Nicholas J. Miller, "Reconstituting Serbia: 1945-1991," in Melissa K. Bokovoy, Jill A. Irvine, and Carol S. Lilly (eds), State-Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945-1992, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1997, pp. 291-314.

By now it is clear that the claim of Yugoslav Communists that they solved the national question was invalid. In fact, the opposite was certainly true: rather than solve the national question, the communist regime demonized it, which allowed negative mythologies to develop within and about each of the nationalisms of Yugoslavia. Rather than search for reasons why the state collapsed so violently, one might better seek reasons for the minor miracle of its 46 years of peaceful survival. It seems now that Yugoslavia served different purposes for each of the state's different ethnic groups. For Serbs, Tito's Yugoslavia provided protection (as did the first Yugoslavia from 1918 to 1941). Any threat to Yugoslav unity equalled a threat to the unity of Serbs, who were dispersed through each of the Yugoslav federal units except Slovenia.

When the Yugoslav state began to unravel, and after clearly stating their preference that Yugoslavia remain a single state, the desire for unity led many Serbs to take up arms not in the interests of a united Yugoslavia, but for a strictly Serbian state. With the prospect of Croatian and Bosnian (not to mention Macedonian, Albanian, and potentially Montenegrin) separatist movements in the 1990s, Serbs in each of those regions feared complete separation from the core Serbian state. The demand of Serbian unity in the face of Croatian and Bosnian secession movements prompted the wars of Yugoslav succession beginning in 1991.

To understand Yugoslavia's collapse, it is vital to understand how each of the Serbian communities of Yugoslavia-Serbia proper and the intra-Yugoslavian Serbian diaspora in Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Montenegro, Vojvodina, and Macedonia - fit into the larger picture of Serbian national ideology and mythology. This brief chapter has several goals: - to examine in institutional and political terms how the Serbian nation was treated in a federal Yugoslavia after 1945 and then after 1966, when the federal structure of the state began to change; then, to analyze the response of the Serbs, politicians as well as intellectuals, to the status of Serbs in Yugoslavia; and finally, to determine whether there was consensus among Serbs in Yugoslavia, which elements it was cornposed of, and how it conceived of Serbia. The strength of serbian nationalism might seem exaggerated now, but in light of the long-term commitment of Serbian intellectuals, politicians, and even mainstream communist politicians to maintaining a united Serbia, it is perfectly understandable-even inevitable.

THE SERBS IN A FEDERAL YUGOSLAVIA

Serbs traditionally conceived of Serbian lands in loose rank order: the modern core of Serbia was Sumadiia (the Belgrade region southward); Kosovo (known by nationalists as "Old Serbia") farther south was integral to Serbia in spite of its predominantly Albanian population; Macedonia, known before 1945 as "Southern Serbia," was among the lands of the medieval Serbian kingdom; Vovjodina to the north (really Baranja, Backa, and part of Banat) was the location of the nineteenth-century cultural revival of the Serbian nation, but Serbs there suffered from cultural biases against those who had left the heartland. Thus, Croatian and Vojvodinian Serbian communities were included in the category of Serbs from "across the river" (the Sava and the Danube), known as precani. Bosnian Serbs also occupied an ambiguous place in the Serbian spectrum. Serbs from south of the rivers still proudly call themselves Srbijanci whereas all other Serbs are called Srbi-a critical distinction. Precani have periodically been resented for their "European" culture and pretensions and for the fact that they had, allegedly, unheroically abandoned the homeland to the aggressor Turks by emigrating to the Habsburg lands.

During World War II, the Serbs of these regions suffered to varying degrees. Serbs constituted approximately half of the war deaths: 530,000 of 1,027,000.

The Serbs of Bosnia and Croatia had been exposed to the atrocities of the Independent State of Croatia and its Ustasa supporters. The Serbs of Serbia proper fell under the regime of the German puppet ruler, Milan Nedic; significant numbers of them died as Partisans, Cetniks, or victims of German reprisals. The Germans administered the Banat, and Kosovo had been given by its Italian occupiers to Albania, which placed Serbs under an alien and hostile regime. In Macedonia, which Serbs always considered a Serbian land, Yugoslav Partisans, Bulgarian occupation authorities, and others competed for its ultimate control. Serbs thus suffered greatly during the war.

Serbia brought more than suffering to the postwar table, however. The Yugoslav Communists believed that the strength and position of Serbia in the interwar state had alienated other nationalities in Yugoslavia, leading to its collapse in 1941. Thus Serbia's legacy of suffering was to some degree offset by its history of intolerance in the interwar state. Serbs were in essence punished after the war for their role in the first Yugoslavia. In the course of the war and its aftermath, several basic assumptions (often in mutual contradiction) formed in the minds of the Partisans: that Serbia could not be allowed to dominate the second Yugoslavia, because of its role in the first; that certain nationalisms would be discouraged after the war (namely, Croatian and Serbian), while others would be tolerated or even encouraged (Macedonian, later Albanian); and that decisions regarding borders would be manipulated according to the need to balance national aspirations in the postwar state. Even with such general guidelines, the tally of territorial winners and losers after the war was unclear. Clearly enough, however, Serbs considered themselves losers.

