Garcevic Speaks at Harvard on Yugoslavia
Ambassador Vesko Garcevic, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, spoke as part of a September 25, 2019 panel at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies on the former Yugoslavia entitled “Yugoslavia Revisited.” The discussion was followed by the exhibit “Remember Yugoslavia? Photographs by Martin Karplus”
Other panelists included Marie-Janin Cilic, Professor of Eastern and Southeastern European History at Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich; and Suzan Woodward, Professor of Political Science at The Graduate Center of City University of New York. Gzegorz Ekiert, Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Government at Harvard University chaired the discussion.
Garcevic’s intervention was entitled The Breakup of Yugoslavia – the Perpetual War of Historic Narratives. His explored how the Yugoslav crisis began as a conflict of historic narratives in the 1970s or even before then, continuing into a full-scale conflict during the 1990s and again evolving into a narrative struggle over what Yugoslavia was.
According to Garcevic, the failure to develop a common historical narrative broadly acceptable for its peoples was detrimental for Yugoslavia. He emphasized that the persistence of irreconcilable national historical narratives (and their growing presence in the 1980s) had the result that the diverse peoples of Yugoslavia had different views at important aspects of their history, both in the remote and the recent past.
Garcevic said the narrative distinction stems from different understanding of the two events from the proximate past: 1) The legacy of the World War II and the antifascist character of the Yugoslav revolution; and 2) How Yugoslavia came to being – the role of Serbia in the creation of Yugoslavia.
During his diplomatic career, Amb. Vesko Garcevic dealt with issues pertinent to European security and NATO for almost 14 years. In 2004, he was posted in Vienna to serve as Ambassador to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He had been a Montenegro’s Ambassador to NATO from 2010 until 2014 and served as a Montenegro’s National Coordinator for NATO from 2015 until he joined the faculty at the Pardee School.