Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class

Making and Breaking the Yugoslav Working Class

Author: Goran Musić

Publisher: Central European University Press

Published: 2021-05-14

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9789633863398

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Workers' self-management was one of the unique features of communist Yugoslavia. Goran Musić has investigated the changing ways in which blue-collar workers perceived the recurring crises of the regime. Two self-managed metal enterprises, one in Serbia another in Slovenia, provide the frame of the analysis in the time span between 1945 and 1989. These two factories became famous for strikes in 1988 that evoked echoes in popular discourses in former Yugoslavia. Drawing on interviews, factory publications and other media, local archives, and secondary literature, Musić analyzes the two cases, going beyond the clichés of political manipulation from the top and workers' intrinsic attraction to nationalism. The author explains how, in the later phase of communist Yugoslavia, growing social inequalities among the workers and undemocratic practices inside the self-managed enterprises facilitated the spread of a nationalist and pro-market ideology on the shop floors. Yet rather than being a mass taken advantage of by populist leaders, the working class Musić presents is one with agency and voice, a force that played an important role in shaping the fate of the country. The book thus seeks to open a debate on the social processes leading up to the dissolution of Yugoslavia.


The Butcher's Trail

The Butcher's Trail

Author: Julian Borger

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2016-01-19

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1590516052

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The gripping, untold story of The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and how the perpetrators of Balkan war crimes were captured by the most successful manhunt in history Written with a thrilling narrative pull, The Butcher’s Trail chronicles the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague. Borger recounts how Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić—both now on trial in The Hague—were finally tracked down, and describes the intrigue behind the arrest of Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav president who became the first head of state to stand before an international tribunal for crimes perpetrated in a time of war. Based on interviews with former special forces soldiers, intelligence officials, and investigators from a dozen countries—most speaking about their involvement for the first time—this book reconstructs a fourteen-year manhunt carried out almost entirely in secret. Indicting the worst war criminals that Europe had known since the Nazi era, the ICTY ultimately accounted for all 161 suspects on its wanted list, a feat never before achieved in political and military history.


Europe from the Balkans to the Urals

Europe from the Balkans to the Urals

Author: Renéo Lukic

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 472

ISBN-13: 9780198292005

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The disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1991 shed entirely new light on the character of their political systems. There is now a need to re-examine many of the standard interpretations of Soviet and Yugoslav politics. This book is a comparative study of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union - as multinational, federal communist states - and the reaction of European and US foreign policy to the parallel collapses of these nations. The authors describe the structural similarities in the destabilization of the two countries, providing great insight into the demise of both.


A History of Yugoslavia

A History of Yugoslavia

Author: Marie-Janine Calic

Publisher: Purdue University Press

Published: 2019-02-15

Total Pages: 443

ISBN-13: 1612495648

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Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state survive for so long, and where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of Europe in the twentieth century? A History of Yugoslavia provides a concise, accessible, comprehensive synthesis of the political, cultural, social, and economic life of Yugoslavia—from its nineteenth-century South Slavic origins to the bloody demise of the multinational state of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Calic takes a fresh and innovative look at the colorful, multifaceted, and complex history of Yugoslavia, emphasizing major social, economic, and intellectual changes from the turn of the twentieth century and the transition to modern industrialized mass society. She traces the origins of ethnic, religious, and cultural divisions, applying the latest social science approaches, and drawing on the breadth of recent state-of-the-art literature, to present a balanced interpretation of events that takes into account the differing perceptions and interests of the actors involved. Uniquely, Calic frames the history of Yugoslavia for readers as an essentially open-ended process, undertaken from a variety of different regional perspectives with varied composite agenda. She shuns traditional, deterministic explanations that notorious Balkan hatreds or any other kind of exceptionalism are to blame for Yugoslavia’s demise, and along the way she highlights the agency of twentieth-century modern mass society in the politicization of differences. While analyzing nuanced political and social-economic processes, Calic describes the experiences and emotions of ordinary people in a vivid way. As a result, her groundbreaking work provides scholars and learned readers alike with an accessible, trenchant, and authoritative introduction to Yugoslavia's complex history.


The Chetnik Movement and the Yugoslav Resistance

The Chetnik Movement and the Yugoslav Resistance

Author: Matteo J. Milazzo

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2019-12-01

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1421433400

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Originally published in 1975. This book fills a gap in the historical knowledge of wartime Yugoslavia. Focusing on the Chetnik movement provides a better understanding of the various ways that important segments of the population, including members of the Yugoslav officer corps and Serb civilians, perceived and responded to the occupation. The partisans' ultimate success does not conceal the fact that during the greater part of the war, several armed groups, owing at least some sort of allegiance to Mihailovic, chose very different courses of resistance. The overriding question for Milazzo is how a movement whose leadership was in no sense pro-Axis found itself progressively drawn into a hopelessly compromising set of relationships with the occupation authorities and the Quisling regime. What was it about the situation in occupied Yugoslavia and the Serb officers' response to that state of affairs that prevented them from carrying out serious anti-Axis activity or engaging in effective collaboration? The author attends to the emergence, organization, and failure of the Chetniks, the regional particularities of the movement, and Mihailovic's efforts to establish his own authority over the widely scattered non-Communist armed formations. The author also discusses the domestic opposition to Tito and the complex reality of the national and political civil war in Yugoslavia.


Metropolitan Belgrade

Metropolitan Belgrade

Author: Jovana Babović

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2018-06-12

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0822983397

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Metropolitan Belgrade presents a sociocultural history of the city as an entertainment mecca during the 1920s and 1930s. It unearths the ordinary and extraordinary leisure activities that captured the attention of urban residents and considers the broader role of popular culture in interwar society. As the capital of the newly unified Yugoslavia, Belgrade became increasingly linked to transnational networks after World War I, as jazz, film, and cabaret streamed into the city from abroad during the early 1920s. Belgrade’s middle class residents readily consumed foreign popular culture as a symbol of their participation in European metropolitan modernity. The pleasures they derived from entertainment, however, stood at odds with their civic duty of promoting highbrow culture and nurturing the Serbian nation within the Yugoslav state. Ultimately, middle-class Belgraders learned to reconcile their leisured indulgences by defining them as bourgeois refinement. But as they endowed foreign entertainment with higher cultural value, they marginalized Yugoslav performers and their lower-class patrons from urban life. Metropolitan Belgrade tells the story of the Europeanization of the capital’s middle class and how it led to spatial segregation, cultural stratification, and the destruction of the Yugoslav entertainment industry during the interwar years.