The Yugoslav state was restructured several times over the course of the twentieth century, but James Robertson’s excellent new book, Mediating Spaces: Literature, Politics, and the Scales of Yugoslav Socialism, 1870–1995, shows that the Yugoslav idea went through many more iterations. Robertson focuses his attention on leftist intellectuals who imagined and reimagined the region in response to globalizing capitalism. He argues that these intellectuals embraced supranational models—from the concrete ones that came to be, to the speculative ones that never were—as a way to “mediate” the region’s space and, thus, its standing on the world stage.

Supranational models appealed to several generations of Yugoslav leftist thinkers because, as Robertson suggests, they were based in fundamentally socialist ideals like cooperation and coexistence. At the same time, it was not lost on them that supranational unification was one of the few available models that could safeguard the autonomy of small nations in a globalizing world. “These projects sought to reconcile nationalist demands for self-determination with an understanding of capitalist modernity as increasingly global in scale and marked by profound asymmetries of wealth, power, and prestige,” Robertson writes. “Recognizing the weakness of small nations within this global order, socialists on Europe’s southeast periphery set out to secure political sovereignty, economic development, and cultural modernization at a scale between national and the global” (6). The ideas Yugoslav leftist thinkers imagined ranged from late nineteenth century proposals for a Balkan federation to the loosely structured community of the Third World during the Cold War. What these ideas shared was their commitment to mediating space without relying on national markers such as race, ethnicity, or language.

Mediating Spaces draws upon the writing, activism, and cultural output of Yugoslavia’s leftist intellectuals. Robertson calls on the work of early agrarian socialist Svetozar Marković and the Serbian Social Democratic Party theorist Dimitrije Tucović to study debates about supranational possibilities in the prewar decades. He refreshingly devotes three full chapters to the interwar years, a generally understudied period of Yugoslav history. While the communist movement was suppressed in Yugoslavia at this time, Robertson explores how left-wing writers like Miroslav Krleža, Ljubomir Micić, Srečko Kosovel, and Miloš Crnjanski imagined speculative supranational projects. Finally, the last chapters of the book move chronologically to explore the mediation of the postwar supranational state, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and the supranational political alliance, the Non-Aligned Movement.

Robertson’s work reframes our understanding of the region in several important ways. First, he challenges the scholarly overreliance on the framework of the nation by showing the prevalence of supranational ideas and the richness of the region’s intellectual history surrounding them. Second, Roberson convincingly argues that the supranational imaginary, much like the national one, was a product of capitalist globalization. Finally, he shows a clear lineage of socialist mediation of space that underlines that the Balkans ought to well be read as a historical site of “anti-imperialist and anticapitalist resistance” (24).

Mediating Spaces is a gorgeous feat of cultural and intellectual history. It forges its own interpretation of the history of the Yugoslav idea while standing confidently alongside foundational books in the field like Andrew Wachtel’s Marking a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (1998) and Dejan Djokić’s edited collection Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea, 1918–1992 (2003). Robertson’s book is essential reading for students and scholars of Yugoslavia, eastern Europe, and global socialisms, and it is a text that is sure to have a lasting impact on the study of the region.