The End of History or a Crisis of Historicity?

In 1992, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously described the collapse of state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe as marking the “end of history.” His phrase captured the imagination of the immediate post-Cold War moment, giving expression to a certain liberal triumphalism that celebrated the denouement of the ideological rivalry between capitalism and communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall became a metonym for the definitive eclipse of communism and the advent of a new era of liberal capitalist hegemony around the world.Footnote ⁸ For Europe’s Left, this was a moment of profound demoralization and ideological disorientation. Although many leftists around the world had long been disillusioned with the bureaucratic socialism of the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, the continued existence of these states seemed to affirm the viability of non-capitalist economic systems. So long as these states existed, they helped to sustain a field of possibilities in which alternative political and social forms might be imagined and pursued. The eclipse of state socialism radically narrowed that field, unmooring the Left’s utopian impulses from any sense of historical concreteness.Footnote ⁹

Yet the disillusionment and disorientation of Europe’s Left in this moment exceeds the framework of Fukuyama’s “end of history.” Well before crowds forced their way across a divided Berlin, social democracy in Western Europe had entered what would become an existential crisis.Footnote ¹⁰ The failure of Keynesian economics to resolve the stagflation of the late 1970s, the subsequent rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the defeat of labor movements had shaken the Western Left to its core.Footnote ¹¹ In this sense, the experience of the Left’s historical defeat clearly predated the revolutionary events of 1989 and must be located in processes that exceeded the breakdown of state socialism. Christopher Bickerton has recently observed that the decades that immediately bracketed the end of the Cold War witnessed the implosion of a range of political, economic, and cultural forms that had dominated European societies since the end of World War II. This implosion was not limited to the collapse of state socialist regimes in the East, but also the more gradual dismantling of Keynesian economies in the West and the hollowing out of mass political parties, trade unions, and civic associations that had anchored postwar political systems.Footnote ¹² The years surrounding 1989, therefore, were a crucial historical juncture in the transformation of Europe’s societies, economies, and political orders.

These transformations had a profound impact on the European Left’s experience of historical time. Far from a conclusive resolution of world history, as Fukuyama narrated it, this experience is perhaps better understood as the collapse of history as a site of meaning, purpose, and direction. During the final decade of the Cold War, the regime of historicity that had structured the European Left’s experience of historical time since the late nineteenth century broke down. Writing of this experience, Enzo Traverso describes the onset of a “left-wing melancholia” characterized by a pervasive sense of historical closure and an almost existential feeling of defeat.Footnote ¹³ The Left had, of course, experienced loss in the past. Indeed, much of left-wing culture in the twentieth century was characterized by an almost obsessive commemoration of earlier defeats, from the martyrs of the Paris Commune to the heroic death of Che Guevara in the jungles of Bolivia. But these earlier defeats had not disrupted socialism’s temporal horizons. Indeed, they often fueled the utopian impulses that gave momentum to its future-oriented experience of history. The profound sense of historical stagnation that beset the final decade of the Cold War, however, struck at the very foundations of socialism’s temporal order. As the horizons of possibility appeared to be exhausted by an increasingly unregulated capitalism, visions of alternative social orders appeared ever more vacant and ethereal.

If in the West socialism’s crisis of historicity led to the disorientation of the parties of the Left, in Europe’s East it shook the ideological foundations of the state itself. State power offered socialists few resources with which to withstand the new temporal conditions or to rejuvenate their experience of historical time. On the contrary, the dissolution of socialism’s historical horizons compounded a deeper sense of bureaucratic stagnation and further undermined the ideological legitimacy of the party states. As the 1980s progressed, these regimes increasingly appeared anachronistic, out of sync with the temporal rhythms of the present.

Across both sides of the Iron Curtain, this moment of temporal rupture was experienced not as the end of history so much as its traumatic, contentious, and unsettling return. The decades that bracketed the end of the Cold War witnessed a new preoccupation with historical memory.Footnote ¹⁴ In Western Europe, this centered on the horrors of the twentieth century, in particular the Holocaust and its place in European and national histories.Footnote ¹⁵ In Eastern Europe, the return of history was reflected in the explosion of strange nationalist rituals involving the excavation and reburial of controversial historical figures in the years surrounding 1989.Footnote ¹⁶ The explosion of historical revisionism in Yugoslavia in the 1980s should also be understood within this broader European context of the new culture of historical memory. It is hardly surprising that a crisis of historicity would foster a renewed concern with the past. With the closure of socialism’s horizon of expectation, the present became haunted by the specters of the past. As Traverso observes, “a world without utopias inevitably looks back.”Footnote ¹⁷ It is perhaps for this reason that during this period the Holocaust was universalized into a symbolic warning of the dangers posed by all utopian ideologies.Footnote ¹⁸ In this new culture of historical memory, socialism became reduced to the totalitarian violence of the twentieth century, further dissolving and discrediting the emancipatory hopes it had once sustained.Footnote ¹⁹

