The Paradoxes of a Regional Construction
The Paradoxes of a Regional Construction

Summary/Abstract: From the time of its constitution as part of Serbia, the political and cultural debate over Vojvodina’s (Serbia and Montenegro) place on the discursive raised new issues. This situation continually generates intense conflicts focusing on questions of regional loyalty and national identity among intellectuals and politicians. Serbia is an unfinished nation-state, and issues related to the territorial frame of a nation-state appear whenever structural transformation becomes evident. It should not be forgotten that re-actualizing Vojvodina as a regional and multiethnic locus where different cultural, social, and political items are exchanged remains a possibility. In order to properly depict the unique character of Vojvodina, wide-ranging, everyday and economic relations between members of different ethnic groups should be mentioned. Comprehensive communication and well-coordinated realization of common interests illustrate habitual behavioral pattern-making it necessary to observe both elements of micro-history and the impact of accumulated social capital that underlay Vojvodina’s political history. The discursive construction of regionalists reifies regional identity and neglects: a) the tensions between the nationalizing and regionalizing processes, b) the claims of national minorities which are described as the continual inscription of equality into structural inequality between majority and minority.

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