Marek Mikuš

“State Pride:” Politics of LGBT Rights and Democratisation in “European Serbia”

This is a pre-review, non-final version of a paper forthcoming in East European Politics and Societies.

“State Pride:” Politics of LGBT Rights and Democratisation in “European Serbia”

The Distant Democratiser: Representations of the EU and their Political Uses in Serbia

Here comes the first version of my paper to be presented in the RRPP Annual Conference in Montenegro.

FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: PERFORMING STATEHOODS IN ORAŠAC

On the Christian feast of Sretenje (The Presentation of Jesus at the Temple) in 1804, the First Serbian Uprising against the declining Ottoman domination began in Orašac, a village some 70 kilometres south of Belgrade in the Central Serbian region of Šumadija. The uprising was but the beginning of the wars of independence known as the Serbian Revolution (1804–1817) which prepared the ground for the formation of a modern Serbian state. Indeed, on Sretenje of 1835 the Constitution of the then Principality of Serbia was adopted. In Serbia today, Sretenje – falling on 15 February in the modern Gregorian calendar – is not only a Church holiday. According to a 2001 law, it is also a key državni praznik (‘state holiday’, as opposed to ‘religious holidays’) called Dan državnosti Srbije (Serbia’s Statehood Day). Interestingly, a 2006 presidential decree declared this date also the Serbian Army Day. This completes the symbolic association of Serbian statehood with the military, the critical actor in the consolidation and expansion of the Serbian state in the 19th century, as well as with Christianity, more specifically with its brand practiced by the autocephalous national church – the Serbian Orthodox Church. While the latter link was actively repressed in the socialist Yugoslavia and not officially endorsed by the Milošević regime which did not mark a clean break with socialist symbolism, it became much more prominent after 2000 with the final death of the idea of Yugoslavism and the quest of the Serbian state for a new identity. That the chain of associations revealed by the multiplication of holidays celebrated on 15 February is fully intentional rather than random was this year confirmed, among others, by the Serbian president Boris Tadić who was quoted as saying that ‘the proclamation of 15 February the Statehood Day and the Serbian  Army Day renews the deepest historical and traditional link in the [process of] founding and building of our state and its army’.

The triple link was also manifested in celebrations which took place in Orašac, at the site commemorating the First Serbian Uprising. In the morning, the high Church dignitary vladika šumadijski Jovan served a mass in the nearby Church. Flags of Kraljevina Srbija (The Kingdom of Serbia), an association sponsored by the heir to the throne Aleksandar II  Karađorđević which, predictably, advocates the return to parliamentary monarchy, could be seen at the churchyard. Following the mass, a mixed procession of Church and lay dignitaries transferred to the commemorative site, which forms a sort of stage at the bottom of a natural amphitheater. Taking the asphalt path and stairs leading from the church to the commemorative site, they passed between two lines of men facing each other who had taken the positions during the service. The majority of men were wearing uniforms, mostly reminiscent of the black or less commonly green uniforms of četnici, the monarchist paramilitaries fighting in the WWII second against the Germans as well as the communist Partisans. The men were holding easily recognizable četnik flags, with white skull and bones on black background and reading ‘For king and fatherland; freedom or death’, as well as the flags of the contemporary četnik Ravna Gora Movement whose name refers to the region in which the original četnik militias formed. Many other men in the crowd could be seen wearing full or partial uniforms; apart from the četnik ones, a few older men sported traditional peasant-style uniforms.

After the procession reached the site surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, a special commemorative service (pomen) for Đorđe Petrović Karađorđe, the leader of the First Uprising and the founder of the royal house of Karađorđević of which Aleksandar II is a descendant, was served. The attendees of note then laid laurel wreaths at the monument. These included the crown prince, the representatives of the Aranđelovac municipality of which Orašac is a part, the delegation of the Serbian Army and government officials. Significantly, the latter were represented by the Minister of Religion Bogoljub Šijaković and the delegation of the Ministry of Defense, i.e. officials to do with religion and the military. Speeches of the president of the municipality and the heir ensued, followed by a short rodoljubiva poezija (patriotic poetry) award ceremony and some poem-reading. The event concluded by performances of a local folk music group and of a female performer who sang, in an angelic voice, the revolutionary anthem of the First Serbian Uprising Vostani Serbie (Arise, Serbia).

