Yugoslavia as History Twice There Was a Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1996. xx, 421 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Photographs. Tables. Maps.$59.95, hard bound. $ 19.95, paper.
John R. Lampe, a noted economic historian of the Balkans, has written an account of Yugoslavia’s history. The book is divided into eleven chapters. The first three (approximately a quarter of the text) provide the account of South Slavic affairs before World War I. The next three (an additional quarter) deal with the rise and fall of the interwar Yugoslav royalist state. Chapter 7 (31 pages) comments on the occupation and the rise of the communist federal state, whose story is treated in the subsequent three chapters (a further quarter of the text). The survey ends with a chapter on Yugoslavia’s demise (31 pages). The book includes an interestingly constructed guide to further reading (in English and German),twelve fine maps that admittedly) contain some unfortunate errors, and twenty-three excellent tables.
Lampe’s book has some strengths. The author is in his element when he writes on economic history. Many of his observations, though not necessarily new, are appropriate and well woven into the narrative. Nor can one quarrel with the architecture of his work, which is apposite to his argument. Unfortunately, the argument itself belongs to a curious evolutionary typology, rather than to historical argumentation, being overwhelmed by his view that all pre-1918 developments point to the rise of the Yugoslav state(s). The agencies of the country’s dissolution seem insignificant by contrast. Small wonder that the weakest chapters are the first three and the concluding two chapters.
Lampe makes it clear that he did not set out to write a “comprehensive history of the two Yugostavias.” Instead, he wanted to “connect the unfinished tragedy of [Yugoslavia’s] violent end with its history, more specifically, with its origins in related but separate peoples and places before the First World War and the search for viability that both state and idea pursued twice, from 1918 to 1941 and again from 1945 to 1991” (xvi). The distinct marks of this definition can be found everywhere in the ahistorical “related but separate” trope. Modern situations are transferred into distant history. The medieval border between eastern and western Christianity “proceeded from Bosnia to the coast just south of Dubrovnik” (p.11). Stefan Dusan’s subjects, including “Macedonians and Bulgarians” (p.18), “Southern Vojvodina,” and “subdivided Slovenia,” (p.27) prance about in the eighteenth century. Dalmation scholars go to the University of Budapest in the fifteenth century. Rudjer Boskovic is a “Catholic Serb” and a “physical scientist” (p.36).
Given the nature of the narrative, with so many anachronisms, misreads, and bloopers in the early chapters, this book is utterly depressing for a critical specialist. The sense of depression is not mitigated by Lampe’s relatively good command of contemporary-as opposed to older-literature. But this knowledge is capricious. For example, why must we hear the same old tales about the Illyrian Provinces if the works of Fran Zwitter (1964) and Drago Roksandic (1988) span a quarter of a century of research on the subject? The same can be asked of nearly every major area of controversy from the Illyrianist movement to Ilija Garasanin, from Josip Juraj Strossmayer to Prince Mihailo, not to mention all the topics that are entirely left out, especially in Bosnian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, and Slovenian history. A catalogue of these misreads, most of them connected with Lampe’s need to channel all likely events into a prehistory of political Yugoslavism, would overwhelm this brief review.
The genre of synthetic literature is, of course, restrictive and affords few real excursions into genuine analysis. Lampe’s solution is to fill his historical mold with significant facts. In this he occasionally succeeds. It might be useful, therefore, for the benefit of future researchers, to note some of the major analytical problems that Lampe never really addresses: (p.1) What was the real state of society and political affinities in the South Slav provinces of Austria-Hungary and in occupied Serbia and Montenegro from 1915 to 1918? (p.2) What was King Aleksandar’s political program and under which ideological formula did he organize the 6.January dictatorships? (p.3) Why did the Croat national movement of the interwar period develop within an agrarian populist party? (p.4) What was the relationship between religion and nationality in the interwar period? Lampe never even mentions such overwhelmingly important developments as the theology of svetosavlje, and his knowledge of intellectual-political trends in Croat Catholicism is represented with the claim that Stepinac was a Jesuit.) (p.5) What was the impact of the occupationist regimes during World War II and of communist mobilization on the cohesion of national societies and traditional belief systems? Related problems, all of them relevant for the process of Yugoslavia’s dissolution, are not addressed in the sections on the communist state.
The book is marred by a real absence of cultural history, which, when it appears, serves purely decorative purposes. Excursions outside the Serb-Croat matrix are few and inadequate. There is an excessive number of factual, orthographic, and spelling errors, as well as macaronic terms (D`emiyet!), that could have been corrected had the manuscript been subjected to critical prepublication readings. In short, we have a book that is too factual for a synthesis and a not analytical enough to inspire genuine discussion.
The old Cambridge Singleton as certainly surpassed, but the problem of synthetic literature preceding laborious archival and textual research still remains the main obstacle to understanding in the field of Yugoslav history, which henceforth will need to focus on the period from 1918 to 1991.
Ivo Banac/Yale University Slavic Review Vol. 57 No. 2, Summer 1998, pp. 438-439.)