Few countries in Europe have witnessed as much turbulence during the past quarter century as the seven states which emerged from socialist Yugoslavia after it dissolved amidst a catastrophic series of wars of succession. Although actual armed conflict only took place in Serbia (then still including Kosovo in the rump state Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) in 1998 and 1999, Serbia directly participated in the wars of Yugoslav succession beginning in 1991 in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and then finally in Kosovo. For nearly a decade from 1992 until 2001 Serbia's economy languished under the combination of a kleptocratic regime, expensive and protracted military engagements and international sanctions. The long Serbian transition entered a new phase in October 2000, when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević was ousted by a very heterogeneous political coalition whose leaders shared only an intense antipathy for Milošević. The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was transformed into the short-lived state union of Serbia and Montenegro, which disappeared when Montenegro declared its independence in 2006, followed by Kosovo in 2008.
Penning such a brief summary of the evolution of Serbia since 1991 elides most of the details and much of the complexity of recent Serbian history. Yet in the shortest possible way it serves to underline that Serbia as a country has undergone a protracted and painful post-Yugoslav transition, which has left indelible marks. All of this turbulence could not but impact both the historians and historiography of Serbia.Footnote 1 Moreover, a number of historians participated directly as advisors to key actors in the events of the 1990s, and they were complicit in the weaponisation of history, in particular that of the mass atrocities of the Second World War.Footnote 2 Đorđe Stanković spoke of a situation in which ‘everyone was running away from “global scholarship” and satanically confining themselves to parochial mythologies’, and the bookstores of Serbia were inundated with what Andrej Mitrović, Radivoj Radić and others called ‘pseudohistory’.Footnote 3 Others, particularly younger historians, sought a refuge of sorts by studying or working abroad during the same period.Footnote 4 Hence the historical profession cannot be divorced from the politics and wars of that awful decade.
This piece attempts to survey recent Serbian historiography by identifying and analysing major publications and developments. Together with my own review of the historiography, I rely on useful conceptual historiographical essays produced by historians in Serbia.Footnote 5 Needless to say, it would be much too challenging and time consuming to examine all publications produced by Serbian historians in recent years, so this essay will of necessity be selective and subjective.Footnote 6 The most obvious restriction involves periodisation; as a historian of the Balkans in the twentieth century, I have chosen to focus predominantly on works that cover this period. I commence with an overview of the tumultuous debates regarding the topics of resistance and collaboration during the Second World War. In addition, I cast a glance at the newer historiography of Serbia under communism. The article concludes with an overview of prominent and interesting publications on a wide array of other topics and with some general reflections about the state of Serbian historiography. As will be seen, many of these observations could also easily pertain to neighbouring Croatia and to other Yugoslav successor states.
Although I focus on the twentieth century, I have decided to exclude the Serbian historiography of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars. A number of historians in Serbia have engaged with this topic and continue to do so, but a survey of it and the attendant controversies would at a minimum require a separate article.Footnote 7 My hope is that the present piece will succeed in acquainting a broader audience with significant newer trends and names in Serbian historiography as well as detailing the often pervasively politicised environment in which historians operate in Serbia. Finally, let me make it clear that in alignment with the Spotlight series in which it appears, the ambit of this essay is, with a few exceptions, restricted to recent historical works produced by historians working and publishing in Serbia, though references will also be made to a few works produced elsewhere.Footnote 8 Let it also be stated clearly that I make no claim that the publications of foreign historians on Serbian history are superior to those of their colleagues in Serbia.
Of Disintegration and Revisionism
The disintegration of Yugoslav historiography was, like the process of the country's disintegration itself, a long one whose exact beginnings significantly predate the country's actual collapse in 1991. Ivo Banac, a Croat historian who taught at Yale University, wrote perhaps the most prominent essay regarding the demise of Yugoslav historiography.Footnote 9 Banac pinpointed a gathering of Yugoslav historians in May 1979, one year before the death of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito, as the beginning of the end. As Tito's reign drew to a close, historians were among those who began to question the core axioms of the Yugoslav state. A number of other scholars have also engaged with the topic of the role of historians in the collapse of Yugoslavia.Footnote 10
Writing in 2019 one can perhaps still legitimately ask whether the end of the disintegrative process has been – or will ever be – reached. Historians of all countries which have been part of other state or imperial constructions – and Serbia has been through many such transformations – must struggle with how to process intellectually the legacies and meanings of predecessor states.Footnote 11 After all, Serbia spent much more time in various forms of a Yugoslav state in the twentieth century than it did as an independent state.Footnote 12 The tendency to ignore those areas of the predecessor states not encompassed by Serbia (and Kosovo) today – as Turkish historians long did with respect to the Ottoman Empire – or to cast these predecessors as annoying (and annoyingly long-lasting) anomalies which merely served to delay the (return to the) allegedly natural condition of the nation state, is evident in much recent Serbian historiography.