Understanding this event would be impossible without taking into account the vehement behaviour of the crowd. First of all, I have already mentioned that many men wearing uniforms or parts of uniforms were in attendance. The banners of the original četnik movements and its contemporary epigones completed the strong military symbolism of the event. (It is important to point out, however, that the state organized another, much bigger celebration of the Statehood Day and the Serbian Army Day which was essentially a military parade combined with state medal awards. The fact that it took place in Belgrade and on Sunday, although this was two days before the actual holiday date, suggests this was intended to be the main official festivity for the public.) Other banners disclosed the presence of some of the most important far-right nationalist movements or NGOs. While the group of Obraz supporters, holding one long banner, stood on one side of the passage leading to the commemorative site (through which the procession passed on its way from the church), was relatively small and peaceful, the other side of the passage was occupied by a much larger and rowdier crowd of SNP Naši 1389 standing next to the people holding četnik and Kraljevina Srbija flags. In this part of the crowd, the 19th century flag of Imperial Russia could be seen, as well as current flags of Serbia and two banners of SNP Naši 1389 opposing Serbia’s accession to the European Union.

The crowd reacted in different ways to four other types of persons in attendance: the policemen securing the event, the government and municipality representatives, the Church dignitaries and the heir to the throne. The policemen formed a cordon on both sides of the passage, presumably to protect the distinguished guests from a potential attack by an onlooker. As they were standing face-to-face with the first row of the supporters of far-right movements, it was obvious that at least some of them engaged in friendly conversations with the latter. As for the other categories of attendants, people reacted to them when they walked to the stage, spoke or were mentioned by the host of the ceremony. Even before the procession started to descend to the commemorative site, the crowd shouted the names of two of the most prominent Serbs suspected of war crimes during the Yugoslav wars - Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić. When the government officials approached and laid laurel wreaths as well as when the municipality president spoke, they responded with booing and shouting Ustanak! (‘Uprising!’). They also sang, hooligan style, Spasi Srbiju i ubij se, Borise (‘Save Serbia and kill yourself, Boris’, Boris being the president of Serbia Tadić). On the other hand, the presence and speech of the heir to the throne was appreciated by calls Imamo kralja! (‘We have a king!’). (However, more quietly, some people exchanged amused comments about the heir’s bad Serbian, which is a subject of much mocking and contempt in Serbia. This may suggest that the crown prince marshals support because he stands for the general idea of monarchy rather than by his perceived personal qualities.) Finally, the audience enthusiastically sang prayers together with vladika, and at the sound of the bells as well as the sight of the approaching Church procession nearly everyone crossed themselves the Orthodox way. Very interesting was the appeal to the crowd after the procession reached the stage and before the first, religious part of the programme commenced. A kind voice from the speakers asked the crowd to stop shouting, ‘because the prayer is most important’, and said that they can continue to shout ‘what is pleasant (udobno) to God’ after the prayer, thus implying an endorsement of their messages and their compatibility with Orthodox Christianity.

