Between the Nation and Socialism in Yugoslavia. The Debate between Dobrica Ćosić and Dušan Pirjevec in the 1960s

Abstract

From a perspective rooted in conceptual history, the following article studies the transformations of Yugoslav political discourse from the end of World War II until the 1960s, in order to later analyze the famous debate held by the Serbian writer Dobrica Ćosić and the Slovene critic Dušan Pirjevec regarding cultural cooperation between the Yugoslav republics. By examining the transition from a centralist model to a more decentralized model based on the conceptual paradigm of selfmanagement and the consequences of such a transformation on the official approach towards the national question, the text aims at taking a closer look to the development of the new political language of Yugoslav communism and its effects on the political and intellectual debates of the time.