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‘East? West? Or Both?’ Foreign perceptions of architecture in Socialist Yugoslavia

Introduction Socialist Yugoslavia blurred the contours of the Cold War and the implied definitions of ‘East’ and ‘West’. The defining moment of its history – the expulsion of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia from the Cominform in 1948 – led to a spectacular political summersault in which the former staunchest ally of the USSR came to the brink of joining NATO before reinventing itself again as a leader of the non-aligned movement. Eventually, the country carved out a special niche for itself between the two blocs of the Cold War world, softening the contrast between socialism and capitalism, between the planned economy and the free market, and between liberal democracy and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Despite the uncontested rule of a communist regime for forty-five years, Yugoslavia was never part of a full-fledged communist bloc; its stint as the closest satellite in the Soviet orbit ended before that orbit coalesced into an officially organised military and economic alliance. Such a position emphatically determined the personal and collective identities of Yugoslav citizens; endowed with a higher standard of living and freedom to travel, they proudly perceived themselves as distinct from and often somehow superior to their ‘poorer relatives’ behind the Iron Curtain. In retrospect, the wars of the 1990s almost seem like an ironic punishment for such hubris. Architecture and art were important tools in constructing Yugoslavia’s distinction from other communist countries, especially at the height of antagonism with the Soviet Union, when such distinction was paramount to bare survival. By defying the stereotypical image of architecture in a socialist country, Yugoslav modernism provided a clear visual statement of cultural affinity and, by extension, political alliance with the West. But once the hostilities with the communist bloc subsided in the late 1950s, which coincided with the final demise of Socialist Realism, the prevalence of socialist typologies allowed Yugoslav architecture to be seen positively in the East as well. Out of a broader framework of the Cold War, two opposed but complementary interpretations thus emerged, which rendered not only Yugoslavia’s politics, but also its architecture ambiguous. Beside the Cold War, there was also an older interpretive framework in which Yugoslavia’s position in the East or West could be considered, carrying its own binary assumptions, images and stereotypes. Defined by a longue durée perspective, this framework subsumed a host of various schisms: between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, between Islam and Christianity, and between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs. They all met on Yugoslav soil and all left indelible architectural marks on it. The resulting mixture gave rise to an often confusing and contradictory picture, interpreted within a specifically Western discourse developed to deal with the broader region of the Balkans. Inspired by Edward Said’s concept of orientalism, Maria Todorova termed this related but distinct discourse ‘balkanism’. According to Todorova, while the West saw the ‘Orient’ as a complete Other to its own civilisation, it presented the Balkans as a 129