Clio amid the Ruins

Yugoslavia and Its Predecessors in Recent Historiography

DUŠAN J. DJORDJEVICH

What seest thou else In the dark backward and abysm of time?

— Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.49

Exit into History, The Rebirth of History, Return to Diversity, The Haunted Land, Balkan Ghosts. ... Since 1989, "past as prologue" has been a dominant motif in accounts of contemporary Eastern Europe, as these titles of some of the most popular books on the subject indicate. There are several reasons for this. One is the notion that people of the region are unusually preoccupied with their histories, real and imagined, and tend to view the present in terms of the past. This tendency seemed especially significant with the new freedoms and uncertainties of life after communism. Outside observers, too, looked to precommunist Eastern Europe for clues to the new era, as awareness grew of persistent, historically charged local conflicts previously subordinated, in fact or perception, to superpower rivalry. Moreover, the fall of the Wall happened to roughly coincide with a "turn to history" in various social sciences against their commonly ahistorical stance since the 1950s.

For those who write and teach about the history of Eastern Europe, these developments would seem to be a boon. And to an extent they have been, at least in terms of heightened interest in the region's past among social scientists and lay audiences. At the same time, however, there has been dismay in the profession at the often crude manner in which history has been interpreted and used.

Nowhere has this been more true than in the case of the former Yugoslavia. When fighting broke out, there was little knowledge of the country's history among Western publics, especially in North America, and thus a marked inability or reluctance to interpret the state's disintegration on its own terms. Instead, simple messages from more familiar history — the Sarajevo assassination as catalyst of world war; the Munich Pact as appeasement; Vietnam as quagmire — were put forward as dubious guides. The dominant "ice-box" model of East European communism has meant that Titoist Yugoslavia is all but ignored; instead, Tito's death and the collapse of communism are claimed to have reanimated a more essential historical pattern, often reduced to serial slaughters and vague, intractable, age-old "Balkan" antagonisms, more often referred to (especially by critics) as "ancient ethnic hatreds." Masquerading as historical explanations, such claims are in fact profoundly dismissive of the need for historical knowledge; a turn from, not to history. So a good deal of scholarly energy is spent combating this type of simplistic conventional wisdom. Unfortunately, these efforts have had limited effect on popular understanding, and they may have actually impoverished academic discourse: denunciation of the ancient-hatreds thesis and similar breezy reductionisms has become almost de rigueur in scholarly texts, where the author is usually preaching to the converted.

At stake of course is not simply historical understanding for its own sake. Behind the ancient-hatreds thesis, there often is, or is seen to be, an argument against outside involvement and in favor of ethnic partition. At the other extreme, interpretations that dismiss the force of history altogether and focus solely on contemporary elites can serve the cause of intervention of one kind or another. Dueling historical analogies are even more clearly tied to rival policies.

Political passions surrounding rival interpretations run as high in academia as anywhere else. This stems in part from historians' awareness that they are inescapably participants in politically charged, competing visions of the future as well as of the past. More simply, it has also been true that in East European studies (as in other fields, to be sure), "special pleading, based on national self-images and stereotypes, can infuse even works of scrupulous scholarship and high erudition," as the British historian of Yugoslavia Mark Wheeler has written. So it is perhaps not surprising that Yugoslavia's violent collapse has led to a high degree of polarization and frequent recriminations among those who study the region.

Unsurprising, perhaps, but regrettable. Too rarely will Yugoslav specialists of different political persuasions appear together at a conference or in a book, addressing each other's arguments directly, respectfully, and productively. Too often, criticism and debate revolve implicitly or explicitly around the question: Which side are you on? Of course, focusing on the moral and political assumptions, motivations, or implications of scholarship is perfectly legitimate. Even the most politically charged fields, however, can and should be subject to more academically grounded evaluation as well, as shown by the valuable reflections in recent years on the historiography of Russia and the Soviet Union.

The historiography of the South Slavs might have seen similar assessments, had Yugoslavia's breakup been more consensual and less subject to debate over international policy. As it is, the field is overdue for a checkup. There has been an overwhelming flood of publications since the early 1990s. Most of the new books will have short shelf lives, but the number of valuable, serious works has been rising steadily. Some of the historical writing is based on new archival research (mostly conducted during the 1980s, a period of generally freer research environments that ended with the disruptions and destruction of the 1990s). Much more is primarily synthetic or interpretive in nature.

In this chapter, I survey recent work on the modern history of the Yugoslav lands, hoping to make a contribution toward evaluating the state of the field and to encourage discussion of its needs and achievements in the wake of the country's collapse. A few notes on the chapter's scope: I emphasize general trends in the historiography of Southeast Europe at the expense of a more comprehensive bibliography and closer examination of the monographic literature on South Slav...