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.
Basic facts
The Republic of Serbia is a landlocked country in the Western Balkans region of Southeastern Europe, with a population estimate of 7,35 mil. in 2008 (Prirodno kretanje… undated). In the 16th century, most of the territory of the medieval Serbian empire was occupied by the Ottoman empire, with the northern region of Vojvodina controlled by the Habsburg Empire since the 17th century. In the course of national uprisings in the 19th century, the first modern Serbian kingdom came into existence, and it joined the autocratic Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia) in 1918. In World War II, the Kingdom was dissolved following Hitler’s invasion and Serbia was put under the rule of a joint Serb-German government, militarily opposed by Communist partisans led by Josip Broz Tito. Meanwhile, the fascist Croatian ustaša movement established the puppet Independent State of Croatia and subjected Serbs and other ethnic minorities to large-scale genocide. After the war, Tito became the Secretary-General of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and a key founding figure of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) which he ruled as a Prime Minister and then President until his death in 1980. SFRY was a multi-national socialist federation of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The political changes in the 1960s and 1970s, especially the adoption of a new constitution in 1974, created a radically decentralised and rather unstable state with a much weaker federal centre than in other two socialist federations – Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union (Vladisavljević 2008: 32–35). The new constitution also upgraded the status of Serbia’s autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo to one of de facto republics; while Serbian leadership effectively lost control over the provinces, their leaders were able to influence matters affecting central Serbia only.
During the economic decline of the 1970s and 1980s and following Tito’s death, the functioning of the confederation became increasingly strenuous and elite struggles ruthless. In the aftermath of the 1989 ‘antibureaucratic revolution’ in Serbia, nationalist mobilisations in the constituent republics resulted in a de facto disintegration of SFRY, which was formally dissolved in 1992. In Serbia, now forming the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) with Montenegro as the only other constituent republic, the president of the former Socialist Republic of Serbia Slobodan Milošević retained his power and established a semi-authoritarian ethno-nationalist regime dominated by his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). The latter was founded by Milošević in 1990 as a merger of the League of Communists of Serbia and the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Serbia. Milošević presided over a series of bloody conflicts, in the first half of the 1990s mainly in the Serb-inhabited regions of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (where he supported local Serbian para-states, with a vision of creating a ‘Great Serbia’ which would harbour all ethnic Serbs), later in Albanian-dominated Kosovo. The second sequence of hostilities resulted in the destructive NATO bombing of FRY in 1999. Milošević was finally ousted after the October 2000 presidential elections when massive street protests forced him to concede his defeat. FRY was reconstituted as a State Union of Serbia and Montenegro in 2003, which only lasted three years until Montenegro declared independence. In February 2008, the Autonomous Province of Kosovo (under the United Nations interim administration since 1999) unilaterally declared its independence, but the governments of Serbia and some other countries refused to recognise the new entity.
Although since the 1970s SFRY lived beyond its means and accumulated a large foreign debt, in 1990 it was one of the most affluent, if not the single most affluent, of the former socialist states. Economic development, however, was uneven, with Slovenia and Croatia most prosperous, Serbia close to the federal average and other regions, especially Kosovo, lagging behind. In 1990, Serbia’s GDP per capita at current prices was 4,288 USD; it continuously fell under Milošević’s mismanagement until it reached the bottom of 1,202 USD in 2000 (UN Statistics Division 2008).1 After the regime change, the economy recuperated somewhat, with 5.4% average growth of the GDP at constant prices in 2000–2008 (IMF 2009), and the GDP p.c. at current prices exceeded its 1990 level by 2007. However, this growth was largely jobless; unemployment rate actually increased from 12.1% in 2000 to 18.1% in 2007 (UNDP 2008: 220). Poverty is still perceived as a grave issue, although according to the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia poverty rate decreased from 14% in 2002 to 6.6% in 2007 (Republički zavod 2008: 12).2
Post-Milošević political leaders declared ‘normalisation’ of relationships and reorientation from China and Russia to the West as their major foreign-policy objectives. In April 2008, Serbia signed a Stabilisation and Association Agreement with the EU and is now a ‘potential candidate’ for EU membership (European Commission 2008). However, as I discuss below, the political situation was much more ambiguous than such a simple statement of facts might render. Relations with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the status of Kosovo, and political elite conflicts were amongst the most contentious issues. In March 2003, the assassination of the reformist prime minister Zoran Đinđić was a forceful reminder of the persisting influence of politico-economic networks associated with the former regime. Perhaps even more relevantly for an anthropological perspective, the EU romance is not welcomed by a large part of the population.
