The last Yugoslav generation

The rethinking of youth politics and cultures in late socialism

Ljubica Spaskovska

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526106346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This promising addition to the growing literature on the history of late socialism charts the development of youth culture and politics in socialist Yugoslavia, focusing on the 1980s. Rather than examining the 1980s as a mere prelude to the violent collapse of the country in the 1990s, the book recovers the multiplicity of political visions and cultural developments that evolved at the time and that have been largely forgotten in subsequent discussion. The youth of this generation, the author convincingly argues, sought to rearticulate the Yugoslav socialist framework in order to reinvigorate it and 'democratise' it, rather than destroy it altogether.

1

‘Pockets of freedom’: the youth sphere and its spaces of negotiation and dissent

Moje su nebo vezali žicom

Po mome mozgu crtaju šeme

Žele još jednu kopiju svoju

Da njome vrate nestalo vreme.

Al’ ne dam svoje ja ideale

I ješću snove umesto hleba

Ja svoju sreću nosim sa sobom

Ona je parče slobodnog neba.¹

‘Nebo’, Električni orgazam (1981)

In the 1980s, the voices of dissent coming from the young Yugoslav generation were not, for the most part, expressed within a clearly delineated alternative sphere, but rather within the wide framework of the SSOJ. Whilst most work on political alternatives in late socialism has focused on the rise of alternative spheres or parallel societies, contention and negotiation from within official institutions has seldom been studied in detail.² Addressing the last Yugoslav generation through the ways it articulated its generational specificities and preoccupations in the institutional youth sphere – more specifically in media and culture – this chapter maps the wide, decentralised youth infrastructure of the SSOJ as a form of public space. It outlines the processes of change in the late socialist youth institutional realm and reflects specifically on the ways contestations nested, became voiced or accommodated within the existing framework of the SSOJ. Arguably, the very existence of its decentralised network allowed for novel youth cultures and politics to emerge and develop – through the venues, events and in particular through the youth media/press network. In addition, the chapter reflects on the limits of toleration, the appropriate forms of expression, and the acceptable boundaries of freedom and criticism.

As was the case with other socialist states, the youth was considered one of the most important pillars of Yugoslav society. The widely popular slogan Tito–Partija–Omladina–Armija [Tito–the Party–the Youth–the Army] points to the importance given to the youth, as a separate pillar in the socialist order. Hence the SSOJ was established as one of the five ‘socio-political organisations’ in socialist Yugoslavia, alongside the Socialist Alliance of Working People (SSRNJ), the Union of Fighters of the National-Liberation Struggle, the Alliance of Trade Unions and the SKJ. As such, it was formally part of the political system, in particular through its delegates to the SSRNJ and to the various chambers of the municipal, republican and federal assemblies.³ However, not all members of the SSOJ were members of the Party. Membership in the SKJ was voluntary, albeit desirable; from the 1960s onwards, and in particular during the 1980s, the number of SKJ members below the age of twenty-eight began to decrease. Seen as a critical pillar of the Yugoslav socialist project, the state invested in the youth both symbolic and economic capital with the hope that the sense of ‘Yugoslav socialist patriotism’ would supersede and replace narrower circles of belonging or ethnic and class divisions.

The sense of a multi-level crisis and the decline of trust in the Party and in the SSOJ in the first half of the 1980s led many young activists to argue that the institutional youth sphere had to be reformed. In the early 1980s, youngsters who wished to express alternatives found possibilities in the ‘peripheral’ parts of the SSOJ, i.e. in the cultural realm and the youth media. It was in particular the decentralised nature of the SSOJ which allowed ‘pockets of freedom’ to be created or (re)claimed by a new generation of political activists, journalists, musicians and artists, within its very institutional infrastructure – consequently producing cross-fertilisations of ideas and initiatives that did much to promote a burgeoning music/media scene. By the late 1980s, most of the major youth magazines contained hardly any trace of what was their originally conceived role of acting as official organs of the branches of the SSOJ. While differences between federal units and regional variation have to be acknowledged, a new pan-Yugoslav network of alternative voices was created though the SSOJ’s cultural and media infrastructure. Yet, in the first half of the 1980s, these challenges remained on the periphery: it was not until the second half of the decade that the SSOJ began to reinvent itself as a space where political alternatives could be articulated and where a more pronounced challenge towards the institutional set-up as a whole emerged.

The processes of contention, negotiation and change unfolding within the youth sphere were certainly embedded within the larger societal and political developments and the all-pervading discourse and sense of crisis. A history of a relatively liberal youth culture and a semi-free press coupled with ongoing processes of freer public debate and a consensus on political reform contributed to the creation of the youth media as an arena for various articulations of demands for freedom of speech and critical reflection on the contemporary socio-political reality. Essentially, the last Yugoslav generation chose not to withdraw or completely opt out of the institutional framework, but met the state in its own ‘official’ territory and challenged it there.

