The multi-nation and political concept of Yugoslavia has always exerted a certain interest and intrigue in me – as much as, if not more so than, that of Czechoslovakia. I think I can safely say that it started in my middle-school days, with my Mennonite peace-church upbringing looking for humanity even in the popularly-dæmonised Serbs. It would only be much, much later that I would discover paternal ties of blood with the South Slavs. My wife, who grew up in mainland China, remembered seeing news photos of the carpet-bombing of Serbia when she was a child – that was how her own anti-war sentiments began; of course, this was shortly after the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was bombed by American planes.
In addition, the Yugoslavia which took shape after World War II was one of the ‘instigators, main drivers and pioneers’ of the Non-Aligned Movement – one of the only European countries, actually, to even join a movement inaugurated by the Bandung Conference and essentially centred around the East Asian, African, Arabic and Latin American civilisational ambits. Yugoslavia pursued diplomatic and trade policies that were anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and largely independent of both major superpower-led blocs. I would be lying if I said this didn’t render the entire project of Yugoslavia that much more endearing to me.
However, it was really a book by a friend of the family, The Participatory Œconomy by the late Czech-American œconomist Jaroslav Vaněk of Cornell University, which stoked my interest in the Balkan multi-nation, and specifically in its lost potentials as a multi-ethnic polity distinguished by a participatory ethic of socio-œconomic egalitarianism and a strong authoritarian power-vertical. Both of these aspects, as I would discover after swimming the Bosporus, are contained to some degree in the history and political praxis of the Eastern Roman Empire to which the South Slavs were at one time subject. (How ironic that a project that would come to be, and continues to be, associated so heavily with anti-imperialism itself had imperial roots. But that’s not only the Orthodox oikoumenē, not only Byzantium and Russia, but Chinese history as well!)
A recent article in Slavonic and East European Review by Dr Aleksandar Ignjatović, a professor of architecture at the University of Belgrade, elucidates the complicated and dialectical relationships between the historical memory and built legacy of Byzantium on the one hand, and the lasting (and, in fact, still-extant) attachment of the Serbian national consciousness to the multi-national project of Yugoslavia on the other – even as the ideology of Yugoslavism itself was being developed. Even as Serbian historiography transitioned between a Romantic nationalism and a more objective critical perspective, the linkages between the Serbia and Byzantium were drawn upon both for a sense of association and a sense of independence. The Serbian sense of its own identity drew upon both of these sources:
On the one hand, historiography reinforced a sense of association of Serbs with Byzantium, which was explained by the profound influence of Byzantine customs, art and culture on medieval Serbia. On the other hand, Serbia’s cultural and political emancipation and its differentiation from Byzantium were emphasised… Consequently, the position of Byzantium became ambivalent in [Serbian] historiography, simultaneously seen as ‘national legacy’ and expressed in terms of the nation’s political adversary and cultural obstacle.The biggest problem facing the first generations of Serbian Yugoslavists was that ‘Byzantium’ never just meant Byzantium. In the Western European and American imaginations, it has always – from Whig historians to post-modernists, from Montesquieu, Voltaire and Gibbon down to John Julius Norwich – been a repository for various Western fantasies about the East. Behind the Gibbon tradition stood a massive body of intellectual habit that (ironically) had its roots in the Greek philosopher Aristotle, but which encompassed not only Montesquieu and Voltaire, but also Machiavelli, Smith, Mill and (sometimes) Marx: the East was a uniformly-benighted backwater, an impersonal faceless horde in slavish submission to debauched despots; against which the virtuous-free-and-republican West could be set in contrast.
Even the earliest, most stridently-Romantic Serbians were sensitive to this body of intellectual habits; and their thought was shaped accordingly. Although the early Serb historiographers accepted the stereotype of a static and despotic Byzantine Empire, the shared religious and cultural heritage of Byzantium and Serbia meant that their criticisms were always reserved and provisional. Not for a Prokić or a Stanojević (both students of Krumbacher; the latter a student of Jireček) the vituperation of Voltaire, to the effect that Byzantium was ‘a worthless repertory of declamations and miracles, a disgrace to the human mind’, much less Hegel’s heckle that it was a ‘disgusting picture of imbecility’! Ignjatović proclaims, rather, that even the earliest Yugoslav Byzantinists were ‘multifaceted’ in their approach.
Indeed, from the Russian Slavophils, the early Serbian Byzantinists inherited a few notes of positive regard for their subject. It was the repository, not of worthless declamations, but the true religious doctrine, beautiful churches, peaceful and contemplative monasteries. It was no disgrace, but instead the careful tender of the fires of Roman and classical Greek civilisations – their literature, their architecture, their visual arts, their philosophy. ‘It presupposed an image that was an antipode to the rationality of the West.’ A certain Romantic view – one to which, having Yugoslav and Czechoslovak heritage myself, I am not entirely immune – of Orthodoxy as a more authentic and purer form of the religion of Christ and His Apostles, was common among these Serbian Byzantinists, along with certain ‘leftist’ political ideals. However, from the Slavophils also came pan-Slavic cultural nationalism, which differentiated the Serbian nation from its Byzantine spiritual foster-mother.