To take stock of the argument thus far, the final decade of the Cold War was characterized by a novel temporal condition that was felt with particular sensitivity by the European Left on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The onset of this condition preceded the revolutionary events of 1989 by almost a decade and was characterized by the narrowing of historical horizons, a profound sense of temporal stasis or stagnation, and a renewed concern with revisiting the traumatic events of the twentieth century. It led to a sense of temporal disorientation that precipitated deep political crises in both the electoral parties of the Western Left and the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe. To what can we attribute this temporal crisis? What structures, processes, or events could precipitate a common experience of historical disorientation across Europe’s Cold War frontier? The answer, I believe, lies in the new conditions of sovereign indebtedness that followed the global economic turbulence of the 1970s.

Sovereign Debt and Temporal Disorder

In a groundbreaking study of the end of the Cold War, Fritz Bartel has convincingly demonstrated how the crisis of state socialism in Eastern Europe was bound up with and exacerbated by the historical emergence of a neoliberal economic order at the end of the 1970s. His account foregrounds the impact of the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, which had two long-term consequences. First, it rapidly increased the price of oil, leading to generalized inflation across global supply chains.Footnote ²⁰ Second, the sudden increase in oil revenues brought a flood of funds into international financial institutions that sought profitable investments. With easier access to cheap international credit, developing states, including those of socialist Eastern Europe, borrowed heavily to offset the costs incurred by rising inflation and to finance an expansion of industry. This wave of cheap credit masked a generalized crisis of profitability in the global capitalist system. It helped to sustain both Western social democratic and Eastern state socialist projects and to forestall the impact of the “long downturn” on their national economies.Footnote ²¹

These years of credit-fueled growth came to a sudden crash in 1979 when the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker, raised interest rates on the dollar in an effort to control rising inflation. Overnight, governments around the world found themselves weighed down by unsustainable obligations on dollar-denominated loans. In Europe, the heavy rates of borrowing over the 1970s and the subsequent “Volcker Shock” precipitated deep economic crises in both capitalist and socialist economies. When faced with ballooning foreign debt payments, governments found themselves under pressure to break the social contract between labor and the state that had underpinned their economies since the end of World War II. Desperate to meet their loan obligations, debtor states were compelled to cut spending on generous social programs, reduce imports, and impose wage constraints. Across Europe, the effort to implement these policies exacerbated social inequality and, in the case of Britain and Poland, precipitated violent conflicts between trade unions and the state.Footnote ²² These global financial pressures eroded the foundations of the Left on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the West, social democracy was increasingly discredited as political elites reconciled themselves to a new paradigm of neoliberal reform embodied most decisively in the figure of Margaret Thatcher. In the East, the effort to implement austerity corroded the ideological foundations of state socialism and ultimately led to the system’s collapse.Footnote ²³ The breakdown of the postwar economic order also undercut those efforts by the global South and its European socialist supporters, like Yugoslavia, to reorganize the global economy according to more redistributive and developmentalist priorities. The sovereign debt crises that followed the Volcker Shock inaugurated an era of neoliberal structural adjustment across the global South.Footnote ²⁴

Bartel’s account is a crucial framework for understanding the end of history as bound up with a wider crisis of historicity. It allows us to perceive the ways in which both the dissolution of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the ideological defeat of social democracy in Western Europe were entangled in the broader crises of energy and profitability that beset the global economy in the 1970s.Footnote ²⁵ More specifically, it highlights the central role that sovereign debt played in the trajectory of socialism’s decline. That debt increasingly corroded the authority of national governments, forcing them to defer to global financial markets and radically recast their economies in ways that strengthened an emerging paradigm of neoliberal economics and delegitimized alternative economic models.Footnote ²⁶

The pressures and limitations that the debt crises fostered in the field of politics shaped a new experience of time, disrupting the historical horizons of socialism across Europe. In her work on the contemporary culture of indebtedness, Annie McClanahan describes credit as a “temporal fix” to the capitalist impulse for growth. Credit, in other words, allows capital to escape its present limits through a projection of profitability into the future, “as if it has already happened.”Footnote ²⁷ This anticipatory structure facilitates a mode of temporal deferral that obscures the present moment of production. Credit, then, is a mode of living on borrowed time in the sense that it mobilizes value whose realization is deferred to a future moment.Footnote ²⁸ The present, in turn, is recast as a future past, one whose limitations seem to have been overcome.

