“Homelandless,” by Saša Savanović, is a Communis original feature.

“Is an alternative homeland even conceivable, let alone possible, within the boundaries of the modern bourgeois nation-State? Can a nation-State produce any homeland that is not ethnonational? Is it possible for a homeland to escape the State, to become a utopian project? If thinkable at all as such, this project requires from us to reject the default naturalized national framework.”

— Saša Savanović

I grew up in “Yugoslavia.” Back then, I didn’t know that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), in which I had been born, and its successor, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), were not the same country. When sanctions against the latter were lifted in 1995, allowing athletes from my then-country to perform in international competitions, the Yugoslav male volleyball team won medals at European and world championships, and in 2000, gold in the Olympics. I remember all the players and the positions they played. The anthem I sang with them was Hey Slavs: “We stand firm like the giant cliffs, may he be damned, the traitor of his homeland!” And yet that homeland vanished, and with it my childish patriotic phase. In 2004, when I was barely 18 years old, Hey Slavs got replaced by God of Justice. After the overthrow of Milošević in 2000, the newly inaugurated State (Serbia and Montenegro since 2003, and Serbia since 2006) engendered a new homeland, along with new symbols, founding stories, and songs. Years later, I once again switched homelands, moving to Croatia, another post-Yugoslav State, with its own “homeland package,” which I needed to learn and adopt.

These experiences, particularly those felt at a young age, regardless of intent, endowed me with an acute awareness that no homeland is written in stone, and with a chronic wariness of its proclaimed truths. I can’t but flinch at the sight of the national flag, mine or any other. I feel no pride, nor reverence, only uneasiness and dread. Of war, violence, suffering, hatred. This dread is but one of the indicators of my patriotic deficiency. I don’t identify with national myths; I don’t suffer from national traumas. Some would call me a “traitor.” I don’t agonize over being one, but the political program of traditional “traitors” doesn’t concern me either. I don’t care for reinterpreting the nation, recasting it in civic instead of ethnic terms. What interests me is something else; can there be politics without the nation, can there be resistance without patriotism, without loyalty to the State and the homeland inscribed in it?

On the verge of patriotism

Although Serbia was formally (re)established only in 2006, the transformation of a Yugoslav homeland into a Serbian one started much earlier. As a child, I wasn’t aware of it, but from this vantage point I can now detect it in my own experience.

The first memory that I can retroactively relate to Serbian patriotism dates back to 1991 or 1992. I am five or six years old and I am in kindergarten. I love my class and especially my teacher, who is my absolute idol. She is loud and strong, and she is always smiling. Her short hair is dyed orange, she wears massive earrings and broaches, and she dresses so fashionably—loose sweaters and leggings, bright lipsticks. Most importantly, she plays the accordion, to whose tune we, the children, sing. We sing all kinds of songs and perform them at recitals for our families. Except for one, a dashing march that we adore but which we are never allowed to perform: On went marching King Peter’s Guard. “We mustn’t,” replies our teacher when we inquire if we could put it on the repertoire for the next show.

Later on, I learned that patriotic and war music—old and new—was booming during the 1990s. I had known some of it, songs from WWI and newly produced Kosovo-themed ones, but these were marginal in my experience. According to my own informal research among friends, children from those days remember learning them from classmates or from TV. My memory from the early nineties is dominated by Channel 3, or 3K, which in the morning aired illegally obtained MTV videos—how fascinated I was with George Michael’s Freedom—, and local dance music in the afternoon, and of course ZaM, the show that launched turbo-folk.

We lived in a kind of Yugoslav delirium. Not by accident, FRY’s schizophrenia in terms of political orientation and identity was a deliberate strategy. Serbia was playing the role of the “Federation’s guardian” under the guise of which it was meant to become “great.” Yugoslav and Serbian identities intertwined.

At the surface of Yugoslav (socialist) everydayness, here and there a Serbian underbelly appeared. I lived on the Bačkopalanačkog odreda street—whose name memorialized the partisan squadron from Bačka Palanka—which almost imperceptibly became that of Jovan Dučić, a Serbian poet.