The Serbia of 1913, that Serbia which Serbian nationalists considered minimal, disappeared in 1944-45. Macedonia became a republic, the now-nurtured Macedonian nation its lord. Portions of Baranja, Backa, and Banat became the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina-autonomous from the Socialist Republic of Serbia. Kosovo became the Autonomous Region of Kosovo and Metohija - a slightly lesser status, also autonomous from Serbia. In addition, other territorial decisions affected Serbian communities: the Serbs of Croatia were not given autonomous status, which had been considered by the communist leadership;

Bosnia and Hercegovina, instead of being divided between Serbia and Croatia (an impossible case), became a republic. And Montenegro retained its independence.

In 1948, 14.47 percent of Croatia's population was Serbian (543,795 total Serbs); by 1981, that percentage had fallen to 11.55 percent, for a total of 531,502. In 1948, 41.48 percent of Bosnia and Hercegovina's population was Serbian (not including those designating themselves as Serb-Muslims in that year's census), for a total of 1,064,125 Serbs; by 1981, the percentage had fallen to 32.03 percent, but there were 1,320,644 Serbs total. Kosovo's ethnic composition, always a contentious topic, was 76.9 percent Albanian in 1981, leaving 368,445 non-Albanians, nearly all ethnic Serbs and Montenegrins. In 1981, of 8.1 million Serbs in Yugoslavia, 6.5 percent lived in Croatia and 16.23 percent lived in Bosnia. A further 14 percent lived in Vojvodina A much smaller percentage lived in Kosovo, but that region's importance transcended the population figures. Only about 58 percent of Serbs lived in Serbia proper in 1981.

From the Serbian perspective, Tito's Yugoslavia was founded and organized on a series of unhappy ironies. Arguably the most persecuted nationality in Yugoslavia during the war, Serbs provided the core of the original Partisan units. Yet after the war their Serbia was all but dismembered. The perception that Serbs were punished after the war grew over the postwar period, as power in the new Yugoslavia devolved ever more to the republics and provinces at the expense of the center.

There was certainly a different logic to the federalization of Yugoslavia than the desire to destroy Serbian nationhood. At the risk of repetition of some of the truisms of postwar Yugoslav politics and power: the Partisans came to power on a dual wave of social revolution and anti-nationalism. Furthermore, they recognized that Yugoslavia could only survive if some sort of mechanism could be implemented to control nationalism. The result was a Yugoslavia federalized according to the Soviet model, but with variations. Self-management, for all of its revolutionary character as an alternative to Marxism-Leninism, was envisioned as a transformative means to eliminate bourgeois cultural identifications like nationhood in favor of class identifications. Moreover, until the early 1960s, Yugoslav leaders attempted to create a new supranational "Partisan" Yugoslav patriotism. In a self-managed Yugoslavia, it was conceivable (if visionary) to imagine the elimination of older national loyalties. This confidence lasted until the early 1960s, when the state's economy slowed down significantly.

Through this early era in the history of the second Yugoslavia, Serbs did not fear their status in the state in spite of the demonization of their interwar role and regardless of their dispersion throughout the republics and provinces of Yugoslavia. One reason for this was the position and influence of Aleksandar Rankovic, a Serb, one of the "big four" Yugoslav Communists (with Tito, Edvard Kardelj, and Milovan Djilas), the head of the UDBa (internal security) and, from 1963, vice-president of Yugoslavia. Rankovic provided both symbolic and real comfort for Serbs, especially due to the role he and his security service played in maintaining the dominance of Serbs in the nomenklatura of Kosovo, which then as now was by far the most critical territory in the minds of Serbian nationalists. Although it is unclear exactly how Rankovic's position and influence reassured Serbs, it is quite clear that his removal, which would come in 1966, would have the effect of disorienting many Serbs, from the top communist leadership through the intelligentsia and including the general public.

REVISING THE ETHNIC SOLUTION: THE LIBERALIZATION OF THE 1960s

The early 1960s were a time of rapid change in every sphere of Yugoslav political life. With the economy stalled, much of the Yugoslav leadership determined that the administration of both the state and the economy needed to be decentralized to facilitate market-oriented reforms. That point of view opened the door to the gradual devolution of power to the republics and provinces in Yugoslavia at the expense of the center in Belgrade; it therefore also opened the door to evermore fragmentation of the Serbian community of Yugoslavia. Not coincidentally, Aleksandar Rankovic and his supporters in the federal government were those most resistant to economic reform-because such reforms would involve decentralization of decision making and thus a weakening of the only guarantee that Serbs had of continued, if circumscribed, unity. The implications of economic reform were thus in direct contradiction to the political and administrative interests of Serbian unity.