More generally, Srđan Milošević has noted that ‘Serbian historiography has no developed tradition of studying its own development’.Footnote 13 Undoubtedly, the dramatic transitions and discontinuities afflicting Serbian history did not prove conducive to historiographical studies. All too often, the tendency after each transition was instead to cast the previous system's historical production (and some historians) on the landfill, a process that was sometimes accompanied by equally uncritical rehabilitation of the historical writings produced in the system preceding the discarded one.Footnote 14 In this sense, the period since 1991 proved true to form. Yugoslavia's dissolution also led to an additional question: what should be done with the historians who inhabited the common Yugoslav state until 1991 and their own scholarly production, often produced in dialogue with colleagues in Serbia? Should one standard of scrutiny be applied to the work of ethnic Serbs – including those ‘stranded’ outside of Serbia – and another to those historians who are not Serbs – including those still residing in Serbia?
As in other formerly socialist countries, historians in Serbia in the late 1980s and early 1990s seized upon topics that had previously been deemed taboo or too controversial by the communist hierarchy, particularly as regards the Second World War.Footnote 15 Predrag Marković, Miloš Ković and Nataša Milićević identified five developments that ‘began to reshape the image of the recent past during the 1980s, and gathered momentum in the 1990s: a) the redefinition of the Četnik movement, b) new approaches to pre-communist Yugoslavia, c) the reinterpretation of Serb casualties of the Second World War, d) the rediscovery of communist repression and its victims after 1944, [and] e) the over-proportional role of non-academic “history-centred” writing (and thinking) in public life’.Footnote 16
Though outright censorship had been rare in Yugoslavia in comparison to Eastern Bloc states, many historians had exercised self-censorship by consciously avoiding sensitive topics. Tamara Spasojević certainly exaggerates in claiming that research on Serb victims in the Second World War had been for decades a ‘forbidden topic’ and that Serbs were ‘condemned to be quiet about such killings in the name of preserving “brotherhood and unity”’.Footnote 17 In some cases, these topics were tackled by young historians eager to make their mark, and undoubtedly a number of previously taboo topics deserved thorough historical scrutiny. However, as Spasojević has noted, some of these historians went to the opposite extreme and completely denigrated the ‘People's Liberation Struggle’ (Narodnooslobodilačka borba; NOB), the official Yugoslav communist term for the Second World War. Extensive research on Serb and other Second World War victims was conducted in socialist Yugoslavia, but the exploitation of victims and victimhood for nationalist gain was forbidden.Footnote 18
Two of these developments were focused on the Second World War. In 2004 Spasojević delineated three phases of Second World War scholarship in Serbia from 1983 to 2001.Footnote 19 In the first phase, from 1983 until 1991, historians did not challenge the party-state's interpretation of the struggle as nearly infallible and inviolable, though as interethnic tensions rose in the final years of Yugoslavia's existence the question of mass atrocities committed during the Second World War become more acute and politically relevant. Despite voluminous research in socialist Yugoslavia on the crimes committed by the quisling Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska; NDH), Spasojević adheres to the view that this was among the forbidden topics and that ‘Serbs were condemned to be quiet about this suffering because of the preservation of “brotherhood and unity”’.Footnote 20
The second phase, which lasted until 1997, witnessed the flourishing of historical research challenging previously held views. Particularly noteworthy was the rehabilitation of Dragoljub ‘Draža’ Mihailović and the Chetnik movement, which had initially enjoyed Allied support after the capitulation of Yugoslavia in 1941 but had disgraced itself through tactical collaboration with the Axis and mass atrocities committed against its opponents. Primarily thanks to the historians Bojan Dimitrijević and Kosta Nikolić, the Chetnik movement now came to be portrayed as an ‘anti-fascist movement’ on par with the Partisans. This marked a complete rebuke of the official socialist Yugoslav stance regarding the Chetniks as a traitorous and counterrevolutionary if not outright fascist movement.Footnote 21 Conversely, historians cast a much more critical eye than previously on both Tito and the Partisan movement, raising amongst others the question of extrajudicial killings and mass reprisals committed by the Partisans at the end of and immediately following the Second World War. According to Jelena Đureinović, ‘after the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, the state devoted considerable effort in the field of the politics of memory, officially recognising the Chetniks of Dragoljub Mihailović as a national anti-fascist movement and often interpreting the end of the Second World War not as a victory and liberation, but instead through the politics of repression and victimisation on the part of the communist regime’.Footnote 22 Đureinović observes that neglect and nationalist distortions of the Partisans paralleled the positive reevaluation of the Chetnik movement. Đorđe Stanković effectively skewered the weak factual basis of the rehabilitation of Mihailović.Footnote 23