First seaside holiday I can recall in great detail: it’s 1994, in a workers’ holiday resort in Bečići, with Ceca—who will later marry the infamous paramilitary leader Željko Ražnatović Arkan and become known as the “Serbian mother”—playing on all the speakers. Electricity shortages: I am returning from school in winter, climbing four floors in pitch dark, a candle on the dining table, mom and dad are asleep, and I am eating reheated beans. When electricity is available, the TV is constantly on, war raging on the screen. Sometimes we watch cartoons. Quite often, they are dubbed in Croatian, like the eco-socialist “The Little Flying Bears,” a Yugoslav-Croatian/Canadian co-production from 1990, my all-time favorite. Streets are ruled by “diesel boys,” stores are empty, inflation is rampant. We mostly eat from my grandmother’s generous garden, and from her hen.

My cousins from Croatia (in 1992) and Bosnia (in 1995) spent the summer with us. We hung out at the public pool: longingly looking at burgers, which we couldn’t afford. My mom would bring us sandwiches, bread, lard, and sugar. The appearance of social status difference between rich and poor kids in school: seeing a video camera for the first time in my life at the birthday of the most popular (and wealthiest) girl from my class, whose father was rumored to be smuggling fuel.

The central hall of my elementary school, “Prva vojvođanska brigada”—or First Vojvodina’s Brigade—another partisan brigade, was filled with photographs of fighters and battles from WWII and stories about them. We didn’t learn about them in history class, whose lessons centered on the medieval “Serbian” State, the Thessaloniki front, “Albanian Golgotha.” In language classes we read patriotic poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and at school slava recitals, instituted in 1990. We sang the Hymn to St. Sava, first archbishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church established in 1219.

Religion became a thing; I was baptized in 1996. My godmother was my favorite family friend, otherwise a Croatian catholic. All I recall from the event are the priest’s instructions to her—“Godmother, say Amen,” and her “Amen” in response, and the yellow plaid skirt I was wearing.

With intensifying repression against Kosovar Albanians and the outbreak of the Kosovo War, the propaganda about “šiptar terrorists”—the derogatory term used to refer to ethnic Albanians from Kosovo—became ubiquitous. Being called a “šiptar” was how one of my classmates, a suspected Albanian, was constantly bullied. I was not an exception, though I remember experiencing a certain inner conflict, since some of our family friends were from a “mixed” Albanian Croatian family.

The ruling slur of the time was complemented with an equally indispensable “criminal NATO pact,” both Serbia’s archenemies plotting to take over our Kosovo, a land to which we have a “historic right.” NATO’s “intervention” in 1999 further strengthened the quasi-anti-imperial narratives of “sovereignty and territorial integrity,” which were established as the backbone of the Serbian nationalist project, along with a widespread identity matrix placing Kosovo—the timeless essence of the Serbian being— at its center.

In the closing years of the 1990s, State-led pop-cultural patriotism became much more pronounced. The unofficial anthem of that period, written at the behest of the Army—Volimo te otadžbino naša (We love you, our homeland)—was launched at the end of 1998. I remember it as the first patriotic song that ceaselessly played on TV. Curiously enough, the name of the homeland revered in the anthem is never mentioned.

Patriotism’s New Clothes

After Milošević was toppled, the homeland was in need of an urgent, unmistakably national overhaul, even before it formally changed its name.

Here begins the road to “normality,” toward a capitalist liberal democracy, within a State that was, at last, formally national. On the one hand, restauration: privatization, deindustrialization, deregulation. On the other, reaction: formalization of nationalist iconography and symbols (a new anthem, a new flag, a new coat of arms), further revision of history, or, more accurately, of the State-sanctioned memory, romanticization of the pre-war and between-the-wars society, demonization of that which followed, introduction of religious education in public schools, a whole flood of newly-built churches. New street names, new monuments, new heroes, new holidays.

Unburdened by the legacy of the Yugoslav wars and the role of Serbia in them, the new democratic State enthusiastically embraced patriotism. In the 2006 Constitution, the triumphant “second Serbia”—the bearer of progressive, liberal and pro-Western worldviews, and most importantly of transition—formalized the previously established formula of Serbian nationalism, stressing the status of Kosovo in the preamble. The Constitution also defined Serbia in strictly ethno-nationalist terms, as the State of “Serbian people” (“and of all citizens who live in it”). That same year, the rehabilitation of Draža Mihailović, leader of Chetniks, was set in motion, two years after the law equating the rights of partisan and chetnik fighters was adopted, along with the narrative of “the two resistance movements” during WWII.