The success of the liberal reformers, who included many of the leaders of the Slovenian and Croatian parties and relatively few Serbs, radically altered the path that Yugoslav federalism had taken until the mid-1960s. Hitherto, federalism had been less fact than fiction. After the victory of the reformers, Yugoslav leaders began to implement true decentralizing features, and federalization gained substance. With decentralization, the old emphasis on producing a new, "Partisan," identity receded. The nurturing of benign forms of national self-definition would take the place of the demonization of Individual nationalisms. Now each republic and province would be considered the territory of one of the major nations of Yugoslavia in an effort to' balance and harmonize the relations of the various groups. The adoption of this strategy foreshadowed the turnover of Kosovo to its Albanian majority, and the recognition of a Muslim nationality among the South Slavic-speaking religious Muslims of Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Sandzak of Novi Pazar.

The years 1966 to 1971 were filled with the aftershocks of Tito and Kardelj's decision to decentralize. In many ways the most important symbolic change in the Yugoslav administrative system was the removal of Rankovic in 1966. In order to eliminate Rankovic's faction from the federal government, where it was providing much resistance to decentralization, the leadership removed Rankovic from his positions in 1966 for a variety of stated reasons that included the claim that he had spied on Tito himself.

His removal was also motivated by the desire of the rest of the ruling class in Yugoslavia to stigmatize, finally and completely, centralism and Serbianism as one and the same ill in Yugoslavia. Without question, it was a purge of the periodic type that accompanied major changes in orientation in communist regimes. Serbs could only view his removal as an affront to them, while others, especially in Kosovo, breathed a sigh of relief at the fall of the Serbian watchdog.

Other events served notice to Serbia that its comfortable position in a firmly controlled Yugoslavia could not last. After Rankovic's fall in 1966, Tito handed Kosovo over to its Albanian majority, effecting a massive overhaul of the nomenklatura and making it resemble an Albanian mini-state. The police forces in Kosovo, hitherto dominated by Serbs, were fired, and Albanians replaced them, In 1968, the first of several phases of unrest hit Kosovo. In order to quell the disturbances, further concessions were made to the Albanians of the region: the University of Pristina was founded in 1969 as an Albanian-language institution; in official business, the term "Albanian" replaced the pejorative "Siptar"; the province's official designation, Kosovo-Metohija, was shortened to Kosovo, since Metohija was a Serbian place name with no cultural validity for the Albanian majority of the region. It seems likely that the demonstrations of 1968 represented a demand for further liberalization of the regime in the area, a reflection of the principle that violent opposition to a situation only occurs as that situation begins to improve.

Serbs reasonably perceived the fall of Rankovic and the Albanian assumption of predominance in Kosovo as part of the same process.

Additionally, between 1968 and 1971, Muslim South Slavs gradually moved from an unclear position as a religious minority to full status as a constituent nation in Yugoslavia.

Those Muslims who spoke Serbo-Croatian (that is, not Albanian or Turkish-speaking Muslims) were, as of the 1971 census, a nation-fully equal to Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes, and Macedonians among Yugoslavia's ruling nations (not nationalities, such as the Albanian, Hungarian, and others, which fell beneath nations in the Yugoslav hierarchy). Muslim attempts thereafter to designate Bosnia-Hercegovina the republic of the Muslims failed, but for the Serbs and Croats of Bosnia, recognition of a Muslim ethnicity represented a huge setback to national mythology. Previously, all had assumed (and Muslims had been forced to acknowledge) that Muslims were simply Serbs or Croats of the Islamic faith.

Once again, the revised approach to national relations in Yugoslavia appeared to work to the detriment of Serbs.

Finally, the Croatian Spring, whose origins dated to 1967 but which peaked in 1971, saw a rapid rise in open Croatian nationalism. It followed the victory of the liberal reformers of the mid- 1960s. The movement involved many issues, but focused on the sovereignty of the Croatian people in Croatia. In light of the fate of Croatia's Serbs during World War II, Serbs viewed the movement as a threat to them.

The writing of a new constitution for Croatia most directly affected Serbs. Proposals emanating from the Croatian cultural organization, Matica Hrvatska, did not include recognition of the Serbian nation in Croatia. As such, the key issue of 1971 for Serbs in Croatia would be mirrored in the crisis of 1990-91: Would Serbian individuality in Croatia be respected under Croatian authority? In 1971, the Serbian cultural organization Prosveta presented the Serbian position, while within the Croatian League of Communists, the only Serb, Dusan Dragosavac, did the same. When Tito decided to crush the mass movement, the Serbian question played a prominent role in his calculations.

The ultimate expression of the decentralization that proceed apace after 1966 was the constitution of 1974, with which self- management decision making was shifted almost entirely to the republics and autonomous provinces. Furthermore, the ultimate logic of the concept of "one republic, one nation" was unveiled, as Kosovo and Vojvodina both achieved near-republican status-the only notable remaining condition being that they did not have the right to secede from the federation. However, they did now occupy the unique constitutional position of being parts of both Serbia and the Yugoslav federation simultaneously. As if to prove again the maxim that upheaval under repressive regimes gathers steam as the repression declines, demonstrations again erupted in 1981 in Kosovo for republican status for the province. Only then did the issue of fully and constitutionally reconstituting Serbia arise with a vengeance among Serbs.

