What remains of Yugoslavia? From the geopolitical space of Yugoslavia to the virtual space of the Web Yugosphere

1 A nation without a space?

Yugoslavia ceased formally to exist in 2003, after a popular referendum abolished the denomination Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which by that time included only Serbia and Montenegro. As is common knowledge, the disintegration of Yugoslavia had already begun in the 1980s (following several events: the death of Tito, the Albanian protests in Kosovo, a deep crisis of the country’s economic system, and centrifugal tendencies of the more industrialized republics of the Federation in the north of the country), and then had speeded up in the early 1990s through the secessions of Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia (1991) and finally Bosnia-Herzegovina. ² The boosts to secession and revived nationalisms led to a chain of terrible civil conflicts involving all populations until 1995, resulting in the break up of the social and collective fabric of Yugoslavia and the drawing of a new map of the south-western Balkans, with new borders and new senses of national belonging. Events such as the siege of Sarajevo, Operation Storm in Knin, the ‘urbicides’ of Vukovar and of Dubrovnik, or the Srebrenica massacre are just a few notorious episodes in a cruel civil war that at times assumed the form of a genocide.

In 1995, the so-called Dayton Peace Agreement ratified the new institutional structure of the states born out of the rubble of Yugoslavia, transforming the boundaries between the former federal republics of Yugoslavia (Croatia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro, which remained federated to some extent) into state boundaries. Bosnia-Herzegovina was subdivided into two ‘entities’ (the Muslim–Croat Federation and Republika Srpska) that were included within the same national institutional frame. ³

After 1990, therefore, Yugoslav peoples – who were nourished with the slogan of bratstvo i jedinstvo, the ‘brotherhood and unity’ preached by the rhetoric of the socialist regime guided by Marshal Tito – found themselves in the uncomfortable position of being citizens of a nation that no longer existed. That miracle of composition of different and, perhaps, apparently incompatible (ethnic, religious, national, cultural and linguistic) elements collapsed violently due to the war and the explosion of nationalisms.

They call ‘old Yugoslavia’ a still-existing area of the Balkans, whose regions are no longer part of the same state and whose geo-politics, after the destruction, is under reconstruction. … Political and geographical spaces are dissociated. … Through the compulsory use of the seamy ‘former’ prefix, along with the history, the past itself is denied, including the individual past (as if it was a ‘black chapter’). (Ivekovic, 1999: 6–7; my translation)

These words were written by Rada Ivekovic at the end of the Yugoslav wars – when the geo-political face of the area determined by the new borders raised between the new countries appeared uncertain yet. They clarify pretty well the tenor of the diffusion of both a collective and an individual sentiment about the traumatic loss of an ‘identity’ that was, among other things, geographic too (inasmuch as it was based also on the territorial unity of the country). Even more than ten years later, the words of Ivekovic still sound topical, and not much has changed within those post-conflict borders – except for the independence of Montenegro from Serbia, peacefully achieved through a referendum in 2005, and the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo, which merely ratified the situation sanctioned by the Rambouillet Conference after the NATO Operations. Nevertheless, in the following years, the new independent countries have strengthened their national identities and are currently committed to a process of normalization and stabilization, easier for some (like Slovenia, which is a member of the European Union, and Croatia, which will join in 2013), harder for others (like Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose institutional profile is still affected by all the tensions and instabilities that the Dayton Peace Agreement left unresolved, or Kosovo, which has not been recognized as an independent state by Serbia and other countries ⁴ ). Yugoslavia today is no more than a ghost of the past, an ‘extinct civilization’, as Ivekovic herself calls it.

What remains, then, of Yugoslavia today? Does a common (cultural, social, economic) space – having survived the appearance of the new borders that made it explode – still exist? And, if so, which (and what kind of) places does Yugoslavia occupy today? Who, today, are the Yugoslavs?

