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The Communist Ideological Legacy and Serb–Albanian Relations in Kosovo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Gordana Božić
Gordana Božić*
Affiliation:
145 Daford Street, Ottawa, ON, K1L 6Z5, Canada. Email: gorbozic@yahoo.ca
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Extract

In the course of trying to establish functional and harmonious relations among Yugoslav nations, the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (hereafter the Communist Party) asked two key questions: (1) did the common interests that united Yugoslav nations and nationalities after the Second World War change over time? And (2) was nationalism a manifestation of the failure to resolve the national question? The Communist Party answered “no” to both questions. We may deepen our understanding of why multinational socialist Yugoslavia resisted disintegration for almost 50 years, if we get a better grasp of the Communist Party's responses and arguments to these questions. Equally important, since the Kosovo question is, so to speak, an unresolved legacy of the socialist (communist) system, reviewing the arguments that dominated the political life of socialist Yugoslavia may also give us some insights into future developments in Kosovo. By putting the above-mentioned questions into the Kosovo context, the article does not, however, attempt to offer the “right” answer to them. Rather, the purpose of this article is to provide some important background considerations about challenges, such as decentralization, that multinational Yugoslavia faced and to explore lessons learned from the past.

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 33 - 58
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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