Conclusion: rethinking youth politics and culture in late socialist Yugoslavia

Abstract

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....