‘The phantom of liberty’: new youth activism

The third chapter reflects on new youth activism within the wider context of what has been termed ‘the new social movements’. It addresses the broader transnational influence of movements abroad, and shows how new areas for political expression opened up around peace, anti-militarism, environmentalism/nuclear disarmament and sexuality. Late socialist Yugoslav society witnessed the proliferation of a youth arena of civil initiatives and activist citizenship, albeit fragmented and often discordant, which found shelter and support within parts of the existing youth institutional framework. Although the federal Youth League did not explicitly endorse all of the initiatives stemming from the new social movements, it did provide spaces for some of them and increased the visibility of their demands in the public space.

‘Comrades, I don’t believe you!’: youth culture and the rethinking of historical legacies

The second chapter focuses on the way in which parts of the youth articulated a specifically anti-regime critique and through it questioned some of the values embodied in contemporary politics and culture. In particular, it examines how older forms of political discourse and ritual - embodied by Tito’s personality cult and the Day of Youth relay race - were critiqued in both political and new cultural forms. For the most part, this critique was not reduced to a demand for outright abolishment of Yugoslav socialism, but it was rather about challenging the norms of an older generation and reinventing socialism through the state’s youth institutions.

Introduction: revisiting the 1980s through a generation lens

The Introduction situates the study within the literature on late Yugoslav socialism, generations and youth. Scholarly literature on Yugoslavia views the 1980s primarily as the prelude to the violent dissolution of the country and has generally dealt with the end of Yugoslavia as a fait accompli. The Introduction posits the manuscript as one of the first attempts to explore this alternative world of the Yugoslav 1980s through a generational lens, taking the variety of political and cultural projects that sought to redefine – but not destroy – the Yugoslav project. The study maintains that a generational approach provides new insights into the processes of remaking/rethinking and decline in late socialism. The younger generation was not central to negotiating the dissolution, yet some of its representatives were at the forefront of trying to rethink Yugoslav socialist federalism.

Conclusion: rethinking youth politics and culture in late socialist Yugoslavia

Moja prva i najveća želja bi bila da se probudim i da ustanovim da je 1990 godina i da kažem ‘Uh, al’ sam nešto ružno sanjao …’1 Milan Mladenović, EKV Amidst a major rethinking of the economic and political status quo, the 1980s saw the revival of a generational challenge to Yugoslav socialism, in which socialist self-management was not necessarily rejected, but rather seen as capable of reform within the existing Yugoslav federal framework. The book showed how an urban trans-republican network developed that expressed novel ideas in politics and culture and engendered issue-oriented activism, in addition to a new ‘sense of citizenship’, where the Yugoslav and the ethno-national line of identification were seen as complementary and not mutually exclusive. Although significantly conditioned by the republican contexts, debates, exchanges and interactions took place across republican borders. This realm of youth politics and culture which had the wide decentralised network of the SSOJ as its institutional umbrella broke down only very late in the decade once the physical dissolution of the country began to materialise. The book analysed a range of public ‘acts’ the youth actively engaged at different levels of the institutional youth realm undertook during the 1980s, against the background of Yugoslav late socialist research that dealt with ‘the crisis generation’. It also addressed the ways in which the actors themselves mobilised the rhetoric of youth/generation to challenge the mainstream, establishing new political languages through cultural acts, journalistic writing or issue-oriented activism....

The eighty-eighters: the arena of youth politics and the break-up of Yugoslavia

The last chapter looks at the ways the Youth League initially sought to reform and re-invent its role and mission and was later subsumed in and divided by the wider Yugoslav political debates and developments in the country. The proposed statute changes which came out of the public debate organised by the SSOJ in 1989 reflected both the gap between the Slovenian, on the one hand, and the Serbian, the Montenegrin and the Army youth leagues, on the other, but also shed light on a spectrum of shared visions and values which existed among the other branches. The chapter reflects upon the (lack of) consensus about the dilemma of how to modernise Yugoslav society and the sphere of institutional youth politics and culture and shows how by the end of the decade the consensus on change and reform and the discourse of ‘pluralism of self-managing interests’ was almost entirely replaced by a new discourse of human rights and liberal values which foreshadowed the ‘exit from socialism’.

‘Pockets of freedom’: the youth sphere and its spaces of negotiation and dissent

The first chapter maps the wide, decentralised youth infrastructure of the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia (SSOJ) as a form of public space which accommodated both mainstream and ‘alternative’ politics and cultures, outlining some of the major debates which occurred within its strictly speaking political/institutional core, as well as in its peripheral sites, i.e. its media and cultural realms. It also offers an overview of the history of the institutional youth sphere, focussing on certain crucial events, such as the events of 1968 and the 1974 reorganisation of the youth organisation which resulted in the disappearance of the Student Union(s) as separate body. It shows how a process of negotiating new forms of youth activism (in the youth press), of questioning of inherited traditions and creating venues for democratisation of the youth organisation were made possible by the advancement of a new young political, media and cultural elite which generally sought to target the malfunctions of the system and undermine dogmatic socialism.