The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism: Soft Nation-Building in Yugoslavia

The Rise and Fall of Communist Yugoslavism: Soft Nation‑Building in Yugoslavia examines how the Communist Party of Yugoslavia incorporated the idea of a Yugoslav nation into its ideology and created the Yugoslav Soft Nation‑Building project after the Second World War. With an innovative approach of researching three levels of research (from above, from below and from the viewpoint of interethnic relations) the book brings forward an original concept of soft nation‑building, with a focus on the Slovenian‑Yugoslav dimension.

Drawing on archival sources from Ljubljana, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Belgrade, the author argues that after the abandonment of the Yugoslav national idea, two Yugoslavisms were created in the mid‑1960s. State‑based socialist Yugoslavism was propagated by the Party and had no ethnic connotations, only a small proportion of the population identified themselves as “Yugoslav” in national terms. The created vacuum was filled by old national identities.

The book is of interest to specialists and advanced students of cultural and intellectual history, studies of nationalism, but also history of science and institutions and the history of everyday life. The book aims to appeal to scholars of Balkan, South‑East European and Yugoslav history.