by Matthew Boyd, Ph.D.

1.

Yugoslavia

The Socialist Federal Republics of Yugoslavia was a country on the Balkan peninsula that existed from 1946 until the country’s breakup and the bloody wars of succession that ensued beginning in 1991. This “Second Yugoslavia” consisted of the republics of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, and included many significant populations of minorities not hinted at in the names of the constituent republics.

The first Yugoslavia was established in 1929 as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, or the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. This country was formed in 1929 with the fall of Ottoman rule in the region. It existed until1941, when Axis forces invaded and pushed the monarchy into exile and the legitimacy of the government was displaced by Josip Broz “Tito’s” partisan forces.

Socialist Yugoslavia had the distinction of having liberated herself from Nazi occupation through the concerted and motivated leadership of Josip Broz “Tito” and his partisans. They were therefore in a unique position where they were formally beholden neither to the Soviet Union nor the Western powers. They had a large army and a strong ruling party that enjoyed the popularity of a patriotic, more than ideological, backing. The Soviet Union under Stalin could not impose unilateral control over the regime as a satellite socialist state, and the West could not, as Churchill suggested, split control over the postwar Balkans 50/50 between the Soviet Union and Western Europe. Yugoslavia had freed herself from the fascists, and she was her own.

After the war the Yugoslavs built a culture as they rebuilt their country, and the story of how popular musical culture developed there is a part of that rebuilding. They accepted worldwide trends in music and other arts while injecting their own national character and innovations into them. The works that originated in the SFRY resonated with world trends and maintained their own cultural center. Though they remained current with Western cultural trends, they were not a colony of Western culture. As the youngest generation of Yugoslavs came of age, in the same way that Tito’s early partisan government was able to resist direct colonization by outside forces, the Yugoslav music scene was able to develop political ideas and ideals that locally centered the identity of a generation. Though today their country is gone, the music that they made then carries on in importance throughout the region.

Continue | Back