2 From Yugoslavia to Yugosphere: the Yugoslav semiosphere

Yugoslavia ceased to exist in 1991, with the secessions that announced the ensuing wars. The emergence of new political entities and national identities testifies to the process of fragmentation (‘balkanization’, as they say) of a geo-political space but also to the division of a people, of a nation made of diversity but accustomed to living together. ‘Six states, five nations, four languages, three religions, two alphabets and only one Tito’: this old saying was very popular during the socialist period, testifying to the complex mosaic of ethnic, religious and cultural differences held together by the charismatic Yugoslav statesman. According to widespread opinion, the impact of the disappearance of Josip Broz Tito was strong enough to bring about the collapse of the already crumbling Yugoslav edifice. But can we really consider the death of the leader of Yugoslavia to be the main reason for the fragile and unstable balance that held the country together? And was this balance really that unstable? I am not aiming to cover the issues related to the historical reasons for the Yugoslav wars, nor those related to the actual (contractual or conflictual?) nature of multiculturalism in the western Balkans, land of clashes but also of encounters among different civilizations and gateway between the East and West; conversely, I do aim to demonstrate that a common heritage – of shared memories, experiences and cultures – characterizes even today the countries comprised within the fragmented area of former Yugoslavia. Some years ago, in a provocative article published in The Economist, journalist Tim Judah (2009a, 2009b) coined the term ‘Yugosphere’, to refer precisely to the still-existing ‘texture’ of relationships and exchanges among the persons and the people from the countries of former Yugoslavia. According to his argument, even some years after the breakup of Yugoslavia, the space of the western Balkans is less fragmented than one could expect, and the new borders that now divide Yugoslavia are more permeable than they seem. Therefore, the end of Yugoslavia didn’t lead to a real breakdown of the links among western Balkan peoples, and today, more than ten years after the wars, it is possible to speak again of a ‘common area’, of a Yugosphere:

The Yugosphere has its roots in shared experience, in trade and in business. Most former Yugoslavs – Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegrins and Croats – speak the same language with minor variations. Many Macedonians and Slovenes still speak or understand what used to be called Serbo-Croat as a second language. Within most of the region, people can travel freely using just their identity cards. They like the same music and the same food. Political, religious and ethnic differences persist of course … but opinion polls show a certain commonality of outlook: people have similar fears, worries and hopes. (Judah, 2009a)

Judah’s Yugosphere stresses economic exchanges, as well as the fact that where there is business, even more ingrained nationalisms give way to forms of internationalism. But it’s not only about that: as Judah himself specifies, the Yugosphere is also made of shared experiences and memories, cultures, musical tastes, expectations and life-styles. The advantage of Judah’s notion is that it calls to mind another concept, highly relevant for the goals of this article: the ‘semiosphere’, a word coined by the semiotician of culture, Yurij Lotman (1985), based on Vernadskij’s theory of the ‘biosphere’. According to Lotman, a semiosphere is a homogeneous cultural universe: a semiotic space that occurs as a continuum in which all the – broadly speaking – ‘texts’ of a culture are immersed and circulate, interacting with each other and producing new meanings. The main device of the semiosphere is the ‘border’, considered as that element which keeps the different semiotic/cultural universes separated from the external (the ‘extra-semiotic’) and from each other (the ‘hetero-semiotic’); however, the border is ‘porous’, it allows crossing from outside to inside, acting as a ‘linguistic filter of translation’. These borders/filters run through the inside of the semiosphere as well, producing internal differentiations.

Borrowing the word from Judah, I adopt the term Yugosphere, to mean, according to Lotman’s theory, a homogeneous cultural universe, and in this article I try to prove its existence in the Web. I posit that while a Yugoslav semiosphere still exists, sometimes overlapping with new national semiospheres (i.e. the different national cultural universes strengthened by the rise of the new Balkanic nation-states), it is often unable to fit and ‘conciliate’ with them. This ‘translation incapacity’ of the surviving (or re-born) Yugosphere into the new national semiospheres appears as well in the different and contrasting processes of collective identification in the cultural universes of the new countries: Can one feel one belongs to a transnational Yugosphere and to a national (Serbian, Croat, Bosnian, Slovenian — each of which relies upon a ‘geo-political territorialization’) semiosphere (which can also count on a ‘geo-political territorialization’)? Such a question is also relevant for determining if a presumed diasporic feature exists for members of this ‘ideal community’ within the Yugosphere.

Moreover, considered from another perspective, the diasporic feature of this community is confirmed by the evidence that the extension of the Yugosphere (and of its semiotic borders) exceeds the geographic borders of former Yugoslavia; due to the waves of migration that began during and immediately after the wars, the ‘members of Yugosphere’ – meant again in a Lotmanian sense – are spread all over the world.