THE BIRTH OF SERBIAN DISSENT

It took very little time for the cumulative effect of the Albanian, Muslim, and Croatian exploitation of the new nationalities orientation of the regime to provoke an unsuppressed but isolated Serbian response. On May 29, 1968, at the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, Dobrica Cosic, a member of that committee and a favored member of the postwar Partisan intelligentsia, spoke. His speech established the foundation for Serbian complaints about the devolutionary tendencies of Yugoslav communism for the following two decades. Several things were notable about his presentation.

First, Cosic echoed the familiar communist claim that the national question could only be solved through modernization. The path to "human liberation" for Cosic was socioeconomic development so that "national identification [pripadnost] is a matter for the private sphere, an existential possibility for the enrichment of human creative originality." To assure such development, Cosic became the first strident Serbian voice in opposition to the "bureaucratization" of Yugoslav society, asserting that the federalization of Yugoslavia contributed not to the modernization of the state but to the growth of distinctly antimodernizing local bureaucracies in every republic and province. The idea that modernization would solve the national question was hardly new among Communists; nor was the proposal that bureaucracy was an enemy of progress in communist states. However, to underscore the persistence of the Yugoslav national question, the debate regarding modernization and bureaucracy in the 1960s followed national lines: the reformist Slovenes and Croats assuredly believed that market processes would accelerate modernization, and that those processes could only be implemented in a decentralized state; Serbs sincerely felt the opposite.

More than a sociologist's eye informed Cosic's overall expose, however. Also implicit in his presentation was a vision of what constituted Serbia, and the ways that current changes in Yugoslavia affected Serbs. His vision was not narrow. He rejected the notion that Serbia was nothing more than Sumadija, the nineteenth-century heartland of Serbia: srbijanstvo (Serbianism that diminished the importance of the precani) was "an essentially primitive and anachronistic political mentality." In fact, when pressed, Cosic discovered Serbian nationalism only among believers in this narrow definition of Serbdom - which thus placed all nationalisms, which were doctrinarily negative for him, in corresponding categories: bureaucratic, narrow, based in new federal units. Serbs, in his view, should not be particularists but universalists. Only a universal perspective could resolve Yugoslavia's national and developmental questions successfully. In the behavior of the Vojvodina and Kosovo leagues of Communists (emboldened by the reforms of the 1960s and moving away from the Serbian center), Cosic saw the destruction of Serbia: "Will the Sava and the Danube indeed be for our generation the border between Belgrade and Novi Sad, Macva and Srem, Banat and Danubia? Do in fact some Communists really continue to view the socialist autonomous Vojvodina as their own vojvodstvo?" Cosic feared that Vojvodina would become Magyarized, or its Serbs separated from their Sumadijan anchor, by its bureaucracy. Cosic's fear of the growth of a Vojvodinian (Magyar) identity was more than matched by his fear that Kosovo, "the ancient and original homeland of the Serbian people," would also abandon its Serbianness.

Perhaps the strongest impression left by Cosic's speech is obvious disdain for Albanians and fear of Albanian nationalism it is here that one senses finally the ultimate logic of his (an attacks on bureaucracy, decentralization, and nationalism. feared the creation of an Albanian Kosovo. He relied on the old ist fictions: "To me the favoring of any nationality at the expense the class perspective, at the expense of general social worth, at the expense of knowledge and capabilities, work and morals as fundamental human values in the socialist community is unacceptable in social and Marxist terms." But in Kosovo, the Albanian nationality was favored in his view - in fact, "nationality is obviously favored and the first characteristic of an expression of autonomous rights," a critical reversal of classic Marxist teachings, and a critical reversal for the Serbs of Kosovo. The new treatment of Kosovo was "bureaucratic-etatist," and "[could] not but end in irredentism, in the deepening of political differences between the nations of Kosovo and Metohija and Albania and Yugoslavia, in a permanent and open conflict." Thus, with regard to Albanian nationalism, Cosic asserted that "the only way that [Albanian irredentism] can have no serious political effect is if economic progress, democracy and social relations in Yugoslavia are always and in every way dominant over Albanian reality." A dual logic informed Cosic's position: Decentralization clearly allowed the "Albanian reality" to predominate over all others in Kosovo, and it did indeed enable the growth of huge bureaucracies that eventually hindered economic development. The missing element is the human one-Kosovo's population was Albanian, but the land was Serbian. Thus the Albanian reality was irrelevant.

Cosic was the first, but has not been alone, In asserting that the character of Kosovo is not to be determined by its demographic makeup but by its history. The starting point for many Serbs in discussions of Kosovo is their assertion that Kosovo is, in simplest terms, a Serbian land. There is no room for discussion of that point. Mihailo Markovic would later note in 1990 that "[t]he region which was invaded and eventually conquered by islamized Albanians, also happened to be the cradle of Serbian culture.... That is why Serbs cannot give it up."