The Yugoslavian authoritarianism and Serb political culture
SFRY has been known for its specific, relatively decentralised and pluralist brand of socialism, often branded ‘market socialism’, which positioned it – almost in a symmetrically opposite way to Balkanist discourses – between the Cold War foes.3 Its distinctive principle of workers’ self-management, referring to the autonomy of enterprises vis-a-vis the state and their management by the workers, was already introduced, together with local self-government provisions, in the 1950s. The party also declared an ambition to draw a line between the functioning of its organs and those of the state. The 1960s, alongside the weakening of the federal government, brought yet more liberalisation, including pro-market reforms of 1965 and the tolerance of non-party associations and foreign travel and employment. The 1974 constitution, in its drive for ‘de-étatisation’ and the reduction of bureaucracy, sought to further reinforce the participatory mechanisms of self-management and municipal autonomy. In reality, the main target was the federal administration, and reforms resulted not only in a strengthened bureaucracy at other levels, but also fragmented the society, economy and government bodies, and failed to create any representative links between constituencies and the members of legislature (Vladisavljević 2008: 30–39). However, the relatively widespread view of ‘Yugoslavian exceptionalism’ (based on the particularities of Yugoslav authoritarianism further discussed below) demands that we specify whether it is appropriate to approach Serbia in a postsocialist framework, and to see which other ideologies (and their ‘posts’) have a had a formative impact on present political, social, cultural, and economic conditions of ‘development’, democratisation and EU integration in Serbia.
Following Humphrey’s (2002: 12–13) defense of the category ‘postsocialist’, I argue that this question should be addressed comparatively whilst also staying attentive to the specificities of historical developments in various cases. The logical locus of comparison, then, is the way the purported regime change took place. This proposition may superficially seem to support the Yugoslavian exceptionalism thesis, as nowhere else has the fall of socialism led to such large-scale and violent nationalist mobilisations. The other two multi-national socialist federations – Czechoslovakia and Soviet Union – dissolved peacefully. Nevertheless, the Yugoslavian party state and its relations with the society before and after its collapse did display some important structural similarities with other East European communist states, suggesting that an analysis within the general postsocialist framework may be meaningful.
Before proceeding to a discussion of the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ in Serbia, I would like to establish the specific nature of Yugoslavian authoritarianism. This was very much a party state emphasising core communist ideologies (albeit selectively) and, as I hinted above, still largely allowing only for a collectivist representation by the party. Nevertheless, its central features such as ‘corporatist structures, limited pluralism, relaxed cultural policies, a measure of charismatic leadership and highly selective repression, likened it to non-communist authoritarianism, prevalent in Southern Europe and Latin America during the greater part of the Cold War’ (Vladisavljević 2008: 49). The general failure of supposed socialist egalitarianism evidenced by the gap between workers and party members and the formation of workers’ group identity (Verdery 1996) has been intensified by the economic crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. In their protests in 1989, then, workers have been able to use some legitimate channels for dissent, which was moreover prone to be supported (actively or passively) by certain groups in the political class who formed strategic informal alliances with the protest groups. Indeed, workers did not challenge the regime as such but rather demanded more social security and an accountability, or the resignation of some highly visible (especially federal) officials. These bottom-up initiatives were subsequently exploited in top-down mobilisations by leaders furthering their own agendas, including Slobodan Milošević.
Vladisavljević argues that the regime was much more likely to tolerate workers’ protests (because of their centrality for the legitimacy of socialism) and those revolving around ethnic relations (due to the particular history of Yugoslavian multi-nationalism) than dissent of other kinds of groups. These were precisely the two ideological frameworks which coalesced in the ‘revolution’ of 1989–1990. They were activated in relation, on one hand, to the fall in the living standard of workers (accelerated by a pay freeze in the wake of austerity measures adopted in 1988), and on the other hand, to the long-standing ethnic conflict between the Serb minority and Albanian majority in Kosovo, formerly a taboo subject. The protests were therefore not a clear-cut case of the kind of ‘democratic opposition vs. the communist regime’ setup found in East Central European states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia or Hungary. The peculiarity of the SFRY’s authoritarianism and the complexity of protests explains why ‘[t]he focus was on the reform of Yugoslavia’s authoritarianism and state, rather than on democratization’ (ibid.: 205). The overarching mobilising element was the ‘antibureaucratic’ theme, which did not provide much guidance on what was to be done once the officials stepped down. In reaction to the general foregrounding of the political principles of ‘national sovereignty’ in the SFRY, which I discuss below, the main thrust of the protests shifted to more exclusionary nationalist themes in February and March 1990. But authoritarianism was not the only matter of concern. Combined with the constitutional logic of Serbia’s relations with the rest of the federation, this could only mean that the ‘transition’, as in the Soviet Union, was not only about regime change, but also about ‘the restructuring of complex multi-national states’ (ibid.: 206).
