Saviours of the Nation?: Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism

Yugoslavia's breakup in 1991, and the wars in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo that followed in its wake, have been widely blamed on Serbian nationalism. Most analyses have not examined this nationalism in the years before Slobodan Miloševićs' rise to power, when its principal articulators were dissident intellectuals. This book traces the trajectory of intellectual opposition to Serbian nationalism from its origins in the 1950s to its consolidation in the 1980s, arguing that the acceptance of Milošević's undemocratic approach to the national question undermined the intellectual opposition's ability to present a convincing political alternative and was crucial in allowing the regime to continue. -- book cover.