Divided or Common Post-Yugoslav Memory of Yugoslavness?
Divided or Common Post-Yugoslav Memory of Yugoslavness?

Summary/Abstract: At the end of Yugoslavia’s existence, as deep political, economic, and social crises made the federation’s collapse increasingly unavoidable, intellectual debate shifted toward what, if anything, might survive from the Yugoslav community. This issue became even more pressing after the state’s violent and traumatic breakup. A key concern was whether former Yugoslavs would continue to share a common symbolic and cultural space encompassing both high and popular culture, collective myths, and figures of identification after decades of coexistence within a single yet highly diverse polity. This question was complicated by the evident failure of both the Yugoslav political and socio-economic system and the broader project of Yugoslav identity. Only a relatively small portion of the population had embraced that identity in a national, rather than merely civic, sense. In the immediate aftermathof the collapse, public discourse and political practice were dominated by fragmentation: separatism, deliberate breaks with the shared past, revisionist narratives, and the amplification of differences whether longstanding or newly constructed. At the same time, various intellectual and cultural initiatives emerged that sought to preserve, reinterpret, and circulate elements of Yugoslav popular culture. These efforts aimed to reconstruct a supranational “community of memory” through shared cultural references, while avoiding both the ideological legacy of socialist Yugoslavia and uncritical Yugonostalgia. Their goal was to create a more reflective, inclusive, and accessible narrative for post-Yugoslav audiences. Among these, the Lexicon of YU-Mythology became especially influential, along with the debates and cultural activities it inspired. It helped shape post-Yugoslav memory by collecting and legitimizing dispersed, often positive recollections of everyday life before the collapse. In doing so, it outlined spaces where a shared memory could persist or be reimagined, despite ongoing divisions. This raises a central question: is post-Yugoslav memory primarily fragmented along national lines, or does it retain a transnational dimension? This issue is closely tied to identity formation and remains both analytically significant and socially relevant.

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