The „Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia" (1955-1990) between Yugoslav and Sub-Yugoslav nation-building

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Voß
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 525235595

The Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia (EJ) was the flagship project of the socialist Yugoslav nation-building in the fields of culture and academic knowledge. The first edition of the EJ was published in one Serbo-Croatian version (1955-71), but the unfinished second edition of the EJ (1980-90) appeared in Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian in Latin and in Cyrillic script, Macedonian, Hungarian and Albanian versions. The EJ aimed to give Yugoslav peoples and nationalities the sense of a common identity based on culture and history. It was simultaneously given the, sometimes contradictory, task of nation-building at the level of sub-Yugoslav federal units as well as the building of identities of all six constituent peoples and larger nationalities. How did the EJ content present nation-building on Yugoslav and sub-Yugoslav levels; were the EJ and its creators a voice of particular nation-building political positions or bias; how did the nation-building concepts in the EJ shape knowledge production in it and what was the public impact? The research will be based on the thesis that the EJ served as a leading knowledge authority for anti-centralist forces in the intellectual and cultural life of Yugoslavia. The EJ transformed itself from the staunchly federalist Yugoslav cultural platform in the 1950s that subverted Yugoslav unitarism to one that strongly affirmed nation-building(s) of republics and autonomous provinces reflecting the decentralist remodeling of Yugoslavia from the late 1960s onwards. The EJ’s sub-Yugoslav nation-building role became especially important in the case of the Yugoslav periphery that was historically Serb dominated or strongly marked as well as politically and culturally emancipated by the decentralization (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Vojvodina, Kosovo). The EJ provided these communities, partially emerging for the first time, with the nation-building argumentation and orientation as their cultural and academic infrastructure was still developing and they lacked cultural legitimation in the Yugoslav centers and internationally. The project will document these assumptions by focusing on four aspects of the EJ: 1) the content related to nation-building will be explored with the assistance of frame analysis, a discourse-analytical approach; 2) the authors that contributed to the EJ articles on the “national question” will be studied based on their biographies and academic work outside the EJ; 3) the analysis of the EJ’s institutional (YLI), and 4) broader political context will be primarily based on the research of archival and newspaper primary sources, as well as interviews with the collaborators of the EJ, that will be conducted in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Prishtina, and Skopje. The research will particularly focus on the representations of Albanianas and Kosovo in the EJ as well as 2EJ’s Albanian language edition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Croatia
• Cooperation Partner: Privatdozent Dr. Dino Mujadzevic