The appearance of the audience, their banners and verbal and non-verbal reactions to various components of the official programme represented an active dialogic contribution to the event. More than that, it revealed a lot about the reception of the event, the participants and their performances by the audience or it least its more clamorous and conspicuous part), and is thus crucial for the contextualization not only of the event itself, but also of the institutions and ideas that these participants and their actions represented to the crowd. First of all, the amalgamate of statehood, Orthodox Christianity and militarism was as much intended by the organizers (or indeed the Serbian state which legally defined the holiday in the described manner) as it was performed by the crowd, but these two performances were somewhat different. While the woman hosting the event was careful to repeatedly point out that the event also celebrated The Republic of Serbia’s Statehood Day, the symbols carried and worn by the audience were unmistakably monarchist. Nevertheless, neither the organizers did clearly reject the royal idea, as they invited the heir to the throne and allowed the open promotion of the royalist party he sponsors. This illustrates that the identity of Serbian state remains somewhat incomplete and ambiguous; while constitutionally a republic, in its quest to define its Serbianness, the state is compelled to turn to its ‘authentic’ monarchic roots as opposed to republicanism associated with the failed Yugoslav project. Furthermore, the audience reacted rather positively to the crown prince, whereas the government officials and the municipality president were identified as representatives of the ‘regime’ which, given its declared pro-European and liberal orientation, could only be an enemy. By responding to them with the calls to rise up (Ustanak!), the crowd mapped the popular resistance against the present regime onto the heroic rebellion against the Ottomans; this semantic association simultaneously marked the government as a rule ‘foreign’ to the nation. Finally, the Church dignitaries and their actions were approached with the highest respect and allegiance, thus completing the performative construction of a Serbian nation which, now and then, longs for a neo-Byzantine monarchic state supported by the strong military and sanctified by the blessings of the national Orthodox Church. Paradoxically, although the present regime was openly dismissed by the audience as the enemy of the desired statehood, it had itself supported such a construction by adopting a favourable legal framework and by delegating officials dealing with religious and military affairs to represent the government in the event.

The Distant Democratizer: Representations of the EU and Their Political Uses in Serbia (ABSTRACT)

This is an abstract for a paper I will present in the forthcoming conferenceSocial, Political and Economic Change in the Western Balkans on 25-26 May in Sveti Stefan, Montenegro.

The European project is ostensibly associated with democratization, but whether and how socio-political discourses and practices in countries aspiring to the EU accession reflect this link is often poorly understood. Yet this is crucial for examining what meeting the Copenhagen criteria means at various levels of discursive and political practice and what shapes the outcomes. How important is the equation between democratization and European integration, and which other representations are prominent? Do legal and institutional reforms required and assisted by the EU lead to a deep transformation and democratization of the overall governance of the society? In my anthropological work-in-progress, I suggest that the preoccupation with normative ideas, legal harmonization and formal institutions proves profoundly insufficient for understanding the whole range of representations of the EU and their political uses in Serbia, a potential candidate country whose “transition” from socialism to a liberal market democracy was even less linear and predictable than in most other postsocialist countries. Several strategically chosen “sites” serve as my empirical points of inquiry on the interconnected processes of political change: democratization, Europeanization, the rebuilding of institutions and civil society. In this paper, I first investigate the revealing empirical case of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade to demonstrate that EU-promoted democratic values such as LGBT rights can easily end up presented and approached, by both the supporters and opponents in their own specific ways, as something foreign. The violent protesters, on the other hand, approximated more closely a mass-based and culturally entrenched nationalist movement, in some features reminiscent of an attempt at the Hindu “conservative revolution”. While the militarization of the Parade ensured that no participants were harmed, which was applauded by the European Commission and the European Parliament, it also limited its transformative impact and enabled politicians to play up the governmental-technological rhetoric of the state’s monopoly of power. Thus, if the EU is equated with democratic principles at all, this is not conducive to the overall democratization of the society because it easily lends itself to positioning these principles as alien and limited to alliances of particular civil-society and state elites. I elaborate this argument by analysing “political subjectivities” of civil-society actors who could be assumed to be the pro-democratic and pro-European avant-garde, but whose often ambiguous understandings of the EU and European integration encompass concepts such as modernity, tolerance or order alongside ideas of centralization, partiality, or incoherence. Nevertheless, there is unexpected light at the end of the tunnel. Jelena Karleuša, a pop-singer whose music and private relationships place her closer to the conservative-nationalist pole of the dichotomous folk model of “two Serbias”, surprisingly condemned the expressions of homophobia with a forcefulness which triggered and mainstreamed a lively public debate. To be consequential, the EU’s democratization efforts should move beyond top-down legal and formal-institutional channels toward a dialogue with local political culture, in order to destabilise seemingly natural divisions which represent barriers to a broad, grassroots societal transformation.

FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: EU TALK(S)

A few days ago, I travelled to Bruxelles for a presentation trip of the best grantee in the first cycle of the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, Stevan. Stevan, a journalist working for the Econom:east magazine, used the Fund’s grant to write a series of stories on the period of Slovak ‘structural reforms’ shortly before and after the EU accession - namely, the overhauls of tax, pension and labor market policies - and how this experience could be relevant for the challenges Serbia faces. In short, Stevan argued that while the EU accession gave momentum and felicitously helped the government legitimise what were often unpopular changes, there was no direct relationship between the accession and the particularities of the reforms. Doing so, he inevitably emphasised the importance of the political and institutional conditions of transformation ‘at home’. The Slovaks and Serbs working on the project considered his work the most interesting output of the first group of grantees, and invited him for a two-day trip to Bruxelles packed with meetings with officials and representatives of EU and EU-related organisations. Stevan built new contacts, presented his work to his interlocutor, but also used the opportunity to pose a journalist’s questions. Two more people attended the meetings with us, both of them representatives of the two partners in the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund  - Andrea of the Slovak Pontis Foundation, who prepared the trip, and Vladimir of the Center for Democracy Foundation. Meetings ranged from relatively formal to dining and wining affairs, and for some meetings, we were joined by other people with various relationships to the members of our group and motivations to participate, adding to the general feeling of heterogeneity and complexity.

However, the main cause of such impression were the highly divergent statements of EU officials with which we were confronted. On the first day of our visit, the Council of the EU was meeting in Luxembourg and deciding, among other things, on whether it will ‘forward’ Serbia’s application for membership’ to the European Commission and thus bring the country one step closer to the official candidate status. Although the Netherlands was expected to oppose such decision, in the end the Council did forward the application. In such emotionally charged atmosphere, the questions that Stevan and others of us posed to our interlocutors inevitably included the issue of Serbia’s integration process – whether it will be successful, what Serbia needs to achieve to become a member, and just how painful and slow the process will be. And some of the answers we were to hear could not, it would seem, differ any more dramatically.

We started the second day by visiting the office of Jelko Kacin, a Slovenian Member of European Parliament (ALDE) and a Vice-Chair of the EP’s Delegation for relations with Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. Kacin is a well-known critic of Serbian politics and his comments fully met the expectations. Talking about the supposed personalisation and de-institutionalisation of Serbian politics and concentration of all factual power in Tadić’s hands, Kacin seemed to indulge in totalising, somewhat theatrical statements, such as ‘there is no government’ or ‘there is no parliament’. When he proceeded to talk about ‘accession chapters’ more specifically, the tremor of his comments was mostly negative. At one point, he announced ‘I will say a few words in Serbian’ and, addressing mostly the Serbs in our group, added: ‘Srbija ne čuje dobro’ (‘Serbia doesn’t hear well’). All of this created an image of Serbia as unable or unwilling to become a standard liberal democracy, a pupil who is rebellious and perhaps a bit thick as she clearly has some trouble ‘hearing’.

Later on the day, we met Jana Katarina Lolić Šindelková, the deputy head of cabinet of the Member of the EC for Enlargement and European Neighborhood Policy Štefan Füle. A Czech born in Bosnia with a diplomatic experience in Serbia, Šindelková communicated in a no-nonsense, good-natured manner her strong optimism and belief in the ultimate success of Serbia’s European ambitions. While Kacin barely mentioned the yesterday’s Council’s decision, Šindelková congratulated ‘to everyone who holds a Serbian passport’ and said that the commissioner’s team were happy about the decision and that they now ‘have a momentum to work with’. She denied that the EC’s 2010 Progress Report on Serbia is so negative as politicians and the media presented it, and wondered how come everyone seems to have read it when the report is a yet-unpublished internal Commission’s document. To elaborate on her point, she read a sentence from the document – ‘there was some improvement on the status of Roma’ – and then explained: ‘that is actually quite positive, because there is “little improvement” and “no improvement” below that … You have to read this report in relationship to all the other reports from that year and the report on the country from the previous year … I’m still learning this English’.

