Thus Spoke the People: Public Discourse in Belgrade’s Politika on the Eve of Yugoslav Wars

The presentation presented a study dealing prewar public discourse by analysing the origin, content, and sentiment of a corpus of more than four thousand letters written by people from all walks of life and published in the Belgrade daily Politika loyal to the regime of Slobodan Milošević during three years directly preceding the Yugoslav wars. Our analysis combines lexicon-based tools of automated topic and sentiment analysis with the data on the socio-demographic characteristics of the letters’ authors and their localities. We demonstrate that the crucial determinant of the geographical distribution of the letters’ origin and their overwhelmingly negative tone directed at the opponents of the Milošević regime was the World War II past of the authors and their localities, as well as its interaction with the economic crisis in the 1980s. The letters disproportionally came from areas more exposed to WWII combat; and negative discourse disproportionally came from authors who were either WWII veterans themselves or who lived in areas simultaneously more exposed to WWII combat and suffering economically. Our study exposes the critical importance of politicisation of the history of conflict for the shaping of public discourse in the runup to war: we show how the inter-ethnic violence of the 1940s in Yugoslavia was being grafted onto the economic crisis of the 1980s and built into a frame for the ongoing political conflicts and the wars to come in the 1990s.