FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA: THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA IN 1918
FROM UTOPIA TO DYSTOPIA: THE CREATION OF YUGOSLAVIA IN 1918

Summary/Abstract: The creation of Yugoslavia was not a development that could be predicted, let alone treated as a politically viable project, before the outbreak of the Great War. It was the result of unique circumstances and geopolitical shifts created by the war itself. After it came into being, its advocates tended to reinterpret the past to make the new state look like the natural result of profound long-term forces. This view assumed that the alleged ethnolinguistic-racial kinship provided the foundation for the South Slavs’ cultural and political compatibilities. This was a myth, long outdated even at the time it was applied. Far from confirming such claims, the unification was rushed following the Croats’ realization that they needed the common state to protect their distinct national interests. On the other hand, the birth of Yugoslavia resulted in the Serbs’ “national demobilization,” which ideally served the projects of national integration of others. The scene was thus set for the futile interwar quest for stability, for the horrors of Axis occupation, for Tito’s long dictatorship, and for the final bloody disintegration. Yugoslavia was an imagined community par excellence, based on faulty intellectual constructs. It was flawed ab initio, doomed in any shape or form.

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