Danijel Kežić, Vladimir Petrović, and Edvin Pezo, eds. Taming the Yugoslav Space: Continuities and Discontinuities in Coping with the Infrastructural Challenges of the 20th Century

The edited volume Taming the Yugoslav Space, recently published by the Institute of East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg and the Institute of Contemporary History in Belgrade, promises to shed new light on Yugoslav history. Contrary to traditional depictions of the Yugoslav past, which focused primarily on issues related to political history, this volume brings forth the social and institutional underpinnings of the country’s history.Focusing on infrastructure, understood broadly as all projects and institutions oriented toward long-term development (12), the volume helps better understand the many issues of Yugoslavia’s state-building. Namely, as the authors explain, infrastructures served both as a vehicle for the country’s (spatial) integration and disintegration and thus provide a background against which the social, political, and economic processes of Yugoslavia unfolded. Given the resilience of infrastructures, the authors challenge established periodizations of political history and generally opt for a longue-durée approach to historiography. Their work rests on solid theoretical foundations. In addition to the interdisciplinary field of the history of infrastructure, the authors also build on assumptions of path dependencies and historical heritages. That said, they accentuate the influence of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian legacies in creating an institutional framework in Yugoslavia that was incredibly resistant to change. While all the contributions analyze relations between the infrastructure and societies, the volume is roughly divided into two thematic clusters. In the first one, the authors address the material aspect of infrastructure, hence how infrastructure defines people’s lives (and vice versa). In the second, however, the emphasis is on the impact of the institutional infrastructure on politics and societies. The authors, therefore, deal with a number of topics, ranging from the organization of traffic, water supply, electrification, housing, crematoria, the role of political infrastructure, the politics of commemoration, and the role of sports in nation-building.Writing on the development of the railway system, Kežić underlines the ways in which different imperial legacies obstructed spatial integration and, therefore, also Yugoslavia’s nation-building. It was only in the 1970s that Yugoslavia became fully integrated by railways. Analyzing air transport, Kukoban points out the interwar traditions of Yugoslav aviation upon which the aircraft carriers in the 1960s were built. Likewise, Heitman looks at (dis)continuities in the electrification of two Yugoslavias, pointing out the absence of such studies in the scholarship, which has mostly provided republic-specific case studies. A similar lack of investigation is observed by Tomić, who draws attention to housing projects in socialist Yugoslavia, emphasizing path dependence with the interwar period. Like Kežić, Gašić also delves into railways, only that she explores the Belgrade station rather than the railway network. While in 1880 two railway stations were projected, only one was erected at that time, with the other being established only in 1970. The fact that the “old one” remained operational until 2018 suggests the resilience of inherited infrastructure. Ibragimova moves to the organization of death care in Belgrade, an issue that has scarcely been dealt with in scholarship. Even though the private cremation society was established as early as 1904, the people of Belgrade had to wait another sixty years for the introduction of a crematorium, the author finds out. Ristanović ponders the water supply in Belgrade, which should have been well taken care of considering the town’s position. Nonetheless, as the author suggests, introducing innovative methods into patriarchal and conservative surroundings proved to be an arduous endeavor. Moving to the political infrastructure, Gužvica analyzes the functioning of the Politburo of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from Tito’s struggle for power in 1938 until the Tito–Stalin split in 1948. He considers Tito’s personalization of power, transforming the Politburo into a “Team,” as instrumental in instigating a breakdown in Soviet–Yugoslav relations. Similarly to Gužvica, in analyzing the organizational-political secretariat of the Yugoslav Communist Party, and in particular its head, Aleksandar Ranković, Pezo focuses on political actors, defined as “human sides of infrastructures.” His contribution is followed by that of Šarenac, who examines path dependence in commemorating the victims of World War I at Vido Island near Corfu, where the “zero contingent event,” establishing a memorial site on foreign grounds, was affirmed whenever Serbian identity politics gained prominence. Mijatov then examines the ways in which Yugoslav identity was affirmed in the first and second Yugoslavia in the stadiums of Belgrade and Vršac. Finally, Lecić brings under scrutiny the municipality of Kragujevac in the years 1930–1950, implying the existence of continuities despite the shift in political regimes. His study suggests that the corruption of bureaucracy, the lack of an impartial judiciary, and the problematic relationship between public and private interests were most resistant to transformation. Finally, in the afterword, Lučić situates the volume within the broader debate on infrastructure and provides valuable insights for further exploration.While the authors shed light on a variety of topics, there are still a number of fields waiting to be explored. Apart from the environmental aspect proposed by Lučić, the link between migration and infrastructure could also be explored more in-depth, as it is now only discussed within other issues, such as housing. The fact that the volume does not cover all possible ramifications of infrastructure, of course, clearly does not indicate the book’s shortcomings. Rather, the possibility of extending the authors’ approach to other fields confirms the authors’ remarkable achievement, namely that they managed to demonstrate the advantages of looking at Yugoslav history through the longue-durée perspective.