What happens to the intellectual life of a country in times of deep economic and political crisis, social unrest and profound systemic change, when extremist political forces take over and the state disintegrates amid large-scale violence? This is the subject of Agustín Cosovschi’s new study of Serbian and Croatian social scientists at the time of Yugoslavia’s violent dissolution at the end of the 20th Century. Written as an intellectual history, the first four chapters of Cosovschi’s book chart the progression of the inter-related fields of sociology, political science and ethnology/anthropology from 1945, when the socialist Yugoslav federation was created, until 1995, which marked the end of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The last two chapters consider in detail the two dominant themes of this last phase of Yugoslavia’s evolution—nationalism and transition—and the ways in which Serbian and Croatian social scientists sought to respond to the theoretical and historical challenges posed by the Yugoslav crisis.

Following the break with the Cominform in 1948 and Yugoslavia’s adoption of a new “road to socialism” in the 1950s and 1960s, Yugoslav social science flourished and became internationally renowned, thanks to the relaxation of censorship and greater intellectual freedoms, considerable American support for travel and scholarly exchanges, and an international context in which “new left” ideas found expression both in scholarly output and student activism. In this broader context, the Praxis group, inspired by the Frankfurt School and the ideas of young Marx, occupied a prominent place, not least due to the annual summer schools on the island of Korčula taking place from 1963 and the creation of an English-language version of the group’s journal, which brought together some of the most prominent social thinkers of the time across Cold War boundaries.

However, the 1970s saw the onset of a new period of repression in response to the surgent liberalism and nationalism that characterised the 1971 Croatian “mass movement”, which threatened both the communist party’s hold on power and the integrity of the federal state. The ensuing crackdown on “liberal” leaderships of Yugoslavia’s republics was accompanied by a return of censorship in the intellectual sphere, as well as the onset of a deep economic crisis and a revival of social unrest, this time in Kosovo. Tito’s death in 1980 and the passing of the Partisan generation left Yugoslavia without an undisputed figure to reconcile the increasingly acrimonious divisions between the party leaderships of the eight federal units (the six republics and two autonomous provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina).

Much of the book focuses on the final decade of socialist Yugoslavia’s existence, the dissolution of the federal state, the international recognition of the break-away republics and the growing violence that eventually turned into full-scale war in several of Yugoslavia’s republics. Cosovschi traces the attempts of Serbian and Croatian social scientists to diagnose how the country had come to this, focusing on some of the key moments and debates in the process, such as the publication in 1984 of the book Sistem i kriza [System and Crisis] by Jovan Mirić, a prominent Croatian political scientist of ethnic Serb background. Mirić’s important text provided a diagnosis of the Yugoslav crisis that focused on the unravelling of the federal state due to the incompatible positions adopted notably by the Slovenian leadership (which sought to preserve the de facto confederal arrangement and called for more economic independence) and the Serbian political establishment (which argued in favour of greater central control and a common approach towards the economic crisis). The subsequent rise to power in these two federal units of uncompromising political actors (Slobodan Milošević in Serbia and Milan Kučan in Slovenia), who increasingly drew on the nationalist grievances articulated by the Serbian and Slovenian ‘critical intelligentsias’ for purposes of legitimizing their rule and their stances in the debate on the country’s future, put Yugoslavia in the late 1980s on the path towards disintegration.

1 See, notably, Berdak, O., 2012, “I Exist, I Belong, I Contribute: The Self and the Collective in Cr (...) 2 The process by which the Serbian “critical intelligentsia” became a nationalist force, providing th (...) 3 The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia was a large, multi-volume, state-sponsored project that began in 197 (...) 5As Cosovschi notes, the 1980s were the key decade in which the theoretical and conceptual tools were forged that enabled social scientists to comprehend the rapid decline of the common state and the violence that accompanied it (p. 101). While the intellectual trajectories of this period (especially in Serbia) have been covered elsewhere,1 what Cosovschi’s book shows is that social scientists—unlike writers and historians—were, mostly, not part of the intellectual “trend setters” that articulated the nationalist grievances that were subsequently adopted by political actors.2 Whereas the Yugoslav Writers’ Union and the large common historical projects, such as the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia,3 fell apart first—presaging the political disintegration of the country—the links between social scientists came under strain mainly with the onset of war.

Cosovschi carefully traces how the war years impacted social scientists, when their divergent experiences led to different preoccupations and approaches to the conflict. For most Croatian scholars, the direct experience of war and the occupation of a third of Croatia’s territory by ethnic Serb forces supported by Serbia and the Yugoslav People’s Army meant that the dominant discourse was one of “Serb aggression” and “invasion” (p. 113). Some scholars were mobilized into the armed forces; others gave up their academic work for a career in politics—whether in the ruling Croatian Democratic Union of President Franjo Tudjman or in the opposition. Those who remained in academia, such as the scholars gathered around Croatia’s Ethnological Association, contributed to the forging of “an atmosphere of a national renaissance in the context of the war” (p. 123). Cosovschi examines this push towards the ethnic nation as an object of study and charts the “reinvention of tradition” in Croatian scholarship (p. 151-53). Meanwhile, the traditional “Yugoslavism” of the Croatian left was faced with the cataclysm of what Yugoslavia had come to represent, forcing scholars to redefine their own political and “national” positionality.

4 The Belgrade Circle was an informal association of Serbian intellectuals critical of the Milošević (...) 7The situation in Serbia differed in the sense that Serbia did not experience war on its own territory until the NATO bombing of 1999 (which is outside the scope of Cosovschi’s study). The main impact was felt politically and economically, with the influx of Serb refugees from Bosnia and Croatia, skyrocketing inflation resulting from the regime’s financing of the war and a debilitating international sanctions regime that came into force in 1992. Sanctions extended to include academic exchanges and travel, thus isolating Serbia’s scholars and preventing the continuation of any existing collaborations across the Yugoslav space, including with Croatian social scientists (p. 110). While many prominent social scientists adopted a critical stance towards the Milošević regime and opposed the war, trying to forge spaces of resistance such as the intellectual kruzhok known as the Belgrade Circle,4 the predominant perception in Serbia remained that what was unfolding was a “civil war” for which Tudjman’s regime and its treatment of ethnic Serbs in Croatia was co-responsible (p. 112). Cosovschi highlights the deep polarization of the intellectual sphere that ensued in Serbia during the war years, noting that the “liberal” side too was not immune from resorting to simple binaries and essentialist tropes in its assessment of Serb nationalism (p. 158-159).

The final chapter examines the attempts by social scientists to understand the nature of “transition” in their two countries. Most directly, this transition manifested itself in regime-orchestrated assaults on institutions viewed as bastions of critical thought—the University of Belgrade, which was systematically purged in the early 1990s, and the Institute of Social Research (IDIS) at the University of Zagreb, which was forced to close. The revenues and possibilities for researchers also plummeted, especially in Serbia under international sanctions. Unsurprisingly, many social scientists found that Western models of transition hardly applied to countries like theirs, characterised by semi-authoritarian regimes and politically subservient economies. Instead of the promise of Western democracy and prosperity, the post-Yugoslav space had become subject to a re-peripheralization and continued crisis (p. 213).

Cosovschi has written a rich and thought-provoking analysis of the social sciences at a time of profound systemic, national and societal crisis in Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War. His account of the ways the social sciences struggled to define the crisis and grappled with the material and political constraints in which they found themselves not only contributes to the literature on a particular geographical region in a specific time period, but also forces us to reflect on our own current polycrisis and the role of the social sciences in the contemporary historical conjuncture.