Trump,Montenegrins and the third world war

Thanks to President Trump's controversial interview in which he described the Montenegrin people as very aggressive, suggesting that Montenegro could be the cause of a third world war, this small Balkan nation got more attention than it had ever had before. Effectively, Trump exaggerated a historical stereotype of Montenegrins and based his comment on Montenegro's political behaviour from several centuries ago when they developed a warlike ethos. How this awareness of Montenegro's aggressive nature as a warrior people made its way to Donald Trump and how exactly he thinks Montenegrin bellicosity could be the cause of a third world war, we can only speculate. Montenegro has fewer than 700,000 inhabitants. The Montenegrin army counts some 1,800 soldiers. Most of the soldiers in active service see the job as a secure source of income, not a chance to prove their combat skills. Montenegro is therefore most unlikely to be the source of aggression itself. Starting from President Trump's statement regarding Montenegro, in this article, the author problematizes the historical roots of Montenegrin traditional masculinity, the reasons why the question of NATO membership still provokes controversies over Montenegrin identity and the position of Montenegro in contemporary geopolitics.     

‘New face of Serbia’ at the Eurovision Song Contest: international media spectacle and national identity1

The aim of this paper is to examine the construction/recycling of national identities primarily through the participation of Serbia (and Montenegro) at the Eurovision Song Contests 2004–2008. First, the performances of this country's representatives at the Eurovision Song Contest will be examined, emphasising the aspects that contribute to the popularity of the songs chosen to represent the nation and the state. All those elements reinvent a picture of the past in its lived totality, managing to reawaken the sense of the supposedly idyllic national past associated with them. In this manner of (re-)creating identity, the recycling of memory and imagined tradition, but also references to European cultural, media and political spheres, have great symbolic weight. The second part will offer a discourse analysis of media coverage of the performance of the country as a host of the Eurovision Song Contest. It is shown how the notion of ‘the new face of Serbia’ is supposed to balance different, sometimes even confronted cultural markers present in concurrent identity strategies in Serbia.     

Of love and national borders: the Croatian anthem ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’

Croatia became a UN member only in 1992, after the violent break‐up of Yugoslavia. Its anthem is marked by historically founded ambivalences as to the nature and territorial extent of the nation in question. This article offers an interpretation of the current version of the anthem and an analysis of the narrative and imagery of the nineteenth‐century poem from which the anthem originates. Three of the anthem's four stanzas speak about the Croats’ love for their homeland and their people and of the steadfastness and immortality of their love; the remaining stanza extolls the beauty of the homeland. By addressing the homeland's rivers and the sea directly, its singers appropriate this geography and so demarcate the borders of their much‐loved homeland. The anthem thus asserts Croatia's unity (against potential pretenders) and its unbreakable ties with its people. In contrast, the original fourteen‐stanza poem ‘The Croatian Homeland’, written in 1835, is a paean to the Croats’ ties to nature, their simple life and bravery – the romantic virtues of pure national souls. On their path to anthemhood, the four stanzas drawn from this poem have undergone significant modifications and additions, the result being a song that is doubly reassuring: it reassures the singers first of the people's love for themselves as a people, and second that this love is the means by which the ‘natural’ territory of the homeland is maintained.     

Cuba's Cinematic Élan Vital: Cubanidad and Cubanía as Citizenship and Sentiment

This article focuses on the current shifts in expressions of Cuban national identity by considering the articulations of cubanidad and cubanía in recent documentary films from Cuba's Muestra joven. Rather than suggesting a disappearance or deterioration of national identity, these three examples of contemporary Cuban cinema evidence a more fluid, sentiment-based articulation of Cubanness that can be considered the island's élan vital. This analysis of representations of the ongoing transformation of Cuba deploys theories and terms conceptualised by Georg Sorenson in The Transformation of the State: Beyond the Myth of Retreat (2004) in order to posit how cubanidad is aligned with the modes of citizenship (the official), which is a sense of Cubanness defined by a rationality that may be imposed, while cubanía is affined with a sentiment fuelled by intuition (the personal). Thus we propose that just as the Muestra joven embodies the current vacillation and movement of Cuban cinema between citizenship and sentiment, so deMoler (Muestra 2004), Model Town (Muestra 2007) and La Época, el Encanto y Fin de Siglo (Muestra 2000) indicate a process of reinterpretation and rupture in a context of flux instead of rigidity.     

The Cold War's cultural ecosystem: angry young men in British and Soviet cinema, 1953–1968

Using examples from postwar British and Soviet cinema, this article interprets European Cold War culture within the framework of a shared cultural ecosystem. The case study of reformist movements in 1950s and 1960s British and Soviet cinema makes clear that analogous sociopolitical and economic developments across postwar Europe inspired film heroes, narratives, and aesthetics that transcended national and ideological borders. The concept of a continent-wide cultural ecosystem elucidates how and why specific cultural phenomena—such as the figure of the “angry young man”—reflect an existence of a dynamic trans-systemic Cold War culture.