The Memory of Young People From Vojvodina Born in Mixed Marriages About the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s

Although armed conflicts in the South Slavic wars of the 1990s avoided Vojvodina, Serbia’s multi-ethnic northern province, the war left deep scars on its population. Some argue that the province avoided conflict in part because it had a relatively high rate of ethnic-based mixed marriages in Yugoslavia, which served as a bond between Serbs and ethnic minorities. The state-sponsored nationalist propaganda of the 1990s had a detrimental effect on ethnic minorities in Vojvodina, many of whose members left the country during this period. In the 1990s, the young minority generation may have been the most adversely affected group, as they faced overt nationalism, alienation and the prospect of being side-lined and having their childhood stolen. For those born into mixed marriages, one of the milestones of their lives was that when they enrolled in primary and secondary school, their parents were given the choice of language of education (majority or minority). The aim of this research is to examine the role that family background played in the self-representation and meaning-making of this generation during the turbulent 1990s. The thesis is based on an in-depth analysis of interviews with Generation Y children born in mixed Serbian–Hungarian marriages. The results show that the choice of school language has an impact on children’s identity and group affiliation. It is also found that those who received education in a minority language experienced more ethnic-based incidents of nationalism during their education than those whose parents chose to attend a majority language school. The research approached the issue from two directions. Firstly, it provides a brief insight into the Serb–Hungarian relationship through a historical overview of political and social events in the 1990s, in comparison to the Serb–Croat–Bosnian relationship, which is the most discussed in the literature. It also explores the situation of children born in Hungarian minority and Serbian majority marriages, which is rarely discussed from a qualitative perspective in the literature.