Coming Due: Debt, Stagnation, and the Crisis of Borrowed Time in Late-Socialist Yugoslavia

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Cultures of Decline IV: Economic Downturn and Second World Cultural Production II

Abstract

This paper explores the metaphor of the crisis of “borrowed time” as it was developed and
deployed in Yugoslav cultural production from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. It tracks the
movement of this metaphor from its use in the economic field, where it served as a critique of the
socialist government’s reliance on foreign credit, to the political-cultural field, where it became
an explanation for the resurgence of ethnic animosity and conflict. This transposition of the
metaphor allowed economic explanations for the collapse of the Yugoslav federation to structure
essentialist accounts of the incompatibility of its national communities. In so doing, the metaphor
rendered the nationalist violence of the 1990s inevitable, framing it as the coming due of a debt
incurred by the socialist regime’s policy of brotherhood and unity. Reconstructing this crisis of
borrowed time allows us to better trace the origins of Yugoslavia’s violent collapse to the global
crisis in profitability of the 1970s.

Author

• James MacEwan Robertson, UC Irvine