Agustín Cosovschi: Les sciences sociales face à la crise: Une histoire intellectuelle de la dissolution yougoslave (1980–1995)

The history of the social sciences in postwar East Central and Southeastern Europe has enjoyed some well-deserved attention in historiography. Whether from the history of science, intellectual history, social history, or political science, the interest in knowledge production during the socialist period has been long-standing, but in recent years the emphasis of the analysis has been visibly shifting. Some of the main questions researchers had been asking before 1989/1991 related to intellectual production and political power, including: What were the ideological, institutional, and political constraints within which social scientists worked during state socialism? What was the official position toward various disciplines over time? To what extent was cooperation with, criticism of, and resistance against political power possible on the part of social scientists? While these questions have not lost their salience, recent scholarship has also focused on issues of transnational circulation, exchanges, and cooperation, i.e., scholars have been working toward a deeper understanding of the political epistemology of the social sciences, asking new questions about the aftermath of Marxist social thought and social sciences in the postsocialist period more generally, including its relevance for the political and social struggles of the capitalist present.

Agustín Cosovschi’s study of the social sciences in (former) Yugoslavia brings together several of these directions of scholarship. Les sciences sociales face à la crise is an account of the dissolution of Yugoslavia that intertwines the history of political developments with that of knowledge production. The study’s main concern, as stated by Cosovschi, is the relationship between society, science, and political power, which he follows chronologically over six chapters, from the post-1945 period to the death of Tito in 1980 (Chapter 1), during the time of the Yugoslav crisis between 1980 and 1990 (Chapters 2 and 3), and until the end of the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in 1995 (Chapters 4, 5, and 6). Cosovschi does not focus on any one discipline, exemplary social scientist, national context, or isolated period. Indeed, one of the main strengths of his analysis is his systematically comparative approach. Chapter 1 introduces the three social science disciplines featured in his book: sociology, political science, and ethnology/ethnography. Reconstructing the history of these disciplines up to the 1980s, Cosovschi argues that each of them established a different relationship to power over the socialist period. While sociology, partly due to its early academic contacts abroad, most notably through the Fulbright Program, was the most consistently critical of the three disciplines, political science was the one closest to power on account of its original mission of training cadres. And while political science enjoyed a privileged position because of this relationship, including at the time of the Yugoslav crisis, ethnology had a difficult time grappling with its nationalist and “bourgeois” past. This latter discipline took a politically neutral line as it transformed itself into ethnography after the Soviet model, and was later rivaled by state-supported folklore studies, on the one hand, and moved closer to American cultural anthropology on the other.

Chapters 2 and 3 follow the path of these disciplines up to the time of Yugoslavia’s increasing re-peripheralization in the 1980s and its subsequent dissolution. They focus on social scientists’ engagement in the debates about the crisis, notably on the topic of the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution, and on their criticism of power, including from increasingly nationalist positions. Cosovschi demonstrates his aptitude as an intellectual historian in the way he identifies the most consequential shifts in political language over the 1980s, notably the growing abandonment of previously key Marxist concepts such as “class” or “self-management” from sociopolitical analysis, in favor of the language of civil society. In this context, nationalism was increasingly described as an ideology analogous to communism in terms of its authoritarian and manipulative approach to the masses.

Les sciences sociales face à la crise is also a comparative endeavor diachronically speaking, as it treats the transformative 1980s and 1990s together, rather than as separate time periods. One of the main arguments of the book is that there are important continuities between the ways in which social scientists approached the Yugoslav crisis and their evaluations of the 1990s at the level of their conceptual toolkits as well as the underlying logic of the political language to which they contributed. For the period after 1991, Cosovschi also offers an insightful comparison of Serbia and Croatia in terms of social scientists’ engagement with war as they split into largely distinct intellectual communities whose lived experience of war and the ensuing economic crisis differed (Chapter 4). In Chapters 5 and 6, the author delves into the debates around nationalism and the transition, respectively. Left-wing, critical Yugoslav intellectuals’ turn to nationalism is one of the most puzzling political outcomes of the transformation in East Central and Southeastern Europe, and Cosovschi does an admirable job of identifying the different positions that social scientists took in relation to the nation and nationalism in Serbia and Croatia. These included, for instance, the essentialization of national identity, more critical accounts that presented nationalism as a form of manipulation of the masses, and the complex questioning of the binary logic of tradition versus modernity that exposed the perpetuating bias of modernization theory. It is here that Cosovschi recognizes one of the main continuities between the 1980s and 1990s in terms of political language, best illustrated by the debates about transition and the possible future of Yugoslavia. He shows that from an early stage, social scientists critically reflected on the inadequacy of existing conceptual and theoretical approaches rooted in Western-centric modernization theory, which they also saw as continuing previous Marxist teleology. Discussions of the concept of “transition” revolved around the so-called “problem of actors” – that is, the lack of social actors to enact the transformation to capitalism. These included various critical approaches to transition, notably analyses of the region’s re-peripheralization: as one Serbian sociologist memorably put it, “capitalism creates the periphery according to its needs, not its image” (212).

Cosovschi’s conclusions are a measure of his systematic, balanced, and insightful analysis of the fall of Yugoslavia through the history of the social sciences. One of his most powerful statements is that when it comes to political thought, it is better to view the transformation from socialism to capitalism not in terms of continuity and rupture but in terms of simultaneity. Following Reinhart Koselleck’s formula of the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, Cosovschi captures the complexity of political language after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, “an epoch that declares itself entirely divorced from the socialist past, but which it inevitably inherits” (214). Just as criticism and conceptual innovation that did not question the basic ideological tenets of Yugoslavia in the 1980s still opened up new horizons of political expectation, the conceptual and theoretical toolkits of the past continued to define the critical political imagination of the 1990s.

On two accounts, Cosovschi is unduly restrained. The first relates to his methodology, which involves him skillfully combining the more traditional tools of intellectual history – conceptual analysis, discussion of temporalities and horizons of expectations, as well as reconstruction of political languages – with over 40 oral history interviews in Belgrade and Zagreb. One can assume that the interviews shaped his analysis in significant ways. Adding a lengthier discussion on the complexities of social actors’ life stories as yet another layer of temporality to the political languages he reconstructs would have only enhanced an already sophisticated analysis. This would have allowed him to make more of the voices in the interviews heard in his interlocutors’ own words, but it is also likely to have pushed the book’s temporal reach well beyond 1995.

Second, Les sciences sociales face à la crise leaves implicit its own political intentionality. Only in his conclusion does Cosovschi reflect on the importance of the Yugoslav project not just in terms of its dissolution, but also in terms of its legacy for the present. In his thoughtful study, Cosovschi uncovers a wealth of progressive critical thinking drawing on Marxist social and political thought, including by criticizing its blind spots and its theoretical limitations on the issues of nationalism and transition. Such reflections have been increasingly marginalized since the 1990s, including, at times, by their own authors. Studies such as Cosovschi’s allow us to revisit them both with respect for the historical past and commitment to the present.