This statement ignored the fact that, at the time of its writing, more than 80 percent of Kosovo's population was Albanian. It reflects the blinders that hinder dialogue between Serbs and outsiders regarding Kosovo.

Cosic's presentation, Marxist in its pretensions and rhetoric, reflected deep-rooted fears among Serbs that they were to be made second-class citizens in their own lands. Such a fear was, on the surface, not unreasonable. But the speaker's Marxist structure gave way to an ethnic nationalist superstructure when he defined that which was Serbian in expansive terms. The structure of the populations of Kosovo, where Serbs were vastly outnumbered, and Vojvodina, where they coexisted with a large Magyar minority, did not alter for Cosic the fact that they were Serbian lands. And while there were rays of hope in his exposition ("the freedom-loving and revolutionary Serbian people has the consciousness, strength and desire to democratically understand the national feeling of the Siptars of Kosovo and Metohija, and to support all of their demands if they are democratic in content and form"), it is rooted in an uncompromisingly collective vision of equality. Thus the offer is conditioned by the demand that Albanian "national sovereignty [not be] founded on nationalistic forms and on the endangerment of the survival, freedom, and integrity of the very Serbian nation in Kosovo and Metohija. Because Serbs and Montenegrins did not annex Kosovo and Metohija, they did not conquer it from the Siptars by war, therefore they are not occupiers and conquerors. Kosovo and Metohija are the ancient and original homeland of the Serbian nation." Cosic viewed the rights of nations (not individuals) as a zero sum equation. If Albanians had them, Serbs would not. But if Serbs were predominant, not only would it be historically just, but it would be morally progressive, since only the Serbian nation had the requisite consciousness.

Dobrica Cosic spoke in 1968, and was immediately excluded from the Serbian League of Communists along with a like-thinking colleague, Jovan Marjanovic. Their outburst reflected the growing assertiveness of other national groups in Yugoslavia: the Croatian Spring got its start with the uproar surrounding the publication of a common dictionary for Serbian and Croatian languages in 1967; the first productive movements toward the recognition of a Muslim nation in Yugoslavia began in 1968; and Serbs feared the demonstrations in Kosovo in 1968. One could view the three-year period from 1966 to 1968 in either of two ways: It was an expression of hitherto repressed nationalisms and was a healthy response to the decentralization of power in Yugoslavia; or it represented an insidious assertiveness on the part of national groups in Yugoslavia who saw in the decentralizing reforms an opportunity to dominate their neighbors once again. Either way, it appeared to threaten Serbs of Cosic's mind, and such Serbs would continue to use his 1968 speech as a cornerstone. In the late 1980s, Slobodan Milosevic used the idea of opposition to bureaucracy to focus his own revisionist communist movement, which he artfully labeled the "anti- bureaucratic revolution By the 1980s, in very changed circumstances, it reflected not merely fear of empire-building local bureaucracies, but the desire for a complete turnover in the Titoist party, which had, in their view, become weak and uncreative-and consequently anti-Serbian.

THE CREATION OF A SERBIAN NATIONALIST CONSENSUS

The 1974 constitution made official the confederation of the party and the atomization of economic decision making in Yugoslavia, and thus represented the culmination of the tendencies of the 1960s. Before that, however, Tito made certain that nationalist passions, unleashed in the late 1960s and best represented by the Croatian Spring of 1970-71, could not challenge the ultimate authority of the center. Along with the Croatian leadership (Miko Tripalo, Savka Dapcevic-Kucar, and others), Tito removed members of the leadership of the Serbian party whom he claimed to view as too nationalistic, although there is general agreement that Marko Nikezic and Latinka Perovic (the best-known victims in Serbia) were sacrificed in the president's quest to achieve ethnic symmetry in his persecutionary measures. Today, there is significant support for the thesis that Serbia lost its best and brightest in 1972, leaving the field open to talents like Milosevic in the 1980s.

Tito thus granted Yugoslavs the 1974 constitution after purging those "nationalists" who he assumed might take republican liberties too far. The constitution made immutable all of the best and worst of confederation: the one nation, one republic-province equation, which represented an attempt to allow each major ethnic group in Yugoslavia a home of its own; the entrenchment of republican, provincial leaderships that might have become national leaders, but instead developed into corrupt apparatchiks. For Serbs, the constitution made the situation of Kosovo and Vojvodina ridiculous. Each province now occupied a dual constituent status: simultaneously part of Serbia and the federation, they played a republican role in the federal context, where their powers were almost identical to the republics with the exception of the right to secede.

