Burn This House: the making and unmaking of Yugoslavia

by Jasminka Udovički (Editor)

A collection of articles by Serbian, Croatian, Muslim, Macedonian, and American scholars, covering the history of the South Slavs and Yugoslavia from the sixth century to the present day

Genres: History, War, Nonfiction

Paperback

First published November 1, 1997

Reviews

[mel]

I enjoyed this, but I don't think it does deconstruct the 'ancient ethnic hatred' thesis like the back cover text promises. I think I saw it recommended as a good introductory text to the wars in another review and it's not that either. There is no single summary of events. The essays jump around chronologically and would benefit from more maps. Sarajevo is barely mentioned. There are also two essays purely dedicated to describing the independent newspaper and television news outlets of 1990s Serbia and Croatia.

[Risotto]

The book lands squarely in the bizarre limbo between academic exploration and popular readability; that is to say the tone and delivery of events, such as when the object of discussion is the independent press in Serbia and Croatia, have a gripping quality to them, but the analysis of said events do not achieve what they set out to accomplish.

With respect to “academic analysis” one of the criticism against socialist Yugoslavia found within the book can be boiled down to “it wasn’t a liberal democracy, which as we all know is the only valid form of governance”, which fails to engage simultaneously with the idea of “komšiluk” referenced in passing at the start, the administrative commune system inspired by the French example of the 1800s, or what necessarily set this socialist experiment apart from the others and what its shortcomings in its own terms were. The successes of this system are seen as a “historic anomaly” while its failures “a natural consequence”.

In short the book is indecisive in many aspects: too diverse in its subject matter and too shallow in its analysis to be a detailed study of the Yugoslav wars, too focused on certain aspects (like the media wars and Western foreign policy) to be an introductory text; too ignorant of its natural biases in favour of liberal democracy to be a purely academical statement of facts, and yet too academically charged to justify being a politically argumentative piece.

A good start for some, but definitely not the definitive work on this time and place.

[Pedro]

A collection of essays focusing principally on the unmaking of Yugoslavia. I would love to read a book about how such a peculiar nationalism was constructed, but this one does an admirable job at explaining its collapse. Burn this house is very scholarly in its tone but not to a degree that makes it difficult to understand. While the respective authors have their biases, I feel the book does a great job at examining the mindsets of all actors involved. I thoroughly enjoyed Burn This House, and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in learning about the breakup of Yugoslavia.