Tito's Archipelagos: Liminal Spaces of the Third Path
Tito's Archipelagos: Liminal Spaces of the Third Path

Author(s): Tatjana Petzer
Subject(s): Applied Geography, Governance, Political history, Government/Political systems
Published by: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije
Keywords: third-path model; liminality; Yugoslavism; the Yug / South; space policy; prison islands; Brioni archipelago;
Summary/Abstract: In this paper I investigate Tito's space politics which followed his rhetoric of political in-betweeness and was marked by a specific logic of decentralization and territorial reorganization. After the Tito-Stalin-split, Yugoslavia’s 'Third Path' was literarily put on stage at its southern periphery where particular areas of an exclusive Yugoslavism were created on the archipelagos. Especially two forbidden insular areas, the President’s residence on the Brioni Isles and the prison-islands of Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, give evidence of ambivalent socio-political strategies, i. e. of marginalization and exclusiveness respectively, that should guarantee a self-determined development and transformation into the visionary 'third' space. The prison camps in the midst of the Dalmatian holiday paradise and the imperial-cosmopolitan stage on the Brioni archipelago are regarded as pictorial examples of the former Yugoslavia's liminal condition. They constituted ‘anti-structures’ within a society which acted as a threshold towards a new socio-political order beyond the two major blocs of the Cold War era. In both cases, the territorial strategies of inclusion and exclusion give some indication of how the delicate balance between East and West was enabled by the creation of liminal spaces that would transcend and also transgress the Yugoslav socio-cultural system.

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