The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire by William Partlett and Herbert Küpper (review)

Abstract

Sarajevo’s ‘Balkan manners’, and overcome a constant sense of ‘secondariness’ in Yugoslav identity vis-à-vis the capitalist West. In addition, Jovanovic interprets the Olympic boom in Sarajevo in the context of the contemporary paradigm change in the history of Socialist Eastern Europe, which saw the West through the lens of its consumer culture, rather than through the opposition between liberal democracy and socialism. Participation in popular consumer culture therefore took priority over any political needs. The book’s key argument is that Sarajevo’s success is an example of integration set against the dominant perception of fragmentation in 1980s Yugoslavia. Contrary to this deterministic outlook, Jovanovic shows how Yugoslav identity was celebrated (Slovene skiers were Yugoslavized, for example), new technologies, tourism and advertising were championed, and the benefits were real, not just a show. Sarajevo stood at the core of ‘New Yugoslavism’, a modern, futuristic, non-national identity. This compelling study of Sarajevo’s place in Yugoslavia during the 1980s sets the prevailing view of its history, characterized by the rise of ethnonationalism across the country, against an opposing trend that emerged in major Yugoslav cities and amongst the youth. The effect of Jovanovic’s book, therefore, is to overturn all the easily-drawn links between the two (or three) events that made Sarajevo globally famous (or notorious), to expose them as tenuous, or even tendentious.