The previously taboo topic of the brutal repression of pro-Cominform communists on the prison island Goli Otok also attracted research. And in addition to the rehabilitation of Mihailović, historians in Serbia in the 1990s devoted much greater attention than previously to the genocide perpetrated against Serbs in the NDH. Unfortunately, in part reacting to widespread denial of these crimes in contemporary Croatia, some of this scholarship veered into a ghastly and myopic obsession with the numbers of victims – the so-called ‘numbers game’.Footnote 24
Finally, in the third phase after 1997, spurred on by the deteriorating situation in Kosovo, many historians moved away from the Second World War and on to other topics, particularly Kosovo and Serbo–Albanian relations. The fact that this revisionism took place against the background of extreme antagonism between Serbs and Albanians, culminating in the Kosovo War of 1998–9 and the eventual and still contested independence of Kosovo, already speaks sufficiently of the motivation for much of this historiography.
Bojan Dimitrijević, who has written extensively about the Serbian royalist Ravna Gora (Chetnik) movement during the Second World War, has identified the following topics which received ‘new interpretations’ during the 1990s: the history of Serbia under occupation, the history of the Ravna Gora movement and its leader, Dragoljub Mihailović, the collaborationist Nedić regime, the so-called Independent State of Croatia, concentration camps.Footnote 25 As already noted, the engagement with such topics did not take place in a vacuum. Dimitrijević himself notes that ‘historians have become much more present in the media’, and their findings have been disseminated also through history textbooks for primary and secondary schools, which have been extensively rewritten. Another consequence has been the Serbian state's decision to extend the same veterans’ rights to veterans of the Chetnik movement which were previously only available to veterans of the communist-led Partisan movement.
Very broadly put, the new generations of historians in Serbia in the 1990s were engaged in revisionism with respect to much of twentieth-century history.Footnote 26 To quote Vladimir Petrović, in the former Yugoslavia (and in other post-socialist societies), ‘revisionism plays the role of the bogeyman, but also has the allure of fruit forbidden until yesterday. On the one hand, it is used as a label to devaluate scholarly contributions, on the other hand as a plume to legitimate pseudo-historiography.’Footnote 27 There was of course nothing inherently wrong about assuming a critical stance with respect to socialist historiography. The problem arose when the critical stance was replaced by a wholesale rejection of the previous historiography and by a rather uncritical and nationalist stance.
In still other cases, older historians who had previously written more or less dogmatically about these topics in previous decades produced new publications which substantially revised or even contradicted their previous findings and adopted a nationalist straitjacket – often without even acknowledging this volte-face. For example, the historian Branislav Gligorijević during his long career produced solid articles about interwar Yugoslav history written from a Marxist perspective. However, at the end of his career, he produced a three-volume biography of King Aleksandar Karađorđević which, while serviceable, fundamentally contradicted much of Gligorijević’s earlier writings.Footnote 28
In addition to scholarly production, historians in Serbia have been involved in the rehabilitation of leading figures from the Second World War through courtroom testimony as expert witnesses as well as in the work of state commissions established to identify victims of both official executions and extrajudicial killings in Serbia during the last year of the war and in the immediate post-war period.Footnote 29 To a significant extent, the historians working on these commissions regard any executions or other punishments meted out towards collaborationists as illegitimate and legally void.Footnote 30 Indeed, Dimitrijević even seems to reject or at least relativise the very notion of collaboration with Axis forces, suggesting that what he calls the ‘so-called memory culture is, in essence, a sick and personal relation towards the past’.Footnote 31 The priority instead is placed on how the Chetnik movement acted out of a laudable primary concern for the survival Serb nation, shunning direct confrontation of the Axis (and in particular German) forces in order to avoid bloody reprisals. Any participation of Serbs as collaborators or perpetrators in the Holocaust is also questioned. Criticism of the Chetniks’ atrocities or extreme nationalist ideology is by contrast dismissed as being ahistorical and decontextualised.
