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Volume 69 Issue 2-3 - Kosovo in the Yugoslav 1980s

Issue of Comparative Southeast European Studies

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Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available November 17, 2021

Frontmatter

Page range: i-v

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Kosovo in the Yugoslav 1980s

Guest Editors: Hannes Grandits, Robert Pichler and Ruža Fotiadis

Open Access November 17, 2021

Kosovo in the 1980s – Yugoslav Perspectives and Interpretations

Robert Pichler, Hannes Grandits, Ruža Fotiadis

Page range: 171-182

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Abstract

The introductory article in this issue argues for greater consideration of the impact of the Kosovo crisis on political developments in other Yugoslav republics and on the entire federal state structure of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. It also calls for a closer examination of alternative paths that were considered by various actors to resolve the conflict but were not or could not be pursued. Such a discussion of developments in Kosovo in the 1980s in a broader Yugoslav perspective would, it is argued, also have the potential to contribute to a more complex understanding of the Kosovo crisis itself.

Open Access November 17, 2021

The Ideology and Agency of Kosovar Albanian Marxist Groups in the Demonstrations of 1981

Mrika Limani Myrtaj

Page range: 183-203

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Abstract

The author explores the ideological underpinning and political goals of Kosovar Marxist-Leninist groups and examines their role in the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo. She contextualizes these events against the backdrop of theories of revolutionary violence that were prevalent in Kosovar Albanian Marxist groups. Describing the position of Albanians within socialist Yugoslavia, she traces the formation of these groups of dissidents and their support of Hoxhaism—following the political views of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Hoxhaist propaganda shaped anti-Yugoslav dissidence to a certain extent, and the author throws light on the nationalist incentive to support Hoxhaism. She contextualizes Yugoslavia’s response to the demonstrations as an act of coercive violence aimed at stemming events that the Yugoslav officials perceived to be both counter-revolutionary and to presage the rise of nationalism.

Open Access November 17, 2021

“Kosovo, My Land”? Slovenians, Albanians, and the Limits of Yugoslav Social Cohesion

Jure Ramšak

Page range: 205-222

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Abstract

The author examines the Kosovo crisis in the context of the pluralisation and democratisation of Slovenian society in the 1980s and early 1990s. This issue became a catalyst not only for the repositioning of structures of party leadership in relation to Belgrade, but also with respect to general public debates. By charting individual stages of the critical decade of 1981–1991, the author presents Slovenian perceptions of Kosovo’s political, economic, and social issues, first through the works of neo-Marxist critics and later through the activism of a group of left-liberal intellectuals, which included the provision of legal support and a high-profile social action related to the violations of Kosovar Albanian human rights. The author discusses the constraints encountered by this brief attempt to establish a pan-Yugoslav civil society initiative. At the same time, he shows how the complexities of the Kosovo crisis were used to coalesce the Slovenian nation into flight from Yugoslavia.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Kosovo 1989: The (Ab)use of the Kosovo Myth in Media and Popular Culture

Radina Vučetić

Page range: 223-243

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Abstract

The author explores the creation of public opinion in Serbia in the late 1980s and the (ab)use of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo on 28 June 1989. As a result of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević’s carefully planned propaganda, a negative image of Albanians as well as a positive perception of Serbian nationalism were enforced. The media and popular culture played a particularly important role in reviving the Kosovo Myth, together with the leading Serbian (academic) institutions and influential intellectuals. Thirty-some years after 1989, the Kosovo Myth is presented in the media in a largely unchanged manner, while for Serbia the Kosovo problem remains unsolved.

Open Access November 17, 2021

The Discourse about Kosovo in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1981–1989

Husnija Kamberović

Page range: 245-265

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Abstract

The author analyses the discourse about Kosovo in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) during the 1980s. During these years, Serbian media developed several stereotypes to discredit the political leaders of BiH and accuse them of fomenting unrest in Kosovo. The author assesses these stereotypical depictions as well as the response of the Islamic Community and political leadership in BiH to these accusations. He asks what the attitude of Serbia’s political elite towards BiH was, and what role the Serbian political leadership played in the media attacks. He then investigates the evolution of the BiH leadership’s stances towards the events in Kosovo between the beginning and the end of the 1980s. And finally, through a close reading of session minutes and media, he assesses the increasingly deviating views of the BiH political leaders vis-á-vis the situation in Kosovo.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Croatia’s Knowledge Production on Kosovo around 1989

Branimir Janković

Page range: 267-287

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Abstract

In socialist Yugoslavia in 1989 the extremely sensitive matter of Kosovo had an ambiguous effect on the League of Communists of Croatia, which was then still caught in the so-called “Croatian silence”. It did however provoke much turbulence in the Croatian media, which made pointed comments on the larger Yugoslav crisis, on the situation in Kosovo, and on the politics of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. An intense dynamic could be also found in the field of knowledge production which encompassed scholars, historians, and intellectuals. Who produced knowledge about Kosovo? What were their political and intellectual agendas? How did they intervene in the dominant discourses and media coverage, what debates and reactions did they spark? Within the frames of the history of knowledge, the history of books and intellectual history, the author here assesses the works on Kosovo of a number of Croatian and Yugoslav intellectuals, chiefly Darko Hudelist and Branko Horvat.