Under conditions of a debt crisis, however, this future dissolves and we are thrown back into an earlier moment of production with all of its constraints and failures. “When credit works,” McClanahan argues, “it lives only in the future, transfixing in its seemingly magical power to move itself ever forward. But when it fails, credit is pulled back into its own uncanny past, back into the reality of labor and production that it so desperately attempted to disavow, confronted with the material limits it thought it had overcome.”Footnote ²⁹ If the temporal vector of credit is an anticipatory future, then that of debt is a spectral return of a past that has been repressed. With the sudden narrowing of temporal horizons, the present becomes unmoored from the future and finds itself riven through with shards of a traumatic past.Footnote ³⁰ Debt crisis is, then, a moment of temporal upheaval in which the future past of credit abruptly gives way to a present past of stagnation and regression.

The experience of the crises of sovereign indebtedness in Europe dramatically expands McClanahan’s analysis and offers a generative framework for understanding the late Cold War chronoscape. While her account is based on the study of U.S. household debt, I propose two theses in adapting this analysis to the conditions of sovereign debt, which are borne out by the Yugoslav experience. First, in a crisis of sovereign debt, the bearer is not the private individual or company but the state. Consequently, if debt disrupts a temporal order by puncturing the present with a repressed past, under conditions of sovereign debt the past that returns will likely be the foundational moments in the history of the state’s formation. This helps to explain why the years of sovereign debt crisis in Europe were accompanied by a new culture of historical memory that interrogated the history of the breakdown and re-founding of political order on the continent, particularly with regard to the violence of World War II.Footnote ³¹

Second, the temporal structure of credit resonated with socialism’s regime of historicity in ways that exacerbated the corrosive effects of the debt crisis on the Left. Both credit and socialist ideology were structured by a similar anticipatory temporality that anchored the present to a promised future. The promise of this future served as a point of orientation that could stabilize the present and drive its temporal momentum forward.Footnote ³² As with credit, so long as that horizon of expectation remained open, this ideological structure could function more or less smoothly. The sovereign debt crises that followed in the wake of the global economic turbulence of the 1970s, however, dissolved socialism’s future as a point of historical orientation, and the temporal engine that gave the present its sense of dynamism broke down. The debt crisis thereby corroded the ideological coordinates of the socialist project, introducing a sense of historical precarity and rootlessness.

The dissolution of socialism’s horizons of expectation and the pervasive sense of temporal stagnation that accompanied it were precipitated by the sovereign debt crises that beset Europe in the final decade of the Cold War. The shared entanglements of national governments in the global financial system explain why this temporal crisis was felt with such existential force by the Left on both sides of the Iron Curtain. As governments across the continent faced the pressures of bond markets and rapidly growing debt payments, the credit that had once fueled social democratic and state socialist visions of future growth receded. The historical present was no longer experienced as dynamic and pregnant with future possibilities, but rather constrained and stagnant, stuck in a past from which it could not escape. Yugoslavia in the 1980s offers a rich case study through which to develop this argument.

Yugoslavia’s Sovereign Debt Crisis

In Yugoslavia, a crisis of historicity took root in the early 1980s, when the country’s foreign debt crisis began to corrode the ideological and economic foundations of the socialist state. This corrosion was manifested in a new culture of historical memory that began to permeate society and eat away at the historical myths upon which the postwar state had founded its authority. Writing midway through this decade, Sabrina Ramet observed that Yugoslav society had begun to display signs of “apocalypse culture,” characterized by “strains of pessimism, gloom, resignation, escapism of various kinds,” a country that increasingly perceived itself to be at the “end of time.”Footnote ³³ A crisis of indebtedness fostered a crisis of socialist historicity, as dissident intellectuals became preoccupied with recovering accounts of the country’s dark past that they believed had been repressed by the state.

From its early years, Yugoslav socialism had been characterized by high levels of foreign debt.Footnote ³⁴ Since the country’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948, the communist leadership had exploited its position between the two Cold War blocs to secure access to global markets and favorable lines of credit. To facilitate this strategy, they introduced reforms designed to decentralize the economy and move toward market socialism.Footnote ³⁵ These reforms reached their peak in 1974–76 when the leadership radically devolved political-administrative power to national-republican institutions—curtailing the authority of the federal government—and created more forums for workers’ participation in the management of their enterprises.Footnote ³⁶ This decentralization left the country especially ill-equipped to respond to the global economic upheavals of the 1970s. The oil shocks hit Yugoslavia especially hard. Since the mid-1960s, the country’s energy needs had increasingly shifted from coal and hydropower to imported oil.Footnote ³⁷ The spike in global prices meant that by the early 1980s foreign petroleum accounted for almost a quarter of Yugoslav net import payments.Footnote ³⁸ Meanwhile, the devolution of administrative powers made it impossible for the federal government to exercise oversight on foreign borrowing, which exploded during these years as enterprises met the challenge of rising inflation, energy costs, and wage increases by relying on their continued access to cheap foreign credit.Footnote ³⁹ This influx of credit helped to paper over the general stagnation of the Yugoslav economy but generated a high level of foreign indebtedness that remained largely hidden from the federal government’s view.

