Ipostazele postcomunismului balcanic: iugo-nostalgia ca formă de „recuperare” a memoriei
Stances of post-communism in the Balkans: Yugo-nostalgia as a way of `recovering` memory

Summary/Abstract: Yugoslavia illustrated the profile of the only communist society in which the `initiatory` metaphor “ex oriente lux”, shared by all of Stalin`s disciples, metamorphosed into the much more seductive “ex occidente luxus”. Despite this evidence, the fall of the `Iron Curtain` brought not only the collapse of the regime, but also of the country fancied by Tito. The civil wars turned Yugoslavia into a sum of (pseudo)states, gnawed by suspicion and in an endless strive for self-identity. Save for Slovenia, the former republics, in the aftermath of the repeated ethnic cleansings of the civil war, continued to be `miniature Yugoslavias`. `Decoded` - in the historical and sociological register – as a collective form of `filtering` recent history, Yugo-nostalgia equally constitutes an opportunity for emotional attachment to the former motherland, as well as for idealizing the fragments of life lived together in a country that ceased to exist. Yugo-nostalgia exists today in multiple forms, from the embodiment of the fantasies of an essential Yugoslavian past, to a more reflexive variety that envelops evasively and ambiguously this past. From the pilgrimages along the traces of Tito, to lexicons of Yugoslav mythology, Yugo-nostalgia is experienced both culturally and individually, directly or indirectly, both by the elites, as well as the masses. As a form of collective memory, it is, in fact, a `two-edged sword`: one watches that the safety fount never dries up, while the other prevents the members of the society from developing their critical-thinking skills and the independence from tradition. Tito`s policy encouraged the assertion and preservation of regional identities, concurrently with the efforts to grow a shared conscience based on a Yugoslav identity. Half a century of shared history, which led to an overlapping of territories, languages and customs, guaranteeing the continuity of mutually-shared relations inside Yugoslavia, was replaced by the ideology of exclusion, which segregated the inhabitants along cultural, linguistic, religious, and economic lines. Tito`s political epigones from Slovenia and Croatia divided the country by opposing the purportedly `civilized` (recte European) nations with the `primitive` groups from the South and East, perceived with a hardly concealed disdain, as `lairs of orientalism`. The `refuge` in Yugo-nostalgia, as a subjective personal/group `history`, can be interpreted, as such, also as an answer to the finding according to which a commonly assented history was aggressively subordinated to the social commands of the new political deciders.

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