iz "Ekonomista", Tim Judah

When commerce beckons, political and linguistic barriers come tumbling down

ANYONE interested in doing business in the region that used to be
called Yugoslavia might be tempted not to bother—on the ground that
its successor states were all very small, obsessed with minor
linguistic and cultural differences, and generally not worth the
effort.

A few years ago this might have been true, but now things have
changed. Have a browse in a branch of Buybook, a Bosnian bookseller.
In one section are shelves of "foreign" titles (by British or French
writers, for example), and in another books by "local" authors. But
"local" in this case does not mean only Bosnian. It means anyone
writing in the language once called Serbo-Croatian—which is spoken,
with only small variations, in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro.

In business and economics, as well as linguistics and culture, the old
Yugoslav space is re-emerging. Damir Uzunovic, the director of
Buybook, complains that it is still hard to sell Bosnian books in
Serbia; but otherwise the book trade between all the countries which
speak nas jezik—our language, as it is sometimes called in a desperate
effort to sound neutral—has been flourishing.

After all, together the populations of Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia and
Bosnia make up a market of some 16m people. Macedonians and Slovenes,
also ex-Yugoslavs, speak different but closely related tongues; if you
add them, the number swells to 20m. It grows to 22m if you throw in
the Kosovo Albanians—most of whom understand the common Slavic
language even if they abhor it. In any case, the simple fact that all
members of the quarrelsome ex-Yugoslav family can understand one
another (linguistically at least) makes it easy to market products of
every kind.

Before the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s the country had plenty of strong
brands. When it fell apart those brands lost most of their devotees.
Now, partly thanks to the normalisation of relations between the
former Yugoslav republics, those familiar labels are surging back.
They include everything from Croatian chocolates to Slovene juices to
Montenegrin wines.

Some of the change is psychological. A few years ago Croatian radio
stations would not play Serbian pop. That taboo has now gone. Radio
stations which specialise in "Yu-nostalgia" and festivals celebrating
the music that all Yugoslavs once shared have become wildly popular.
The best locally produced film about the wars—"Vukovar: The Final
Cut"—is a joint Serbian-Croatian production. It tells the story of the
devastating siege of the eastern Croatian town in 1991.

The re-emergence of a Yugoslav market in goods and culture has been
helped by a fairly general economic recovery. People now have more
money to spend, and they are using some of their extra cash to pay for
cable-television packages that serve up broadcasts (and
advertisements) from across the old country. In recent years Merkator,
a Slovene supermarket chain, has made strong advances across the
region. Croatia's main petrol company, INA, is also recovering some
lost ground outside its home territory.

In diplomacy as well as commerce, the ex-Yugoslav states are getting
along better and at last coming to recognise that they have common
interests. But that may not suit everybody. Even though Serbia is a
long way from joining the European Union, its interpreters had been
licking their lips at the thought of thousands of pages of EU rules
and regulations needing translation. Imagine their disappointment when
the Croats, keen to smooth Serbia's European path, simply sent their
Serbian colleagues all the translations they had already made. This
left just a little tidying up (and a change of script from Latin to
Cyrillic) to be done in order to convert the documents from the
Croatian language to the slightly different Serbian.