There is something almost paradoxical about the fate of the 1979 collection The Emergence and Development of the Serbian Nation. It grew out of a scholarly debate organised by the Marxist Centre of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, an institutional setting that today would be reason enough for many people not even to open the book and, with all the banality demanded by the spirit of the age, dismiss it as a relic of “communist totalitarianism”. And yet, at a time when the public sphere is once again filling up with genetic maps of haplogroups, with supposedly immutable mediaeval identities imagined as ready-made products pulled from God’s magician’s hat, and even with nations alleged to have roamed the Balkans unchanged since the Neolithic, this “ideological” volume reads as remarkably sober and light-years removed from the carnival of pseudo-intellectual nonsense staged at every turn. Its editors explicitly warn against projecting modern national categories back into the past and against leaving historical terrain unexamined, because whatever research fails to occupy is very quickly colonised by mystification.
More interesting still, the contributors did not seek refuge in the opposite extreme. In their account, the Serbian nation does not come into being on a single date, as though before 1804, the year of the First Serbian Uprising against Ottoman rule, there had been nothing but a dense ethnographic fog, only for “the Serb” suddenly to appear with the rise of the market and the bourgeoisie. What gradually emerges from their essays is something far more interesting: the modern nation as a process of “densification”. Older names, memories, language, ecclesiastical affiliation, traditions of statehood and a sense of communal belonging do not disappear. They enter into a new density of social relations, acquire new bearers, new institutions and a new speed of communication and, most importantly, a new political and economic force.
This is particularly clear in the work of Dragoslav Janković, a jurist and historian of state and law. He has no need to deny the importance of mediaeval Serbia. Quite the opposite. The mediaeval Serbian state and Church under the Nemanjić dynasty, the cult of rulers venerated as saints, and membership in a shared political and religious community all helped to create and preserve a specifically Serbian ethnic consciousness. After the collapse of the mediaeval state, the Church largely assumed this integrative role, while epic tradition and successive migrations carried the community’s memory forward and continually reshaped it. But this was not yet a modern nation. That emerged when these older bonds began to be incorporated into a new social mechanism: commodity and monetary relations, an emerging bourgeois society, political mobilisation, and a state capable of imposing a unified legal system, administration, schooling, military organisation, and market.
In other words, the Nemanjić dynasty did not “invent” the modern Serbs, but neither did modern Serbs arise without the historical material left behind by the Nemanjić period. A new society does not manufacture identity out of nothing. It takes earlier symbols, names, and representations, selects among them, and puts them to new uses. This is precisely what makes Karađorđe’s seal, the portrait of mediaeval emperor Stefan Dušan displayed in the Praviteljstvujušči sovjet, the Governing Council established during the First Serbian Uprising, or appeals to Serbia’s “ancient borders” so revealing: premodern memory was being transformed into a political resource of a modern revolution.
Here Janković’s argument almost imperceptibly flows into the analysis of Mirko Mirković, a jurist and historian of the Serbian Orthodox Church. His contribution lies precisely in rejecting a simple equation: Serbian people equals the Serbian nation, and popular consciousness equals national consciousness. Such an equation, he warns, erases the differences between historical epochs. The Church had indeed served for centuries as an enormous reservoir of political and cultural memory, while the Patriarchate of Peć was the only institution capable of exercising an integrative influence across a vast territory. But precisely because that function was historical, it could also change. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Church was no longer the principal driving force of the process. New social strata and the state took up the conductor’s baton, while the ecclesiastical inheritance became one of the materials out of which bourgeois society constructed a national ideology.
But what, exactly, was giving this older sense of belonging its new density? This is where Danica Milić, a historian of Serbia’s economic life, brings the story down from altar and throne to the fairground, the road, and the marketplace. By the end of the eighteenth century, the subsistence economy was slowly beginning to break down, livestock exports were expanding, rural merchants were emerging, capital accumulation was growing, and people whose lives had once been largely confined to the local community were increasingly becoming participants in a wider sphere of exchange. Fairs connected different nahiyas, Ottoman administrative districts; roads and postal networks increased the frequency of contact; towns became administrative and cultural centres; and merchants, craftsmen, and officials became the bearers of a new way of life. Serbian identity, one might say, was no longer heard only in church or to the accompaniment of the gusle, the traditional one-stringed epic instrument. It now travelled with caravans, circulated through credit, read newspapers, went to school, paid taxes, and encountered itself in the marketplace.
And it is precisely here that Branislav Đurđev, a historian and Orientalist, introduces a necessary brake on vulgar materialism. History does not change simply because one new structure replaces an older one. It also accumulates in layers. Something of earlier experience, language, forms of community, and culture passes into the new formation and changes its function within it. For Đurđev, therefore, the nation is a historically formed ethnic category built upon the people, rather than an empty vessel into which capitalism later pours its content.
Radomir Lukić, a jurist and sociologist, goes furthest in this direction, almost provocatively asking whether there is any clear psychological boundary between a people and a nation at all. A person does not wake up one morning feeling that he has ceased to belong to a people and has become a member of a nation. A Serb of the sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth century and a Serb of the nineteenth all say that they are Serbs. What changes is the density of the ties that sustain this “we”. At one point, those ties consist of the Church, local tradition, epic poetry, and occasional encounters; later, they include schools, the press, the army, the state, the market, the railway, and the struggle for universal suffrage. Lukić therefore has good reason to doubt that national consciousness is necessarily qualitatively different from the earlier collective consciousness of a people. It may, above all, simply be denser, more widely diffused, and continuously reproduced.
And perhaps this is precisely the best way to read this forgotten volume today. Between two equally banal simplifications, one according to which present-day national consciousness has existed in an almost unchanged form since the Middle Ages, and another according to which virtually nothing national existed before capitalism, there remains an understanding of historical processes as constant transformations. The premodern is not the modern, but neither did the modern emerge without it. The nation is not an ancient organism that simply “awoke” in the nineteenth century, but neither is it something created out of a void. It is an old name drawn into new circuits of money, power, literacy, communication, and complex political relations. It is not continuity without change, but continuity through change.
It was not an awakening, because nobody had been asleep. It was a densification.
This is a sound historiographic proposition that works for probably most "modern" European nations (not nation-states, but nations). Or is there one that followed a different path to the described "densification"?