ABSTRACT
When Yugoslavia dissolved in 1991, it was one of three multinational federations that collapsed within a short time of each other. Even though some observers now note the existence of both ‘Yugonostalgia’ (Lindstrom, 2006) and a re-emerging network of cultural and economic ties aptly termed by The Economist correspondent Tim Judah as ‘Yugosphere’ (Judah, 2009), the seven successor states have expressed little interest in re-establishing any closer union.1 Yugoslavia was a project promulgated by intellectuals during the 19th century as a shared state of South Slavs and emerged as a state twice as a result of the two large wars of the 20th century. The First World War precipitated the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy shortly after the Ottoman Empire had been forced out of the Balkans by the new states. This Yugoslavia was centralized and dominated by the largest constituent unit, the Kingdom of Serbia. Its inability to reform itself and accommodate the aspirations of different communities kept the country in permanent crisis. The second Yugoslavia, then federal, emerged only after the first effort had been dismantled by Germany and its allies in 1941. Support for a renewed Yugoslavia became a mass-movement led by the eventually victorious communist-led Partisan forces that re-established Yugoslavia as a socialist and federal state in 1945. The formal federalism of early socialist Yugoslavia only gradually evolved into a genuine federal system during the late 1960s and early 1970s; hence, the expression ‘Federalizing the Federation’ (federiranje federacije), was coined by the leading Croat Communist and member of Josip Tito’s inner circle Vladimir Bakaric´ (Kuljic´, 2004: 116).