This still leaves unanswered the question of the vast differences between the ways the Soviet Union and the SFRY broke up. Vujacic (2004) considers that the explanatory ingredient missing in comparative literatures dealing with this issue is ‘political culture’, a term he uses to denote historically constituted relationships and orientations of the society to the state and political system. While he acknowledges the importance of factors such as institutions and the particularities of leaderships, he notes that these alone are insufficient to explain political motivations. Institutional setups of the Soviet Union and the SFRY made both Russian and Serbs likely to perceive the prospect of state disintegration as a challenge to their national identity, unlike those groups that sought to establish that identity by creating their own independent states (ibid.: 180). What made their reaction, then, so discrepant?
Vujacic identifies four important differences in the historical legacies of their state and nation-building (ibid.: 166–8). First, he contrasts the Russians’ ‘imperial’ identity, blurring the boundaries between them and other ethnic groups, with the Serbian experience of nation-building as a resistance to imperial domination and an effort to incorporate the ethnic diaspora into the state being formed. Second, while Serbs identified with the state in an unequivocally positive manner, the ‘patrimonial features of Russian autocracy’, found also in the practices of Stalinism, ruled out such an orientation in Russians. Third, the collective memories of Serbs emphasised victimisation by empires and proximate ethnic groups in World War II, whilst the Russians directed this sentiment at their own autocratic and later Stalinist state. And finally, Russians remained a Staatsvolk of the federation without any nationally defined institutions, but Serbs had their own political and cultural institutions which Milošević could later use for nationalist mobilisation. To complete his multi-factorial explanation, Vujacic mentions some contextual factors leading to ‘the selective reactivation’ of these legacies by elites, such as the extreme confederalisation or the Kosovo crisis touching on the heart of the Serbian national myth. Ultimately, ‘it was only the bitter disappointment with the failure of Yugoslavism that pushed many [Serbs] in the direction of ethnic nationalism’ (ibid.: 191). In these differences we can find an explanation for why former Yugoslav reverted to ready-made republican institutions during the state transformation.
These were not only the only resource available for Milošević to use in order to maintain his hold over the society. Another important component of the historical legacies of political culture and also one which was distinctly (post)socialist was the collectivist political representation, to which I alluded above. This organizing principle presumed ‘the people’ as a ‘solidaristic community’ whose interests could be expressed through delegation. Naturally, it was the League of Communists of Yugoslavia and its organs which claimed to represent the universal interests of all citizens (Greenberg 2006b: 184). It is easy to see how this underlying structural principle remained in place in the 1990s despite the transformation of the ideological ‘content’ of representation which ‘was no longer based on the universal socialist subject but rather on a collective subject defined by ethnic belonging’ (ibid.). Sociological research on social value orientations in Serbia in the mid-1990s confirmed a preference of a significant share of the population for the strong, illiberal leadership, which is a fertile ground for authoritarianism – be it of the socialist or nationalist variety (Djuric-Kuzmanovic & Zarkov 1999).
Serb national identity, Balkanism and nesting Orientalisms
It is important to stress that it is not the case that national identities would be completely irrelevant for political life in the SFRY; to the contrary, they often exercised a strong influence on political actors. The important difference was that the post-SFRY regimes officialised the political significance of national belonging and elevated it to a key ideological principle. Anthropologists of socialism and postsocialism have noted the heritage of the ‘socialist nation’ and its significance for post-transtition ethno-nationalist political processes in general (e.g., Verdery 1996), but it is apparent that nationalisms in the former Yugoslav space have been of particular importance: both specific and extraordinarily potent. To fully appreciate this, we must pay at least brief attention to scholarly debates on Balkanism. This scholarship is useful in that it amends the simplistic instrumentalism of some analyses of nationalist mobilization by bringing out deep historical roots of the images and rhetoric being exploited by recent leaders. ‘While some of the rhetoric we analyze may in fact constitute conscious political manipulation, much of it is probably done without full awareness of the implications of the images contained within it’ (Bakić-Hayden & Hayden 1992: 3).