Yugoslavia’s heightened exposure to global financial markets meant that it was hit especially hard by the Volcker Shock of 1979. In 1980, the country’s foreign debt ballooned to USD $21 billion. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, the federal government turned to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), eventually agreeing to an “enhanced surveillance” program that effectively compromised the country’s economic sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁰ In an early instance of the structural adjustment measures that would become a key characteristic of neoliberal programs in the developing world, the federal government pursued radical economic reforms intended to streamline enterprises by restricting wages, curbing price increases, reducing imports, and prioritizing exports. In 1983, the government initiated the “Long Term Program for Economic Stabilization,” which made clear that the economic contraction was not simply another brief stint of belt tightening but a more ingrained and prolonged crisis. The Volcker Shock pushed Yugoslav debt payments to unsustainable levels. According to one Yugoslav economist, between 1981 and 1988, the country’s foreign loan payments amounted to seven to ten percent of national income, a percentage that, he calculated, exceeded the reparations paid by Germany after World War I.Footnote ⁴¹

Such sums called for a savage cut to government spending, and the ensuing austerity measures had a dramatic impact on the living standards of everyday Yugoslavs. In an effort to restrict expensive foreign imports, the government abandoned subsidies and price controls, making basic items, including oil, coffee, laundry detergent, food, and fuel prohibitively expensive. Inflation grew to triple digits and unemployment rose to previously unseen heights.Footnote ⁴² To make matters worse, the reforms failed to achieve their intended outcome. With a near-stagnant economic growth rate of 0.5 percent throughout the 1980s, the country’s foreign debt remained at unsustainable levels by the decade’s end.Footnote ⁴³

Although Yugoslav workers had grown accustomed to patterns of sudden exuberant expansion and subsequent austere downturn, the duration and extent of the crisis in the 1980s were unprecedented. One of the effects of this economic shock was to foster a widespread moral discourse that valorized austerity and criticized profligacy. In its early years, this popular discourse clearly operated within the horizons of a socialist historicity. As Goran Musić notes, many workers initially embraced the calls for austerity and sacrifice in ways that recalled the appeals to revolutionary optimism and national solidarity from an earlier, more heroic era of the socialist regime. A comment from a worker in the Slovene city of Maribor in 1983 illustrates this early spirit especially well: “The economic situation is grave indeed and it limits our purchasing power. I admit we were a bit spoiled during previous years and this sudden crisis caught us unprepared. The scarcity of items in the supermarket, higher prices, and similar stabilization measures had an effect on all of us. However, I am convinced that also this time around we will come out of the crisis by relying on our own capacities…. We should increase productivity and work discipline, shorten the time spent in meetings, cut back on personal and collective consumption.”Footnote ⁴⁴

What is important to note here is that the worker’s moralizing language, her chastising of an earlier period of excess, is framed within the anticipatory horizons of socialist ideology. The present is not a condition of suffocating stagnation or regression into the past, but one in which a temporal momentum still moves forward to a brighter future of prosperity and productivity. Within this anticipatory temporal structure, the present impasse can be overcome through greater discipline, sacrifice, and collective effort. The contours of a socialist historicity are still felt in her reaction to the crisis.

But by the second half of the 1980s, this moral rhetoric was configured within a new temporal order, one in which the anticipatory horizons of socialism were not just dissolved but increasingly repudiated as a dangerous illusion. The issue of Yugoslavia’s foreign debt was often a key factor in the transition to this new experience of time. In a series of essays from 1987, for instance, the Slovene philosopher Taras Kermauner criticized Yugoslavia’s socialist leaders for their ideological hubris and culture of excess, both of which had been enabled by the country’s reliance on foreign credit: “Thank God the creditors submitted the bill to us! Because only thanks to this did we start to sober up. That lavishly equipped Mercedes, which had been bought on credit and which seated the highest symbols of Yugoslavia, would have crashed into the abyss in mid-gallop before its drivers and the pseudo-aristocratic passengers even realized what was happening to them. That is, if that arrogant wagon had not first run out of gas and money and creditworthiness.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Foreign credit, Kermauner insisted, had morally corroded Yugoslav socialism by fueling a revolutionary hubris that allowed the country’s leaders to project their ambitions beyond the state’s natural spatial and temporal horizons. Spatially, this was evidenced in the country’s leading role in the Non-Aligned Movement, an alliance of mostly Third World states that sought to steer a path between the two Cold War power blocs.Footnote ⁴⁶ To Kermauner, these global ambitions were evidence of the regime’s delusions of grandeur. Cheap credit had allowed Yugoslav socialists to imagine that they could exceed their country’s humble place on the periphery of Europe. This unabashed Eurocentrist found his country’s ties with the Third World especially distasteful and, in blatantly orientalist fashion, blamed Yugoslavia’s alliance with the “East” for contributing to the excess, corruption, and degeneracy of the political class.Footnote ⁴⁷ The intervention of the IMF, he insisted, had provided one last opportunity for the country to break with this eastern culture of profligacy and return to the borders of an austere and disciplined Europe.Footnote ⁴⁸