The new State had more difficulties in adopting the second key ingredient of the national identity equation. Abhorred NATO and the “rotten West” now had to be made reasonable and attractive. The world was to be turned upside down, and Yugoslavia, in all of its incarnations, served this purpose. Yugoslavia was proclaimed to be the fundamental error of Serbian national politics, which the country should finally rectify, and head to “Europe.” Similarly, the Yugoslav wars gained the status of misguided politics and were suppressed, especially after Milošević’s death and the conclusion of trials before The Hague Tribunal. Nevertheless, the separation between the “first” and the “second” Serbia, the former being warmongering, nationalist, autocratic, uncivilized, Russia-loving, and the latter anti-war, civic, democratic, cultured and European, remained an important axis of political conflict. Both Serbias are, however, grounded in Kosovo, the mythical sacred land and inviolable “heart” of Serbian identity, the center of the medieval “Serbian” State, lost to the Ottomans in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, and asserted as the decisive State-making myth during the national renaissance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The “Kosovo Oath,” a promise to reconquer the territory and regain “the heart” of the Serbian homeland bringing together narratives of martyrdom and heroism fundamental to any national project, has since remained Serbia’s central State reason.

I got to visit the “sacred land” during the final year of high school, when I took part in one of the then-popular “reconciliation” projects. I met my Kosovo-Albanian peers, traveled to Priština, and (Kosovska) Mitrovica. It quickly turned out that I had more in common with them than with the Dutch who had served as mediators of our reconciliation project—I was shocked to find out that the mothers of our Dutch peers were mainly housewives, while all our mothers were working women. Yet, as the project was drawing to a close, I felt used. After two years of being encouraged to get to know each other and form friendships, the closing activity of the project was a debate on the status of Kosovo. We were split into Albanians and Serbs, sat on opposing sides, and were pitted to spew fire on each other, youthfully overconfident and thoroughly brainwashed. I am afraid to remember now what I was saying back then.

When I entered college, the only talk was about Montenegrin independence. I passionately took part in those discussions. However, as the unbearably ideological consonance ruled the classrooms, I soon lost interest in my studies. I spent a year volunteering in a non-governmental organization, the same one that organized the reconciliation program I attended. I left after the director screamed at me for daring to ask to be paid for the additional workload I was assigned. This was followed, on my end, by years of cynicism.

I finished college in 2010, the same year the city of Belgrade committed its first controversial ecocide: cutting down hundreds of plane trees in one of its central boulevards. Bloodthirsty progress started showing its insatiable face. Not long after, when the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power and Aleksandar Vučić became Prime Minister, environmental destruction became commonplace. Ever since, the combination of discursive nationalism and neoliberal materiality has been reaching ever new heights with clearing sales on everything that used to be “social property” and the complete national overhaul of public spaces.

In a matter of a decade, cities and towns in Serbia downright transmuted. Social functions were displaced by profit-making investment. Buildings, buildings, and more buildings. Commercial real estate, shopping malls, luxurious residential complexes. Cars, cars, cars, and parking lots. Merciless razing and outpour of concrete. Tons and tons of cement. All laid over together with its ideological superstructure. Progress wears a national guise. At night the bridges shine with the colors of the national flag, flags hang from bridges, along the boulevards, from the balconies of student dormitories. Belgrade Tower, a 168-meter-high screen, emits the images of Serbian saints, footballers, scientists. On the billboards: “We are not genocidal people.” Murals of Serbian warriors (including Ratko Mladić) are painted on the facades, along with the Serbian tricolor flag with or without the inscription “When the army returns to Kosovo.” A giant monument of Stefan Nemanja in Belgrade, of King Peter in Novi Sad, a thirty-odd-meter cross above Kraljevo. At the celebration of the recently established joint holiday of Serbia and Republic of Srpska “Day of Serbian unity, freedom and the national flag,” Vučić emphasized that “today we are celebrating (…) the very essence of our being.” Armed with the same spirit, to strengthen patriotic values among the youth, the Ministry of Education has mandated schools to intone the national anthem at the beginning of every school year, has introduced “national textbooks,” and is currently forming the Faculty of Serbian Studies (following the example of the Faculty of Croatian Studies, founded in 1992).

