blanket generalization that elevates them to a seemingly coherent and, most often, dangerously sweeping and oversimplified picture. Later, I learned that such stereotypes are shared. In the mid-1990s, when I was writing Imagining the Balkans at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., the journalist Liljana Smajlović, at that time a cofellow, told me that at one point she lived in Algeria, where her mother, a doctor, was posted for a period of time. When rambunctious Yugoslavs would go to the beach with wine and beer, and were accosted there by the local police, they maintained that they were Bulgarians. Recently, I read Vesna Goldsworthy’s wonderfully moving memoir Chernobyl Strawberries, in which she describes going to a bookstore near St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. I remember this very same bookstore from before 1989: it gave out free books to Eastern Europeans – mostly forbidden literature, but also useful dictionaries, textbooks, and guides – and all you had to do was sign up in a pro forma book with your name and provenance, without being obliged to provide an identity. Vesna, upon picking up her volume of Solzhenitsyn (I believe), signed up, just to be on 6 the safe side, as Bulgarian. But this is not necessarily malignant. It displays a certain kind of “cultural intimacy,” to use Michael Herzfeld’s notion, where you partake in the dirty linen of your group or a group you consider sufficiently close or well known. Yugoslavia was the last Balkan country (outside of Albania, where I have not been yet) that I visited while still living in the Balkans. As a child, we had actually passed through it once en route to Hungary, but I did not remember anything. But Yugoslavia was a favorite choice for many Bulgarians. The language was close, there were often open border meetings (even in the days of the Cold War), and then there was Macedonia, the bleeding Bulgarian irredenta until the Second World War. To end with my section on personal reminiscences, I recall how recently I almost lost a good Serbian friend. Countering the bitter complaint about the fate of the Kosovo monasteries and what was the sacred symbolic center of Serbian national consciousness, I pointed out (obviously tactlessly): “You’ll get over it. The Bulgarians got over Macedonia, but most importantly the Greeks got over Constantinople, and Constantinople is worth a couple of hundred Serbian monasteries and Macedonia on top, and even I would not be able to get over the city.” We are still friends. It was mostly because of Macedonia that I was demonstrably not interested in Yugoslavia, since for many Bulgarians, and certainly for most of my historian colleagues, Macedonia was an obsession. I was sick of it and did not want to have anything to do with it (in fact, Macedonia is the only one of the former Yugoslav republics that I have not been to). But apart from Macedonia (and that primarily in unofficial conversations), the university courses actually gave me a fairly solid grounding in the history of the neighboring South Slavs. As undergraduates, conforming to a curriculum owing still a lot to the Humboldtian system, we were drilled with an inordinate amount of ancient and medieval history. Apart from Bulgarian 7 medieval history, I have passed exams in ancient Greece and Rome, Byzantine, Serbian medieval, Russian medieval, and Western European medieval history. All these courses were remarkably devoid of any nationalist zeal. The same was true, more or less, for the modern period, but it depended on the instructor. I happened to be exposed to professors of both kinds. For example, the professor who gave the lecture course on modern Balkan history went against every cliché that would have been instilled in school. Explaining the Treaty of San Stefano, for example, the cornerstone of the idea of the modern Bulgarian state, he did not necessarily challenge the idea that it resurrected a Bulgarian state in its ethnic boundaries, since it actually did follow the borders of the Bulgarian Exarchate recognized by the Sublime Porte. However, he accompanied this with a map showing that this new Bulgaria of 1878 was larger than the territories of the new kingdoms of Serbia and Greece taken together. Here was a wonderful illustration not only of clashing perspectives, but of the conflict between the principles of balance of power and self-determination. On the other hand, his young assistant, who was writing a dissertation on the Comintern policy toward Macedonia, was of the opinion that Yugoslavia was an “artificial formation” and would inevitably disintegrate. I thought this was silly at the time and I still think so, even as he seems to have been vindicated by the latest developments. What is natural as opposed to artificial in the world of politics, after all? One of the most valuable graduate seminars I have had at the University of Sofia was one devoted to the history of the discipline. It was not exhaustive and there was little written at the time, but it provided a sound framework that remained intact over the years, to be filled with detail and nuance. It is there that I first learned about Jovan Cvijić and his major work La Péninsule Balkanique (1918). This grand regional scheme was a paradigmatic work of geopolitical theory, drawing on the conjunction of geomorphologic and geophysical analysis 8 with human geography and migrations, which bestowed a central political and strategic