Croatia’s Knowledge Production on Kosovo around 1989

Abstract

AbstractIn socialist Yugoslavia in 1989 the extremely sensitive matter of Kosovo had an ambiguous effect on the League of Communists of Croatia, which was then still caught in the so-called “Croatian silence”. It did however provoke much turbulence in the Croatian media, which made pointed comments on the larger Yugoslav crisis, on the situation in Kosovo, and on the politics of Serbian president Slobodan Milošević. An intense dynamic could be also found in the field of knowledge production which encompassed scholars, historians, and intellectuals. Who produced knowledge about Kosovo? What were their political and intellectual agendas? How did they intervene in the dominant discourses and media coverage, what debates and reactions did they spark? Within the frames of the history of knowledge, the history of books and intellectual history, the author here assesses the works on Kosovo of a number of Croatian and Yugoslav intellectuals, chiefly Darko Hudelist and Branko Horvat.