As we were walking from the Commission building into a nearby café for the final meeting of the day, Stevan has remarked on the experience of talking to Šindelková and Kacin on one day that it’s ‘typical of EU’ that their opinions would be so discrepant. Not that he was very surprised or unable to understand – he knew that the institutional position of Šindelková, as an EC official for enlargement, differs markedly from that of Kacin, an MEP free to pursue his particularist party and individual agendas. However, it was clear that the trip must have been revelatory for his understanding of the ‘EU’; he could see with acute immediacy that the EU is in some ways a fiction encompassing many different interests and agencies.

Nevertheless, thinking back to these meetings a day later, I realised that there was something important these two meetings shared, something which collapsed them into one genre and also testified that Šindelková did, after all, learn ‘the English’. When talking about ‘accession chapters’ in EU–Serbia relations, both Šindelková (as she was scanning and reading aloud from the Progress Report) and Kacin (from the top of his head) adopted a certain enumerative mode, in which they typically first identified a chapter by a few keywords, then quickly assessed Serbia’s progress and/or how costly and difficult it will be for her to meet the criteria, and finally proceeded to a next topic. Some of these labels occurred in both conversations – ‘restitution’, ‘judicial reform’, ‘ICTY’, ‘(independent) media’; some only in one of them – ‘Kosovo’, ‘electoral system’, ‘regional co-operation’, ‘the Hague’, independent regulary bodies’, ‘minorities’, ‘organise crime‘ or ‘state of law‘ (which seemed to be Kacin’s direct translation of pravna država, the Slovenian as well as Serbian variant of the English ‘rule of law’). The meaning intended by these allusions was, in varying degrees, immediately clear to everyone present, as all of us were somehow involved or interested in the EU integration process of Serbia. For instance, the mere mention of the ‘ICTY’ evoked a more specific meaning of a ‘full co-operation with the ICTY’, and even more precisely, ‘arrest Mladić and Hadžić’. That this would be an inseparable part of accession conditions was also a matter of course, as evidenced by Stevan’s reaction to Šindelková’s mention of the ICTY: ‘to sa podrazumeva’ (‘that is implied’).

What I am trying to suggest is that these labels, in the established genealogy of EU–Serbia relations, serve as easily intelligible metonyms which stand for what are believed to be well-known and agreed-upon issues. (One label that at least I had some trouble putting quickly in a context was ‘restitution’ which seems to be the new issue just being stabilised, a hypothesis corroborated by Šindelková asking herself: ‘What’s the English word?’). They migrate intertextually and interdiscursively, appear in international and Serbian media, policy documents such as the 2010 Progress Report or Kacin’s motion for a resolution that his assistant printed out for us, but also in minds of politicians, officials and citizens. In the process, they become naturalised, self-perpetuating and self-evident. They get a life of their own and an ability to shape what is thought of as possible and necessary in this particular conceptual space, and are therefore key for an analysis of how the European integration of Serbia unfolds.

FIELD NOTES FRAGMENT: QUEERS AND PRIESTS

(…) As the second Belgrade Pride Parade approached the Vaznesenjska crkva (The Ascension Church) in Kneza Miloša Boulevard, mid-way to its destination in the Student Cultural Centre, the crowd got somewhat louder and rowdier. I soon learned what induced their derisive shouting and wolf-whistling. At the gate of the churchyard, behind the fence, a small group of mostly middle-aged men silently stood, headed by an Orthodox priest holding up a large wooden cross. His dour face, hard look and pressed lips made the meaning of his gesture clear – he was guarding the holy lands against the imminent contamination by sin. However, the paraders were eager to demonstrate their upper hand.