role to “Greater Serbia” as ordained by geography and in the best interests of the West. Thus history was subordinated to a geopolitical and ethno-cultural framework and the regional narrative was meant to buttress Yugoslav nation-building, where common racial characteristics overwrote divergent historical and religious experiences. While the turn of the twentieth century was generally characterized by the radicalization of national discourses, it also saw the rise of non-national historical comparative methodologies, primarily among linguists, literary scholars, and ethnographers. Historiography, to the little extent that it ventured beyond the national framework, later followed suit. The interwar period saw the institutionalization of Southeastern European studies in the whole region, and in this respect what was happening in Yugoslavia was crucial. In 1934, a Balkan Institute was founded in Belgrade under the auspices of the King of Yugoslavia. Alongside its research program, it had a regional geopolitical agenda envisaged on the basis of Balkan solidarity. “Our patriotism, if it wants to be real, should be a Balkan patriotism,” was the programmatic pronouncement of the founders of the Belgrade Balkan Institute. What the interwar architects of Southeastern European studies (commonly referred to at that time as “Balkanology”) habitually pointed out, when positing the utility of the regional context for the better understanding of national history, was the unusual ethnic mix or “ethnic chaos” of the region and the millennia-long superimposition, crisscrossing, and interpenetration of political and “civilizational” structures. Two scholars were pivotal in defining the new “science” of Balkanology: the linguists Petar Skok, a Croat, and the Serb Milan Budimir. As editors of the Belgrade-based Revue internationale des études balkaniques, they aimed at demonstrating the commonality of Balkan societies while “drawing upon the comparative method of the nineteenth century.” History was singled out as the major 9 among the three pillars of Balkanology, along with anthropology and linguistics, as an “immanently comparative science of historical synthesis,” whose main objective was “to reveal, understand, and define the common reality of that which can be called the Balkan organism,” with its own unique life resulting from a shared millennial history. In their first editorial, a sui generis Balkanological manifesto, Skok and Budimir observed that the “estrangement of the Balkan sciences into national compartments” had led to “duplication of state particularism with scientific particularism,” and they pleaded that The time has come to contemplate the coordinating of national academic Balkan studies, to give them cohesion, and, above all, to orient them towards the study of a Balkan organism that had constituted one whole since the most distanced times of classical and pre-classical antiquity. This is the principal goal of the science that we have called Balkanology and to which our journal is devoted.2 The Yugoslav scholars outlined two “immanent historical trends” – unification and particularism – that had blended, above and beyond the multiplicity of local peoples and their mixtures, into “a unique law of the Balkans guiding the vicissitudes of the totality of their history.” These two tendencies had in turn defined the evolution of the region since antiquity. The major forces of “Balkan aggregation,” whether locally engendered or imposed from the outside, were the Hellenistic Empire, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the “But et signification des études balkaniques,” par P.Skok et M.Budimir, Revue internationale des études balkaniques, 1934, I, 2-3, quoted in Diana Mishkova, “What is Balkan History? Spaces and Scales in the Tradition of South-East European Studies,” Southeastern Europe, 34, 2010, 72. 2 10 Ottoman Empire. The particularism of the Greek city-states was overcome by “the first Balkan aggregation” under Philip and Alexander the Great, which “issued from the proper forces of the peninsula [and] laid the basis of the European civilization.” Irrespective of the linguistic divide between the Greek and the Latin worlds, the region preserved its political unity and internal cohesion under Roman and, subsequently, Byzantine domination. The tribal particularisms of the Slavs eventually succumbed to the same “Balkan law of aggregation:” the prime ambition of two Bulgarian empires and of the empire of Stefan Dušan was the unification of the peninsula. Where they really went against the grain was in their assessment of the Ottoman Empire. Budimir and Skok attributed the present degree of social and cultural cohesion of the Balkan region primarily to the aggregation achieved and imposed by the empire of the “Turks.” Modern scholarship, however, had misinterpreted, according to them, the productive results of this aggregation; it had moreover not duly recognized that the imperial regime had never pursued policies of denationalization typical of many other European states. The roots of this skewed interpretation lay in the ideology of nineteenth century Balkan romanticism. Balkan intellectuals, imbued with the desire to deliver their peoples from Ottoman oppression, saw the long centuries of Ottoman rule only as a continuous degradation of a formerly illustrious independent national past. This view was widely shared by the practitioners in the new national disciplines, and