Review: Miscellaneous: Saviours of the Nation
| Author | John M. Fraser |
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002070200305800216 |
| Subject Matter | Review |
Reviews
Serbs
felt
they
had
been
his
victims
over
the
past
twelve
years,
and
they
were
not
going
to
put
up
with it
anymore.
When
Milogeviý was
over-
thrown,
he
turned
out
to
have
few
real
friends,
and
even
his
extradition
to
The
Hague
was
greeted
with
only token
protests.
LeBor
paints
a
vivid
picture
of
Milogevik's
personality
and
back-
ground,
how
he
gained power
and how
he
lost
it.
The
book
does
not
leave
the
reader
feeling
that
he
now
understands
Milo~evik
completely,
but
the
understanding
it
gives
may
be
as
much
as
we
shall
ever
get.
John
M.
Fraser/Ottawa
SAVIOURS
OF
THE
NATION
Serbia's
intellectual
opposition
and
the
revival
of
nationalism
Jasna Dragovik-Soso
Montreal
&
Kingston-Ithaca,
McGill-Queen's
University
Press,
2002,
viii,
2
93pp, $70.00
cloth
(ISBN
0-7735-2522-x), $27.95
paper
(ISBN
0-
7735-2523-8)
This
book,
engagingly
dedicated
to
Tito,
approaches
the
subject
of
Yugoslavia's
disintegration from
an
unusual
vantage
point,
looking
at
the
role
of
Serbian
intellectuals
(with
some
mention
of
their
Croatian
and
Slovenian
colleagues).
They
were
not
necessarily
wiser
than
the
politicians or
the public.
Nor
were
most
Serbian intellectuals
any
more
capable
of
rational
discussion on
the
question
of
Kosovo
than
other
Serbs.
Serbian
writers
seriously
argued
that
Kosovo
was
'a
holy
place
and
the highest
spiritual
symbol
only
to
Serbs,'
which
didn't
leave
much
room
for
other
views.
On
the
other
hand,
as
this
book
makes
clear,
the intellectuals
were
not
the
evil
geniuses
who
plunged
Yugoslavia
into
a
decade
of
destruction
and
war.
Intellectuals
in
North
America
are
usually
not
much
taken
into
account
when
great
questions
of
politics
arise.
In Europe
generally,
and
particularly
in eastern
Europe,
intellectuals
are
taken
very seriously
indeed.
In
former
communist
states,
they
were
perhaps
the
least
con-
trollable
element
in
society.
Regimes
tried to
harness
them,
not
least
to
borrow
the
air
of
respectability
they
lent,
but
regimes
also
kept
a
close
eye
on
them,
knowing
that
their
stock
in
trade
was
ideas
and
that
ideas
could
be
dangerous.
Dragovid-Soso
agues
that
the solutions
offered
to
the
'national
ques-
tion'
by
Serbian
intellectuals
in
the
1980s
'mostly remained
moderate
INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL
Spring2003
429
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