The standard Serbian response to the situation was acquiescence. Such a response is completely understandable- the strength of the Titoist ideology, the pervasiveness of the myth of self-management, and the intense antinationalistic rhetoric of the regime and popular culture made it so. Until the late 1970s, the Serbian party doctrinarily ignored or persecuted those like Cosic who claimed anti-Serbianism was integral to post-1966 Titoism. This era gave birth to real disillusionment with Titoism among Serbs. By the late 1970s, however, within the Serbian party, a subtle consensus grew that the dispersion of Serbs could not continue. From that point on, quiet agitation for a revision of the 1974 constitution began. For loyal Serbian Communists, there was only one way to take advantage of Titoism and still support a reconstitution of Serbia: attack Albanian nationalism (as well as others) while asserting that "progressive forces" (Serbian, socialist) existed that could eradicate it. Those progressive forces could only be adequately utilized in a reunified Serbia, in which the excesses of Albanian nationalism could be tackled.

To the frustration of many Serbs, this approach was self-limiting: Ivan Stambolic, the head of the Serbian party until 1987, accused those Serbs who went beyond assertions of Albanian counter-revolution and denied the ability of the Serbian and Kosovo parties to solve the problem institutionally of having "already begun to swim in the waters of a different nationalism [Serbian]." That was the limit, set by the system itself, on expression of Serbian unhappiness. All energies devoted to the reconstitution of Serbia had to be channeled through the party's initiative to revise the constitution of the republic. The source of tension in Serbian society in the 1980s, however, would be precisely the growing belief of Serbs outside the party that Titoist methods were no longer useful. The party no longer served Serbs.

Until the mid-1980s, outside of the party, little could be said. Until Tito died in 1980, open Serbian pining for the return of Kosovo or Vojvodina was muted. But after he died in May 1980, the Serbian nationalist movement grew outside of the party, among historians, writers, and other intellectuals. That movement embodied the true expression of anti-Titoism, the deepest sense of opposition to the regime-in effect, the energies of the Serbian opposition were totally focused on re-creating Serbia. What's more, new demonstrations in Kosovo occurred in 1981. Those events, more violent and challenging than the 1968 demonstrations, reminded all Yugoslavs that Albanian nationalism was a potent force in Kosovo. As of 1981, the older, more restrained methods of questioning the division of Serbdom were outpaced by the development of extra-party movements that were overtly nationalistic, that utilized old, pre-partisan mythologies, and that mined the depths of anti-Titoism in Serbia, reviving older nationalist cultural images, especially those which were anti. communist and anti-Muslim. Whereas in other countries of Eastern Europe, opposition took the form of "living in truth," "antipolitics," or "the new evolutionism," all of which described attempts to create a "civil society" parallel to the regime, in Serbia attempts to create space for the individual were rare indeed. instead, the re-creation of a Serbian "ethnic society" was the goal.

Dobrica Cosic, the herald of the original antibureaucratic revolution, also heralded the opening of the second front, the non-party, intellectual uprising against Titoism, with his 1977 speech to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, which has come down to us under the name "Literature and History Today."

Cosic's vehicle was a speech on the relationship of the novel to history-specifically, the ability of the novel and the novelist to characterize the history of a people where historians fall. However, the true theme of the presentation is to be found in the history he claims has inadequately been served by historians. And that is the history, of the Serbian people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cosic establishes here the litany of grievances that Serbian historians and intellectuals would carry forward in the name of the return of history and truth. Here we discover that "in Europe there is not a small nation which in the past two centuries, and especially in the twentieth, has expended so much in the name of history ... as the Serbian nation." His exposition betrays a petulance that would characterize the next ten years of Serbian attempts to revise the verdict of Yugoslav historiography. Thus outsiders were to blame for Serbian failures; Serbs are not accorded enough credit for their suffering in the name of civilization. He approvingly notes the command of Tolstoy: "Write the real, true history of this century! There is your life's task!" Cosic's call would be taken up in the 1980s by historians seeking the truth. In the process, the pendulum would be dragged too far in the direction of a new false orthodoxy-nationalist this time.

The first area in which the new search for truth would be practiced was with regard to Kosovo, the Albanian land that provided Serbia with its vast pantheon of heroes, anti-heroes, and sacred grounds. The absence of Tito emboldened an enormous range of people to attack the Titoist solution to the Albanian "counter-revolution." In the course of the period from 1981 to 1986, an opposition to the way the Serbian party dealt with Albanian nationalism would coalesce around several specific points: the fact of Serbo-Montenegrin outmigration; the immense economic drain that Kosovo represented; and the alleged revisitation of ancient crimes (rape, murder, and even impalement) against Serbs perpetrated earlier by Turks, now by Albanians. The overarching theme of this new opposition was the argument that Kosovo was a Serbian land. Thus, not only were crimes being committed against Serbs in Kosovo, they were being committed in a land that was Serbian by definition, regardless of the demographic facts. Given the long-term Titoist commitment to seeing Kosovo develop in the hands of Albanians, the Serbian league of Communists came to be viewed as a virtual traitor to the Serbian nation.

