The Mystery of Wealth: Capitalism. Democracy. Rule of Law 9783110712322, 9783110712766, 9783110712827, 2021939860, 3110712326

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Boundaries and Borders in the Post-Yugoslav Space

Boundaries and Borders in the Post-Yugoslav Space A European Experience Edited by Nenad Stefanov and Srdjan Radović

ISBN 978-3-11-071232-2 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-071276-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-071282-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021939860 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover illustration: Abandoned Bobsled in Sarajevo. Photo Julian Sandhagen Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. © Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

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1 Establishing a federative Yugoslavia during World War II

Fade scrathe in marble

: Fedral b/ordeing of socialt Yugoslavi

P litik

Borba

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3 Remembering Cold War refugees

Mapping the uncertain: Difficulties with establishing the ethnic borders

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in interwar Yugoslavia was popularized predominantly through monographs and, most importantly, in articles in various cultural and political journals that aimed at a non-professional readership. Between 1903 and 1913, the Serbian geographer Jovan Cviji produced several influential maps of ethnicities in Macedonia. He visually organized them in order to support Serbia s territorial claims, although it should be noted that he did not identify the local Slavic population as Serbs, but rather as Macedonian Slavs, a distinct group that might become either Serbs or Bulgarians (Wilkinson 1951, 149 150; Cviji 1906). In 1918, in anticipation of the end of the war and the creation of a larger Yugoslav state, Cviji was keen to show the geographical distribution of the Balkan peoples to international audiences, and so he resorted to maps (Cviji 1918b; he had earlier written about the issue in Cviji 1913). The experience at the Paris Peace Conferenc e, however, left him disillusioned and doubtful of the fairness of ethnographic maps in general (Cviji 1921, 6). At the end of the First World War, establishing the borders of national spaces and of newly created countries was clearly a top priority. Cviji , for instance, was primarily interested in the outer borders of the Yugoslav national space. And he was not the only one: in the early days of the Yugoslav state, a number of Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian geographers focused on the Yugoslav territories as a foundation of Yugoslavia s international borders (Duan i 2016). Establishing the spatial extent of the Yugoslav national (ethnic) territories was of strategic importance for determining the country s borders, even if relations among the titular ethnic communities the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was the issue that would loom large over the political life of the country. As this chapter shows, geographers treatment of the Serbian, Croatian, and Slovenian national territories within Yugoslavia would be significantly different, politically more convoluted and occasionally methodologically more demanding. Yugoslav geographers knew how to make maps, and they did. By the mid1920s, Slovenian geographer Roman Savnik (1925) was able to review as many as twenty-seven maps of Yugoslavia created by Yugoslav geographers. These mostly unambitious maps depicted either physical terrain or administrative borders, and in fewer cases transportation lines, industry, or agriculture, but not the burning issue of interwar Yugoslavia which was otherwise being continuously and abundantly elaborated in geographical works. There was a difference between the visual and textual representation of the national territories (with an important caveat that historians of geography and cartography treat maps as texts, too [Harley 2001]): textual representations seem to have been more tolerant of ambiguities and uncertainties inhere nt to the concept of national space or national territories. We have for a long time been accustomed to an abundant use of maps and other forms of visual representations in geography. Yugoslav geography