they focused accordingly on the study of the periods preceding the coming of the Turks, especially antiquity and the medieval states. Research on aspects of national life during the Ottoman period was almost completely ignored, with the exception of the anti-Turkish resistance. The Ottomans, according to Skok and Budimir, exerted their most significant impact by having imposed identical political and social conditions on the Balkan peoples. They had introduced “oriental urbanism:” the Balkan city originating with the Turks was “totally different 11 from the ancient and the European” one and it exerted a strong impact on everyday life as well as on language. By tolerating and even favoring the mixture of Balkan races, the Turks had obliterated to a great extent the differences in mentality induced by the previous exclusivist medieval states. Skok and Budimir even attributed folklore and popular literature to the stimulus coming from Turkish rule insofar as the period of Turkish domination had encouraged the creation of national epics that became major sources of national pride for the Balkan peoples. The fact that popular poetry could travel freely across the space of the Ottoman Empire realm allowed for the creation of common themes and vocabularies among the different Balkan folklores. Even the Romantic literary movement, known as “Balkan Romanticism,” equally owed its unique characteristics that set it apart from the other European romanticisms, to Turkish rule. Finally, and this was the most powerful contention, it was utterly wrong to consider the Turks hostile to the civilization created in the Balkans before them since their empire had embraced and maintained a number of Byzantine institutions. All of this had a singular appeal to me, legitimizing, as it were, my scholarly interests in a period that was not held in high esteem. In the manifesto “But et signification des études balkaniques,” Balkanology was defined as a science of historical synthesis seeking to study in detail the results of the two tendencies in Balkan history – unification and particularism, without privileging one over the other. In addition, the impartial research should be imbued by a moral ideal, namely that of inter-Balkan intellectual cooperation. It also formulated the methodology of a “new science” that was to “to define and explain the parallel facts that make themselves manifest in the different domains of human activity in the Balkans.”3 A Balkanologist should be looking for analogies among the neighboring Balkan peoples. For any given question, at least two Balkan peoples should be 3 Ibid., 7. 12 compared, but the analysis should be never confined to a single case. Only a perspective of this kind was capable of explicating major historical processes and circumventing the strictly national frameworks. This advocacy of a comparativist framework within the region even prompted them to transcend the confines of the region itself. For example, they advocated a cross-regional comparison between the Balkans under Ottoman rule and the Iberian peninsula, stressing parallels between the impact of Arabs and Turks on traditional Christian societies. All in all, Balkanology had two objectives – theoretical and practical: “As a theoretical science it is expected to deepen our knowledge about the relations between the Balkan peoples and to throw light on the intrinsic laws which have governed and continue to govern their development and their life.” As a practical science, it had a singular moral importance in that it was “entitled to influence the Balkan mentality” by empowering Balkan statesmen with knowledge of the Balkan man, his natural and social environment, his way of thinking and feeling, and at the same time by teaching the Balkan communities the necessity to know, understand, and cooperate with each other. 4 This interwar conceptualization of Balkan history, which was shared across the peninsula – already in 1920 a Balkan Near-Eastern Institute was inaugurated in Sofia, and in Romania the first Institute of Southeast European Studies in 1913 continued with the Nicolae Iorgaestablished Institute of Byzantine Studies and then the Victor Papacostea Institute of Balkan Studies and Research in 1937 – had much to do with the political conjuncture, especially adding a scholarly facet to Balkan cooperation following the establishment of the Balkan Pact (1934). The Second World War put an end to this, and only the thaw in East-West relations in the early 1960s made possible a renewed regional dialogue. The present institutional 4 Ibid., 24-25. 13 organization of Balkan Studies institutes in Greece, Turkey, the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, and Albania, as well as the ongoing system of Balkan Congresses, has its immediate roots in the 1960s, but the fundamental principles and conceptualizations as they were formulated especially clearly by the influential Belgrade-based Revue internationale des études balkaniques (6 vols., 1935-1938) stood the test of time and structures research in the area to this day. So this is the bookish baggage with which I came to this country in the late 1980s, exactly at a time when the geopolitical reconfiguration produced a concomitant boom of interest in the region (catalyzed mainly by the dramatic events of the dissolution of Yugoslavia). On the one hand, it internationalized even further the scholarship on this region; on the other hand, it opened up gates