Todorova (1994) coined the term ‘Balkanism’ for the part of Europe formerly ruled by the Ottoman empire and argued that it developed its specific rhetorical repertoire, out of the region’s liminal, undetermined position between the ‘East’ and ‘West’, and is thus not a mere variety of Orientalism. Bakić-Hayden (1995) countered that this rhetoric would be impossible to understand outside the Orientalist framework because it shares its basic logic. In any case, the complexity and abundance of ‘the axes of European symbolic geography’ running through Yugoslavia is striking – the region has been and stays the meeting site of empires (Eastern and Western Roman; Ottoman and Habsburg), scripts (Cyrillic and Ottoman Turkish vs. Latin), religions (Orthodox Christianity and Islam vs. Catholicism and Protestantism) and cold-war politics and ideologies (the ‘in-between’ position mentioned before) (Bakić-Hayden & Hayden 1992: 4). To move closer to the present, divides between the EU member and non-member states can be added to the list.
The related term of ‘nesting Orientalisms’ introduced by Bakić-Hayden is very useful for an analysis, both of the dissolution of the SFRY and of state-society relations under Milošević and after. Bakić-Hayden (1995: 918) conceives of this concept as a ‘gradation of “Orients”’ which reproduces the original Orientalist dichotomy in a series of hierarchically ordered spatial scales: ‘In this pattern, Asia is more “East” or “other” than eastern Europe; within eastern Europe itself this gradation is reproduced with the Balkans perceived as most “eastern”; within the Balkans there are similarly constructed hierarchies’. These rhetorics and images were invoked, for instance, by politicians, foreign commentators and other actors to draw a line between Croatians and Slovenes as ‘Catholic’, ‘Western’, ‘frugal’, ‘modern’ etc., and other former Yugoslav nations as ‘Orthodox’ (or ‘Muslim’), ‘Oriental’, ‘lazy’, and ‘traditional’. More locally, then, purported characteristics of the Serbian nation may be contrasted with those of Albanians and Muslims, which are terms often used interchangeably. Significantly, Bakić-Hayden argues that the defining terms of this dichotomous model ultimately establish conditions for its own contradiction, manifesting itself by ‘nesting divisions’ within each group which has previously used the strategy only vis-à-vis other groups. I will attempt to show that this is indeed what has been happening in Serbian political discourses since the 1990s.
Balkanism was undoubtedly a key factor contributing to the troubled, ambiguous nature of Serbian national identity. Van de Port (1998) has attempted to draw parallels between the worlds of Gypsy-bar festivity and war and to show their place in the Serbian collective imagination. While I think his argument suffers from an excessive idealism, what I find valuable is that he demonstrates the historical embeddedness of truths and forms of knowledge represented by these worlds in the insecurity of Serbian identity. Serbs interpreted the war as ‘the return of the wild man’ – of the irrational, primitive, very Balkan being they thought they had managed to bury a long time ago. While some consciously chose to embrace this primitivism, others rejected it and struggled to uphold their civilised self-identity. Another reaction to the war was its discussion in a kind of dialogue with ‘a strict, disciplined foreman who was situated somewhere in the West’ (ibid.: 74), to whom they felt obliged to explain and justify their actions (if they could); in other words, they engaged in a self-scrutiny through the other’s eyes. To explain these reactions, van de Port travels back in history to examine the formation of the Serbian nation, and while he focuses on developments in Vojvodina, I think the gist of his account holds for Serbia as such. The Serb urban middle class rising in the 18th century adopted the lifestyle, values and overall civilisational model of the bourgeoisie of Central European metropoles and distanced itself from what they and foreign writers perceived as the primitive ways of the Serbian village. However, from the early 19th century there were also signs of a desire for Serb national emancipation, driven especially by Herder’s romantic philosophy, and this led to a celebration of all things wild, rural and uncivilised. Van de Port claims this is the source of the duality which continues to inform and constrain thinking about what it means to be a Serb: ‘The way in which the idea of a Serb identity has arisen can best be understood as a process of bargaining. To put it simply: the Serbs distance themselves from their Turkish past and as Christians they wanted to be recognised as Europeans. But the Europeans whose recognition they sought were not at all interested in the “European Serbs”’ (ibid.: 85).
