Who Were the Yugoslavs? Failed Sources of a Common Identity in the Former Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia's leaders believed that a policy of equality among the many nationalities in Yugoslavia, in tandem with Communist Party hegemony, would allow nationalism within Yugoslavia to exist, mature, andfinally diminish as a political force without jeopardizing the political stability and economic development of the country as a whole. Consequently the identification of people with their nationality was accepted to the neglect of an identity associated with the state as a whole. The expectation that a shared political agenda and the modernization of the society would weaken nationalism as a political force was not met. Instead, economic and political rivalries among the Yugoslav republics intensified nationalist feelings. In the early 1990s Yugoslavia's experiment in building a multinational state was replaced with open hostilities and warfare among the South Slavs. We identify four routes to Yugoslav self-identification and analyze the significance of these using survey data from 1985 and 1989, just prior to the break up of Yugoslavia. Urban residents, the young, those from nationally-mixed parentage, Communist Party members, and persons from minority nationalities in their republic were among those most likely to identify as Yugoslavs. None of these factors, however, proved sufficient to override the centrifugal forces of rising nationalism. Implications for political integration in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are discussed.