In 1964 Morris Janowitz published his seminal The Military in the Political Development of New Nations: An Essay in Comparative Analysis. Contrary to prevailing thought during the heady days of decolonization, Janowitz argued that new national military institutions mainly failed in their tasks to build national identities, elite competencies, and overcome the scourge of tribalism. This failure grew from limited time-in-service for recruits, limited budgets, elite evasion of military responsibilities, and external political pressures, among other reasons. Under these limitations, common military symbols especially proved too weak and evanescent to craft unity among atomized populations.
Janowitz was not far from my mind as I read Tanja Petrović’s Utopia of the Uniform. This is a plaintive, often bittersweet, analysis of young men’s lived experiences in and after their service in the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) and after the dissolution of the Yugoslav state. Petrović, a Serb whose interviews with former JNA soldiers of diverse nationalities called into question her own conflicted identity, celebrates the unity of purpose and melding identities enabled by military service that brought together young men from the far-flung (ethnic) provinces of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like Janowitz, she also shows that such service ultimately failed to overcome the animosities building toward the 1990s Yugoslav wars, even as it remained a crucial experience for these men as they tried to deal with their country’s end.
As Petrović shows, memories of conflict-aborted relationships in the JNA loomed large to the former recruits and helped many address the despair and ambiguities produced by Yugoslavia’s implosion. Petrović explores recruit relationships through the concept of “affective afterlives.”
This precisely challenges the idea of “Yugo-nostalgia,” a yearning for the independent, non-aligned, self-managed, multi-ethnic state that was Yugoslavia. Nostalgia, she says, stultifies the relationship of past and present, while “afterlife” imagines “endings that are not over” and presupposes an agency for former JNA cadres “capable of unsettling the stillness of the aftermath.” Afterlives, in other words, give former JNA soldiers possibilities to craft diverse meanings for themselves beyond the fixedness of ethnic identity. She illustrates this in the search of former JNA recruits for their buddies of different ethnicities, searches that occasionally end up in graveyards of atrocity.
Petrović explores a range of contradictions as she lays bare the role of the JNA experience in her informant’s lives both during and after their service. To her the military symbolized the essence of the state, despite its regimented negation of Yugoslav self-management and non-alignment. She suggests how JNA structures, ritualization, and regimented practices forged a forced unity, a “barbed-wire utopia,” among army recruits that grew from WWII partisan traditions, but was nevertheless challenged by recruits’ own diverse backgrounds, experiences, and family interventions prior to, during, and after their military service. Furthermore, the strength of military regimentation partially negated the creative ideology and drive of self-managed socialism to which many of the army’s young recruits aspired.
The stifled creativity of JNA life is reflected by the experiences of artists, photographers, poets, and playwrights from JNA ranks on whom Petrović focuses. This approach was both salutary and myopic. In the former sense, a view through the photographic lens or the graphic depiction of soldiers and military images, before and after the Yugoslav deluge, and how those changing images first celebrated then challenged military life, enables vivid understanding of the emotional content and symbolic significance of the JNA experience and its afterlives. However, the elevation of the artistic leaves the experience of working-class and peasant boys, who comprised the lion’s share of JNA recruits, barely considered and less understood.
Meanwhile, the JNA uniform, despite the book’s title, is not itself considered a potential canvas for analysis. A focus on the material uniform, its history, manufacture, insignia, decorations, differences in rank, linguistic indications, and its treatment by diverse recruits might have given us a deeper understanding of the fate of the attempt to manufacture unity from diversity. Along with these two fairly narrow critiques, the redundant listing of how the JNA blended recruits from different backgrounds (ethnic, rural-urban, educational, class, experiential and the like) and what the purpose and meaning of the JNA was in the multi-ethnic republic of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians, and other associated nationalities, diminished the narrative of this heartfelt, nuanced analysis.
In the end, reading of the struggles of these men, late of the JNA, to reconstruct their lives and their former relations in now-defunct Yugoslavia was poignant and redolent of memories of another time, nostalgic though they were.
