Vassilis Petsinis: National Identity in Serbia: The Vojvodina and a Multi-Ethnic Community in the Balkans

A typical political history of the Western Balkans would focus either on the former Yugoslavia or any of a number of its successor states. In this genre, sub-state regionalism normally gets short shrift. Vassilis Petsinis’ book contributes to a small but important subset of studies engaging with the politics of regionalism in this part of Europe.^[1] His is a richly documented political history of Serbia’s autonomous province Vojvodina, ranging from the Habsburg era to the early 21st century. The work foregrounds the idea of a multi-ethnic regional community that nonetheless does not pose a challenge to the territorial integrity of the country of which it is a part. Thus, at least implicitly, what we have here is an example of a territorial unit that skirts the centrifugal tendencies that have become familiar to observers of Southeast European politics over the past several decades.

The Vojvodina that emerges from Petsinis’ work is a composite community with multiple lines of differentiation. It is home to numerous minority communities of various sizes, including notably the Hungarians, but also the Croats, Romanians, and others. At the same time, the majority Serbs are themselves internally differentiated, with successive waves settling in the province under varying circumstances. One segment of Vojvodina’s Serb community traces its origins back to the Austro-Hungarian past (in fact, members of this community played a key role in the rise of the Serb national project in the nineteenth century), whereas others arrived after each of the major twentieth century wars, including the refugees from Bosnia and Croatia during and after the conflicts of the 1990s.

At the core of Petsinis’ work is the recognition of the fluid and constructed character of collective identity, reflecting and further supporting the by-now well-established position in sociology and political science.^[2] As importantly, the book demonstrates that one of the key lines of internal differentiation of any national community—in this case the Vojvodina Serbs—concerns their institutional preferences, an issue meriting greater recognition than it has received thus far.^[3] Here, the main divide is about the status of Vojvodina in Serbia. For instance, while during the 1990s no major mainstream political party in the region advocated independence from Serbia, there was a wide variety of options, from near-confederal proposals of the regionalist outfits such as the League of Vojvodina’s Social-Democrats (136) to highly unitary ones of the Serb Radical Party (140), and compromise positions such as the regionalism of the Democratic Party (141).

The book demonstrates that this internal differentiation overlaps to an imperfect degree with a person’s membership in one of the sub-sets of the majority community. Thus, the patterns of the 1990s and 2000s seem to suggest that the Vojvodina Serb “old settlers” (that is, those whose settlement predates World War II) were more inclined toward parties advocating greater autonomy and asymmetry (112; 137) than communities tracing their settlement in the province to post-World War II period. At the same time, Petsinis suggests a more complicated story, with many exceptions to the rule (87, 138).

The author also demonstrates a shift in institutional preferences even within specific segments of the majority national community through time. For instance, the post-World War II Serb colonists from Croatia and Bosnia seem to have been more receptive to anti-autonomist political positions in the 1990s since they associated the demise of the Yugoslav state, and the resultant displacement of their family members from those republics to Serbia and Vojvodina, with federalism, including Vojvodina’s autonomy (86–7; 112; 119–23). Though more evidence could have been provided here, the book supplies sufficient information to suggest significant shifts with respect to institutional positions through time.

While the book is a valuable addition to the literatures on Southeastern Europe, sub-state regionalism, and nationalism, its conceptual and theoretical contribution could have been signalled more clearly. Indeed, there seems to be a less-than-perfect fit between some of the theoretical signposts in the book’s first chapter and the empirical material provided in the rest of the book. While the author includes a discussion of ethno-symbolic approach to nationalism studies, and covers some of the literature on European regionalism, the book’s true contribution seems to be in demonstrating what might be called the constitutive role of institutional visions in defining national identities. This dimension could have been foregrounded more explicitly and in greater detail.

On a related note, the role and function of the comparisons with other jurisdictions, both in Chapter 1 (covering Italy and Spain) and Chapter 3 (with Kosovo and Montenegro) is unclear. If the goal was to foreground the conceptual similarities and differences between Vojvodina and other European regions, a more explicit comparative schema in which to contextualize the region could have been developed. At the same time, and in the absence of such a schema, the book would not have lost much by the omission of these cases. These issues notwithstanding, the book will be appreciated by anyone interested in general coverage of this fascinating region of Serbia.