It has become fashionable to hate the late Yugoslavia, or to diagnose it retroactively as a kind of Frankenstein assemblage of mismatched parts whose dissolution was thus inescapable and inevitably bloody. But, a few decades from now, when some historian on a think-tank sinecure looks at the devastation in America left in the wake of Trump and his troops, she might discover abundant evidence of hundreds of years of hatred and inherent American racism, with all kinds of historical inevitability leading to the catastrophe. She would be wrong, just as are those who disparage Yugoslavia, for, in both cases, there is a history of conflicting traditions and tendencies, of struggles against the worst of the people’s instincts for a better polity and a kinder country. The bad guys won in Yugoslavia and ruined what they could, as soon as they could; the bad guys are doing pretty well in America, too. But nothing is inevitable until it happens. There is no such thing as historical destiny. Struggle is all.

Yugoslavia, a country of the South Slavs, was formed as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, on December 1, 1918, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Three major empires had just disintegrated after centuries of eventful existence, allowing for the creation of obscure small states whose people experienced the post-imperial chaos as freedom. The idea of a compound state had a history and had inspired South Slav leaders who believed in the benefits of unity. In 1929, the kingdom became Yugoslavia, as King Aleksandar changed the constitution to make himself an absolute monarch. In 1934, His Majesty was promptly assassinated on a visit to Marseille. The propagandistic story had it that the King’s last words were “Take care of my Yugoslavia.” My paternal grandfather travelled to Belgrade to be there for the grandiose funeral. Both of my parents were born as subjects to a teen-age heir, Peter II, who escaped the German invasion, in 1941, to end up in the United States.

The Second World War was bloody in Yugoslavia, but was there a place in Europe where it wasn’t? The Germans found many willing servants among local fascists and nationalists whose main historical modus operandi, like that of their masters, was genocide—their descendants would be at it again a couple of generations later. But the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, illegal before the war, was versed in resistance and underground networks and sparked, under Josip Broz Tito’s leadership, a national resistance movement that outlasted the Germans, despite their efforts to extinguish it in waves of unspeakable atrocities.

Say what you will about Tito and the postwar regime that was so centered on his personality that it barely outlived him, but, under his leadership, the Party organized a resistance movement and liberated Yugoslavia. He also managed to keep the country at a safe distance from the Soviet Union, breaking away from Stalin and his absolutist control in 1948. Tito was a clever, if authoritarian, leader, positioning the country between the East and the West in such a way—making it nonaligned—that it could benefit from each side.

Tito and the Party came out as not only the winners but also as the historical force that carried Yugoslavia into the twentieth century. With the doctrine of “brotherhood and unity” to counter the post-genocidal traumas and resentment, the country strove to create a civic identity that overrode ethnicity. This took some suppression, but, in retrospect, it may have been worth it, if only for a little while. The country had a defined utopian goal toward which its citizens could strive. There was optimism; a better future could be conceived of. For a few decades, the socialist Yugoslavia was a common project that everyone could work on. My parents belong to the generation that took a crucial part in that work, only to discover that it was all in vain.

My parents on their wedding day, November 11, 1962. Photograph Courtesy Aleksandar Hemon

It’s hard today to comprehend the magnitude of the leap into a better life that someone like my mother made in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Back in 1946, in the wake of a cataclysm, the new regime instituted gender equality and mandatory and free education, so a peasant Bosnian girl, born in a house with a dirt floor, could go to school. Had she been born a generation before, she wouldn’t have gone to school. She would’ve worked the land with her parents until she got married, whereupon she would’ve popped out children into her middle age, unless she died giving birth or from sepsis after a homemade abortion, like one of Mama’s father’s sisters. Mama’s future was entangled with Yugoslavia’s, enabling her to leave behind the poverty that had lasted for centuries.

Yugoslavia provided a framework into which my mother fully grew, having departed, at the age of eleven, from her more or less nineteenth-century childhood. She built the country as she was building herself. After the war, a practice of “Youth Work Actions” was established, in which young people in Yugoslavia volunteered to build roads and railroads as part of “youth brigades.” In 1960, while in college, Mama was one of the young women and men who spent their summer constructing a road that would connect Belgrade and Niš, part of a larger project of uniting parts of Yugoslavia by way of a highway known as the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity. She would tell her children stories of shovel-inflicted blisters and solidarity and friendship and joy, or so we imagined it, because the truth was that the youth brigades were not always given the hardest tasks. They’d shovel soil and help the professionals, but, more than anything, they’d sing patriotic songs and chant slogans in praise of hard work: “Comrade Tito, you white violet, all of youth loves you!” and “In the tunnel, in the darkness, shines a five-point star!” There would be celebratory bonfires, around which there would be more singing, and probably some comradely making out. For years, she would be proud of taking part in building the country—even if symbolically—and of the sweat she spilled with the best of the Yugoslav youth to construct the highway.

The practice of youth work actions lasted into the eighties, and she often suggested that I should do it, too, because I’d cherish the experience of sharing goals, taking part in common projects, and singing by the bonfire. I always defiantly refused. For not only did voluntary youth actions become, by the time I was young, a parody of the great ones from my mother’s youth but my teen-age politics were indistinguishable from my precocious cynicism. For one thing, I never cared for that kind of shared work-related ecstasy; no blister or sunburns could ever make me proud and joyous. I thought that youth brigades were a form of forced labor whose main goal was indoctrination. I deplored what I called their “primitive patriotism.” I committed myself early to a life of contemplative, productive laziness and hated singing along with other people, being one with a collective, even at rock shows. I was what they call an individual.

After the war, to our mother’s dismay, my sister and I started referring to the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity as the Highway of Youth and Foolishness. But now I envy her; I envy the sense that she was building something larger; I envy the nobility and honor that comes with being part of a civic endeavor.

My sister and me in 1971. Photograph Courtesy Aleksandar Hemon

It was while attending a youth work action that my mother became a member of the Communist Party. Many of her friends and fellow-volunteers joined the Party, too, for it was a cool thing to do. She was a devout Party member thereafter, and it became part of her personality, as much as a religion might be for a religious person. She believed (and still does) in social justice, generosity, and a fair distribution of wealth. She believed in the system committed to making the country better; Tito and the Party were that system. Before the Second World War, she liked to say, there had been only seventy-five kilometres of paved road in all of Yugoslavia, while the Highway of Brotherhood and Unity alone was more than a thousand kilometres.