Temporally, too, Kermauner believed that the state’s irresponsible foreign borrowing had sustained its “millenarian phantasmagorias.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The anticipatory temporality of Yugoslav socialism, in this reading, was an immature fantasy and, far from guiding the country into the future, had made Yugoslavia an anachronism in the contemporary world. As a new global economy increasingly rendered the proletariat historically insignificant, Kermauner insisted, Yugoslav socialists had refused to come to terms with the new times and instead “barricade[d] [themselves] in defense of backward modes of production and productive-social relations.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The revolutionary tempo of socialism was out of place in the more austere chronoscape of the 1980s. What was called for now, he intimated, was a humble presentism, a spiritual reassessment that was informed by a realistic appraisal of the narrow possibilities afforded a small nation in a rapidly globalizing world. According to Kermauner, this temporal humility would become a necessity now that Yugoslavia’s debt had come due and the cheap credit that had once sustained its revolutionary ambitions had dried up.

Alongside this new moral rhetoric, the debt crisis and the temporal disorientation it fostered also gave rise to a new culture of historical memory, one that created the conditions for the growth of a nationalist counterculture. This was particularly pronounced in Serbia, where the liberalization of the public sphere gave these controversial views a greater airing than in the federation’s other national republics.Footnote ⁵¹ Starting as early as 1981 but really gathering pace in the middle of the decade, oppositional historians and writers began to interrogate the official narrative of World War II and the founding of the state. This wave of historical revisionism complicated the socialist state’s uncritical account of the partisan struggle, reassessing the legacy of the Serbian Chetnik movement in particular and reexamining the factional disputes that had divided the communist party (often along ethnic lines) during the war. The wartime genocide of Serbs at the hands of the Axis-aligned Croatian Ustasha became an especially fraught topic. Dissident historians accused the socialist regime of a conspiracy of silence regarding both the scale and ferocity of the slaughter and the ethnicity of the victims and perpetrators.Footnote ⁵² Images of wartime atrocities against Serbs, Jews, and Roma became widespread, trafficked by tabloids and academic organizations alike.Footnote ⁵³ These themes resonated with a Europe-wide interrogation of the historical memory of World War II and its themes of victimhood, atrocity, and complicity.Footnote ⁵⁴

The new nationalist culture of historical memory was often articulated through a paradigm of repressed traumas. Owing to their generic form, memoirs or autobiographical accounts of wartime ethnic violence or of persecution by the young communist regime that appeared during this decade frequently presented themselves as an effort to recover suppressed memories. But fictionalized accounts, too, often relied on this framing device. Vuk Drašković’s notorious 1982 novel, Nož (The Knife), for instance, centered on a Bosnian Muslim protagonist, whose research into his family’s past reveals a dark secret. The young man, we discover, was originally born a Serb whose family was murdered by their Muslim neighbors during the war. It was these very neighbors who took the young child in and raised him as one of their own.Footnote ⁵⁵ In Drašković’s tale, the repressed memories of the wartime past could return to expose the lie of ethnic harmony in the present.

Throughout the 1980s, then, the paradigm of historical trauma was wielded by Serbian opposition intellectuals who sought to evoke the past to disrupt the regime’s claim to the present. But why should opposition to the socialist regime have taken this specific temporal form? What about the conditions of economic crisis prompted a preoccupation with the history of World War II and its immediate aftermath? The answer lies in the temporal dynamics of Yugoslavia’s debt crisis. Debt is, as we observed, the disruptive return of the past to the present. As the anticipatory future of credit breaks down, we inhabit a present permeated by the debts of the past. Little wonder, then, that a crisis of sovereign debt would foster a culture of historical revisionism that targeted the state’s own founding myths.