Open Access November 17, 2021

In the Shadow of Kosovo. Divergent National Pathways and the Politics of Differentiation in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia

Robert Pichler

Page range: 289-311

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Abstract

The author examines the roots of Albanian nationalism in Yugoslavia, focusing on the Socialist Republic of Macedonia (SRM). He displays regional historical developments, interethnic relations, and Kosovo’s political impact upon Albanians in Macedonia. By analysing Macedonian and Albanian nation-building processes from an entangled and comparative perspective, he sheds light on shifting power constellations, divergent social developments, and asynchronous processes of national emancipation. After the occurrence in 1981 of Albanian demonstrations in Kosovo and in western Macedonia, officials in the SRM aimed at counteracting Albanian nationalism with a policy of differentiation—that is, they aimed at drawing a clear dividing line between Albanians loyal or disloyal to Yugoslavia. This punitive policy failed on all levels, further deepening the social divisions between the two major ethnic communities of the SRM and alienating even those Albanians well integrated in the common state and republic.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Same Goal, Different Paths, Different Class: Women’s Feminist Political Engagements in Kosovo from the Mid-1970s until the Mid-1990s

Elife Krasniqi

Page range: 313-334

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Abstract

The year 1989, when Serbia revoked Kosovo’s autonomy, was a break that changed also the course of women’s political engagements. Women had always to negotiate and strategise with different layers of power and against different forms of oppression—state and patriarchal oppression and cultural racism as well as class oppression. The author highlights the convergences and divergences of women’s political activism in the political dynamics of late socialism and then in the 1990s in Kosovo. She looks at gender, class and national dimensions of women’s political engagements with a focus on women who were part of the underground resistance movement commonly known as Ilegalja in the 1970s and 1980s as well as women intellectuals who held high state positions and were considered a part of the elite. After 1989, many engaged in the peacaful resistance movement of the 1990s.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Producing and Cracking Kosovo Myths. The Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Emergence and Critique of a New Ethnonationalism, 1984 – 1990

Nenad Stefanov

Page range: 335-354

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Abstract

The author analyses how the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) has gained significance for the new leadership of the League of Communists in Serbia since the mid-1980s. With its authority as a scientific institution, the SANU legitimised the political measures implemented to centralise and consolidate authoritarian rule. The new perception of the Yugoslav crisis, marked by ethnicisation and self-victimisation, used Kosovo as the focus and became the dominant stance on the war and authoritarian rule of the 1990s. However, as the author shows, a critique of these developments needs to be included in the analysis in order to adequately grasp the tense dynamics.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Relations Between the Writers’ Associations of Kosova and Serbia in the Second Half of the 1980s

Arban Mehmeti

Page range: 355-373

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Abstract

The author examines the activities and relations between the writers’ associations of Kosova and Serbia during the second half of the 1980s. He focuses on the interaction between the two cultural institutions and the debates they organized between the mid-1980s and the end of the decade. While political relations were deteriorating, the meetings of the two associations were intended to form a channel for communication which it was hoped would stimulate debate among intellectuals about then-current relations between Kosovar-Albanians and Serbs. But, as this study explains, those attempts ended in endless disagreements over “historical truths.”

Open Access November 17, 2021

Sub-Yugoslav Identity Building in the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije (1955–1990): The Case of the Albanian Question

Dino Mujadžević, Christian Voß

Page range: 375-397

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Abstract

The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia ( Enciklopedija Jugoslavije , EJ) was the flagship project of socialist Yugoslav nation-building in the fields of culture and academic knowledge. The first edition of the EJ was published in one Serbo-Croatian version (1955–1971), but the unfinished second edition of the EJ (1980–90) appeared in Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian in Latin and in Cyrillic script, Macedonian, Hungarian, and Albanian versions. The EJ was transformed from a staunchly federalist Yugoslav cultural platform of the 1950s, which supported Yugoslav unitarism, to one that strongly affirmed the nation-building(s) of the republics and autonomous provinces, thereby reflecting the decentralist remodeling of Yugoslavia from the late 1960s onwards. Using the examples of the two articles on “Albanians” and “Albanian-Yugoslav relations” in the EJ in their 1955, 1980, and 1983 versions, the authors elaborate on the political struggles within the Yugoslav ruling elite and within academia.

Living Memories

Open Access November 17, 2021

Being a Trainee Historian in Belgrade, 1989

Dubravka Stojanović

Page range: 399-411

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Abstract

The author reflects on the year 1989 when she was a newly hired trainee historian at the Institute for the History of the Serbian Labor Movement in Belgrade. The topic she was assigned in the Institute was the relationship of the Serbian Social Democratic Party to the war goals of Serbia 1912–1918. As her reading and writing progressed, by 1991 what the Serbian social democrats wrote about the Balkan Wars of 1912/13 began approaching her own political views. However, their antiwar positions at the beginning of the twentieth century sounded like a real feat compared to the virtually monolithic support for the war of 1991. This is how the author’s first research left her with the bitter impression that history, the seeming magistra vitae, had really taught nobody anything given that Serbian society was falling into the same trap as some 70 years before.

