Enjoy Sara-jevo Coca-Cola, Material Culture and the Siege of Sarajevo

The paper argues that the narrative of the independent Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of its capital city Sarajevo under siege (1992-1995) was built on the trope of Sarajevo's European, Western-oriented, cosmopolitan cultural identity, based on the image initially nurtured by Socialist Yugoslavia. In the new context of the implosion of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (1945 -1991) the siege of Sarajevo and the war in one of the Yugoslav republics, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Yugoslav socialism was replaced by the multi-ethnic and cosmopolitan character of the young Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I argue that the image of Sarajevo during the siege, as a by-product of foreign attention to the plight of the country and its citizens, was built on the pre-existing premises that promoted Socialist Yugoslavia as Western oriented and therefore progressive, in contrast to other communist countries beyond the Iron Curtain.