for the revival of ethno-nationalist and exclusivist constructions. I began to read more closely in the history of Serbia and Croatia while I was working on my historical demography project, trying to make sense of the phenomenon that had been posited as parexcellence Balkan, or rather typical of the South Slavs: the existence of the large communal family, the zadruga. This put me in touch with the works of a host of great pre-Yugoslav and Yugoslav scholars: Vuk Karadžić who coined the word, Baltasar Bogišić, Milenko Filipović, Rudolf Bičanić, Milovan Gavazzi, Vera Erlich, and Wayne Vuchinich. I read most of them in the serene surroundings of Dumbarton Oaks under the wonderful care of the librarian of the Byzantine and Slavic collection – the late Seka Allen. Using rigorous statistical methods and data on population structure, marriage patterns, fertility and mortality rates, family and household size and structure, and inheritance patterns, I could show the great diversity in the Balkan region but, at the same time, its similarity to Western and Central European patterns. Above all, I reassessed the traditional stereotype of the complex Balkan family, showing that 14 even in the periods where the zadruga was documented (only from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries), it was never statistically predominant. Its appearance (or recurrence) and decline could be due to different factors, and I hypothesized that the most plausible explanation was the link between pastoral economy and multiple households.5 My work on this problematic cemented contacts and friendships with younger scholars, of whom the historical demographer and anthropologist Jasna Čapo-Zmegać is the most prominent. With her, we had to commonly fight for the acceptance of our theses against a wall of prejudice – my first real scholarly encounter with Balkanism. Technically, I would not have written Imaging the Balkans had it not been for the events of the 1990s, yet I have to confess that my very first irritant was not so much what was said about Yugoslavia, but that what was said was generalized on the whole of the Balkans when it was a distinctly internal Yugoslav affair, and on top of it often by people that did not want to be described as Balkan. Very soon, however, I realized that I was getting inordinately more emotionally involved than I would have, had this been somebody else’s affair, and not simply with what was being said but with what was going on. I realized that I was thinking and feeling Balkan. As an aside, when I was given a doctor honoris causa by my Alma Mater, the University of Sofia, I was told that there had been a sole voice against conferring the honor on me, the accusation being that “she does not love Bulgaria; she loves the Balkans.” But the bigger surprise was that I was not thinking only “Balkan.” My mind did understand, but my heart could not 5 Balkan Family Structure and the European Pattern: Demographic Developments in Ottoman Bulgaria. Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1993. Second updated, revised and enlarged edition by Budapest: Central European University Press, 2006. 15 share any of the separate national arguments, even when they were articulated in a relatively moderate fashion: the Croatian ebullience over newly acquired independence, the Serbian wounded pride, the Bosnian newly found spirituality, the Slovenian sigh of relief. The Macedonians, as the saying in Bulgaria went, finally proved they were Bulgarian: they were the only ones that did not fight. But, as I was later enlightened, the Macedonians too were unhappy with their provenance: as good Darwinians, they knew that all people stemmed from apes, only the poor Macedonians from Bulgarians. I was feeling sorry for Yugoslavia, and the only people with whom I could calmly speak were the ones who described (and continue to describe) themselves as Yugoslav. But by then Yugoslavia was no more, and the issue on the agenda was how to think of it now? There were numerous options on the table: a failed state doomed from the outset by the incompatibility between the principles of centralization and federalism; or between the constituent principles of the contending nationalisms (one based on ethnic self-determination, the other on historical rights); or because none of the constituent elements was strong enough to dominate over the others and serve as the magnetic center (the Bismarckian model – Pašić’s hesitancy in 1917 may have been vindicated); or because it was not sufficiently democratic, and turned into a Serbian dictatorship; or, on the contrary, because it was excessively democratic and its constitution provided the logical blueprint for the ensuing conflict; or, it was thought of as a mini-empire after the general demise of empires in the wake of the First World War, and Tito as the last Habsburg; or as one of the most successful federative experiments, or as one of the most successful socialist experiments, one that maneuvered deftly during the Cold War, and made its citizens proud of its policy of non-alignment; or, a state that was not doomed at all, had it not been for the international conjuncture and the premature recognition of secession, and on and on. 16 There is probably truth in all these contradictory assessments, when we take into account who and why pronounces them. I am personally not interested in any of these verdicts, but rather in the question of what is left of Yugoslavia. And