Epilogue

Abstract

The epilogue highlights infrastructure—understood as a network of political, social, and material conditions that enable interconnectedness, coordination, and a degree of coherence and mutual trust among different social actors—as central for understanding individual and collective agency in socialist Yugoslavia. In spite of its organizational and formal rigidity and its paucity of forms, the Yugoslav army was part of this infrastructure. It enabled a collectivity based on interdependency, mutual responsibility, and solidarity, and feelings of care, love, and friendship across class, religious, ethnic, cultural, social, and educational boundaries. Such an understanding of collectivity was essential to Yugoslav socialism and self-management as it basic organizational principle, but it proves to be no less important in our own present, in which global neoliberalism keeps us confined in fragmented realms defined by identitarian categories.