Last week, during my trip to Kosovo and Serbia, at times I had difficulties knowing where I was: was I home in Jerusalem, or in Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo? Ethnic states with the practice of ethnic cleansing and “homogenous societies” started to blur together. Yugoslavia has always played an important role in my life: in my childhood, I was fascinated by the stories of Tito and his Partisans Army that liberated Yugoslavia from the Nazi occupation and its local collaborators. Later on, I became interested in a communist regime independent from Soviet Union and developing an imaginative system of “self-management socialism.” When I was a student, I studied the independent Yugoslavian Marxists organized in the “Praxis” group, and was even supposed to come to their yearly summer school.
Above all, I focused my interest on the national issue in Yugoslavia and the ways to combine a federal state with national, regional, and local enlarged autonomies. In particular, the 1976 Yugoslavian constitution which, in many aspects, was a theoretical model of true recognition of the national rights for national minorities. This included the rights of national minorities living within a broader national minority, like the Albanians of Kosovo among the Serbs, or even like the Serbian minority living in Kosovo. Complicated? Maybe, but it remains fascinating.
