From Class to Identity. The Politics of Education Reforms in Former Yugoslavia

In the more than twenty-five years since the beginning of the Yugoslav breakup, the literature on ethnic conflict and national mobilization in the Balkans has been widely enriched by new studies and theories. Dismissing essentialist approaches once and for all, the latest research has stressed the importance of analyzing the concrete mechanisms by which ethnic and national identities are produced and reinforced through specific social and political dynamics, thus underlining the role of diverse factors such as cultural policy and the production of public intellectuals and political discourses and traditions. Ironically enough, the roles of education and education policies in these processes have nevertheless received relatively little attention. In this context, From Class to Identity takes on the task of at least partially filling that gap. And it does so with proficiency.

The book analyzes the development of different education policies in the former Yugoslavia, as well as in some of its former constituent parts, during different periods ranging from the 1970s to the 2000s. Questioning the traditional assumption that education is a magic ingredient that can help surmount social conflict by transmitting knowledge and skills and encouraging economic development, Bacevic emphasizes that education is intrinsically neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, but that its potential to either overcome conflict or help reproduce it depends on how it is articulated in the wider political and social dynamic. With that in mind, the author claims that education must be analyzed not only by explaining its explicit goals but also by elucidating the political logic on which it is based and the specific type of political subjectivity that it seeks to produce—in other words, by focusing on public policy, or the ‘meso’ level of analysis, which stands between the macro analysis, centered on great statistics, and the micro analysis, oriented to ethnographic scrutiny.

Giving a historical account of how education policies have changed during the last decades in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, the study offers an analysis of three case studies. First, Bacevic examines the education reform carried out in the late 1970s by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, known as vocation-oriented education, which attempted to comprehensively transform the Yugoslav education system by more strongly connecting education to the labor market and by decentralizing the system according to the principles of local self-management imposed by the Constitution of 1974. By resorting to official documents and a thorough description of the historical context, Bacevic interprets this reform, which attempted to reinforce the value of labor and to strengthen the influence of Marxist ideology in education, as an anti-intellectual response to the social upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s, founded on the perception of the dissident intellectual as a perilous social subject.

Second, the author examines the introduction of religious education in Serbia during the early 2000s by the government of Zoran Đinđić, a decision that the author interprets not only as the result of an attempt to symbolically reconnect Serbia with its pre-communist past but also as the product of a political ideology that conceptualized Serbian society as firmly divided along religious and ideological lines.

Finally, Bacevic examines the emergence of parallel and competing higher education institutions in Sandžak, Macedonia, and Kosovo. By describing the history of these institutions and by analyzing the local, national, and regional context, the author explains how a decision that could seem irrational at first glance, such as establishing more than one university in a relatively small municipality, is actually the result of a complex dynamic of competition and interaction between different local, national, and international actors with diverse approaches to the management of ethnic conflict.

Through the analysis of these cases, by resorting to a detailed contextualization and a great deal of theory, the author manages to successfully analyze two great processes that have taken place in education in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. On the one hand, she shows the shifting framework of education policies from government to governance—in other words, a progressive transformation of the mechanisms of planning and decision-making through which international organizations and private actors have come to play a larger role in the elaboration of public policies. On the other hand, Bacevic exposes how the focus of education policies has shifted from class to identity, and how education has gone from being a political tool to transform political subjectivities to being, for the most part, a means of reinforcing the existing ethnic and national divisions.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to introduce some critical remarks with regards to the methodological framework of the research. The author claims to have resorted to document analysis and interviews. However, the number of documents quoted is quite reduced—there are very few references to specific interviews with the actors involved, and the research draws, for the most part, from secondary sources. For instance, although Bacevic claims to seek the reasons for the adoption of public policies, she provides the reader with scarce details regarding the actual decision-making behind them. Moreover, even though the author claims to seek to go beyond the explicit reasons for adopting a certain education policy, she rarely brings up new documents or new empirical data that can shed light on the process of production of that policy. For the most part, the book interprets the explicit discourse of policymakers almost exclusively relying on the context. As a result, the author’s conclusions can at times be rather generalizing, or simply constitute new interpretations of the existing literature.

In spite of the limitations that result from the methodological approach, Bacevic successfully accounts for the transformation of education policies in the context of the wider political and social processes that have changed the countries of the former Yugoslavia during the last decades. And especially thanks to its rich theoretical background and its thorough contextualization, the book constitutes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the role that education policies have played and continue to play in producing and reinforcing social division and ethnic conflict.