Under socialism, peasantry and rurality have been largely devalued as stagnant and regressive, and the progress-oriented Titoist regime sought to forge a strategic alliance with educated urbanites. However, the boundaries between urban and rural society and culture were much fuzzier in practice than in ideology. In 1948, 73% of Yugoslavs were living on farms, as compared to only 27% in 1981 (Bougarel 1999: 165). Between the same years, the population of Belgrade soared from 385,000 to 1,470,000 (Gordy 1999: 106). Therefore, a huge sector of the society could be described as ‘semi-urban’ – uprooted from the countryside and living in an urban space, but often poorly integrated in the new environment and culturally rural. Moreover, the unbalanced modernization of Yugoslav society provoked its ‘retraditionalization’ starting in the 1960s – ‘the resurgence of nationalist ideologies and communalist practices in political life, and the reactivation of clan and kin solidarities’ (Bougarel 1999: 165). Yugoslav cinematography and the music scene also did not shy away from using primitive and Balkanist signs, images and cultural forms (van de Port 1998: 88). The reemergence of this aspect of national identity in the 1990s was therefore not as sudden and surprising a resurrection as it may have seemed.
A key role in the Serb nationalist imagination was played by myths of ‘the peasant’. The nobility and purity of the peasant character, which was celebrated by the classics of Serbian ethnology in the best of romantic traditions known to anyone born in East Central or Southeast Europe, has resurfaced powerfully in the nationalist discourses of the 1990s. Moreover, ‘[t]his way of thinking remained at the core of Serbian ethnology, with its insistence on intensive study of small-scale rural communities and exclusively focus on “what our people (naš narod) say”’ (Boškovic 2005: 10) – under an apparent influence of German Volkskunde also found in other parts of Eastern Europe. Some Serb ethnologists took cultural relativism to its extreme by arguing that authors writing against nationalism, and likewise ‘the West’ in general, tend to Orientalise their ideological opponents, and therefore only Serbs can understand Serbs. Balkanism or Orientalism was thus not only a discursive dividing line within the former federation and a tool in the process of its destruction, but also a resource of political mythology which can be wholeheartedly embraced, for instance in the long tradition of dichotomisation of the ‘Slavic soul’ and the ‘rotten West’ (Čolović 2002: 89–97). Indeed, under Milošević the figure of the rural peasant came to define the ideal of national identity, while cities (especially cosmopolitan Belgrade) were targeted by hostile nationalists as rotten, liberal and spoiled by Westernisation (Gordy 1999: 12–14).
Of course, these images of external and internal ‘enemies’ victimising Serbs were exploited by the regime to call for ‘national unity’, repress the opposition, and consolidate its own bases of support. ‘Nation’ and its enemies became undisputed, ‘benchmarking’ principles of the political discourse to such an extent that they were used not only by the SPS, but also by a large part of the opposition – often even in a more radical way. (Vojislav Koštunica, who defeated Milošević in the 2000 presidential elections, was about as ‘nationalist’ as him; and this was probably the reason for his success with voters alongside the chronically fragmented character of the opposition which decided to rally around him.) This was not only because these parties sought to contrast themselves with the SPS, which retained much of the communist symbolism (Pavlaković 2005: 19), but also because Milošević’s pragmatic approach to nationalism became increasingly more apparent and the critique of this trend enabled opposition parties to attract his electorate.
