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Yugoslavia was among a ‘few countries in the world,’ explained a 1967 Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs report, ‘with which the U.S. has such close cultural relations’ and where scholars and political and economic leaders have been so exposed to the United States ‘through the exchange program.’ In its post-Stalinist assessment, Yugoslavia undoubtedly demonstrated ‘great courage […] in meeting its difficulties and applied imagination and adaptability to its problems’; USIA policy generally, and its exchange diplomacy particularly, encouraged the country
organizing American exhibitions at Yugoslav trade fairs, this ingredient remained an essential incentive of the US public diplomacy agenda. Much of American mass culture consumption took place in private: people watched television in their living rooms, the youth paid to see Hollywood movies in quasi-private places of darkened movie theatres, the majority consumed American music via radio or records in homes or dance clubs. Outside private homes, the entertainment industry served effectively and successfully ‘as a site of exposure to American mass culture’ and
This book explains theoretical work in postcolonial and postsocialist studies to offer a novel and distinctive insight into how Yugoslavia is configured by, and through, race. It presents the history of how ideas of racialised difference have been translated globally in Yugoslavia. The book provides a discussion on the critical race scholarship, global historical sociologies of 'race in translation' and south-east European cultural critique to show that the Yugoslav region is deeply embedded in global formations of race. It considers the geopolitical imagination of popular culture; the history of ethnicity; and transnational formations of race before and during state socialism, including the Non-Aligned Movement. The book also considers the post-Yugoslav discourses of security, migration, terrorism and international intervention, including the War on Terror and the refugee crisis. It elaborates how often-neglected aspects of the history of nationhood and migration reveal connections that tie the region into the global history of race. The book also explains the linkage between ethnic exclusivism and territory in the ethnopolitical logic of the Bosnian conflict and in the internationally mediated peace agreements that enshrined it: 'apartheid cartography'. Race and whiteness remained perceptible in post-war Bosnian identity discourses as new, open-ended forms of post-conflict international intervention developed.
2441Chapter7 16/10/02 8:06 am Page 183 7 Tito’s Yugoslavia and after: Communism, post-Communism, and the war in Croatia Not only is the Yugoslav reality as twisted as the tunnels that held the Minotaur, but the observer keeps coming face to face with himself, seeing his own image spring out from what he thinks are the events of history, unable to separate projection from observation, fact from reflection, self from other. (E. A. Hammel in The Yugoslav Labyrinth) After the Second World War and the devastation caused by German and Italian invasion, the
4 Postsocialism, borders, security and race after Yugoslavia The historical legacies shown in the last chapter do much to explain the contradictory racialised imaginaries of the Yugoslav region's ‘cultural archive’ ( Chapter 1 ) and the shifting nature of translations of race into discourses of ethnic and national belonging ( Chapter 2 ). Though many past applications of postcolonial thought to south-east Europe have bracketed race away, identifications with racialised narratives of Europeanness predated state socialism, yet alone the collapse
The book represents the first comprehensive account of the public and cultural diplomacy campaigns carried out by the United States in Yugoslavia during the height of the Cold War. Based on extensive multinational archival research, as well as private papers and personal interviews, this book charts the reasoning behind the US campaign and the impact it had on specific Yugoslav communities and individuals. American soft power, as a form of cultural power, deliberately sought to ‘open up’ a relatively closed society through the provision and diffusion of liberal traditions, ideas, and ideals. Tito and his Party allowed USIA and State Department cultural programs to enter Yugoslavia, liberated from Soviet control, to open cultural centres and pavilions at its main fairs, to broadcast Voice of America, and have American artists tour the country. Exchanges of intellectual and political personnel helped foster the US–Yugoslav relationship, but posed severe ideological challenges for both countries. By providing new insights into porous borders between freedom and coercion in Tito’s regime, the book shows how public diplomacy acted as an external input for Yugoslav liberalization and dissident movements. Meant for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the cultural Cold War, international relations, and diplomacy, this book fills a gap in the literature by looking at the political role of culture in US–Yugoslav bilateral relations, analysing the fluid links between information and propaganda, and the unintended effects propaganda can produce beyond the control of producers and receivers.
3 Transnational formations of race before and during Yugoslav state socialism In domains from the history of popular entertainment to that of ethnicity and migration, ideas of race, as well as ethnicity and religion, have demonstrably formed part of how people from the Yugoslav region have understood their place in Europe and the world. The region's history during, and after, the era of direct European colonialism differed from the USA's, France's or Brazil's; but this did not exclude it from the networks of ‘race in translation’ (Stam and
The book examines the role of the elite representatives of ‘the last Yugoslav generation’ from the spheres of media, art, culture and politics in rearticulating and redefining Yugoslav socialism and the youth’s link to the state. It argues that the Yugoslav youth elite of the 1980s essentially strove to decouple Yugoslavism and dogmatic socialism as the country faced a multi-level crisis where old and established practices and doctrines began to lose credibility. Hailed as ‘a new political generation’, they sought to reinvent institutional youth activism, to reform and democratise the youth organisation and hence open up new spaces for cultural and political expression. One line of argumentation targeted the ruling elite, exposed its responsibility for the poor implementation of socialist self-management and the necessity to thoroughly revise the socialist model without abandoning its basic principles; and a later trend in which experimentation with liberal concepts and values became dominant. The first type of critique - reform socialism - was almost completely abandoned during the very last years of the decade, as more and more dominant players in the youth sphere started to turn away from socialism and came to appropriate the discourse of human rights, pluralism, free market and European integration. The book maintains that this generation embodied a particular sense of citizenship and framed its generational identity and activism within the confines of what the author refers to as ‘layered Yugoslavism’, where one’s ethno-national and Yugoslav sense of belonging were perceived as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive.
Alliance politics theory and the post-Yugoslav states Alliances face many challenges, and among them are “gravitational distance,” “typological distance,” and “attributional distance.” The first pertains to a situation in which a strong power is located too far from states that it might want to support and protect, and its “gravitational” pull is
This article focuses on the judicial consideration of the scientific analysis of the Tomašica mass grave, in the Prijedor municipality of Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Often referred to as the largest mass grave in Europe since the Second World War, this grave was fully discovered in September 2013 and the scientific evidence gathered was included in the prosecution of Ratko Mladić before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Based on the exhaustive analysis of all the publicly available trial transcripts, this article presents how the Tomašica evidence proved symptomatic of the way in which forensic sciences and international criminal justice intertwine and of the impact of the former over the latter on the admissibility of evidence, the conduct of proceedings and the qualification of the crimes perpetrated.