3 The Yugo-diaspora: Migratory phenomena and the ‘extinct-civilization syndrome’

The Yugoslav ‘explosion of the nations’ – as Nicole Janigro (1993) put it – determined one of the most intensive migratory movements of the last two decades of the 20th century. Wars, political instability, the rise of new borders, led to demographic movements inside the Balkan area, on the one hand, and accelerated the migration process from the territories of former Yugoslavia to other parts of the world, on the other hand. Therefore, we have to distinguish between an external emigration (from former Yugoslavia to abroad) and an internal one (from a former Yugoslav republic to one of the new states that replaced federal republics). ⁵ The latter case should also consider the non-geographical migration that entailed the change of citizen status: from Yugoslav citizens to Serb, Croat, Bosnian and Slovenian citizens. These migrations show that some typical features of diaspora and the diasporic status had in some cases an institutional acknowledgement through the establishment in some countries (like Serbia) of a Minister of Diaspora. ⁶

I do not tackle these diasporas from a strictly national perspective (say, from the point of view of the new post-Yugoslav nation-states), but instead try to theorize what I consider to be a further level of the phenomenon, that is, the ‘Yugoslav diaspora’. My hypothesis is that the sudden and violent breakup of Yugoslavia led to the dispersion of a particular community – the ‘Yugoslav community’ – into other spaces that are both internal and external to the territories of former Yugoslavia. This could be seen as a double diasporic movement, with both ‘centrifugal boosts’ (towards European countries and the United States, above all) and ‘centripetal boosts’ (towards the new western Balkan countries).

But in what sense may we speak of diaspora for the Yugoslavs, citizens of a country that no longer exists but was replaced by new national re-foundations – with which the new citizens should apparently identify? In Global Diaspora, Robin Cohen (1997) defines diaspora with regard to those scattered communities that left the homeland but which continue to recognize themselves in a common culture. At the same time, generally, the definition of diaspora refers to all migratory movements determined by an external cause (such as wars or persecutions) but not to those caused by other reasons (such as non-identification with one’s country). The Yugoslav case shows a peculiarity: if it is true that the emigration flow was very high during and immediately after the war, many people continued to live in the same geographic area (the western Balkans); but in many cases they were forced (by different reasons which could be in any case considered ‘external’) to move to another city, region or even country in that area. Furthermore, the spread of nationalistic feelings led to a situation in which many citizens of the new western Balkan nation-states recognized themselves completely in their new nationality, even proudly claiming this national belonging. At the same time, it is impossible to deny the existence of a community whose members instead continue to identify themselves with a no-longer existing nation (or, at least, do not recognize the new countries as their homeland). In any case, the former Yugoslav peoples experienced a violent and radical breach of the identitarian and communitarian ties through a chain of traumatic events (civil wars, new nationalisms, a damnatio memoriae of the recent past).

There is, therefore, a transnational and scattered community – partly in the Balkan area (redistributed in the new countries), partly outside the Balkans (mostly in the biggest European countries and in the United States of America) – afflicted by a sort of ‘extinct-civilization syndrome’ (to use the words of Rada Ivekovic) and kept together fundamentally by two ‘binding forces’: the collective trauma of the war; and a feeling of ‘collective nostalgia’ for the past life in former Yugoslavia and a common cultural heritage that was strengthened in that period. I go on to prove and verify the existence of such a community and to piece together and map its presence in the Web.

4 Jugonostalgija: The past between seized memories and sewed-up life-experiences

The collective sentiment of nostalgia toward the past is probably the principal sign of the existence of this ‘post-Yugoslav’ ideal community. Such feelings of yearning for the socialist past, known as jugonostalgija, is a social phenomenon that has recently become very popular in the western Balkans. If immediately after the war – as pointed out by Nikole Janigro – in the 1990s the word jugonostalgicar (yugonostalgic) was still meant as an insult and was used to indicate ‘traitors to country’ and ‘suspected communists’, today it seems instead to be a widespread ‘fashion trend’, mostly in Bosnia but also in Serbia, Slovenia and to a lesser degree in Croatia. There is a ‘cultural reappearance’ of former Yugoslavia and its symbols in popular culture. But towards what is this nostalgia directed?

This question was recently investigated by a number of scholars (see Modrzejewski & Sznajderman, 2003; Todorova & Zsuzsa, 2010), along with all the other Ostalgic phenomena (composed of ost, East in German, and nostalgia), ⁷ i.e. the longing for the past spread throughout the eastern socialist countries which at the end of 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s underwent radical cultural and political change.

