Jugoslovanska socialisticna nacija : ideja in realizacija (1952-1958)

Abstract

This book focuses on the Yugoslav nation building project in the 1950s. The author argues that after World War Two, the Yugoslav Communist, in compliance with Marxist-Leninist though, tried to build a Yugoslav socialist nation. This became visible especially after the Tito-Stalin split in 1948 when the Cominform countries sought to harm Yugoslavia by instigating internal national frictions. This pushed the Communist Party of Yugoslavia to speed up the project inherent in the thesis of "the merging of nations" by trying to abolish national conflicts and create a Yugoslav socialist nation. This process can be seen in several different fields: the creation of the Serbo-Croatian standard language in 1954, the attempts to define Yugoslav culture and by bringing a "Yugoslav" category into the national census of 1953. In addition, Yugoslavism was promoted in schools, literature and popular culture. With the constitutional reform of 1953, the Party downgraded the republics' role, which was accentuated by the new commune economic system of 1956. The Party also used other methods, like rewriting history, reshaping memory, building Yugoslav institutions, etc. All of this was necessary to fit Edvard Kardelj's definition of nation. Kardelj proceeded from Stalin's definition of a nation, adding social division of labor as an additional criterion. Through careful research of stenographical records of the Yugoslav and Slovene Communist Party and of printed media, the author argues that Socialist Yugoslavism had a clear national connotation and that Slovene Communists started to oppose this project by the late 1950s.