As a corollary, in Serbia and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia, historians influenced by contemporary politics have questioned or even openly denigrated the once hallowed notion of ‘anti-fascism’. Indeed, some claim that this term is some kind of communist Yugoslav invention without any relevance or traction outside of the former Yugoslavia.Footnote 32 Bojan Dimitrijević goes the furthest, calling anti-fascism an overly broad term advocated by a coalition ranging from ‘nostalgic leftist intellectuals through defeated communists to perverted [izopačeni] sexual groups’.Footnote 33 By contrast, Jelena Đureinović states that, ‘in the context of Serbia, the revival of collaborationist movements has the goal of switching value systems: anti-fascism should be discarded as a struggle for power and as a communist crime, and collaboration should be socially accepted as the defence of the nation and as a legitimate struggle against communism’.Footnote 34 Olga Manojlović-Pintar has also criticised the relativisation of the terms collaboration, fascism and anti-Semitism, claiming that ‘it has come to an absurd equation of the ideologies of socialism and fascism. In this manner contemporary nationalist narratives have been constituted.’Footnote 35
The term ‘revisionist’ is frequently deployed in the polemics of historians in Serbia, usually with an expressly pejorative connotation. Revising history is of course part and parcel of the routine work of professional historians. While serving as president of the American Historical Association, James McPherson rightly called revisionism ‘the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue, between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time.’Footnote 36 To be more precise, it is therefore not revisionism per se that is problematic, but rather what the sociologist Todor Kuljić defines as ‘the processing of the past which is informed by clear or concealed intentions to justify narrow national or political goals’.Footnote 37 Revisionism with respect to the Second World War in Serbia can take several different forms. As Kuljić (citing historian Wolfgang Wippermann) observes about revisionism with respect to the Holocaust, there is 1. outright denial, 2. relativisation of crimes and 3. recognition of crimes combined with what is increasingly being called ‘whataboutism’. Often revisionism is (barely) disguised with seemingly reasonable assertions or requests such as ‘it is too early to state with certainty what occurred’ or ‘further research is needed’.
Even more specifically in the context of recent historiography in Serbia, we can identify revisionist works as those which for ideological reasons aim to rehabilitate historical figures and movements associated with the Second World War while either completely denying or extensively downplaying the crimes for which they were earlier deemed responsible. These earlier findings of responsibility in turn stem from both the intensely problematic post-war trials of collaborationists and from the historiography of socialist Yugoslavia. Much recent Serbian historiography on collaborationist movements and leaders during the Second World War commits the basic fallacy of assuming that because these movements were oppressed by a communist regime that itself committed war crimes and human rights violations, the aforementioned movements and leaders must be innocent. In this view, all victims of extrajudicial killings in 1944–5, as well as anyone tried and convicted by a communist court in Yugoslavia, particularly during the Stalinist phase (1945–53), must be guiltless.
