Introduction

The introduction provides a framework for an exploration of meanings of military service that escapes “large” categories of (militarized) masculinity, violence, patriarchy, and the hegemony of the event-aftermath paradigm. It brings together archives, their forms, and feelings that persist through ruptures in time and space. The introduction explores the place of repetitive, performative, and ritualized forms in attempts to understand socialism as a historical experience and its demise. The authoritative power of the socialist state used these same forms for the intentional formation of affective communities, and the Yugoslav military, despite being a total, compulsory, all-male, oppressive, and strictly hierarchical institution, was explicitly engaged in this affective work, oriented toward building friendships, solidarities, and ties across ethnic, class, and gender divisions.

Introduction

2024

History, Stories, and Selves

2024

After providing a concise history of the idea of and the sociopolitical context in which the Yugoslav People’s Army, based on mandatory military service, existed in socialist Yugoslavia, the chapter outlines the main narrative threads about military service present in everyday conversations and popular culture. These are about the friendships men made in the army; about what they learned or gained from military service; and about the skills and strategies they employed in engaging with the military institution. Highlighting the modalities in which these narratives emerge and circulate in the aftermath of Yugoslavia, the chapter focuses particularly on the tension between the ubiquity of army stories in the post-Yugoslav space and the difficulty of incorporating them into the biographies of actual men. This tension results in silence, hesitation, and suspension, forms through which the feelings related to military service work as a force recalling a lost future in the aftermath of political catastrophe.

A Barbed-Wire Utopia

2024

This chapter explores the characteristics of Yugoslav military service that made it an embodiment of some of the central political ideas of Yugoslav socialism—equality, solidarity, brotherhood and unity, and internal internationalism. These characteristics are the army’s syncretic character, its link to Yugoslav citizenship and the ideology of brotherhood and unity, and a combination of the sameness and equality of men and their radical diversity that marked this experience. Striving to make it possible for young Yugoslav men to experience Yugoslav values and ideals by bringing them together, irrespective of ethnic, class, and linguistic boundaries, the Yugoslav army had to be structured as a heterotopian space, in which a single official language was used (as opposed to linguistic diversity as the Yugoslav ideal), female citizens were excluded, and soldiers and officers whose sexuality did not fit traditional, patriarchal, and normative forms were ignored, and sometimes even prosecuted.