The developing consensus was spurred by regular demonstrations of Serbs who left Kosovo after 1981. These manifestations of Serbian discontent became more open, more publicized, and more poignant as it became clear that the party could not answer the demands of these demonstrators. In time, however, the justified (or at least understandable) complaints of migrants from Kosovo took on surreal dimensions. The theme of migration of Serbs from Kosovo has a relatively lone pedigree in Serbian national thought. Perhaps, then, it was inevitable that linkage of the distant past and the present would continue and even escalate. In May 1985, when a Serbian farmer from Kosovo named Djordje Martinovic was found with a broken bottle in his anus, the story inflamed a Serbian public that was convinced that he had been "impaled" by Albanians.

Regardless of the truth of the story, the episode took on religious dimensions when the painter Mica Popovic produced his "1. May 1985," depicting the suffering of Martinovic. The importance of all of this for our purposes is not in the details (it does not matter whether Martinovic impaled himself or was impaled); it is in the nature of the reaction to the event and the nationalist consensus that developed outside of the party as a result and the role that the idea of a reunited Serbia played in that consensus.

The consensus was prompted by intellectuals, the majority; whom represented two factions in Serbian society: one centered the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the other in members the Praxis Group, which consisted of a group of Serbian philosophers best known for their socialist-humanist opposition Marxism-Leninism. Of the two groups, the first seem likely to forge or join a nationalist Consensus. Together, however, these intellectuals entered the fray regarding Kosovo in early 1986, when 200 of them produced a petition to the Serbian and Yugoslav national assemblies. The petition asserted that genocide (the word was used for the first time in this context) was being perpetrated against Serbs in Kosovo (and, meaningfully, Metohija) - the "ancient hearths" of the Serbian people.

Given the ethnic makeup of Kosovo, it is clear that for these intellectuals Kosovo was a constituent part of Serbia because of its history rather than its population. The response of the party to this petition and others signed by residents of Kosovo at the same time only confirmed to these outsiders that the party was still Titoist in every way. And in fact, the party, in its insistence on "self-managed" solutions based on increased efficiency, missed the point. The issue was that change was "unimaginable without changes likewise in the relationship between the Autonomous Provinces and the Republic of Serbia.... [g]enocide cannot be prevented by the politics that had led to it in the first place: the politics of gradual surrender of Kosovo and Metohija - to Albania."

There was little surprise that a portion of this new opposition would emerge from the Serbian Academy. Led by Antonije Isakovic, the vice-president of the Academy and a leading Serbian author, whose work Tren 2 (Moment 2) had already established its author as an outsider and critic of Titoism, the Academy would in 1986 produce the well- known "Memorandum of the Serbian Academy." A long document, the final section concerns the position of Serbia in Yugoslavia. The Memorandum blamed Tito, Kardelj, and the system they created for all of Serbia's ills. It was the crystallization of the thesis, first proposed by Cosic in 1977, that the Serbian nation had suffered more and been rewarded less than any other.

If the general point of the Memorandum was that Titoism mistreated Serbs, then the way Titoism did this is equally crucial. The answer was simple: "[f]irst of all, it is the Serbian nation and its state that are being discussed." "[A]fter four decades in the new Yugoslavia, She alone does not have her own state." Like Cosic in 1968, the authors rejected the notion of a division between Srbijanci and precani. The main focus of the authors was Kosovo, but Croatia followed closely behind. If the "physical, political, legal, and cultural genocide of Serbs in Kosovo and Metohija" was one extreme in the continuum of Serbian suffering, then the belief that "excepting the period of the existence of the NDH [Independent State of Croatia], Serbs in Croatia have never in the past been so endangered as they are today" was the other. The solution was "the establishment of a complete national and cultural integrity of the Serbian nation, regardless of which republic or province it is in, is its historical and democratic right." "In order to satisfy the legitimate interests of Serbia, revision of the constitution is inescapably imposed [on us]. The autonomous regions must become true integral parts of the Republic of Serbia."

The Memorandum, which was never openly released (only leaked to the public), met with a predictably weak response from the Serbian party leadership. Ivan Stambolic, the president of the presidency of the Serbian party, asserted that "we [communist party leaders] do not accept the Memorandum's call for Serbia to turn its back on its own future and the future of Yugoslavia, for it to arbitrarily accuse the proven leaders of the revolution and of socialist development, for Serbian Communists to be seen as the illegitimate leaders of the working class and people of Serbia." The decline of the party's legitimacy in the eyes of the Serbian public could only accelerate in the face of such a weak response.

Where the party missed the point, others did not. Cosic approved the Memorandum and defended the integrity of the academy. But in many ways the Memorandum opened up new vistas. This was particularly true of its condemnation of the treatment of Serbs in Croatia. The opening of a Croatian front met with a strong response from Serbian historians, including Vasilije Krestic, Dragoljub Zivojinovic, Veselin Djuretic, Milan Bulaic, and Vladimir Dedijer, all of whom produced crude, ahistorical, yet influential works purporting to prove the existence of a Catholic conspiracy (or even, in Krestic's case, a genocidal determination) among Croats to eliminate Serbs.

The attack of Belgrade's intellectuals on Croatia was unprovoked and unfair, and led to an escalating series of polemics with Croats that eventually proved the Serbian prophecy correct: Croats did come to fear and despise the Serbia of the late 1980s.

