Institutional Framework
Collective mobilities intended to recreate different aspects of antifascist warfare in Yugoslavia were a countrywide phenomenon practiced by a diverse set of institutional actors and informal groups.
The geographical scope of these mobilities also conditioned the administrative level at which their organizational mechanism took shape. Thus, they could represent practices that concerned a small local community, a municipality or group of neighboring municipalities, one Yugoslav republic, or the whole federation, depending on the administrative jurisdiction over the territory that constituted the marching route. Yet the entities that figured most prominently as organizers and as the pool for prospective participants were the so-called social-political organizations, colloquially termed “leagues” (savezi). These institutional bodies assembled groups with particular shared interests, which could be based on generational, professional, biographical, or leisure preferences. The organizational structure of each league followed the administrative hierarchy of the country, with municipal, county, republic, and federal committees.The mutual cohesion of all social-political organizations, as well as the adherence to the political tenets of the Communist Party, was secured by their collective membership in the Socialist League of the Working People (Socijalisticki savez radnog naroda). In practice, the Communist Party (relabeled as the League of Communists in 1952) exercised political control through securing a supreme position for its cadre within the ranks of the League of the Working People, consequently politicizing the activities of all other member-leagues to a certain degree. This meant that the key ideological postulates—such as the one-party system, Tito’s leading position, equality of all constituent nations and republics, and the official interpretation of the events of World War II—could not be questioned within their ranks.
However, the more quotidian aspects of their respective functioning, as well as the activities not strictly concerned with political issues, usually enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy. With the country’s gradual decentralization during the 1960s and 1970s, the republics’ branches of these leagues developed specificities in their work, in some cases paving the ground for a unique type of semi-public sphere in the 1980s, which acted as a sort of surrogate for the liberal understanding of civil society (Spaskovska, 2017).The federation-wide dispersal of leagues’ local branches, coupled with the range of activities spanning different spheres of life, made this institutional form a convenient mechanism for organizing and popularizing partisan marches as an ideologically appropriate leisure activity for the most diverse segments of the Yugoslav population in terms of age, geographical distribution, and professional and educational structure. The leagues that assembled children and youth (grouping them either by age cohorts or by personal interests) stood out as the most frequent organizers of these kinds of mobilities. The Pioneer League of Yugoslavia (Savez pionira Jugoslavije), formed according to the pattern of other socialist countries, automatically encompassed all children upon enrolling in primary school. Although the organizational structure followed that of the school system, it was supposed to be independent of teachers’ interference and rely, at least nominally, on children’s self-organization (Duda, 2015). The League of the Socialist Youth (Savez socijalisticke omladine), which did not have automatic membership, gathered adolescents who possessed activist inclinations, and it was understood as the first step toward membership in the League of Communists. The main aim of the Hosteling League of Yugoslavia (Ferijalni savez Jugoslavije) was to enable young people to travel cheaply and to bring together Yugoslavs from different parts of the country under the slogan “Get to know your country in order to love it better.” In this endeavor, they often relied on partisan marches to endow their activities with commemorative and political significance. However, the tendency to recreate specific aspects of the partisan wartime history was most blatant in the case of the League of Scouts of Yugoslavia (Savez izvidaca Jugoslavije), which brought together pioneers who were inclined toward outdoor activities and camping. Scouts officials often emphasized that their very founding in the early 1950s was motivated by the desire to take children to former partisan paths (Veljkovic, 1966). Whereas for other leagues the marches represented a side activity, almost every activity of the Yugoslav scouts thematically revolved around places and narratives connected to the political mythology of the People’s Liberation Struggle.These children- and youth-oriented organizations were complemented in their reimagining of the communist fighters’ experience by the former partisans themselves, grouped into the League of the Associations of the Fighters of the People’s Liberation War (Savez udruzenja boraca Narodnooslobodilackog rata). The array of social-political organizations that took part in this field also included alpinist clubs, trade unions, the Yugoslav People’s Army, firefighters, shooting clubs, the Red Cross, the People’s Engineering Society, and other associations. The massiveness of this institutional network (some leagues, such as scouts and hostelers, numbered up to 200,000 members) and its geographical dispersion meant that partisan marches, as one of their most important fields of action, were accessible to a large part of the country’s population.