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Ivo
Banac
.
The National Question in Yugoslavia
.
Ithaca, NY
:
Cornell University Press
,
1984
. Pp.
456
. Paper $45.95.
, Emily Greble Vanderbilt University , US Email: emily.greble@vanderbilt.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Vladislav Lilić Vanderbilt University , US Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic
The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 951–962, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad233
Published:
22 June 2023
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Emily Greble, Vladislav Lilić, Nations, Politics, and the Role of History in East Central Europe, The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 2, June 2023, Pages 951–962, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad233
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Extract
Most historians are in the business of explaining the past. Here, as in other aspects of his unusual academic and political trajectory, the Croatian-American historian Ivo Banac (1947–2020) was an exception. By carefully mining the past, he also predicted how events may unfold. Across Banac’s monographs, articles, and historiographical essays, he repeatedly identified as Cassandra—the mythical Trojan priestess of Apollo, blessed with prescience but never believed.1 Fittingly, Banac concluded his first book, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (1984), with a portentous admonition: if socialist Yugoslavia were to continue managing its constituent peoples’ relations with an iron fist in a one-party political system, the state’s “firm citadel could only be maintained by human sacrifice.”2 How tragically accurate a warning! Merely seven years after the publication of The National Question, Yugoslavia was torn apart by a deluge of ethnically based secessionist movements and years of mass intercommunal violence, leaving a hundred thousand dead and millions displaced.3 Two decades have passed since the end of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession (1991–2001), but the successor states have yet to overcome the legacies of social, economic, and political turmoil. Even human sacrifice was not enough to preserve the Yugoslav edifice. Further eastward, the Russo-Ukrainian war rages as we write this, bringing deadlock and destruction. The Russian invasion unfolds as the latest episode of the breakup of the Soviet Union.4 All (scholarly) optimism about the prospect of a demilitarized, post-national Europe is spent. From the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1996) to the street battles of Kyiv, there is a singular line of crisis that must be integrated into historical accounts of our time. Rather than basking in the glory of a “common European home,” Europeans from Kosovo to South Ossetia are still trying to navigate the death of state socialism and the rubble of imperial collapse. This is why it is critical to revisit histories written during the Cold War—even histories that appear dated—in search of keys to historiographical dilemmas and contemporary crises in Eastern Europe.
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