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.

This lecture examines the development and confrontation of two opposing ideological narratives of Serbian national identity that took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s, in the context of debates over the character of the Yugoslav federation. The national-integrationist approach interpreted Serbian identity through the idea of territorial and cultural unification of the entire Serbian national space, while reform-minded communists proceeded from the concept of a modern Serbia and understood the Yugoslav state as a framework for the equality of all peoples. The presentation analyzes the conceptual foundations of both approaches, their key actors, and their political implications, with the aim of showing how this period marked a turning point in the formation of ideological patterns that would permanently shape the later development of national politics and identity narratives. Particular emphasis is placed on Milentije Popović’s views on the national question in Yugoslavia, as one of the most prominent figures in Yugoslav and Serbian politics from the Second World War until his sudden death in 1971. Given that Popović held numerous important positions in both republican and federal bodies, his theoretical and practical thought was inseparable from the process of shaping domestic policy and identity narratives in Yugoslav society.

Milivoj Bešlin is a historian and Senior Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade. His research focuses on the political and social history of Yugoslavia, nationalism studies, and historical revisionism.

Dušan Marković is a historian and Teaching Assistant at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Belgrade. His research focuses on the history of ideas and Yugoslav–French relations.