In the fleeting moment of a victorious sensation, it was easy to give in and forget the real-world conditions under which this momentary reversal of the balance of forces in Serbian socio-political landscape occurred. The section of Belgrade down-town in which the Pride Parade was able to safely complete its šetnja (walk) was hermetically closed, patrolled by a helicopter and encircled by thousands of policemen, gendarmes and military policemen. Only a few hundred yards away, mobs of young men were trying to break the blockade in heavy fights in which more than 100 people, mostly police, got injured. However, unlike in 2001 when fourteen participants of the first Pride Parade were estimated to be seriously injured, this time the state endeavored much harder to demonstrate its muscle power and ability to enforce rule of law and public order. The blockade weathered the onslaught, and scores of what the media branded as huligani (hooligans), ekstremisti (extremists) and izgrednici (disturbers), but also more neutrally as protivnici povorke (the Parade’s opposers) and demonstranti (demonstrators), were arrested. Some government officials, including President Tadić, rushed to exploit the opportunity in the media and, presumably addressing those in Serbia flirting with undermining the state as well as the international community, to weave together the governmental-technological rhetoric of the state’s monopoly of power with the high discourse of liberalism, democracy and human rights. Belgradians, disgruntled by the disruption and resulting material damage in the heart of their city, were mostly rather unimpressed and either called for stronger repression or condemned the parade as the cause of the trouble.

The scene at the church entrance further illustrates the enduring political and cultural polarization of Serbian society which the pride, owing to the way was executed, helped to materially objectify and forcefully visualise rather than question or reduce. Although the governing Democratic Party’s spokeswoman subsequently insisted that the mob had no ideology at all, this very episode, as well as the involvement of the Serbian Orthodox Church and major far-rights movements such as Obraz and Naši 1389 in organizing and legitimating the attempted carnage, speak to the contrary. As nebulous and vague the ideology may appear, to the hooligans’ minds a chain of well-established and naturalised conceptual associations linked, on the one hand, the LGBT rights movement with all foreign and sick elements threatening the Serbian body ethnonational and, on the other, the Orthodoxy with conservative nationalism and hegemonic heterosexual masculinity, and opposed the two mental constellations to each other. How else can we explain their appeals ‘Kraljevina Srbija, idite na Kosovo!’ (‘The Kingdom of Serbia, go to Kosovo!’) in a context where they could be more obviously expected to only vow ‘Jebaćemo pedere!” (‘We’ll fuck the faggots!’)? Or, on the other side of the church fence, how should we interpret the calls of the parade’s supporters (or, at least, those disgusted by the mob violence), in the internet and real-world discussions, to ‘arrest the priests’? (…)

1968 in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia

Watching the 1984 Yugoslav film classic Varljivo leto ‘68 (Elusive Summer ‘68) made me realise how different the experience of 1968 events had been in Yugoslavia and, say, Czechoslovakia. The euphoria of Prague Spring, marked by a liberalisation drive in politics and public life supported by the highest echelons of the party, resulted in the traumatising occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw pact armies and subsequent ‘normalisation’ of the country, i.e. its return to a heavy-handed socialist authoritarianism. In Yugoslavia, the student protests in Belgrade and (to a lesser extent) other Yugoslav cities were initially being confronted by force, but the country’s leader Josip Broz Tito ultimately stopped the protests by acknowledging some of the students’ demands and declaring that they “are right” (u pravu) in a televised speech. The celebratory TV propaganda featured in Varljivo leto speaks of hundreds of letters and telegrams of gratitude and loyalty that Tito received from representatives of all social and interest groups, including students, in response to his compromising address. Although following years showed that not everything was so cosy between the regime and the society, the contrast with what many must have felt towards their state in Czechoslovakia after 1968 is striking.

prep essay 2: the context of Serbia – postsocialist transition; nationalism; power of new elites; informal networks (part 2)

State reconfigurations: state-society relations, elites and informal economy

In this part of the essay, I would like to move on to examine how the Serbian state and society, in an ongoing interaction with each other, were being reconfigured in recent history. The extent to which conventional transitology is misleading will become more than obvious in the case of Serbia, in which relatively stable but highly ‘deviant’ (from the transition perspective) political and economic structures developed in the 1990s, and have been not fully displaced by standard democratic forms even in the post-Milošević era. These adaptations to the historically specific conditions can be observed at the state level – with the regime actively participating in the criminalization of the economy – as well as at the level of ‘survival strategies’ of the rapidly impoverished masses. Unfortunately, not much anthropological literature is available on these issues in Serbia, unlike on the more cultural and ideological aspects discussed above, so I mainly draw on authors with different disciplinary backgrounds.

