Introduction

Abstract

The dramatic disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, which retrospectively seems to have been almost inevitable, caught both Yugoslav and international scholars and publics by surprise. While genocide ravaged Rwanda, Yugoslav, European and North American attention focused on the violent collapse of an at- leastnominally secular European federal state. To many, if not most, it was inconceivable that the SFRY, consolidated in 1944 by Marshall Tito out of the fragments of the earlier Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, could dissolve into fratricidal civil war. Yugoslav scholars encountered in Yugoslavia by one of the two editors of this volume in the early days of the war (24 June–4 July 1991) were nearly unanimous in their opposition to ethnic nationalism and their support for socialist federation; a year later, during a conference held in Canterbury in August 1992, the same academics had almost without exception sided passionately with their national constituencies.1 Yugoslavia’s transformations, although perhaps not exceptional when compared globally, are nonetheless exemplary in demonstrating to Western audiences the speed with which changes in politics, in social structures, in ideologies and in identities can occur under the conditions of modernity. The editors of this volume, one a historian with a long familiarity with the region and the other an anthropologist with an expertise in Israel/Palestine, were inspired by this mutability and by their involvement with the region to draw together a number of academics, journalists and politicians from Former Yugoslavia to reflect on those changes and their implications in the wake of the ‘normalisation’ that drew the wider world’s attention away from Yugoslavia’s ‘successor states’.