This collective memory was studied by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001), in which she distinguishes between a restorative nostalgia, which aims to restore the (national) past and refers to a historical temporality, and a reflexive nostalgia, more focused on individual memory and on the pair desire/loss in relation to biographical identity. The cultural revival of yugonostalgic movies, of Yugo-rock and even of commercial products from the past attests that yugonostalgia today is a mix of different tendencies (let’s say, restorative and reflexive at the same time) that combine, on the one hand, ‘longing for the security and prosperity experienced during the socialist era’ (Bonfiglioli, 2011), but also, on the other hand, a yearning for the idealized but lost past of individual existences, which manifests itself as nostalgia for some aspects of the material culture and of the former everyday life. This tendency partly recalls the retro-fashion and vintage trends studied, among others, by Appadurai (1996) as cases of ‘nostalgia’.

One interesting interpretation of this question comes from Dubravka Ugresic (1996), who affirms that this form of nostalgia has to be considered as a reaction to the violent process of ‘confiscation of memory’ suffered by Yugoslav people during the war, and with the rise of new nationalisms that rewrote the history of the country, erasing the cultural values of socialist Yugoslavia and of the shared past. We could consider this process of memory rewriting as a ‘semiotic diaspora’, which completely redefined the landscape of collective memory, generating a sense of cultural disorientation amplified by the trauma of war. Indeed Yugoslav people have experienced a rapid dissolution of their shared cultural horizons that is comparable to the experience of forced emigration, characterized by a cultural shock and a feeling of yearning for the home-country (and indeed nostalgia is the characteristic sentiment of diaspora). According to Ugresic, such post-Yugoslav nostalgia emerges as a sort of disjointed regret for what is lost forever, for a sort of Atlantis, and eventually as an incapacity of memory:

Nameless ex-Yugoslav refugees, scattered over all the countries and continents, have taken with them in their refugee bundles senseless souvenirs which nobody needs – a line of verse, an image, a scene, a tune, a tone, a word. In the same bundle of memory jostle fragments of past reality, which can never be put back together, and scenes of war horrors. It is hard for their owners to communicate all these shattered fragments to anyone, and with time they wrap themselves into a knot of untranslatable, enduring, soundless distress. (Ugresic, 1996: 36)

In the face of the incommunicability of a common memory, yugonostalgia becomes a force that builds a community not on a collective memory, but on a denied memory: a ‘parable’ (as Ugresic terms it) against the imposed oblivion.

5 Virtual Yugoslavias: National spaces, cultural spaces and the World Wide Web

In this section I seek to map the Yugoslav ideal community through the traces left by them in ‘cyberspace’. ⁸ On the one hand, the starting hypothesis (which is shared with the more general hypothesis of the e-Diasporas research group) is that the Web is a digital territory that can be mapped: indeed, the Web is not a chaotic space, and there are hierarchies and clusters, depending on the ways through which the different websites are hyper-textually linked (Gibson, Kleinberg & Raghavan, 1998). On the other hand, cyberspace is also a political space, in a Foucauldian sense: a space that reproduces power relationships but also forms of subjectivities and of discourses of power (and counter-powers) (Crampton, 2003). It is a matter for discussion if (and how) cyberspace should be studied as a geographical space; nevertheless many scholars have stressed that the coming of the Internet forces us to rethink completely all the categories typical of geographical analysis: the notion of place, of course, but also region, nation, sovereignty, citizenship, centre, periphery, border and so on. ⁹ While some claim that the Internet and new ICTs are leading to an ‘end of geography’ (Virilio, 1998), ¹⁰ caused by the speed of virtual information and the consequent destruction of the ideas of distance and place, there is another current of thought that argues against this vision (e.g. Dodge & Kitchin, 2001), calling for a ‘new geography’ capable of investigating (and mapping) with geographical categories the space created by the vast networks of computers: a cybergeography. Moreover, many studies have pointed out the interest of an observation of Internet uses in order to study migrations and migrant communities (Diminescu, 2008).

In the case of the ‘Yugoslav cyberspace’, it is worth considering that, while Yugoslavia ceased formally to exist in 2003 (even if one could say that it had disappeared de facto since its breakup in 1991), it continued to officially exist in the Web until 30 September 2009, when ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees the assigning of top-level domain names), removed the .yu domain from the Internet. ¹¹

