Serbia: The Democratic Revolution

Stojanovic, one of Yugoslavia's most prominent intellectuals and once a leader of the 1960s Praxis group, is struggling to come to terms with a lifetime, and two hard disillusionments in particular. The first was his drift from communist conviction to support for social democracy. The second, more intense and seemingly more painful, was giving up his belief in the Yugoslav idea, an animating faith that he inherited from his father. After an autobiographic introductory essay, much of the book consists of a series of interviews and newspaper articles from 1993 to 2000 in which Stojanovic reflects on his part in events, particularly the post-1992 opposition movement against Slobodan Milosevic and the collaboration with Dobrica Cosic. The final third is an essay exploring the meaning of nationalism in a world of fragmenting multiethnic states. The deeper impulse, however, is the need -- especially acute for Serbs of Stojanovic's generation and sensibilities -- to repair Serbia's shaken identity.