Cultural elites as selfless ethnic entrepreneurs in the fall of Yugoslavia?

Abstract

In socialist Yugoslavia, cultural elites were structurally related to the communist ruling elite/s, but the relationship was not simple. Cultural elites were always constituted at the national (republic) level, whereas the political elite was initially a single Yugoslav one, but later, it fractured along the same lines. National cultural elites soon ceased to be anything like transmissions of the ruling one, nor were they unconditionally subjugated to it/them. All cultural elites had a proclivity to view issues as unfavourable towards their own nationhood. The Croat, Serb, and Slovene viewed the Yugoslav arrangement as somehow suppressing, exploiting, or restricting their respective nationhood. This sprang up in literary works, in intellectual production, in the issue of whether Serbo-Croat was a single language. These issues were brought about disputes, which grew from intellectual ones into inter-ethnic ones. These disputes contributed significantly to the disintegration of firstly, the weak Yugoslav cultural nucleus, and secondly of trust among nationhoods and finally they brought about a comprehension of an impossibility of a joint state. Most of these actions could be designated as ethnic entrepreneurship.