From the 1990s onwards, there was much talk about deep cleavage in the Serbian society, dominated by an image of ‘two Serbias’. Naumović (2002: 25–26) argues that this dichotomy was constructed by those who self-identified as the ‘Other Serbia’ – opposition protesters, intellectuals, urban middle class, with a generally liberal, cosmopolitan, democratic orientation. ‘Them’ was a Balkanised Milošević’s Serbia, associated with nationalist, pro-authoritarian, and conservative rural and semi-urban groups. Both Greenberg (2006) and Gordy (1999) describe widely shared folk models of the society and politics in which they draw conceptual links, on one hand, between political orientations and social classes emerging, collapsing or being reconfigured, and on the other hand, particular socio-cultural classifications and identities, such as rural or urban, and cultural forms like turbofolk. Gordy seems convinced that these folk models more or less accurately captured the empirical reality, and he talks about the regime’s destruction of (political, informational, musical) alternatives as its strategy of self-preservation. Greenberg also relates the disgust of urbanites with what they felt was a domination of cities by political ideologies and cultural forms of people from the countryside and suburbs, but adopts a less objectivist conception of a ‘popular imaginary’ conflating origin, politics, and aesthetics. For instance, she analyses turbofolk as ‘a musical and aesthetic genre that glamorized national folk music (including composition, lyrics, costumes, and modes of performance) and valorized militaristic masculinity; hypersexualized, submissive forms of femininity; and Serbian national pride. So-called peasant, criminal, and military cultural forms and consumption practices became linked in the popular imaginary’ (2006b: 135–6).
In fact, the dividing line between the ‘two Serbias’ is probably experienced by many people as running through the core of their very own individual identity. In his article on the reception of the main character of a TV show – a stereotypically Balkan and nationalist ‘ordinary man’, lamenting the gone socialist past – Zivkovic (2007) shows how people chose between various forms of irony, semi-irony and literal understanding in identifying with, rejecting or simply engaging with the character. These ambiguous politico-cultural identities evolve in the context of public polemics about ‘simple folk’ and ‘missionising intelligentsia’ which is ‘not in tune with their own people’ (ibid.: 601). Zivkovic is therefore led to analyse the political scene and people’s orientations to it as unsettled and constantly shifting, and this incoherence and opacity of the social world as being expressed by folk tropes like ‘mud’ and ‘slush’.
This is of course also the framework in which Serbian ‘democracy’ and the place of the country in Europe is being imagined. At the elite level, as I have already noted, there was a wholesale embrace of EU integration in 2000, but this was then problematised by the strained relations with the ICTY. Kostovicova (2004: 23) proposes to differentiate between two meanings of Europe: Europe-as-identity (an experiential/cultural aspect) and Europe-as-EU (a procedural/institutional aspect). Although for the democratic elite these two meanings initially merged into one of a democratic polity where Serbia should secure its place, the perceptions of a part of the democratic block (one favouring ‘soft transition’) of the ICTY as victimising and biased against Serbia led to an emergence of a new meaning of Europe-as-identity compatible with Serb ethno-nationalism. ‘These views are reminiscent of the Milošević-era self-centred spatiality of Serbian identity defined in opposition to Europe when Serbs’ ethnic sense of nationhood was in open conflict with Europe’s urban, cosmopolitan and democratic culture’ (ibid.: 25). Furthermore, Milošević’s legacy of unsettled international and internal borders (especially in relation to Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina) with which the Serb politicians still struggle, resulted in a paradoxical equation of European integration with ‘normalisation’ and ‘defense of national interests’, i.e. the kind of modern rather than post-modern territorial strategy which the process is supposed to transcend. However, the more neutrally perceived separate meaning of Europe-as-EU4 enabled the democratic leaders and their voters to maintain support for the integration process.
At the societal level, democracy has come to be identified, at least by the urban middle-class youth, with electoral and consumer choice and overcoming poverty, international isolation and the general sense of failure bequeathed to them by the Milošević regime (Greenberg 2006b: 193). The trope of ‘catching up’ stresses the need to accelerate the transition to a liberal market democracy through negotiating political and economic entitlements with institutions such as the EU and the IMF. All this, however, is necessarily only a part of the vast cultural repertoire through which democracy is conceptualised, often drawing on the kind of socio-cultural labeling discussed above. In another paper, Greenberg (2006) describes how the media and public figures focused on the ‘proper’ (democratic, heteronormative, middle-class, productive) masculinity and family life of Đinđić during his funeral, contrasting these with the non-productive, criminal, tribal and homosocial masculinities of those held responsible for his death. Telling stories about what kind of men Đinđić and his assassins were, enabled the government to divert attention away from its vulnerability to these criminal elements and the inconvenient continuities with the previous regime; many post-2000 politicians, including Đinđić, were somehow implicated in the state violence of the previous establishment. It also enabled the relegitimising of the ‘love of nation’ as democratic and based on ideas of progress and individualism. Thus posited, Đinđić ‘could serve symbolically as the head of a family of citizens, mediating the production of the “right kind” of political subjects: middle class, educated, and European’ (ibid.: 143).