In Yugoslavia, the temporal disruptions that the debt crisis brought about fragmented the socialist state’s regime of historicity. It was out of this fragmentation that the politics of nationalist grievance and historical revisionism emerged. This is not to suggest that nationalist sentiments or the specific temporal regimes that structured ethnic grievances did not exist prior to the years of the debt crisis. They certainly formed part of postwar Yugoslavia’s temporal ecology.Footnote ⁵⁶ What must be explained is why this previously latent conflict between the historical imagination of Yugoslav socialism and that of its various ethnonationalist rivals erupted at this precise historical moment. The rise of nationalist opposition politics was not the reappearance of irresolvable ethnic enmities but rather an expression of a deeper and more encompassing rupture in the hegemony of socialism’s temporal order. The nationalist counterculture of late-socialist Serbia was part of the chronoscape of the final decade of the Cold War in Europe. To further develop this argument, I will conclude by turning to examples of oppositional culture that explored the preoccupation with the return of repressed historical memories but that avoided the tropes of nationalism.

Debt Crisis Cinema

The temporal dimension of Yugoslavia’s debt crisis was clearly expressed in the cinema of the 1980s. Two films, in particular, illustrate this point well: Balkanski špijun and Već viđeno. Both were very much films of the debt crisis. Not only did they dwell on widespread anxieties around economic insecurity, especially the precarity of homeownership, but they also voiced the abovementioned popular frustrations with the perceived profligacy of the socialist state. More crucially, these films registered the profound temporal crisis of the decade through their staging of the return of repressed traumatic memories. While scholars of Yugoslav cinema have already noted this concern with repressed traumas, they have not adequately explained why this theme should appear during this specific historical moment.Footnote ⁵⁷ What I want to demonstrate is that the theme of the return of the repressed resonated with the uncanny temporality of the debt crisis that permeated late-socialist Yugoslavia. Importantly, neither of these films couched their historical revisionism in the language of nationalist grievance but instead examined the violence that attended the formation of the socialist state in the years immediately following World War II. They suggest, in other words, that a deeper temporal crisis was shaking the foundations of socialist Yugoslavia.

Balkanski špijun was a dark comedy initially written for the stage by Dušan Kovačević in 1982 and subsequently made into a film by Kovačević and Božidar Nikolić two years later. The comedy centers on the character of Ilija Čvorović, a middle-aged man living with his wife, Danica, in the Belgrade suburbs. To deal with the declining economic situation in the country, Ilija and Danica have taken on a tenant, a foreign businessman who is eager to open a line of clothing stores in the country. Ilija, who is clearly under enormous stress due to the economic hardships, begins to get suspicious that his tenant is a Western spy intent on undermining the country. As an idealistic socialist and Yugoslav patriot, he decides to monitor the foreigner, undertaking an ill-advised and ridiculous surveillance operation. When his paranoia deepens, however, his slapstick antics become more and more sinister until the film reaches a dark and bloody ending.

Ilija, we discover, was an ibeovac, one of the thousands of suspected pro-Stalinist party members who were persecuted during Yugoslavia’s break with the Soviet Union in 1948.Footnote ⁵⁸ His suspicion of the foreign tenant is rooted in a deep-seated fear that his loyalty is once again being tested by the party leadership, a belief that prompts him to ever greater demonstrations of ideological conviction. Here the ghosts of Yugoslavia’s past are dredged back up into a present that is defined very much by the economic crisis and the government’s stabilization reforms. The film’s humor, too, turns on the temporal disorientation of the central character. Ilija is an absurd figure, whose paranoia consistently leads him to misinterpret his tenant’s innocent actions as part of a sinister plot against his homeland. Set against the backdrop of late-socialist Yugoslavia’s consumerism and ideological cynicism, Ilija appears anachronistic, a parody of an earlier revolutionary idealism that seems ridiculously out of time in the present.

Već viđeno was directed by Goran Marković and released in 1987. The film follows a melancholic, introverted piano teacher, Mihailo, who is an instructor at the local workers’ university. When Olgica, a young ballet dancer, joins the university to teach modeling, he becomes obsessed with her and the two begin a sexual liaison. When the university enters a nationwide television competition, Olgica sees the event as a chance for social mobility; a win for the university, she reasons, may secure her membership in the party and then an apartment of her own, freeing her from the suffocating poverty of her father’s house. She takes charge of the work collective’s performance, which she envisions as an agit-prop event recalling the glories of the partisan struggle and the revolution. The climax of the performance will be Mihailo performing Chopin’s Revolutionary Études. This piece, however, brings up painful memories, and Mihailo is forced to confront a traumatic past, involving his father’s execution and the appropriation of his family’s apartment by the young communist regime. As these traumatic memories rupture more and more into his present, Mihailo breaks down and initiates a bloody killing spree.

