Abstract
Reviewed by: Benjamin Wynes, University of East Anglia, UK
This volume is an ambitious and information packed attempt to analyse social stratification and inequalities in Yugoslavia during the socialist era. The idea that Yugoslavia – supposedly a classless society – did in fact have distinct social classes is not new. As early as 1957, Milovan Djilas, a former leading communist, argued in his famous critique of socialist societies that a ‘new class’ had emerged in Yugoslavia. He accused a narrow circle of privileged bureaucrats of having betrayed the revolution by taking control of the country’s wealth rather than redistributing it equally. While Djilas was silenced, public expression of social critique aimed at exposing the inequalities of Yugoslav society continued. This volume confines its focus to the late socialist period, and the political, economic and social crises that engulfed the country in the 1980s. The authors of this volume successfully demonstrate that the shifting conceptions of class and ethnicity during this period played a key role in the collapse of the communist state. While the theories of ancient ethnic hatreds have been thoroughly debunked, ethno-nationalism has remained the key frame of reference in discussions of the collapse of socialist Yugoslavia. This volume brings class back into these re-evaluations and represents a crucial piece of social history research on Yugoslav socialism.
The contributing authors come from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, linking studies of the social sciences in the socialist era to current research based on newly available primary sources. This has resulted in the production of a volume that encompasses a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary themes, including history, anthropology, sociology and economics. While the former Yugoslavia may no longer appear to be a fashionable area of research, this collection of contributors attests to the thriving debates concerning the social history of the region that are still taking place.
The volume is divided into 10 diverse case studies that explore a wide spectrum of Yugoslav society. The first five chapters are concerned with introducing and addressing the themes of social stratification and key social phenomena. These chapters explore how the party’s theories of social class informed the politics of social mobility, but conversely also show how grassroots understandings of class influenced party policy. By delving into the contradictions of state socialism in these micro-histories, the volume demonstrates that class differences kept recurring in the last decades of Yugoslav socialism. For instance, Ana Dević’s study convincingly argues that crucial grievances with the socialist state did not concern the suppression of ethnic identity, but rather a sense of social powerlessness. In Brigitte Le Normand’s study, she argues that the gastarbajteri (Yugoslav migrant workers) were a distinct social class whose very existence undermined the socialist narratives of social mobility and development. Rory Archer’s contribution compares white-collar workers, who were given access to social housing, with manual workers, who were forced into costly private renting causing the urbanization of poverty. Meanwhile, Jana Bačević’s study of the 1974 educational reforms shows that we should not see class in objective terms but as flexible and discursive.
In the next chapters, the contributors address the ethnicized differentiations of this social stratification. Julija Sardelić focuses on the under-studied Roma communities in Slovenia as a distinct ‘underclass’, while Isabel Ströhle uses the ‘underclass’ concept in her analysis of the social disparities in Kosovo. Higher living standards never reached rural parts of the province, which provided the basis for ethnic discontent. Goran Musić’s excellent study concentrates on the striking manual workers of Rakovica in the 1980s. Musić convincingly argues that the Serb workers were arguing for class-based rather than national unity, and for reducing social inequalities rather than blindly following Slobodan Milošević’s nationalist policies. The final two chapters focus on social stratification in Yugoslav popular culture. In the penultimate case study, Ana Hofman and Polona Sitar consider the contradictory position of female folk singers who symbolized both working-class socialist women as well as capitalist entertainers. The final study by Igor Duda analyses the immensely popular television series Naše malo misto as a means of illustrating consumer culture in Yugoslavia’s unique brand of market socialism.
All of the chapters are well-written and bring the theme of class back into Yugoslav historiography. It would have been beneficial, however, to have included a concluding chapter, bringing together these diverse micro-histories to show how they interacted to undermine socialism in the late 1980s. In terms of future research, it may be worth considering an exploration of the social inequalities in the Yugoslav successor states, which appear to have only deepened class differences. After all, these new nations are post-socialist as much as they are post-conflict. Nonetheless, this is a very interesting and balanced volume that demonstrates that social stratification should be as much a key term of reference as ethno-nationalism in exploring the deficiencies of Yugoslav socialism.