MIKUS WP062013 - Centre for Southeast European Studies

‘European Serbia’ and its ‘civil’ discontents:
beyond liberal narratives of modernisation
Marek Mikuš
London School of Economics and Political Science
Working paper, No. 7
June 2013
Summary
In 2010–2011, Europeanisation equated with modernisation of the state and society
as such represented a key policy of the Serbian government. The sociopolitical forces
known as ‘Other Serbia,’ ‘Civil Serbia’ or ‘civil society,’ which had always identified as
‘pro-European,’ criticised the process of Europeanisation as formal rather than
substantial. Yet these ‘civil’ critics, of which particular attention is paid to the work of
the historian Dubravka Stojanović, shared with the government the same basic
understanding of Europeanisation which could be described as a Balkan variation on
evolutionist modernisation theories. Furthermore, Stojanović and other ‘civil’
historians contextualised this ‘blocked’ Europeanisation as the most recent episode in
a long history of perpetual Serbia’s failure to modernise. This narrative was based on
the essentialist idea of Serbian ‘premodern political culture,’ a teleological and
ideologically driven notion of modernisation, and a pre-theoretical concept of the
state. Building on contemporary approaches to modernity and the state in
anthropology and other disciplines, the paper suggests ways of reframing these
issues and identifies possible avenues of an alternative research programme.
About the author
Marek Mikuš is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the London School of Economics
and Political Science. His forthcoming dissertation with the working title What
Reform? ‘Civil Societies,’ State and Social Antagonism in ‘European Serbia’ addresses
a set of variously synergic, contradictory, or simply concomitant political processes
which transform the governance of society and individuals in the liberalising and
‘Europeanising’ Serbia. These intentional but open-ended ‘reforms’ are traced across
the state and multiple ‘civil societies,’ understood as ‘scenes’ of associational life
which reflect and channel broader social antagonisms over desirable changes and the
essential meanings of the state, national polity, and democracy in Serbia. Marek’s
research interests include anthropological approaches to politics, state, civil society,
development, neoliberalism, postsocialism, democracy, European Union, communitybased biodiversity conservation, and Roma in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Contact:marek.mikush@gmail.com
Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................. 2
The narrative and the reality of ‘European Serbia’ .......................................................... 6
‘Europe’ and the ‘civil orientation’ in Serbia .................................................................... 9
Europeanisation as a modernisation myth and its ‘civil’ critique ..................................... 13
Serbian history as a Manichean struggle of anti-modernism and modernism .................. 28
Toward rethinking modernisation and the ‘state’ in Serbia ............................................ 34
In lieu of conclusions .................................................................................................. 47
Bibliography ............................................................................................................... 48
2
Introduction
If modernity is defined by its claim to universality,
this always remains an impossible universal.1
Their becoming more ‘European’ can only be expected
to make [the Balkans] more ‘Balkan.’2
At the time of my ethnographic fieldwork in Serbia in 2010–2011, government, media and
public discourses overflowed with references to ‘Europe’ equated with the EU. On Serbia’s
‘path to Europe’ (put u Evropu),3 the daily subject were not just the mundane whens and
hows of EU integration, but also how ‘European values’ – typically unspecified, but clearly
superior – are being, or failing to be, promoted, introduced, accepted, and adopted. RTS,
the state TV, even branded itself as the ‘public service of a European Serbia’. Presumably,
there would be hardly any need for all of this if the Europeanness of Serbia could be taken
for granted; rather, it was seen as just becoming or, more precisely, being made
European. In the same time, these discourses, as will be illustrated below, tended to
equate
this
process
of
‘Europeanisation’
(evropeizacija)
with
a
comprehensive
modernisation of the Serbian state, economy and society. One of the effects of such
presentation was to glorify European integration as a flagship government policy at a time
of profound economic and social crisis that the government proved unable or unwilling to
address.
In this paper, I will examine the relationship between this policy narrative I call
‘European Serbia’ and socio-political forces described by a set of intimately related and
partially overlapping terms, such as ‘Other Serbia’ (Druga Srbija), ‘Civil Serbia’ (Građanska
Srbija), and broader ‘civil society.’ The meanings of these terms and their mutual
relationships will be analysed below; at this point, it suffice to say that these public
intellectuals and NGO leaders and workers were consistently (self-) represented as sharing
what has become known as a ‘civil’ (građanski) political orientation. An aspect of this
1
Timothy Mitchell, ‘Introduction,’ in Questions of Modernity, ed. by Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. xi-xxvii (p. xiv).
2
John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia (London: C. Hurst, 2000), p. 24.
3
This and all other translations from Serbian are mine.
3
relatively firmly established concept is a ‘pro-European’ (proevropski) attitude. One might
be thus easily led to assume that the self-identified ‘civil’ Serbians would undeservedly
support the current policy of Europeanisation. In fact, the opposite was true – they
subjected it to harsh criticisms, the essence of which was that the commitment to
Europeanisation had been so far largely rhetorical and as such it amounted to an imitation
of reform rather than genuine modernisation. The responsibility for this was attributed
especially to Serbian political and state elites who were supposedly afraid that a
‘substantial,’ as opposed to merely formal, Europeanisation would subvert their unbridled
power. The timing of these accusations was superficially all the more surprising since the
2008–2012 government was led by the Democratic Party, a former backbone of the
opposition to the regime of Slobodan Milošević and thus a party of long-standing, if lately
increasingly questioned, ‘civil’ credentials. Together with charges of corruption and
institutional abuses, this discontent with the process of Europeanisation paved the way to
the eventual bitter divorce between the Democrats and some of their hitherto ‘civil’ allies.