The other half of the non-party opposition consisted of members of the Praxis group. Their position outside of the party had been long-established. Yet their opposition to the party had always been essentially Marxist. The fact that they now joined a nation consensus is thus intriguing and somewhat shocking. Four members of the group, Ljubomir Tadic, Zagorka Golubovic,

Mihailo Markovic, and Milan Kangrga had signed the January 1986 petition that first labeled Albanian behavior in Kosovo as genocidal. Their gravitation from Marxism to nationalism was abrupt. Their anti. Titoism was of long pedigree, and their democratic inclinations were well publicized. Their transition can be explained in two ways: their democracy, like that of other Serbs (and Croats, as well as others) was not rooted in a belief in individual liberties, rather it was founded on a collective conception of society and rights; and they found it easy to move from one homogenizing, collective ideology (class-based Marxism) to another (cultural-based nationalism). By the early 1990s, Markovic was Milosevic's intellectual alter-ego.

Several intertwined oppositions to Titoist treatment of the' Serbian population of Yugoslavia have been loosely delineated in this chapter. One, which was pioneered by Dobrica Cosic in 1968, paved the way for all others, focusing on the need to reconstitute Serbia because its division opened the door to antiSerbian nationalisms as well as emphasizing some hoarier myths from Serbia's nationalist' past. The Serbian party adopted portions of Cosic's approach when, from 1974 to 1986, it supported a constitutional revision of the status of the Serbian republic, but rejected the notion of accomplishing that outside of a Titoist framework. Others outside the party adopted those elements of Cosic's dissidence that were more than "revisionist": as we have seen, it included (despite his own protestations) elements that were overtly nationalistic. His fear/loathing of Albanians, his reliance on historical arguments for the reattachment of Kosovo and Vojvodina to Serbia, and his espousal of a broad Serbianism all foreshadowed another major faction in the Serbian opposition to Titoism, that which arose outside of the party in the mid- 1980s after the president's death.

Both general approaches reached their fullest development in Slobodan Milosevic's "anti-bureaucratic revolution," which began in 1988 and played on Serbs' hatred of the Titoist party and demanded a complete turnover in the party elite. Milosevic' took advantage of the general Serbian belief that the party did not have the capability to "end the terror in Kosovo." Instead of droning on using Titoist phraseology about the ability of "self- management" to produce solutions, he took the old Cosic idea of anti-bureaucracy and made it his own. This "anti- bureaucratic revolution," by cleansing the party, allowed Milosevic to install his own men, who supported his new nationalist proclivities, whether cynically or riot. Milosevic thus achieved a historic fusion of the attitudes of the party and of the non-party oppositionists. From late 1987 forward, the now "revolutionary" party incorporated more and more of the ideas of the Serbian Academy nationalists and their non-party allies. The fusion could best be seen in the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in June 1989. With the backdrop of the "field of blackbirds," on which the Battle of Kosovo was fought and which is con sidered by Serbs one of their sacred places, Milosevic pronounced his determination to redress the balance of history. The Battle of Kosovo was lost due to "lack of unity and betrayal." "Therefore," he continued, "words devoted to unity, solidarity, and cooperation among people have no greater significance anywhere on the soil of our motherland than they have here in the field of Kosovo, which is a symbol of disunity and treason. " By linking the fate of a disunited Serbia in 1389 with that of the allegedly disunited Serbia of 1989, Milosevic bridged the subtle revisionism of the Serbian party with the overt nationalism of the Memorandum authors.

CONCLUSION

This chapter demonstrates the existence of a long-term opposition to Titoism both in and out of the Serbian League of Communists based on the desire to see the divisions of Serbia eliminated; a movement, in other words, dedicated to the "reconstitution" of Serbia. Given that long-term commitment, and given the inability of the League of Communists to satisfy that demand in a thoughtful and methodical way, an aggressive nationalist movement was bound to emerge in Serbia. Beginning in 1968 and growing until 1991, opposition to the communist regime in Serbia focused most commonly on the dispersion of the Serbian people among a variety of federal units. And the ironies are endless (to outsiders, national mythology is always full of ironies): Kosovo, the one area of Yugoslavia with few Serbs, became the central goal of nationalists. Croatia, with its large Serbian population, remained a secondary problem (and remains so today).

Today in Serbia, the unanimity with which the major political parties treat the Serbian national question mirrors the strength of the idea over the previous 20 years. Today, it is impossible to conceive of a popular politician or party, and nearly impossible to conceive of a truly popular intellectual, who does not support the consensus that developed over the period from 1968 to 1991. It is true that today's consensus also reflects three years of war. But the fact remains that there were indeed few options to such a nationalist consensus. Dissidence in Serbia focused its hostility on the regime (just as dissidence did in other societies). The regime, for Serbs, meant the power that had punished Serbs when they should have been rewarded; meant the power that had divided Serbs ever more, and more importantly divided Serbian lands. Reconstituting Serbia in an "ethnic society" was the goal.