If the year 2009 marked the final disappearance of the last (in this case, digital) relic of Yugoslavia, until a short while earlier that year the .yu domain was still very popular among the yugonostalgic websites and proudly displayed as a sort of ‘fetish’ from the past. Its ban, however, aroused controversies on the part of some of the website owners (somebody even spoke of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Web for whoever still proclaimed himself Yugoslav), and a huge portion of the ‘Yugoslav websites’ that have not migrated to new domains have simply disappeared from the Web. At any rate, the disappearance of the domain seems to confirm the fragmentation of the Balkan space in the Internet as well. In 2010, the e-Diasporas group asked the question: ‘Where is Yugoslavia in the Web today?’ Starting from the observation of the ‘clusterizations’ of a random group of sites (selected through a Web-crawl) belonging to the six new domains and comparing them with the surviving (and now offline) .yu-websites, they drew a map which shows a rising ‘intra-national’ interlinking among websites of that zone. (See Graph Yugosphere-1 in the colour section at the end of this Issue.) ¹²

But Yugoslavia and ‘yugonostalgics’ never disappeared completely from the Web, and someone like Maja Mikula (2003) tried to even reconstruct the ‘virtual landscapes of memory’ of the dissolved socialist republic. One of the cases she studied is probably the most curious experiment of ‘cybercitizenship’ in the Web of the last years: Cyber-Jugoslavia (www.juga.com, now offline). Created by Zoran Bacic, Serbian writer and playwright, the website was addressed to ‘those who lost their country in 1991 and became citizens of Atlantis’, but also to those who ‘feel Yugoslav, regardless of their current nationality and citizenship’. It provided members with a virtual passport validated by an official coat of arms that parodied the one of the deceased country, and even proposed a ‘virtual constitution’, inspired by ‘hyper-democracy’ principles. According to Mikula, the entire project was traversed by a clear strain of irony and parody, which made free use of the repertoire of jugonostalgija, of Tito-era socialist symbols from movies, pop songs, pictures, kitsch memorabilia, through a recombination of all these elements into a postmodern and cyber (and maybe a little steampunk) aesthetic.

Cyber-Yugoslavia simultaneously conjures up the passing away of the traditional national discourses and ushers in the new, more fluid concept of cyber-nationhood, which transgresses and at the same time replicates conventional territorial, cultural, ethnic or linguistic national boundaries. Cyber-Yugoslavia’s author also perceives himself as a Cyborg, with the machinic element ironically dubbed the ‘Algorithm of the Social System’, this open-source robotic software representing the highest authority in Cyber-Yugoslavia. (Mikula, 2003: 173)

Today juga.com no longer exists, perhaps somewhat because of its backwardness, if we compare it to the new social paradigms that appeared with the Web 2.0. This is an important clue to why yugonostalgic sites, still numerous, are declining today: it seems that Cyber-Yugoslavia today has landed mostly on the more popular social networks, Facebook in primis, where there are hundreds of pages and groups devoted to Yugoslavia and yugonostalgia, with hundreds of thousands of members. ¹³

6 Analysis: the Web-Yugosphere

Concluding remarks

All these different representations of a disappeared, regretted, recalled (and sometimes denied) Yugoslavia are reunified through the ‘yugonostalgic discourse’, well represented by titoville.com , ²⁰ the main territorial centre of the Yugosphere. This site is the real point of intersection among: socialist nostalgic websites; pop Yugoslav websites ‘playing’ with the ‘figurative grammars’ of the Yugoslav repertoires and recombining its languages in a pop-culture version; retro-Yugoslav websites, that ‘pretend not to notice’ that Yugoslavia has faded away; and eventually post-Yugoslav websites, whose users wander the Web looking for a digital version of that ‘common space’ they have lost in the geo-political world. The latter is the only community in which the theme of war is sometimes mentioned, even if incidentally. In the whole corpus considered, indeed, the ‘great absentee’ is the trauma of the war. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was violent and cruel, but with few exceptions, these sites never focus on the actual reasons for its end: a long chain of civil, ethnic and nationalistic conflicts. Through Yugonostalgic discourse, those websites keep at bay shared and individual traumatic memories. Moreover, it seems highly relevant that those sites which had the explicit intention to found a new Yugoslav ‘virtual nation’ on the Internet (like nova jugoslavia, cyber-yu, etc.) are now offline. With the exception of one petition, the Web holds not a trace of these sites (in some cases there is only the domain). This could be the symptom of an increasing ‘unraveling’ of a typology of aggregation once usual in online communities, which is also attested by the presence of the ‘archipelago’, the constellation of monad-sites that do not communicate among themselves and are unable to build a community. ²¹ In conclusion, the sense of belonging to the past Yugoslav nation today seems to be modulated only through the passion of nostalgia and of a nostalgic memory.