Alienation Effects: Performance and Self-Management in Yugoslavia, 1945-91 by Branislav Jakovljevic

Author:Branislav Jakovljevic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

This idyllic alliance of students and workers, cabbies and cops, retirees and clerks, Serbs and Montenegrins, was not fueled by demands for political and economic equality or for social justice, but by the politics of the day. The march occurred at the beginning of one of the most massive and advantageously timed meetings of support for Slobodan Milošević. The trigger for the student protest was a televised broadcast of a gathering in Ljubljana, Slovenia, organized in support of striking miners at the Trepča mines, located in northern Kosovo. The strike itself was not driven by labor issues, but by the national politics that jolted Yugoslavia in its final years. This mass demonstration initiated by the students was the last in a series of massive gatherings across Serbia and Montenegro that secured Milošević’s dominant position in regions populated by ethnic Serbs, and paved the way for constitutional changes that would strip the Serbian regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo of the autonomy granted to them by the Yugoslav constitution of 1974. In response to these constitutional changes, in November 1988 there were mass demonstrations of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, which were brutally suppressed by Serbian security forces. Milošević used the Page 195 →mass gathering in front of the Yugoslav parliament to put pressure on federal authorities to declare a state of emergency in Kosovo.106 What numerous commentators saw as an anachronistic direction of the Serbian leadership was in fact in perfect accord with the development of the projective city through recuperation, distortion, and revision of the spirit of ’68: emancipation was turned into mobilization, solidarity into pragmatism, and calls for equality into promises of freedom.

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