Open Access November 17, 2021

Segregation – Growing Up in Kosovo

Adriatik Kelmendi

Page range: 413-419

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Abstract

The author gives a personal account of how he experienced the difficult 1990s in Kosovo. In 1990, when Yugoslavia fell apart, he was 12 years old. He grew up in Kosovo’s “parallel school system”. In 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the then 20-year-old worked for the newspaper Koha Ditore in Pristina. His family’s house in Peja was destroyed, members of his extended family as well as friends and acquaintances murdered. His parents and siblings sought refuge in Montenegro; he himself in North Macedonia. They returned to Peja after the end of the war, and slowly regained their lives.

Book Reviews

Open Access November 17, 2021

Filip Ejdus: Crisis and Ontological Insecurity. Serbia’s Anxiety over Kosovo’s Secession

Pieter Troch

Page range: 421-424

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Aleksandar Pavlović, Gazela Pudar Draško and Rigels Halili: Rethinking Serbian-Albanian Relations. Figuring Out the Enemy

Hendrik Geiling

Page range: 425-428

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Andreas Eckert and Felicitas Hentschke: Corona and Work around the Globe

Remus Creţan

Page range: 429-432

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Axel Gehring: Vom Mythos des starken Staates und der europäischen Integration der Türkei. Über eine Ökonomie an der Peripherie des euro-atlantischen Raumes

Malte Fuhrmann

Page range: 433-435

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Vjeran Pavlaković and Davor Pauković: Framing the Nation and Collective Identities. Political Rituals and Cultural Memory of the Twentieth-Century Traumas in Croatia

Zora Hesová

Page range: 437-439

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Sabine von Löwis: Umstrittene Räume in der Ukraine. Politische Diskurse, literarische Repräsentationen und kartographische Visualisierungen

Matthias Schwartz

Page range: 441-443

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg, Mark Kirchner, Markus Koller, and Monika Wingender: Identitätsentwüfe im östlichen Europa – im Spannungsfeld von Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung

Meinolf Arens

Page range: 445-447

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Open Access November 17, 2021

Dimitris Katsikas: Public Discourses and Attitudes in Greece during the Crisis. Framing the Role of the European Union, Germany and National Governments

Marina Kritikou

Page range: 449-451

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About this journal

The quarterly Comparative Southeast European Studies (COMPSEES) evolved into its new format from that of its predecessor Südosteuropa. Journal of Politics and Society. From 2021 onwards, it is published both digitally, in Open Access, and in print, thereby becoming more easily accessible and even more visible internationally, not least in Southeastern Europe itself. Before long, a digital repository of Südosteuropa will be available to everyone.

Comparative Southeast European Studies will continue to be a forum for scholars in Political Science, Sociology, Contemporary History, Anthropology, Economics, International Relations, Law Studies, Gender Studies, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and related disciplines. Taking a comparative and broad multidisciplinary perspective it will explore critical processes and societal issues related to　the area bounded by the eastern Adriatic, the eastern Mediterranean, and the Black Sea. We use two formats to showcase research. There are peer-reviewed research articles and a shorter format open to other text genres, which are presented under headings such as ‘Commentary’, ‘Interview’, ‘Background’, ‘Policy Analysis’, ‘Film in Focus’, ‘Debate’, ‘Spotlight’, ‘Book Symposium’, ‘The Making of...’, for example. This is a flexible section allowing us to address more immediately pertinent political, social, cultural, and academic matters. In addition, the Journal also features a book review section.

The new name Comparative Southeast European Studies is the logical next step in the Journal’s evolution. After it was founded in 1952, for more than half a century its predecessor Südosteuropa served as a well-established policy advice journal monitoring events in the region, before in 2007 taking a turn towards becoming a research-oriented multidisciplinary forum of the social sciences. Since 2014 the Journal has been published exclusively in English. We have continued to work towards improving its quality, including by addressing the citation indices relevant in the field, as they increase the pool of potential authors. A rigorous double-blind peer review regime has guided us while we have become more selective in what we publish. We prioritise work that is empirically and methodologically sound, well-written and jargon-free, thereby fostering interdisciplinary scholarly communication. We remain committed to broadening the range of the research we publish, while welcoming both emerging and established scholars to publish with us. Comparative Southeast European Studies strives to consolidate its reputation as one of the major area studies journals focusing on Southeastern Europe. We encourage transnational and entangled comparative perspectives, acknowledging that any ‘area’, any geographical construct, functions in its transareal, indeed global, relations.

We welcome both single manuscript submissions and proposals for guest-edited thematic sections. We look forward to working with you.

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Comparative Southeast European Studies is published by De Gruyter on behalf of © The Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies 2022