‘Discovering’ Yugoslavia in Post-socialism: The Intrinsic and Extrinsic Limits to Researching an Unusual Historical Creation

History and the past not being the same, it is easy to see that historical interpretations of Yugoslavia, themselves deconstructed in the post-socialist era, were heavily burdened by ideological context. This text considers several legitimising models that have become the dominant ideological matrices that seriously limit scientific contributions to the study of the Yugoslav experience. This text first analyses the influence of anticommunism as a globally dominant post-Cold War matrix that delegitimises all historical knowledge on the socialist era. By levelling fascism and socialism through the narrative of two totalitarian orders, this revisionist movement seeks to establish itself within the mainstream of social science. Influenced by nationalist matrices in post-Yugoslav historiography, antitotalitarian discourse reduces to anti-Yugoslavism and anti-Titoism. In the case of Serbia, any study on modernising and democratising movements within the Yugoslav Socialist system carries a particular stigma and accusations of national betrayal. As such, it is the narrowest limiting ring to historical research. With these global and local obstacles in mind, the text seeks to elaborate on the remaining manoeuvring space to the historian attempts to objectively understand socialist Yugoslavia.