Besides continuing with the national reconciliation of partisans and chetniks, a process kicked off by his predecessors, Vučić’s nationalism aspires to reconcile “first” and “second” Serbia within a happy future of liberal freedoms and capitalism. To a certain extent, it also strives to recuperate and co-opt the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (NOB) (1941-1945), reinterpreting it as an exclusively Serbian undertaking. During the NOB, Serbs once again showed their “liberatory character” (in the same spirit, Belgrade’s Zagreb Street was renamed to honor Koča Popović, a prominent Yugoslav-Serbian military and political figure, well-known for his liberal positions). The wars in Croatia and Bosnia are highlighted, with a focus on Serbian victims, recast as just and liberatory, even successful—since they made possible the existence of the Republic of Srpska. For that purpose, sentenced war criminals return to the public stage, narratives of victimhood and martyrdom are supplemented with an increasing heroization of the wars, new myths are created and institutionalized: a prominent place in the pantheon of tragic Kosovo heroes is given to the “Heroes of Košare,” a group of mostly very young soldiers, killed during clashes between the Yugoslav army and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), the latter supported by NATO and the Albanian army on the Kosovo-Albanian border during the Kosovo War.

Efforts in building an ethno-national homeland bear fruit. The current movement against the regime, led by students, takes its national myths at face value. They sing the anthem at the top of their lungs. A good part of them swears the “Kosovo Oath” as back in the day, in the same vein, did Milošević. National pride permeates popular culture and has become a fully-fledged musical genre. Everything is ripe with patriotism, the old and the supposedly new. The flag on the shoulders, the feeling that it has been invested with some sort of newly discovered virtue. To no effect. My brain still refuses to remember the exact order of its three colors—white, red, blue—nor does it know in which order the same three colors adorned the flags of the SFRY (1945-1992) and the FRY (1992-2003), and today those of Croatia and Slovenia.

On the other side of patriotism

I visited Croatia for the first time after the war, in 2007. Two days in Zagreb, several in Split. The typical smells coming in from the Adriatic, salt, pines and figs, bright colors of summer, the promising blue, and the commemorative atmosphere as the icing on the cake. Flags wherever you turn, a phenomenon that wasn’t pronounced in Serbia at the time. Photographs of Ante Gotovina. “Homeland War” on every corner. Black marble, the Croatian checkerboard, the cross—more than 1200 monuments to the Croatian War of Independence, or Homeland War, have been erected.

My knowledge of the war was modest, limited to what was served in Serbia: Operation “Storm” and almost nothing about what had come before. I had some vague idea that “both sides” were to blame, each with its war criminals who perpetuated the war and who should answer for it. I knew that some of them were in The Hague or in hiding. In such a blissfully ignorant state, my friends and I found ourselves in downtown Split, on the day the victory of Operation Storm is celebrated. We nearly shat our pants.

The dramatic encounter with the black shirted crowds corroborated my presumption that the “black” character was inherent to it. But the victory had other shades as well, which I couldn’t grasp at the time. Indeed, I was totally blind to the context. Of the trauma of expulsion, fear, violence, of the societal breakdown which I didn’t experience. And how that experience continued living in people, how it was shaped and (ab)used.

The other shades came gradually. When I moved to Croatia, I still assumed that the people I would be meeting—meaning the political, social, cultural, generational, and in lesser terms, class bubble—would be just like me (I believed that to be true for all post-Yugoslav like-minded people, at least those of us who share the same language). I was wrong. In Croatia I felt “Serbian” as I never did before. Not only because I was recognized as such the minute I opened my mouth. Our experiences were strikingly dissimilar.

My expectations of similarity were belied already at the first parties. The songs that turned up the heat, sang with the heart out in a mixture of irony and kitsch pleasure so typical of our generation, fell flat. The pattern repeated itself. What was meaningful to me was meaningless to them, and the other way around. I was clueless about who a “branitelj” (defender) is and couldn’t grasp the significance of this figure, while they knew little to nothing about Kosovo. I did hear of Thompson, the notorious fascist singer, but not of his oeuvre. I had no idea what the Bleiburg massacres had been, never saw an “U with ears,” the symbol of Ustaše—derived from the word ustati (“to rise up”)—the Croatian fascist, ultranationalist movement that ruled the Independent State of Croatia during WWII. When somebody wrote “ZDS,” short for the notorious Ustaša salute “Za dom spremni”—“For the homeland – ready!”— on the back of my car with Belgrade license plates, I wasn’t sure what it meant. The question “Where were you in 1991?,” ironically referenced in conversation, had no meaning to me, I didn’t understand it.