I propose that the best way to approach this issue is in terms of historical legacies. Earlier, for the sake of making sense of the Ottoman Empire, I developed the framework of historical legacies, and then argued that it is the most appropriate approach to analyzing historical regions. Any region or other geographical entity (in this case, a nation-state) can be approached as the complex result of the interplay of numerous historical periods, traditions, and legacies. For purely cognitive purposes, I distinguish between legacy as continuity and legacy as perception. Legacy as continuity is the survival but also gradual waning of some of the characteristics of the entity immediately before its collapse. Legacy as perception, on the other hand, is the articulation and re-articulation of how the entity is seen at different time periods by different individuals or groups. These should not be interpreted as “real” versus “imagined” characteristics, as perhaps implied by the use of the terms “continuity” and “perception.” The characteristics of the continuity are themselves often perceptual, and perceptions are no less a matter of continuous real social facts. The better way to define the distinction is to say that in both cases the categories designate social facts but that these are at different removes from experience. In the instance of perception, the social fact is removed yet a further step from immediate reality and one can perhaps juxtapose the natural versus the cultural or textual status of the social interaction. Thinking in terms of historical legacies – with their 17 simultaneity and overlap as well as their gradually waning effects – allows us to emphasize the complexity and plasticity of the historical process.6 I will now turn to a couple of concrete examples to show how the category can be applied. When political entities disintegrate, the first casualty is the institutional structure. When they disintegrate through a bloody war, as was the case of Yugoslavia, this is accompanied by major demographical discontinuities. Indeed, one of the most significant brakes has been the final ethnic unmixing of populations that had lived side by side for centuries if not for millennia. Of course, here we see lurking the vestiges of two imperial legacies, the Ottoman and the Habsburg, and this already involves the territories of the former Yugoslavia in spaces that are larger than the entity we analyze. In fact, it was the demographic complexity that I once described as one of the two persisting Ottoman legacies as continuity (the other being popular culture) that were still apparent in the Balkans. One can even posit that the present continuing unmixings are the last throws of an imperial legacy on the road to homogenized Europeanization just at the time when a fairly homogenized Europe raises the banner of cultural diversity. The institutions linked to the federative structure have been all dismissed, earlier in the secessionist republics, last in Serbia which sported the name Yugoslavia until the very end. The existing or nascent national institutions, however, are mostly in place, as are the generations who served in them, although in the past decade there has surely been some significant generational turnover. As long as the generations with institutional memories are in place, however, the 6 The detailed elaboration of my thinking on historical legacies can be found in the afterword of the new edition of Imagining the Balkans, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, as well as in Historische Vermächtnisse zwischen Europa und dem Nahen Osten/ Historical Legacies Between Europe and the Near East, Berlin: Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wiisenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, 2007, also reprinted in: Europa im Nahen Osten-Der Nahe Osten in Europa, Hrsg. Angelika Neuwitrth und Guenther Stock. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2010. 18 legacy as continuity in this sphere will also be alive. I assume that the most drastic break in the institutional sphere will have occurred in education, with the conscious coining of vernaculars as far removed from each other as possible (either in terms of vocabulary, grammar, or phonetics). But again, this would be true only for the republics that had to disengage themselves from the common Serbo-Croatian, not for Slovenia or Macedonia. Like all of Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia is also afflicted by the curious phenomenon, postcommunist nostalgia, and again this links it to a larger space and legacy: the space and legacy of “really lived socialism” with a thousand faces, stretching through the Eurasian landmass to Central Asia (and including China by some counts, not to speak of Cuba in others). In the Yugoslav case, just as in the Soviet, and to a negligible extent the East German one, this is complicated because of a double loss: the political loss (of a state structure), in conjunction with a host of social losses (economic security, employment, educational opportunities, a break in distinct patterns of sociability). We still live within the realm of legacy as continuity and this is secured, among other things, by the presence of people with immediate experiences of living in Yugoslavia. It is like the Swahilli saying that contends that the deceased who remain alive in people’s memory are called “the living dead.” It is only when the last to have