A Barbed-Wire Utopia

Abstract

This chapter explores the characteristics of Yugoslav military service that made it an embodiment of some of the central political ideas of Yugoslav socialism—equality, solidarity, brotherhood and unity, and internal internationalism. These characteristics are the army’s syncretic character, its link to Yugoslav citizenship and the ideology of brotherhood and unity, and a combination of the sameness and equality of men and their radical diversity that marked this experience. Striving to make it possible for young Yugoslav men to experience Yugoslav values and ideals by bringing them together, irrespective of ethnic, class, and linguistic boundaries, the Yugoslav army had to be structured as a heterotopian space, in which a single official language was used (as opposed to linguistic diversity as the Yugoslav ideal), female citizens were excluded, and soldiers and officers whose sexuality did not fit traditional, patriarchal, and normative forms were ignored, and sometimes even prosecuted.