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prep essay 2: the context of Serbia – postsocialist transition; nationalism; power of new elites; informal networks (part 1)

In his monograph on the 1990s ethno-national wars in former Yugoslavia, Hayden (1999) emphasises their constitutional rationality and an almost mechanical logic of the seemingly grotesque acts of violence, while van de Port (1998) finds it more interesting to juxtapose how the worlds of Gypsy-bar festivity and war both serve as the symbolic repositories of vague, inchoate truths that Serbs (and only Serbs) rediscover of their own troubled and bipolar identity. Although I think each offers illuminating and sometimes convincing insights, neither account is complete because it focuses only on one side of the story. Sharma and Gupta (2006) lead us to engage with the state through the analytically differentiated concepts of ‘state-system’ and ‘state-idea’ (cf. Abrams 1998), which facilitate understanding of the ‘cultural constitution’ of states by ‘everyday practices’ and ‘representations’, respectively. In discussing topics of ‘development’, ‘democratisation’ and ‘Europeanisation’ in Serbia, which seem so inextricably intertwined with macro-social transformations such as changes of the state form and political system, it is indeed necessary to pay attention to relevant ideologies, discourses, and cultural meanings as much as to more objectively defined social, political, and economic processes. A satisfyingly complex and nuanced picture of the context in which contemporary development and ‘transition’ interventions take place can be only reached by examining the dialectical mutual constitution of these two spheres of phenomena.
In this essay, I first offer some basic facts on Serbia’s history, economy and politics. I then move on to discuss the ideologies and characteristics of political culture which shaped the Serbian ‘transition’, emphasising the peculiarity of Yugoslav authoritarianism, positive identification with the state and collectivist political representation. In the next section, I look into the specificities of post-Yugoslav Serb nationalism through the prism of concepts such as Balkanism and nesting Orientalisms, and relate these to the ambiguous nature of Serb national identity, the sense of deep polarisation of the society, and the imagining of democracy and Serbia’s place in Europe. I subsequently shift my focus to examine state reconfigurations and state-society relations, i.e. the  dynamism of the state-system, under Milošević’s rule and after. An image of an emergent lived-in social reality, relatively stabilised and yet fraught with conflict, rather than of a temporary transition to a generic liberal-democratic destiny, should arise from this analysis. Following on from my previous essay, I attempt to show how these processes dovetail with intersecting and interrelated topics of elite change and informal economy, simultaneously placing all these in a wider transnational context of globalisation and Europeanisation. I have decided to integrate some tentative conclusions into these respective parts, rather than include over-abstracted general conclusions at the end of the paper.

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Turning Points in Fieldwork

In his book Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild, Mattijs van de Port alludes to the difficulties that the outbreak of war in 1991 in what was then the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia brought for his ethnographic research in Novi Sad. In this capital of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, the local bourgeoisie showed every sign of inclination to the modern Western European lifestyle and, in a slightly pompous manner, likened the town to ‘Athens of Serbia’.  Middle-class Novisadjani cherished values such as rationality, restraint, high-brow culture, career progress and advanced consumerism, and these were the stuff of their stories of themselves as fini ljudi (‘noble people’). Naturally, it initially did not seem an ideal site for van de Port’s intended research on bars with Gypsy orchestras and Serbs’ cultural practices of getting loose and wild in these places: ‘I remember how during the first months of my fieldwork I was in a state of mild panic about my failure to meet or make contact with authentic Serbs (…) what I saw around me was nothing but a thoroughly bourgeois society’ (40).

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Transnacionálne siete a diskurzy v participatívnej ochrane morských korytnačiek na Komorách

Pre slovensky a česky hovoriacich - môj príspevok a prezentácia z konferencie AntropoWebu “Elektronické sociální sítě”, ktorá prebehla minulý štvrtok v Plzni. Príspevok vyjde aj na papieri v špeciálnom čísle AntropoWebu.