I spent my summer holidays in Split and then on Šolta again in 2011, a few months after Ante Gotovina was convicted in the first-degree trial in The Hague. A young woman from Zagreb, whom I met on Šolta and who had studied abroad, told me how her university colleagues asked her if she was sad about Gotovina’s conviction, to which she replied no, why would she be, “he’s not my father.” Her answer did not feel right to me: shouldn’t she not be sad because of the fact that he is a war criminal? Her story suggested that a sharp divide around the interpretation of Yugoslav wars, so prevalent in Serbia, is not the main (or even an important) axis of political strife in Croatia. Though the reason for such difference in historical perspective was rather obvious, it took me some time to understand why. To talk about the war in the abstract is one thing, but to live it is something entirely else. In a war, one cannot be above the situation. Those who are attacked defend themselves. Although interpretations of what is defended might differ, defense becomes its own purpose. The Croatian myth of the “Homeland War” is grounded in this kind of embodied experience of defense, which makes it a first-class political taboo. Defended homeland functions as a sort of empty signifier, to which everyone can assign their content of choice. Yet homeland is not an empty signifier. The State is in charge of its meaning. Neither is the “Homeland War.” The myth levels complexities and conceals aspects which don’t fit in the “just, legitimate and defensive war of liberation,” pictured by the Croatian Constitution.

Here too the nationalist discourse of the 1990s was reaffirmed by “anti-nationalist” political forces, with the “Declaration on the Homeland War” adopted in 2000 by the first post-Tuđman government. For all practical purposes, it forbade any questioning of the highest State truth declaring that “the founding values of the Homeland War are unequivocally accepted by the entire Croatian people and all citizens of the Republic of Croatia.” The discourse was cemented in 2012 when Gotovina was acquitted.

I was in Dalmatia again in 2016, in Komiža, on the island of Vis. My strongest impression there was the massive memorial plaque to the fighters fallen during the People’s Liberation War (NOR), built in 1964 (107 names, among others Mardešić, Marinković, Zanki) and on the right side of it, a significantly smaller plaque to the fallen soldiers of the pro-Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia, built in 1995 (9 names, again Mardešić, Marinković, Zanki). The juxtaposition of these two memorials turned out to be the basic line of political division in Croatia, and the reaffirmation of Croatian (not Yugoslav) antifascism, the main effort of any and all progressive politics. “The Memorial home to the fallen fighters of NOR,” —the official name of the building where the two plaques are located—used to have a memorial room with the portraits of fallen Komižans, but the room was rented to Erste Bank in 2011. The portraits were then moved to the hallway of the building’s first floor, the seat of the city government. The bank’s illuminated logo was put on the façade, right next to the NOR memorial, which, as the mayor explained, needed to be there to inform the guests about the bank’s location. The Memorial house in Komiža is a good metaphor for Croatia. The clash between “ustaše” and “partisans” in a market competition for the creation of conditions most conducive to tourism.

Although these experiences initially affirmed my prejudices toward Croatia as an extremely nationalist country, in time I came to realize that Croatian and Serbian nationalism differ not so much in the degree of their extremism but in their content. Contrary to Serbia, where the Yugoslav wars (except for the one in Kosovo) were suppressed for being too controversial and, until recently, did not feature prominently in the official national narrative, the “Homeland War” is the central Sate-making myth and the backbone of Croatian identity, a revered sacral event. The “Homeland War” myth is powerful inasmuch as it binds together the narratives of victimhood (Vukovar) and victory (“Storm”), and literally fulfills the “millennial dream” of Croatian statehood. Since the seventh century, when according to the Croatian Constitution the story of the Croatian nation began, countless victims—“Croatian martyrs”— have fallen for this dream. Even the hated Yugoslavia (both in its first and second iterations), the Serbian imperialist project and “the prison of nations,” was a step toward the fulfillment of the “historical right of the Croatian nation to full sovereignty.”