Evidently, the debates and changes which ensued in the institutional youth sphere were a consequence of the crisis and set the organisation on a path to reinvent itself, deal with withdrawal in active membership and participation and respond to increased criticism both from without and from within. The principal question this chapter engages with is how the transformation of the official rhetoric, politics and practices within the institutional youth sphere unfolded. How did the youth organisation engage with and respond to the wider socio-political crisis and its own internal crisis in terms of cadres, democratisation and reform? It was the ‘peripheral’ parts of the youth infrastructure (the youth cultural venues) which were the most porous and open to alternative culture and new forms of expression, with the youth press as the most vocal, popular and visible part of the youth institutional framework. It progressively carved out new spaces for debate and rethinking of the socio-political reality and articulated demands for freedom of speech, all the while navigating a series of bans, court cases, pressures and public stigmatisation.

Children of socialism: Yugoslav ‘socialist democracy’ and its (dis)contents

Stemming from the interwar youth revolutionary wing of the Yugoslav Communist Party founded in 1919, the youth organisation went through several organisational reforms.⁴ In the immediate post-war period it was led by and composed of youngsters who had some experience or memory of the Second World War. Although by the mid-1950s the Yugoslav elite had relinquished socialist realism for high modernism, and Western cultural influences including rock and jazz were making inroads into youth culture, it was not until the late 1960s that a whole new generation born in the 1940s had come of age and marked a radical, enduring shift in Yugoslav youth politics and culture. Their coming of age coincided with the significant reform wave in politics and economics after 1965 – most notably the sacking of the secret police chief Aleksandar Ranković in 1966 and the launch of the first foreign capital investments in 1968. The ‘sixty-eighters’ were indeed the first children of Yugoslav self-managing socialism, but they were also well versed in European and global contemporary philosophical, cultural and political theories, events and debates. This knowledge and Yugoslavia’s openness significantly informed their critique targeting the ‘old’, revolutuionary partisan generation as well as their subversive cultural activism which nevertheless nested within the existing youth infrastructure. From the perspective of official youth politics, ‘internationalism’ was seen as ‘an integral part of the socialist upbringing of young people’.⁵ The desired level of familiarity with contemporary international relations, the social and political movements around the world, the international labour movement, and the politics of peaceful coexistence was to be achieved through programmes of youth exchange and mobility. Hence, anti-imperialism and solidarity with the liberation movements formed only one part of what ‘internationalism’ stood for in the Yugoslav context: support for anti-colonial movements, safeguarding peace, a global struggle for socialism and progress underpinned by the ideas of (national) freedom and (socialist) democracy. A spontaneous anti-imperialist fervour marked the protests following the execution of Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and the mass anti-war Vietnam demonstrations in 1965.⁶ The intellectual, political or artistic outlook and activism of the post-war generation and in particular of a significant part of the sixty-eighters was informed by contemporary developments and debates globally, and in particular by those launched by the 1968 student protets in Western Europe. In the words of Borka Pavićević (born 1947), a playwright and cultural activist who took part in the 1968 student protest, ‘I think for my generation internationalism was something completely natural. It need not be labelled as such, but it was that ideational, public and literary convergence – Marx, Mao, Marcuse, the Frankfurt School. All of that existed as one spiritual milieu’.⁷ Velimir Ćurgus Kazimir (born 1948) was also part of the 1968 student movement. His testimony echoes that sense of a European progressive left consciousness and pinpoints a crucial issue that would be taken up by the 1980s generation – freedom of speech:

Most of us were leftist, but we were not communist. That’s the big difference, in particular [relevant] today, when one speaks from an anti-communist position which assumes that everyone who belongs to the Left deep inside is a Stalinist. And here we come to this paradox, when talking about 1968, and I belong to that generation, that we were the critics of what we were calling the ‘red bourgeoisie’, the undemocratic nature of the system, the manipulation of the press. One of our primary demands was freedom of speech and freedom of the media. … We never perceived the Soviet Union as a place where we would like to live, that was rather the West, Scandinavia, even the USA.

It was in particular after the 1968 student riots that there was an increase in the number of scholarly studies of the youth. Perceived both as a potential problem and as a resource, the youth was put under scholarly scrutiny throughout the 1970s and the 1980s with the aim of ‘establishing the reasons for its discontent, but also of proving its attachment to socialism’.⁸ A 1971 study on Yugoslav youth pointed to its ‘litmus-paper-like nature’, i.e. its ability to act as a ‘sensible indicator’ for various societal phenomena or anomalies, assuming ‘an a priori criticism towards the ruling structures’.⁹ Sociologists preserved t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: revisiting the 1980s through a generation lens
• 1 ‘Pockets of freedom’: the youth sphere and its spaces of negotiation and dissent
• 2 ‘Comrades, I don’t believe you!’: youth culture and the rethinking of historical legacies
• 3 ‘The phantom of liberty’: new youth activism
• 4 The eighty-eighters: the arena of youth politics and the break-up of Yugoslavia
• Conclusion: rethinking youth politics and culture in late socialist Yugoslavia
• Select bibliography
• Index