To condemn Stalinist trials from the immediate post-war era is one thing. To propose that the majority of historical scholarship conducted in socialist Yugoslavia be discarded as entirely invalid or to insist on the absolute innocence of wartime collaborators is an entirely different matter.Footnote 38 It is understandable for a historian such as Tamara Spasojević to write that ‘we must not place ourselves in the role of a prosecutor or defender, but should instead through objective and many-sided research arrive at the truth’ regarding the most controversial figures in Serbian history.Footnote 39 However, the reality is that some Serb historians have unfortunately become not only vocal defenders and rehabilitators of figures such as Dragoljub Mihailović and Milan Nedić, but have also excelled in denying their crimes and those of their followers. This is particularly worrying in the context of contemporary Serbia, where some political parties and organisations openly idolise these figures. Revisionist historians in Serbia and in the region as a whole would do well to heed the words of the American historian of Yugoslavia Fred Warner Neal, who already in the 1950s warned that ‘anti-communism by itself is not a substitute for scholarship’.Footnote 40 Moreover, there is a certain irony that many of those historians who reject Yugoslav historiography produce even more ideologically rigid and politicised works than those of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, a number of historians such as Dubravka Stojanović, Olga Manojlović-Pintar and the late Olga Popović-Obradović joined forces with the venerable Latinka Perović to produce research which takes a very critical and even negative view of the course of Serbian history in the twentieth century.Footnote 41 Notably, many of their critiques have been published by the Serbian Helsinki Committee, which also continues to publish critical historical monographs.Footnote 42 That one of Serbia's leading human rights organisations should also be a frequent publisher of historical works may at first glance puzzle outsiders. However, taking into consideration the politicisation and abuses of history under the Milošević regime and the continuing struggles to define the trajectory of the Serbian state and nation, the role of the Serbian Helsinki Committee becomes more understandable.Footnote 43
Another prominent critic of revisionism in recent Serbian historiography was the late Đorđe Stanković, who for many years headed the history department at the University of Belgrade. In 2008 Stanković pointed out that a number of the collaborationist figures being rehabilitated had implicated themselves in the commission of war crimes. For example, it was not ‘leftists’ who claimed that the famous Serb lawyer Slobodan Jovanović had signed documents that led to the execution of numerous Serbs during the war, but rather Milan Nedić and his associates who had provided confirmation.Footnote 44 Stanković also provided several quotes that illustrated beyond any doubt the faith that Nedić placed in the new order promised by Hitler.
Arguably one of the underlying causes of nationalist revisionism – and one of the most persistent problems in the historiography of Serbia and its former Yugoslav neighbours – is the phenomenon of competitive collective victimhood.Footnote 45 In a region which every bit as much as Timothy Snyder's now famous ‘bloodlands’ witnessed a twentieth century in which every state and every nation became victims – often repeatedly – of organised mass violence and authoritarian regimes, victimhood is oversaturated.Footnote 46 Historical research into war, crimes and victimhood is undoubtedly necessary, but all too often the narratives of collective victimhood reveal an obsession with the group rivalled only by a disinterest in the individual humanity of the victims, who are symbolically thrust forward as a justification for the group's past suffering and present and future claims. And articles on one's own victims far outnumber those written about one's own perpetrators or the victims of the ‘Other’. It is unfortunately still relatively difficult to imagine that anyone would write an article about Serbian crimes in Kosovo that would complement Nenad Antonijević’s article on Kosovo Albanian crimes.Footnote 47 Moreover, all too often historians’ writings on these topics in Serbia fail what could be called the ‘reverse applicability test’. To wit: if the arguments and logic applied in a given analysis of a historical event were instead utilised by a Croat, Bosniak or (Kosovo) Albanian scholar to describe a historical event, would it be acceptable to a Serb historian? To be clear, many articles written in neighbouring countries would fail this test as well. Surely it must be possible to describe the crimes of others without denying or relativising the crimes of one's own?
The interlinked and still often mutually antagonistic nature of Serbian and Croatian historiography of the twentieth century can be illustrated by examining the reactions of historians in Serbia to the equally worrying wave of revisionism that has recently afflicted Croatia.Footnote 48 Popular, officially funded tabloids obsessed with irrelevant and sordid trivia, publicists and amateur historians who sensationalise and trivialise mass atrocities and other dark episodes in twentieth-century Serbian and Yugoslav history significantly exacerbate this problem. So do various historical documentaries and dramas which have been aired on Serbian television, and which have contributed to the popular rehabilitation of controversial figures – and to the demonisation or humiliation of others – in modern Serbian history.Footnote 49 And Dubravka Stojanović has frequently and eloquently criticised the content and tone of history textbooks published in Serbia since 1990.Footnote 50
At the worst of times, nationalist historians in Croatia and Serbia seem to be engaged in ‘shouting matches’, though some strange bedfellows have also emerged, as in the collegial relationship of Bojan Dimitrijević and the nationalist and revisionist Croat historian Zlatko Hasanbegović.Footnote 51 Historians in Serbia are correct to view with great concern and dissatisfaction contemporary attempts by their colleagues in Croatia to relativise the systematic mass violence perpetrated by the NDH during the Second World War. Revisionism in Croatia has included the naming of streets after prominent figures from the NDH and an organised public campaign to whitewash the key Ustaša chant ‘za dom spremni’ – roughly equivalent to ‘Sieg heil’ – by claiming that it is an older historical expression that is not inextricably linked to the NDH. Similarly, many of the same historians in Serbia who have accepted or supported the legal and historical rehabilitation of figures such as Mihailović and Nedić have stated their opposition to the beatification and possible canonisation of Archbishop Alojzije Stepinac, whom the communists in November 1946 convicted of collaboration.