This kind of historical revisionism that reduces the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to a pragmatic jumping platform toward Croatian statehood, and the antifascism of Yugoslav partisans to Croatian antifascism, is epitomized in the exhibition of war photography “From the victory of 1945 to the victory of 1995,” commemorating the eightieth anniversary of the liberation of Dalmatia. In the first row, photographs of partisans; in the second, fighters of the Homeland War. Nothing controversial about it. The exhibition is a faithful image of the Constitution, which finds “the millennial national identity of the Croatian nation and the continuity of its statehood,” among other things, in “the establishment of the foundations of State sovereignty during the course of WWII as expressed in the decision of the Territorial Antifascist Council of the National Liberation of Croatia (1943) against the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia (1941), and then in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Croatia (1947) and in all subsequent constitutions of the Socialist Republic of Croatia (1963-1990).” Though the Constitution does not mention which mysterious country this Croatia was part of, it explicitly forbids its reestablishment: “Any procedure for the association of the Republic of Croatia into alliances with other States, if such association leads, or may lead, to a renewal of a South Slavic State union or to any form of consolidated Balkan State is hereby prohibited.” The same massage is relayed by the exhibition, which aimed to raise “awareness about the glorious antifascist history of the Croatian nation.”

For my friends in Croatia the war was not only a televised event. Even when they didn’t experience the war directly, the war was all around: soldiers in the streets, refugees, the rambling of tanks passing by, patriotic music. They had grown up amid a total breakdown and reinvention of the world, so different from the fake continuity of my youth. Their experiences were marked by the war stories. As children, they collected stickers for the Cro Army album, sold wrapped around a small chocolate. Soldiers in battle, different kinds of weapons and military equipment, illustrations of smiling children in military uniform. They were surprised to find out that something like that didn’t exist in the time and place of my childhood.

Several hundred patriotic songs were produced during the Homeland War: from calls for peace and national romanticism to battle cries. The State directly financed the production of music to arouse love and loyalty for the homeland, and boost military morale. This sort of musical nationalistic training successfully persists in the figure of its leading star—Marko Perković, better known by his stage name Thompson. He and his repertoire are the most accurate (musical) expression of the homeland politics which the State has pursued for the last thirty years. Which may well be the most convincing explanation for last summer’s “greatest event in the history of Croatian music”—when allegedly half a million people attended Thompson’s concert in Zagreb in June 2025.

The enormous popularity of this singer with his radical nationalist charge confirms the strong overlap between homeland and ethnic Croatianness. Indeed, Croatia was the first post-Yugoslav State to self-identify as ethno-national in its 1990 Constitution. The Law on Croatian Citizenship, adopted in 1991, further emphasized the ethnic component of the State and the homeland, granting citizenship to all ethnic Croats, regardless of their place of residence, while complicating access to citizenship to those who were not. Naturally, the Croatian Right is proud of their State being one of “the purest” countries in Europe.

The reactions of left liberals to Thompson’s continued popularity best exemplify the powerlessness in the face of the “Homeland War” and the vision of ethno-national homeland enshrined in its wake. He is acceptable, in line with freedom of speech, as long as “Za dom spremni” is omitted. And yet, the supposedly clear indication of where and how Croatian fascism may manifest itself is no longer that clear, ever since Prime Minister Andrej Plenković vindicated it by claiming its “double connotation.” Both strategies are founded in a sort of displacement: while the Right displaces ZDS from WWII to “just, legitimate and defensive war of liberation,” left liberals displace it from 1991 to 1941, where its fascist core and horrendous crimes are indisputable.

We are living today, though, and these are some of the news from Croatia over the last few months: veneration of the ustaše in Thompson’s concerts; a group of veterans violently interrupt an antiwar festival in Benkovac and assault the organizer; Rheinmetall, the largest German weapons manufacturer, is planning to initiate operations in Rijeka; a gathering in Sabor denies that Jasenovac was a concentration camp; anti-military activists, standing before tanks at the military parade in Zagreb in protest against the militarization of society, are sentenced and fined; around fifty people barge into an event of the Serbian Cultural Society, expel people, yell ZDS; Croatia introduces mandatory conscription; new legislation on migration further criminalizes and disenfranchises asylum seekers.

No choice?

I was born in one country, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; I grew up in another, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia; I got politically subjectivized in a third, Serbia and Montenegro, and then again in a forth (Serbia); and now I am living in a fifth one, Croatia. Each of them carries a claim to a homeland, a set of founding myths, official truths, and interpretations of history, and a vision for the future. Is any of them my homeland?