From this complex view of Byzantine history a set of dynamic historiographical threads began to emerge. The South Slavs took the very basis of their religious and cultural distinctiveness from the Byzantines going back to Ss Cyril and Methodius – this was the ‘Byzantinisation thesis’. But they also had to become independent of the Byzantines that had nursed and reared them. Serbian was both enemy and kissing-cousin to Greek, simultaneously both ‘ally and rival’, to use the formula of Jireček. Even as they fought they revealed their ‘indelible’ commonality. The Romantic rubric which was applied to Byzantine studies lent the Serbian national project a kind of stepwise progressivism, particularly as regarded the pivotal political figure of Tsar Stefan Dušan, who was regarded as both an archetypal Byzantine autocrat and a dynamic, vital cultural-political innovator. Among Serbian Byzantinists and mediævalists, Serbia was pronounced a ‘renovator’ of the Byzantine tradition.
It was precisely the kinship of Serbia to Byzantium that gave such a distinct ‘resonance’ to the multi-national project of Yugoslavia. Pace the lazy (but sadly popular) generalisation opposing nationalist Orthodox and cosmopolitan Catholics – precisely these Romantic, Slavophil-influenced Serbian intellectuals were never as deeply seduced by the blood-and-soil rhetoric of exclusive ethnic nationalism as even their close Roman Catholic Croatian cousins were. ‘Serbian élites were frequently trying to substitute a simple concept of an ethnically defined nation-state with a more convenient political entity, based on a multi-national idea.’ The Serbs with their cultural and political development were to be the soft-power nucleus, the ‘attractive core’, that would provide form and legitimacy – even a gospel of liberation – to a pan-Slav state that would gather and unite people of various tribes, languages and creeds. The Eastern Roman Empire, with its clear and careful distinction between ethno-linguistic and political modes of belonging, was the explicit model for the Yugoslav ideal, for such scholars as Ristić, Županič and Cvijić! Even more so than the Czechoslovaks, whose connexion to Byzantium was that much more attenuated and energised by a less well-defined pan-Slavist sentiment, the Serbian Yugoslavists most of all among the South Slavs took to the multi-national creed with the zeal of the newly-converted.
Ignjatović traces out not only how these ideas found their genesis among the intellectual class and among Byzantine scholars, but also how they overlapped with each other. The concept of Yugoslavia was never pure ‘empire’ and never pure ‘nation-state’, but existed in a region of confluence between the two – Ignjatović posits, indeed, that ‘empire’ and ‘nation-state’ exist only as abstract Weberian ideals anyway, and that they are always interwoven to some degree no matter where they are found. He notices parallel trends among Romanian historians (like Nicolae Iorga) and Greek (like Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos) to rebaptise the entire Byzantine legacy in the waters of ethnic nationalist myth-building, to establish links of legitimacy and historical congruity between mediæval and modern political formations, that look all too familiar to students of Rus(sian) history, or observers of current events. The Balkans in general were basically ground zero for the ‘appropriation of Byzantium’ for purposes of nation-building, but the ‘imperial hangover’ of the last nineteenth-century Byzantine symposium is still being felt today. Yugoslavia was formed out of a tension between historical continuity with and rupture from Byzantium, very much as the rest of the post-Ottoman Balkan nations (Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Greece) were.
Still, Yugoslavia more-so than Greece or Romania, both in its monarchical and its Titoist manifestations, possessed a familial resemblance to the Byzantine ideal in its institutional structure. There was the autocracy – the strong power-vertical; there was the multi-ethnic ideal; there was the notion and praxis of philanthrōpia; there was even a new kind of Romanitas. But there was also in Yugoslavia a kind of populism; an œconomic democracy from the ground-up – a hand which Greek-American historian Anthony Kaldellis unfortunately overplays in his treatment of Byzantium, but which was undoubtedly there in limited forms also. This familial resemblance is not accidental. Ignjatović, though he did not necessarily set out to do so, demonstrates convincingly how the intellectual genetics of the Yugoslav political idea – at least among the Serbians who grasped onto it the most intensely in the late nineteenth century – are bound up indelibly with the Byzantine Imperial complex of autocratic, cosmopolitan and populist institutional forms. (In that, he is himself a part, on the ‘critical’ side rather than the Romantic, of the same historiographical project he describes.)
The appeal the memory of Yugoslavia has today is, however, almost entirely anti-imperial. It is a perfectly Grantian ‘intimation of deprival’, yes. It is also a touchstone for non-aligned politics; for mobilisation on behalf of oppressed peoples; for rejection of libertarian and neo-liberal œconomics; for resistance to American hegemonic domination of the globe. In this sense, we could – with a bit of creative anachronism – posit Yugonostalgia as a kind of ‘alter-Byzantinism’. This particular part of the Byzantine legacy, this very human part, needs to be reclaimed by Orthodox Christians who oppose the current technocratic ordo and the looming post-digital idols of a radically-depersonalised future.
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