It also seems that a problematic teleology still underlies much of Serbian historiography in the form of an assumption that the ‘natural’ end state of history is the establishment of a robust nation state. In this deterministic view, the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg Empire appear as anational aberrations that have deterred and delayed Serbia's greatness.Footnote 52 In the twentieth century Yugoslavia replaced the aforementioned empires as the next obstacle to the realisation of the nation state of the Serbs. In the dominant nationalist interpretation which emerged in the course of the 1980s, the Serbs selflessly sacrificed the existing Kingdom of Serbia for a South Slavic state in which the other nations behaved ungratefully and treacherously. This alleged folly was perpetrated again in socialist Yugoslavia, leading Dobrica Ćosić to quip famously that Serbia won its wars but ended up losing the peace. Ćosić also propagated a narrative according to which the tragedy of the Serbs was the disunity caused by the political division of the Serb nation between communist Partisans and royalist Chetnik forces during the Second World War.Footnote 53 In both Croatia and Serbia the theme of ‘national reconciliation’ weighed prominently in the 1990s.
It can be said that the most active revisionists in Serbia display a tendency to depict any political movements and figures that opposed communism as virtuous, even when these movements or figures were inherently antidemocratic, fascist and/or extensively collaborated with Axis forces during the Second World War. However, matters are not made better by the willingness of some scholars on the left to depict anti-fascist movements and leaders as immaculate because they opposed fascism, and to deny or downplay the crimes committed by the repressive organs of socialist Yugoslavia.
Escaping the Gladiators’ Arena: Towards Better and Broader Historical Research
Plenty of historians in Serbia share the dismay of their foreign colleagues at the staid and repetitive research and the heated, ethnocentric and politicised polemics which all too often have characterised the treatment of the most popular topics of twentieth-century history. To paraphrase Iryna Vushko's and Elidor Mëhilli's articles in this journal on Ukrainian and Albanian historiography, too many questions being asked are old, prolong ‘tedious polemics’, or lead to dead ends, little new knowledge results and political history dominates.Footnote 54
Consciously or not, tired of the ‘here we go again’ feeling, many historians have chosen to avoid these questions and the gladiator fights they occasion in favour of a wide array of other interesting and relatively neglected historical topics. I have over the years spoken to a number of younger historians in Serbia and neighbouring countries who have told me that they have deliberately avoided topics such as fascist and communist crimes because too many of their colleagues pursue these topics through exclusively ideological motives. Although not making quite as drastic a retreat those Eastern European and Soviet historians who after the Second World War withdrew to the cloisters of medieval history in order to try to avoid Marxist-Leninism dogmatism, these historians have discovered that steering away from world wars, oppression and mass atrocities provides peace of mind and opens up new horizons.Footnote 55
The tables of contents of the most prominent Serbian historical journals Istorija XX. veka (History of the Twentieth Century), Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju (Yearbook for Social History) and Tokovi istorije (Currents of History) abound with a wide variety of important topics.Footnote 56 Perusing the most recent decade of these journals as well as recent monographs reveals articles and books about diverse topics including the labour movement, Yugoslav foreign relations and participation in international organisations, migration and Gastarbeiter, the Non-Aligned Movement, Yugoslav volunteers in the Spanish Civil War, ethnic minorities, family and private life, science and technology, public health, religion, urbanisation, education, architecture, film and gender and sexuality, economic and industrial history. Much of this diversification of topics can be traced back to the creation of first the aforementioned Godišnjak in 1994 by Andrej Mitrović and Milan Ristović and then the Udruženje za društvenu istoriju (Association for Social History) in 1998. Mitrović’s essay in the inaugural number of the Godišnjak was a heartfelt plea in a time of extreme isolation and nationalism for a Serbian historiography that would be multidisciplinary, innovative, multifaceted and open to dialogue with foreign colleagues.Footnote 57