My first experience of “homelandlessness” struck me in my late teens, when regime change brought about a shift in the State’s ideological orientation, in the State itself, and in its symbolic framework. The new Serbian identity, formulated at the time, stuck with me partially, and after some turmoil, unsuccessfully. For a long time, I considered the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to be my absent homeland, with its antifascism, its self-managed socialist modernism, its brotherhood and unity. Certainly, also because of the fact that I grew up in “Yugoslavia,” that I had family ties and roots in Bosnia and Croatia, that I had lived in a Yugoslav milieu, with “mixed” family and friends. As my knowledge about Yugoslavia expanded—on Kosovo Albanians, the fate of the Women’s Antifascist Front, Goli Otok…—, Yugoslav antifascism’s own consistency became questionable, which slowly made the Yugoslavian identity grow thinner. When I moved to Croatia, I became aware that, in fact, I do have a homeland, because this homeland (whether the SFRY, the FRY or Serbia, or all of them) had programmed me differently than my friends in Croatia had been programmed by their own. Deconstruction, though, had done its work and whatever remained of my identification with “my” State-homeland continued melting away. A citizen of one State with residence in another, instead of having at least two homelands, I was left with none.

I am well acquainted with their respective truths, but none of them arouse in me any emotional attachment. In Serbia, ethno-national continuity is claimed through the “Kosovo Oath” connecting the medieval “Serbian” State with its current incarnation. In Croatia, the “Homeland War” delivers on the “thousand-year-long dream of statehood.” In both cases, these neuralgic founding myths are relayed in the first sentences of their Constitutions, as their key footholds, their raison d’état and even their raison d’être. The Serbian Constitution proclaims Kosovo to be “an integral part of the territory of Serbia,” and prescribes the “constitutional obligations of all State bodies to uphold and protect the State interests of Serbia in Kosovo and Metohija in all internal and foreign political relations.” After taking stock of all the historical foundations of “the millennial national identity of the Croatian nation and the continuity of its statehood,” the Croatian Constitution stresses that “the Croatian nation demonstrated its resolve and readiness to establish and preserve the Republic of Croatia as an independent and autonomous, sovereign and democratic State in the victory of the Croatian nation and Croatia’s defenders in the just, legitimate and defensive war of liberation, the Homeland War (1991-1995).”

Both of my potential homelands self-identify primarily as ethno-national: Serbia is “a State of the Serbian people and all citizens who live in it,” while “the Republic of Croatia is (…) established as the nation-State of the Croatian nation and the State of the members of its national minorities.” There is nothing extraordinary about that. The German Basic Law, for example, doesn’t even mention others, the subject of Statehood is exclusively “the German people” (Das deutsche Volk). State symbols, their memory culture, their founding myths and formally sanctioned patriotic politics, their citizenship regimes—all point to this simple fact.

A political alternative to this notion or idea of homeland does not exist. Not much has changed since the early 1990s, when Boris Buden, a prominent post-Yugoslav philosopher and cultural critic, observed that “the so-called opposition never succeeded in articulating an ideologically and politically relevant counterposition to the State-building project created by Tuđman.” The same impossibility still haunts it. “The so-called opposition” in Serbia had likewise never been able to articulate a meaningful counterposition to the State-building project created by Milošević. Analyzing the political party programs in the first multi-party elections in Serbia in 1990, sociologist Vladimir Goati concluded that the leading opposition parties offered a national program identical to that of Milošević, and that the only difference between them was one between communist and anticommunist nationalism. The same pattern persists, only that in the meantime communist nationalism has become authoritarian. Notwithstanding the efforts to attach some civil aspects to the nation, both States remain faithful to their ethnic foundation. Moreover, it could be argued that even the States that define the nation in predominantly civic terms can’t escape their racial and cultural underpinnings—one should only look at Trump’s U.S. and his “nativism.”

