As part of the Prizma / IMAGINATION project (“Imagining the Nation: Serbian National Narratives in Contestation (20th–21st Centuries)”), implemented at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade (2024–2027) with financial support from the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, a lecture series is being organized in which the project’s researchers present their findings and open a discussion on the ways national narratives are formed, contested, and transformed over the long durée of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The lecture addresses the ways in which national identity in Serbia has been shaped, articulated, and transmitted on two distinct levels immanent to state action: through constitutional texts and through educational content, particularly school textbooks. Proceeding from the premise that a political community and its identity are defined through various articulations of state policies, the lecture will examine two planes on which these policies operate — the legal dimension of constitutional identity and the educational dimension of national self-perception.

The first part will focus on the constitutionalization of the national aspect of Serbia’s constitutional identity from 1945 to the present. It will be shown that national discourse has been continuously present in Serbia’s constitutions, but that its meaning has depended on the historical and political context: from the socialist-federal framework and the emphasis on a particular, “resolved” national question, to transitional and post-socialist formulations, in which elements of reaffirmation and a distinctive “defense” of Serbian statehood come more strongly to the fore. Particular attention will be devoted to the fact that constitutional norms, even when not pronouncedly operative in a legal sense, performed an important symbolic function in the ideological shaping of the political community’s identity and self-understanding.

The second part of the lecture will consider the ways in which the social and political community has been defined through schooling, above all through curricula and textbooks. In this context, the analysis will trace how Yugoslavia and Serbia were presented to pupils from the late 1950s to the early twenty-first century, and how those representations shifted in tandem with educational reforms, the crisis of the socialist order, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the change of ideological framework. It will be demonstrated that national discourse was enduringly present here as well, albeit in mutable forms: from socialist patriotism and patriotic upbringing toward a more pronounced insistence on national and cultural identity.

Srđan Radović, ethnologist and anthropologist, senior research fellow at the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) in Belgrade, works on the politics of memory, space, and identity in socialist and post-socialist Serbia and other post-Yugoslav countries.

Srđan Milošević, historian and jurist, associate professor of legal history and public law at the Faculty of Law of Union University, works on legal (constitutional), economic, and social history.