This is an abstract for a paper I will present in the forthcoming conference Social, 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.
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