Is an alternative homeland even conceivable, let alone possible, within the boundaries of the modern bourgeois nation-State? Can a nation-State produce any homeland that is not ethnonational? For Dubravka Ugrešić, an influential Yugoslav, Croatian, and Dutch writer and essayist, homeland and State were an “alloy, two notions fused into one, a traditional marriage,” and thus homeland as a utopian project is not imaginable. The State produces the homeland, breathes life into it, shapes and arranges it, while pretending it’s the other way around. Clearly, our homelands are not some neutral civil havens, but national territories, rooted in ideas about ethnic and indigenous descent, “birthright,” racial and/or cultural superiority paraded as “natural order.” The history of the nation-State is the history of persecution and genocide. In cycles, with greater or lesser success. And these “cleansings” are not behind us; they are not some sins of the past. “Purity” is the principle by which all of our homelands are continually built as ours.

Somewhere else Ugrešić writes: “If Yugoslavia had served to construct my Yugoslav identity, then its demise, the war and my new Croatian homeland identity served to deconstruct it.” The same could be said in my case. Elaborating further on her third homeland, the Netherlands, she concludes: “My third homeland initiation package has no content. There’s almost nothing in there. A passport and a tax number. My new homeland does not ask of me to love it. Nor does it promise to love me back. We have no illusions on the question of love (…) Choice is that which binds me to my new homeland. My new country was my choice.” From today’s perspective (or simply from my own perspective), her words sound naive, if not ideologically loaded, since they don’t ask if that choice can be afforded by others, and why it is that some can’t choose. Sure, Ugrešić is being self-deprecating, calling herself a perfect subject, but I can’t identify with her position, not even ironically. To start, I don’t believe I have a choice, let alone do the large majority of people in the world. And even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to choose. The various homelands of the world all appear quite unattractive, that is, they all seem, more or less, to embody the same traits I have rejected (and loathed) in others.

Like myself, Ugrešić is a product of her time and her particular life conjuncture—the hegemonic discourses about the “end of history,” a so-called post-ideological world with its neutral “human rights” and “civic freedoms”—as well as her own life experience which, I suppose, tended to confirm these assumptions. This must be the reason why she can afford defining homeland in terms of passports and tax numbers, forgetting that the homeland may not ask for love, but it certainly demands loyalty. Is it possible for a homeland to escape the State, to become a utopian project? I don’t know. If thinkable at all as such, I believe that this project requires from us to reject the default naturalized national framework.

More importantly, however, my lack of patriotism, of love and loyalty toward my successive States and homelands, does not imply some kind of universalist position. I am not a “world citizen.” As much as everyone, I am from somewhere. I have my habitats, my places of life, and I don’t want to leave them. It is precisely my specific positionality that allows me to think in this manner. I have been socialized and subjectivized in certain geographies and cultures, landscapes, historical moments and experiences, material conditions, with a particular ideological heritage. I feel a living connection, and a commitment, to them. To the plains of Bačka, to Novi Sad crossroads under the right angle. To the socialist concrete residential blocks. To the song of blackbirds in Rijeka, to Rijeka’s rains and city library. To the smell of salt and figs in the Adriatic. To Fruška gora, and its springs, to the deer I once saw in its woods. To the hills of Belgrade and Rijeka. To the Danube poplars, to the lindens and birches of Novo Naselje, which are withering away and disappearing due to heating summers. To the institution of kafana. To the tradition of self-organization, the experience of struggle for a world beyond exploitation, domination and oppression. To olives. To the Mediterranean maquis and to the continental forest. To the drystone walls of Vis. To the “filthiness” of Belgrade’s clubs, of “mixed” marriages and languages.

According to Rzavljani, the association for the protection of the river Rzav, whose survival is endangered by the building of the Svračkovo dam, the people of Rzav are all those who feel Rzav as their own. Those “who were born next to it, who grew up alongside it, who have been coming back to it for peace, inspiration and beauty, as well as those who only once saw its currents, but had them remain in their hearts.” I have never been to Rzav, but I feel more as one of its people than that of any national homeland I can be assigned to. “You are of Rzav people if it pains you to see a river die.” It does. Unlike for national sovereignty, I do care about the sovereignty of Rzav, and of all of its species. If possible, my homeland (or homelands) exists in the contours of the Rzav, and stands in solidarity with it. That kind of political project is not imaginable at the moment, but some people are already, sometimes, living it.

Featured image:  Double-page spread from Periplanissis. Following Ulysses’ Gaze, photographs and essays by Josef Koudelka, Alain Bergala and Margarita Mandas. Thessaloniki Film Festival. 1 January 1995. Courtesy of Setanta Books.

Saša Savanović