known them passed away that they are pronounced completely dead. So also Yugoslavia’s legacy as continuity needs at least one or two more generations before one can expect its final waning. It seems to me too early to prognosticate what shape the continuity as perception will take. In the Ottoman case, it was firmly built in the discourse of Balkan nationalism as one of its most important pillars, and displayed striking similarities in all Balkan countries. Precisely because it was at the center of securing present social arrangements, and above all legitimizing the state, it was reproduced for a long time. Only in the last few decades, a century and a half 19 after the separate Balkan countries seceded from the Ottoman Empire, and with the new geopolitical configuration that gradually incorporated (or will do so) the Balkans in the European framework, is this particular perception also gradually receding, to take on new forms but as a whole losing its central significance. Whether the perception of Yugoslavia will serve some legitimizing function (either positive or negative) is yet to be seen. I do believe, however, that for historians it will always be an attractive realm for research, especially for the ones seeking to analyze historical alternatives. Lately scholars have begun to recoil from “finalism” and have become aware of the historical importance of “failed” projects (the “failure” being measured in terms of how they were realized as a political reality). But these “failed” projects can teach us quite a lot if we care to analyze them in all their richness and their promises throughout their whole existence, not only at the moment of their demise. And then, there is memory. One of the most complex issues today in sciences and humanities alike is about how memory operates on the individual as well as on the collective level. How are communities of memory created? This concept was coined to describe how communities create “constitutive narratives” and how group narratives form collective identities (like personal narratives – individual ones). Usually they are defined as small-scale groups who share common experiences and shape their memories through daily face-to-face interaction and acts of remembrance (so-called experiential communities of memory). On a broader level, they can be political communities of memory (structured by ideologies mediated through the public arena – commemorations, conferences, electronic lists, and websites). Not all of them are defined exclusively through a relationship to a single place, nor are they shaped by shared experience alone; they can be linked through transnational bonds, by a community of interests and thoughts, 20 or shared feelings. Some speak of “communities of sentiment” beyond the nation-state, and the formation of “diasporic public spheres.” More and more, they are transformed from experiential to textual communities. Recently, Tomislav Longinovic has movingly paid tribute to the cultural promise of Yugoslavism by elevating Cyber Yugoslavia as the promising, ironic, and all too human heart of the complex labyrinth.7 Perceptions often shape geopolitical nomenclature. In 1989, Europe, which until then had only an East and a West, suddenly acquired a center, which caused Eastern Europe to officially disappear from the map. In due time, Central Europe died, having played out its function, and now we just have Europe, and beyond is Russia and its “near abroad.” The Balkans also disappeared (and I date this to the unintended consequences of the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999). Now that the real geographic Balkan mountains are part of Europe, the area has been elevated (especially in American writing) to Southeastern Europe, and what is left is a tilted Western Balkans, ironically designating the space of the former Yugoslavia that was usually not brandished as “Balkan” until the end of the Cold War, and was certainly not part of the selfperception of Yugoslavs. In due time, the Western Balkans will also disappear, and they will become just a curious item and food for intellectual historians. But toponymy is not only created in the corridors of the State Department or the Pentagon, or NATO, or the CIA. I live in Urbana-Champaign next to a lake. We chose our house because of the lovely view of the water. From late May and into the first week of October, you can swim in the lake. But very few of our neighbors do. In fact, when we started swimming, we thought we were the only ones. And then, one day, we saw an elderly couple from the other Vampires Like Us: Writing Down “the Serbs,” Belgrade Circle, 2005; Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary, Duke University Press, 2011. 7 21 shore swim their way into the center of the lake where they greeted us with a “Welcome to the neighborhood” and “At long last, people with good taste and good sports.” The swimming brotherhood engendered a (mildly) drinking friendship. The charming couple were retirees from the University of Illinois, in their late 70s and early 80s. He was Harry Triandis, a psychology professor with an impeccable Greek genealogy. His wife, Pola Triandis, née Fokić, was the daughter of the last royal ambassador of Yugoslavia to the United States. The lake united us, and we have named it the Balkan Lake and, if this is objectionable, we can still call it “Jugoslovensko more” – a genuine, not virtual, post-Yugoslav and real South Slavic space.