Both Balkanski špijun and Već viđeno illustrate the ways that the debt crisis shaped popular perceptions of the socialist state during the 1980s. Most immediately, they dwelled on widespread anxieties concerning economic insecurity. In Balkanski špijun, these themes are explicitly examined in the plot. As Ivan Velisavljević has noted, Ilija’s paranoia is rooted in the conditions of economic crisis: his declining wages, his and his wife’s health problems, the difficulties in finding or affording food, and their daughter’s long-term unemployment. Indeed, the entire plot turns on the fact that the economic crisis has forced Ilija and Danica to open their house to a stranger whose rent they need to help pay their mortgage. Immersed in his paranoia, Ilija perceives all of these hardships as part of the West’s scheme to undermine Yugoslav socialism.Footnote ⁵⁹ The film is clear in identifying the economic crisis as the proximate cause of his psychological breakdown. One humorous scene is revealing for the miscommunication it stages. In a friendly conversation with a police official, the detective asks Ilija how he is faring given the economic hardships. Eager to demonstrate his fealty to the regime, Ilija announces that he is committed to “the plan.” The language he uses evokes the early revolutionary rhetoric of the immediate postwar years and its grand ambitions of five-year plans. This is a world away from the stabilization plan of the 1980s, a crippling austerity campaign designed to reassure foreign lenders and the IMF. If the five-year plan of the late 1940s announced the utopian horizons on which Yugoslav socialists set their sights, the stabilization plan registered the radical narrowing of those horizons. This early scene sets the stage for the film’s juxtaposition between a central protagonist who continues to inhabit the revolutionary past while bumbling his way through a historically static present.

Although Već viđeno did not explicitly take up the conditions of economic crisis, it hinted at them through its preoccupation with housing. Housing was an overdetermined site of economic discontent in socialist Yugoslavia. Even before the hardships of the debt crisis, inequality in access to appropriate housing marked a sharp divide not only between the political elite and the rest of society but also within the working class itself. Rory Archer has shown that inequalities within the self-management system often turned on access to socially owned housing, which was always in short supply. Within the factory it was frequently the white-collar workers who were given privileged access to this key resource over their less educated blue-collar peers.Footnote ⁶⁰ The economic crisis in the 1980s aggravated these social tensions, and housing became even more explicitly a symbol of precarity, social inequality, and the failures of the socialist state.

Housing is a central thread of the narrative in Već viđeno. The desire to escape the claustrophobic atmosphere of her father’s house fuels Olgica’s ruthless ambition, prompting her to pressure Mihailo and bringing about his psychological breakdown. Meanwhile, the expropriation of Mihailo’s family apartment by the socialist government serves as a constant reminder of the execution of his father and the traumatic legacy of the partisan revolution. The apartment has now been subdivided, and Mihailo shares it with the family of a vulgar and brutal secret security officer, which contributes to the sense of claustrophobia and intrusion into his home life. He is, in other words, very much not at home, an uncanny condition that contributes to his psychological illness. Homes, in the film, are not sites of comfort and security but reminders of the historical brutality or failures of the socialist state.

Both films can also be read as texts about the debt crisis in that they resonated with the widespread moral condemnation of the profligacy of political elites that pervaded the Yugoslav public of the time. To understand this development, we need to recall the growing class divergence within the Yugoslav self-management system—namely, between a more educated, older, and white-collar workforce, who had secured positions of privilege in the workplace and could manipulate the complicated mechanisms of self-management, and a less educated, younger, blue-collar workforce, who were often excluded from the perks of the system. The former were more likely to be engaged in social activism, to take up positions as delegates in various self-managing bodies, and to be members of the party. Because of this, they were also more likely to enjoy security of employment, housing, and access to imported consumer goods. The result was that those most visibly engaged in the socialist project were also more likely to be perceived as enjoying the country’s limited wealth. As blue-collar workers felt austerity cut deeper into their living conditions over the 1980s, they began to identify the politically engaged elite in their workplaces as responsible for the crisis and the inefficiencies and inequalities of the self-management system.Footnote ⁶¹ In these conditions, the country’s foreign debt increasingly came to be associated with a perceived wastefulness and profligacy of the elite, which over time began to corrode the party’s political legitimacy.

Balkanski špijun and Već viđeno represented this frustration with the political elite by associating revolutionary idealism with financial profligacy. In both films, those most eager to demonstrate their commitment to the socialist cause are also the most irresponsible financially. As Ilija Čvorović sinks deeper and deeper into his conspiracy, he stops going to work so that he can focus more on his surveillance operation. While his wife scours the grocery store shelves or bemoans the family’s growing debt, Ilija spends money on various gadgets to better spy on his tenant. Ilija’s ill-conceived efforts to demonstrate his fealty to the state are not only wasteful; they also undermine his wife’s desperate attempts to get the family’s finances in order, a not-too-subtle jab at what the directors perceived as the political elite’s privileging of ideology over economic pragmatism.

