For years, John Lampe's Yugoslavia. Twice There Was a Country (1996) and Sabrina Ramet's The Three Yugoslavias (2006) have remained the country's most comprehensive English-language histories. Purdue University Press thus deserves praise for updating these works by translating Marie-Janine Calic's 2010 German-language A History of Yugoslavia. Like Lampe and Ramet, she succeeds in surveying an impressive number of subjects. Yet Calic also pushes beyond these works by taking her readers more deeply into the world of social and cultural change. At the same time, her book's narrative style has limitations, which render it somewhat inaccessible for a wider audience. Analytically, Calic's approach to ethnicity and nationalism will disappoint scholars in search of fresh explanations for how such issues matter when accounting for Yugoslavia's rise and fall.

Calic begins by posing compelling questions: “Why did Yugoslavia fall apart? Was its violent demise inevitable? Did its population simply fall victim to the lure of nationalism? How did this multinational state manage to survive for so long? And where do we situate the short life of Yugoslavia in the long history of the twentieth century?” (ix) Her central argument “stresses the politicization of differences in twentieth-century modern mass society,” (x) and thus she seeks to uncover “why, how, and under what conditions ethnic identity and diversity were turned into a matter of contention and by whom” (xi). The book is organized into six parts, each of which introduces readers to the histories of the South Slavic movement and the founding of the first Yugoslav state; the First Yugoslavia; the Second World War; Socialist Yugoslavia; life “after Tito”; and Yugoslavia's break-up and aftermath.

Calic is at her best when describing processes of large-scale social and economic transformations. Her depiction of such changes during the 1920s, and especially their effect on gender relations (86–88), is excellent. So too is her account of industrialization during the 1960s. She clearly coveys how communist-led structural economic change transformed social relations and everyday culture of what had been a largely agrarian society (192–212).

These sections’ strengths, however, are offset by Calic's narrative strategy. The bulk of her book struggles to gain sufficient momentum, which is due to Calic's choice not to regularly cite the words of the people who made Yugoslavia's history. Where are the voices, for example, of those peasants whom Calic claims preferred nationalism over class solidarity in the early twentieth century? (43–44) The overall lack of human voices in this history—subaltern and others—flattens out what could have been a much more evocative history. A second issue concerns Calic's regular use of specialized terms and names without adequate definition, which renders her history less accessible than it should be for students and general readers. When reading about the 1960s, to cite one instance, how many such readers will comprehend unexplained terms such as “Bogomoljci” (224), “Bosniak” (227), and “MASPOK” (236), as well as a long list of individuals associated with the journal Praxis (218–19)? This issue, along with the decision to place the book's maps in an appendix rather than throughout the chapters, will leave non-specialist readers—who would seem to be the book's intended audience—with a sense of disorientation.

With regard to analysis, Calic undercuts her stated primary objective of determining how and why ethnic identity became a matter of contention by consistently using groupist language to tell Yugoslavia's history. Too often, the main actors in this book are abstract groups; such as “the Serb people,” “the Slovenes,” or “the Croats.” Yet how can we effectively analyze the changing political and everyday salience of ethnic identification when all people in the region seem to automatically (and, in a sense, ahistorically) already be parts of monolithic “ethnic groups?” Recent pioneering research during the past five years (Hajdarpasic, 2015) has significantly enhanced our capacity to analyze the history of nationalism in the South Slavic lands by moving beyond simplistic notions of “groupism.” Although Calic cites much of this work in her bibliography and endnotes, she does not use its theoretical contributions to explain why ethnicity apparently matters in accounting for Yugoslavia's rise and fall. As such, this history too often naturalizes rather than explains the presence and significance of ethnicity and nationalism. Calic's book is certainly a useful addition to the English-language literature on Yugoslavia. Yet we are still waiting for a historian with the capacity to tell the country's history as one of complex individuals and their changing sense (or lack thereof) of ethnicity, rather than retrospectively submerging them into “ethnic groups.”