Space constraints prohibit me from listing notable works on all the above topics, but I would like to shine the spotlight on some of the most exciting research contributions of recent years. Vladan Z. Jovanović has delved deeply into the history of Serbia and Yugoslavia's rule of interwar Macedonia and Kosovo – formerly known as Old or Southern Serbia – casting a much more critical light on the colonial and nationalist ambitions which Belgrade projected onto this area.Footnote 58 More recently, Jovanović has also expanded into the fascinating history of the opium trade and the criminal underworld in the interwar Balkans.Footnote 59 Vladimir Petrović has published an overview of the concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’, in which he also examines the unfortunate recurrence of the phenomenon in Balkan, Yugoslav and Serbian history.Footnote 60 Moving back to the interwar period, Ivana Dobrivojević-Tomić has produced compelling work on repression and the dictatorship of King Aleksandar.Footnote 61
In the field of gender and women's history, great strides have been made during the past decades.Footnote 62 Neda Božinović wrote a pioneering book about women in Serbian history.Footnote 63 Vera Gudac-Dodić has written about women's education.Footnote 64 Ivana Pantelić has looked at the emancipation of women both in the interwar period and after the Second World War, and has also written a monograph on Jovanka Broz, the ‘first lady’ of socialist Yugoslavia.Footnote 65 Zorana Simić has examined the charitable organisation the Circle of Serb Sisters (Kolo srpskih sestara).Footnote 66 Latinka Perović has edited a volume about women and modernisation and Milan Ristović has edited another volume on family and private life.Footnote 67 Sanja Petrović-Todosijević has written on public health and education.Footnote 68
Srđan Cvetković has done much to uncover the scope of communist repression in Serbia.Footnote 69 He has not only been involved in producing scholarship, but also in identifying the location of previously secret graves of the victims of early communist extrajudicial killings.
Conversely, a number of scholars have explored the non-repressive dimensions of the socialist era. A prime example of this is Radina Vučetić’s highly informative book on the Americanisation of Yugoslav popular culture.Footnote 70 Vučetić has also written about censorship and culture in socialist Yugoslavia.Footnote 71 This type of research interest interconnects with the exhibits and publications of the Museum of Yugoslavia (Muzej Jugoslavije) in Belgrade.Footnote 72 Research like this can to some extent be seen as a reaction to those works of – overwhelmingly political – history that tend to render very negative portraits of position of Serbia and Serbs in socialist Yugoslavia. However, compared to Croatia and some Central European countries, the more nuanced works on life during the socialist period does not seem so far to have elicited such strongly negative and polemical reactions. It would be laudable if historians in Serbia could avoid the problematic but still strangely pervasive assumption that dealing with non-repressive aspects of life under communism is somehow tantamount to a negation of repression under the communist party-state. Finally, also particularly noteworthy as a contribution to transnational history is Vladimir Ivanović’s solid overview of the so-called guest workers (Gastarbeiter) who left Yugoslavia to find work in West Germany and Austria.Footnote 73
Conclusion
By way of rounding out this article, I should also like to point out a few notable developments in the Serbian historical profession which my colleagues have highlighted in our discussions in recent years. Serbian historians’ increased use of archives outside Serbia, including outside of the former Yugoslavia, is a welcome development. Equally positive is the striving of these historians to try to present their findings in a broader context which draws inspiration from, interacts with and reacts to works in other European and even non-European historiographies. This also means an increase in the appearance of Serbian historians at international conferences and workshops to present their research, although not all historians engage equally in this process. For a number of younger historians, mirroring the situation of many other young people in Serbia and neighbouring countries, a mixture of socioeconomic and political push and pull factors lead them to pull up the stakes and emigrate, where quite a few of them launch successful international research careers. These historians can together with foreign colleagues specialising in the Balkans help build bridges, ensuring that the historiography of Serbia and the broader region is informed by constructive dialogue. On the publication front, the number of foreign historians who publish in major Serbian historical journals continues to be very small, as these journals are not seen as being significantly prestigious outside the region. Conversely, relatively few historians residing in Serbia – as opposed to those who have left Serbia – publish in international peer-reviewed history journals.Footnote 74 It is also remains relatively rare that historians from various Yugoslav successor states publish in the history journals of others of these states. It would certainly be a welcome development if, for example, more historians from Serbia published in Croatian journals and vice versa. And Serbia lacks historians’ festivals of the type that are held in Croatia (Kliofest) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (History Fest).