Već viđeno also links revolutionary idealism to profligacy, albeit through a more cynical lens. As self-appointed producer of her school’s competition entry, Olgica takes it upon herself to order millions of dinars worth of cloth for the set. When the director of the school denounces such wasteful misuse of their limited resources, she defends her excessive spending by evoking the heroic ideals of the revolution: “We from the Youth Organization do not think in such terms, comrade director. If we all played our cards so safely, then nothing would ever get done. We gladly give our enthusiasm for something we believe in. And if we fail, we are not sorry. We don’t do this for points but out of love!” The fact that we know Olgica’s goals to be self-serving only reinforces the film’s critique of the political elite. Waste, mismanagement, and inefficiency in these films are all to be associated with those most idealistic and most dedicated to the socialist cause, a criticism that certainly resonated with the views of opposition figures like Taras Kermauner.

But it was in their staging of the return of past historical traumas that these two films best captured the temporal disorientation that Yugoslavia’s debt crisis precipitated. This representation was achieved through the use of the uncanny. As McClanahan argues, the uncanny is the aesthetic form most appropriate to the anxieties of indebtedness: “In its anxious, backward gaze, debt, like the uncanny, doubles, reverses, and returns. This feeling of being haunted explains what might feel uncanny about being in personal debt: it is the experience of being followed by something we left behind, of carrying our past with us like a dead weight.”Footnote ⁶² The uncanny, then, marks a traumatic reappearance of the past in a way that disrupts the present. Debt, in this sense, agitates the sediment of history, stirring up the past and muddying the waters of the present. The experience is one of unsettling disorientation. We have already noted how this uncanny sense of the past returning shaped historiographical debates in the last decade of Yugoslav socialism. But as these films demonstrate, this new culture of historical memory was not limited to the sphere of intellectual discourse but also permeated popular culture.

The plot of both films relied on a narrative staging of the uncanny to reveal the roots of their protagonists’ respective psychological breakdowns. In Balkanski špijun, the depth and horror of Ilija’s paranoia only really become clear in an infamous scene in which the protagonist and his brother descend into the house’s basement. There they unearth weapons and a portrait of Stalin that has presumably been concealed since the regime’s anti-Stalinist purges in 1948. This is the moment that we realize Ilija’s paranoia is rooted in his persecution by the early socialist state for his pro-Soviet sympathies. As the basement is rendered a symbolic space of the unsettled past, both that of the two brothers and of Yugoslav socialism itself, the home becomes a site for the restaging of repressed historical traumas.Footnote ⁶³ From this moment on, Ilija’s pathological fixation on the foreign tenant becomes clearer and also more ominous. Već viđeno stages this uncanny return of history through intermittent flashbacks that gradually reveal Mihailo’s past. As he prepares for Olgica’s concert, his traumatic childhood memories of his family’s persecution become more and more intrusive, contributing to his psychological breakdown. In both films the return of these repressed memories directly leads to the violence and degradation of the protagonists. In the final frames of Balkanski špijun, Ilija is reduced to crawling through the suburbs of Belgrade on all fours like a dog, babbling incoherently. Mihailo, after murdering Olgica, her father, and her lover, is admitted to an asylum, where he falls into a catatonic state. The intrusive and disorienting return of the past grinds the present to a halt, disorienting it to the point of psychosis. And because they spoke to a crisis of sovereign debt, the past that these films restaged consisted of crucial moments in the formation of the Yugoslav state: the initial communist seizure of power in 1945, the foundational break with the Soviet Union in 1948.

What is crucial about these films is that neither staged the return of the past through the lens of nationalist grievance. Although both were produced in Serbia, where a more liberal political environment allowed a nationalist counterculture to flourish, neither film reflected these nationalist preoccupations. This helps us to better contextualize the nationalist rhetoric of the late-socialist period. It was not, as is often argued, that the rise of nationalist resentments led to a preoccupation with historical memory during the 1980s. Rather, the crisis in the socialist order of time agitated Yugoslav society’s historical memory, creating fertile ground from which alternative, oppositional historical narratives could take root. The restless interrogation of the state’s official historiography reflected a deeper crisis in the socialist regime of historicity, in which the promise of a future dissolved and the specters of the past returned. This temporal reconfiguration reflected the new experience of historical time that was brought on by the uncanny conditions of the sovereign debt crisis.