Borrowed Time: Sovereign Debt and Temporal Disorder In Socialist Yugoslavia

When Francis Fukuyama described the collapse of state socialism as marking the “end of history,” he captured the imagination of the post-Cold War moment, rendering the fall of the Berlin Wall a metonym for the definitive eclipse of communism and the advent of a new era of liberal capitalist hegemony. For Europe’s Left, the term became associated with a moment of profound demoralization. Fukuyama’s end of history, however, was only one moment of a longer and more expansive crisis in the socialist order of time. This crisis can be traced back to the global economic upheavals of the 1970s that impacted both social democracy in the West and state socialism in the East. A decade before crowds forced their way across a divided Berlin, socialism on both sides of the Iron Curtain had entered an existential decline. This article argues that the sovereign debt crises that beset European states in the final decade of the Cold War disrupted socialism’s regime of historicity. It develops this argument with reference to late-socialist Yugoslavia and demonstrates how the temporal conditions of sovereign indebtedness shaped popular culture. Through a reading of the films Balkanski špijun (1984) and Već viđeno (1987), the article argues that the erosion of socialism’s horizons of expectation fostered a new experience of historical time in which the past returned in uncanny, troubling, and ultimately destructive ways.