The comparatively difficult socioeconomic situation in which historians in Serbia – and in Southeastern Europe more generally – find themselves still restricts the extent to which many Serbian historians can engage internationally with their colleagues. Moreover, like colleagues in many countries in both Europe and North America, historians in Serbia have in recent years confronted research funding cuts and are increasingly subjected to publication metrics and the ‘publish or perish’ mentality.
Like historians in other countries, there is a visible and positive trend in Serbia regarding multidisciplinarity. Particularly among younger historians, there is a greater openness compared to earlier towards dialogues and collaboration with sociologists, anthropologists and scholars from other disciplines. Particularly noteworthy is the awareness and engagement of a younger generation of historians in Serbia with memory studies and the politics of memory. These historians aim to counter what Miroslav Jovanović criticised as being a stubbornly positivistic Serbian historiography ‘removed from not just post-modernist controversy, but also from key methodological and theoretical dilemmas, considerations and polemics which characterise the main currents of the development of international historiography for more than the past half century’.Footnote 75 There is thus reason to hope that the chronic ‘positivist archivitis’ (pozitivistički arhivitis) which Đorđe Stanković viewed as a widespread affliction among his colleagues is disappearing.Footnote 76
Although there are many areas and topics where Serbian historiography has made handsome strides in the past two decades, there are also some major gaps. Regional and local histories remain relatively few in number. It would be great to see more written about the history of Vojvodina and Sandžak. The same of course applies to Kosovo, regardless of what stance is taken regarding its independence.Footnote 77 Likewise, it would be good to see more – and more open-minded – research on ethnic and religious minorities in Serbia – Jews and Muslims, Albanians, Czechs, Germans, Hungarians, Roma, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Turks and others – and their interaction with the majority population.
In an interview in 1999 the late Andrej Mitrović noted that towards the end of Yugoslavia a tendency emerged in Serbia to portray Yugoslav history as a vain experiment which the Serbs had wasted their energy on during an entire century.Footnote 78 But Mitrović also made another very essential and valid point for Serbian history. Pointing to the famous ‘Fischer controversy’ about the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War, Mitrović stated that Fischer had proved that a state, society or nation ‘does not lose prestige by recognising the historical truth about itself’.
As in so many other countries, the errors and atrocities committed in the name of ‘our nation’ have bedevilled historical scholarship in Serbia. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, the father of the modern Serbian language, also dabbled in history and cooperated with none other than Leopold von Ranke. Interestingly, Karadžić was criticised for writing about how Ottoman Turks had been killed in Serbia in 1809. His critics believed that this dishonoured the Serb nation and by highlighting crimes which Serbs had committed. To this Karadžić responded that such criticism betrayed a false understanding of history. ‘It is true that this is a disgrace for Serbs, but it was a disgrace to [commit the killings], and when it has already been done, it is not worth hiding in history’.Footnote 79 Two centuries later, Olga Manojlović-Pintar reminds us and her colleagues that history should also be about investigating and ascertaining one's own responsibility or even guilt for historical errors and wrongs.Footnote 80 History cannot just be about glorifying the nation state, and historians must resist those who ‘fear a catharsis of the Serb nation’.Footnote 81
Ultimately, the historical profession in Serbia will have to decide what the primary reason for historical scholarship is. Will the remnants of a nineteenth-century view, in which the purpose of historical scholarship is to promote the interests and accomplishments of the nation state and its leaders, prove resilient and dominant? Certainly, this seems likely in a country in which so many historians depend on the funding of a state that continues to adhere to a nationalist agenda. And the recent decreases of international and European funding risk increasing the isolation of historians in Serbia. Or will a more progressive view, in which historical scholarship prioritises social and political criticism and scepticism of grand national narratives, instead emerge triumphant? To be sure, these are discussions that inform many other historiographies – from the besieged progressive historians and other scholars in neighbouring Hungary to debates regarding the place of slavery and other historical wrongs in the historiography and school textbooks of the United States.
Finally, the inexorable passage of time means that younger historians in Serbia increasingly have no living memory of Yugoslavia or, soon, of the 1990s. As Olga Manojlović-Pintar mused already a decade ago, it is to be hoped that they will be liberated from the ideological shackles and gladiatorial arenas in which some of their older colleagues have laboured and fought.Footnote 82 Like a number of other historians, Manojlović-Pintar thinks and hopes that the historians of the future will be better placed to write history – including the history of the traumatic collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing atrocious wars – sine ire et studio.
