The Serbs: Nurtured By Defeat

July 2011 | #13

by: David B. Kanin
Adjunct Professor
Johns Hopkins University
pp: 47
ISSN: 2038-632X

Abstract

There are worse things than defeat. If a community has the opportunity to inspect its setbacks its conqueror has stopped short of wiping out the vanquished group's memory and collective existence. If the defeated are a mobile community they might literally look for greener pastures. Sedentary winners and losers, on the other hand, remain in contact, and their paired experiences of victory and defeat affect future actions on both sides.

The Serbs are among those who have developed their identity by moving from defeat to defeat. Enemies have failed to (or refrained from) destroying them, inundating them with non-Serbian settlers, or banishing them to a destructive exile. The iconic battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389 remains an appropriate starting point for a discussion of Serbia's relationship to defeat, but the evolution of songs and memories adapted to the task of honing a Herderian nation, not the battle itself, informs the construction of collective defeat. The peripatetic remains of "Tsar" Lazar, continuing references to his heavenly kingdom, and mass commemorative rallies at the battlefield in 1889 and 1989 remain central, contemporary, touchstones. Serb poets and politicians folded defeats of the 18th and 19th centuries into the Kosovo memory. Nevertheless...

17th CEI International Summer School
"Beyond Enlargement.
The Wider Europe and the New Neighbourhood"

List of the students selected to take part to this year's Summer School

We are pleased to announce that the following are the students selected to participate in the current CEI International Summer School which will be held in Faenza.

At the end of August a course for this year's summer school will be set up at its website at www.summerschools.it where enrolled students will access/download additional resources available for the classes and receive information about the Summer School. Access to the above-mentioned course resources will be restricted only to enrolled students.