Challenges of new food

Most scholarship on Serbia’s antibureaucratic revolution of the late 1980s has emphasized elite actors while ignoring the motivations of ordinary participants. How do ordinary people describe their involvement? Moreover, given the antibureaucratic revolution’s dark side—such as exclusionary nationalism and political authoritarianism—it is important to investigate whether participants are willing to critically engage their personal political histories. What do they now say about their roles in this episode? In order to provide answers to this question, six focus groups with a total of 34 participants were organized in the town of Novi Sad, the location of one of the best-known rallies of the antibureaucratic revolution, the so-called yogurt revolution. Most people see their involvement in a rather negative way and regret taking part. However, two blind spots also appear that lessen their sense of personal responsibility: conspiracy theories and notions of urban superiority. The former shifts blame onto secret forces and the latter onto nonurban outsiders. Overall, the long-term legacies of the antibureaucratic revolution are negative: they are associated with cynicism and apathy.

Section: The Antibureaucratic Revolution and The “Yogurt Revolution”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Antibureaucratic Revolution and The “Yogurt Revolution”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Antibureaucratic Revolution and The “Yogurt Revolution”mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Antibureaucratic Revolution and The “Yogurt Revolution”mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Looking Back at Milošević’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: What Do Ordinary Participants Now Think of Their Involvement?

Grdešić¹

2019

“…This article explores the context of the antibureaucratic revolution, the so-called happening of the people that swept across Serbia and Montenegro in 1988 and 1989, by interrogating how conditions in late socialist Yugoslavia lent themselves to the production of populist representations among workers. Rather than focusing on the militant Kosovo Serb activists and protesting workers of “frontline” towns and neighborhoods like Titov Vrbas and Bačka Palanka in Vojvodina; Rakovica and Zemun in Belgrade; or Nikšić and Titograd in Montenegro (on this, see Grdešić, this volume; Musić 2016; Lekić, Pavić, and Lekić 2009; Vladisavljević 2008), I focus on coastal cities in northwestern Croatia like Rijeka that were not directly involved in the antibureaucratic revolution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Antibureaucratism” as a Yugoslav Phenomenon: The View from Northwest Croatia

Archer

2019

Most studies of the antibureaucratic revolution have focused on political elites and activists in Serbia, Montenegro, and the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. Recent scholarship has focused on individual participants, often workers, and takes their agency seriously. Building upon such research, this article explores the antibureaucratic revolution as a particular manifestation of a larger sociocultural process, constitutive of long-term structural changes across the whole of Yugoslavia. An analysis of workplace documents and local newspapers in northwest Croatia demonstrates that antibureaucratic sentiment was not the prerogative of Serbian and Montenegrins but of Yugoslav citizens more generally. Yugoslavs were conditioned by the party-state to be critical of bureaucracy. Workers began to admonish the expansion of administrative positions, which they blamed for their falling living standards. Despite decentralizing and autarkic tendencies in political and economic life in late socialist Yugoslavia, working class discontents (and representations of it) remained remarkably similar across republican boundaries. In Rijeka and its environs, a shift does not occur until in mid-1988. Condemnations of nationalism become more urgent and a skepticism toward the mass protests occurring in Serbia is palpable from this point onward.

Thirty Years of Yugoslavia’s “Antibureaucratic Revolution”: A Long-Run Appraisal and New Avenues of Research

Grdešić

2019

This special issue of Nationalities Papers presents an attempt to provide a fresh perspective on Serbia’s and Yugoslavia’s “antibureaucratic revolution” of 1988 and 1989. The 30th anniversary of this turbulent episode provides an opportunity to rethink our interpretation and offer a new appraisal of the event as well as open several new avenues of potentially productive research. This special issue builds on older research (Vladisavljević 2004, 2008; Vujačić 1996, 2003) and is part of a series of more recent as well upcoming contributions (Musić 2016; Musić forthcoming; Archer et al. 2016; Grdešić 2016; Grdešić forthcoming; Vujačić 2017; Archer and Musić 2017). Given the complexity of the event, the contributions collected here cannot exhaust all of the antibureaucratic revolution’s many facets. We do, however, hope that these contributions cover some of the main lacunae in the scholarship published so far. We also hope that this special issue will spark researchers to turn to this immensely interesting and deeply important event.