Utopia on the Sava.

My last Saturday in Zagreb. I spent the morning going to the City Library, which is open until 2pm on Saturdays, to check out a book and to make a little more progress on CiP magazine. I want to get through 1991, so today I did 1990 (almost done). That's actually where the title for the post comes from (It just seemed to also fit the picture, which is Hare Krishna in front of the statue). So, in 1990 CiP ran an article with the title "Utopia on the Sava." You might think that it would be about Zagreb (since Zagreb is on the Sava), but actually, it was a proposal to build a new Yugoslav capital city. The idea was to copy the concept of Washington D.C. and create a new city outside of any of the existing political entities right on the "dividing line" of Yugoslavia. The location proposed included parts of Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia.

I thought, "You know, that might have worked if they had done it in 1950, or even maybe 1960, but 1990 was a little late to try to start just talking about an idea like that." A true Yugoslav city as the Yugoslav capital, without a history preceding World War II, could have really served as a working example of what "Yugoslavia" could become. There was an idea of moving the capital from Belgrade to Sarajevo, but even that was "too radical" for the new revolutionary regime.

I have come to the conclusion that the Yugoslav revolution was really a very un-revolutionary enterprise. Unfortunately, the leadership thought if they could create a socialist economy and "transform the relationship between the workers and the means of production" that alone would suffice. Economic transformation would lead to social transformation. All they really ended up doing was recreating Royal Yugoslavia with a socialist economy. All the same political dilemmas still remained. The idea of the "Utopia on the Sava" was radical, and if it had been done in 1950 it might have really transformed Yugoslav politics. It is telling that it wasn't until the system was actually falling apart that radical ideas started to make it into the discussion.