After such influential public figures as Vesna Pešić and others openly supported the notso-civil opposition in the run-up to the 2012 general elections, the then Democrat leader
and President Boris Tadić famously relabelled them as ‘irresponsible intellectuals.’4
At the first sight, these critiques – of which I will pay a particular attention to those
formulated by ‘civil’ academics, but also by NGO workers5 – seemed a welcome antidote to
the self-serving triumphalism of the government. But this was hardly an original
contribution as the generally bad situation in the country was apparent to everyone. More
crucially, these commentators failed to offer a real alternative for thinking about
Europeanisation and modernisation of Serbia. Instead, they reproduced a number of
deeply entrenched assumptions which obscure rather than clarify Serbia’s issues and
constrain the possibilities of imagining progressive, democratic and cosmopolitan projects
other than those based on liberalism and EU enlargement in its currently hegemonic form.
The aim of this paper, then, is to identify these assumptions and attempt their conceptual
4
Jovana Gligorijević, ‘Boris Tadić i klub neodgovornih intelektualaca,’ Vreme, 1118 (7 June 2012),
<http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1056445#nastavak> [accessed 2 May 2013].
5 5
The data analysed in this paper come from my ethnography and interviews with 26 NGO workers
(including two former) and fourteen participants in the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund project of
which ten were also current or former NGO workers. The Enlargement Fund was a Slovak-Serbian project
whose basic idea was to harness Serbian ‘civil society’ for a ‘transfer of Slovak experiences’ with integration
in order to generate arguments and policy expertise for Serbia’s accession. See my forthcoming doctoral
thesis, ‘What Reform? ‘Civil Societies,’ State and Social Antagonism in ‘European Serbia.’ The interviews
involved questions which elicited the interviewees’ opinion about Serbia’s integration or the key elements of
the ‘European Serbia’ discourse (e.g., ‘European values’). I also participated in a number of spontaneous
exchanges between NGO workers on these issues.
4
deconstruction and reconstruction. As I hinted, this is not only an academic exercise. Since
the Civil Serbia and its views largely dominate the space of progressive and left politics in
Serbia, they are in need of a sympathetic, yet thorough and honest critique if that space is
to generate more varied and widely accepted alternatives to the deeply unsatisfying status
quo.
The argument is developed as follows. The first section reviews the historical context
and main elements of the policy narrative of ‘European Serbia’ and illustrates its close
relationship to the idea of modernisation. This is then briefly juxtaposed with the reality of
Serbia as experienced by its citizens in the studied period. The second section addresses
the other part of the context crucial for my argument – the origins and ideological,
identitarian and social continuities of ‘civil’ thought and politics over past two decades,
with a particular emphasis on their pro-EU aspect. I will then proceed to an exposition and
critical analysis of the ‘civil’ critique of the current process of Europeanisation. My focus
will be on media appearances and scholarly writing of the historian Dubravka Stojanović
who has been among the most highly regarded public intellectuals associated with the
Civil Serbia in the 2000s. It was an NGO worker and friend of strongly ‘civil’ views who
first introduced me, with a professed admiration, to her work. Stojanović has been a
frequent contributor and guest of the seminal Civil Serbia radio show and later webcast
and website Peščanik (see below) whose editor once introduced her, in a special episode
marking the tenth anniversary of the show, as ‘our most favourite historian.’ 6 Thus, her
books and public appearances have recently represented a strong influence on the ‘civil’
perspective on the issues of Europeanisation and modernisation. Moreover, Stojanović’s
arguments manifest clear continuities with earlier historiography written and read by the
members of the Other Serbia. Characteristic for these works was the tendency to look to
Serbia’s past for clues for interpreting and evaluating its present and future. Focusing on
Stojanović’s thought is therefore a reasonably efficient way of addressing the dominant
‘civil’ reading of Europeanisation and its place within Serbia’s modern history.
The third section will introduce Stojanović’s critique of the current process of
Europeanisation and demonstrate that her understanding of the latter is broadly consistent
with both government and broader ‘civil society’ discourses on Europeanisation. In this
interpretation, Europeanisation emerges as a specifically Balkan mutation of evolutionist
6
‘Pisac komada,’ Peščanik (2 July 2010) <http://pescanik.net/2010/07/bonus-emisija-pescanik-02-07-2010mp3/> [accessed 2 May 2013].
5
modernisation theories, based on the assumption of an essential difference and clean
divide between ‘Europe’ and Serbia, the unexamined concept of Europeanness, and a lack
of analysis of the EU. Building on the anthropology of public policy, I will suggest that this
narrative about Europeanisation can be usefully conceptualised as a modernisation ‘myth’
in the sense that it might be proven as empirically false but continues to be upheld and
reproduced as ideally truthful. Its truth-value stems from deeply entrenched ideational
frames which are simultaneously temporal and spatial and derive from discourses of
‘transition’ and Balkanism.
In the fourth section, I move to the attempts of Stojanović and other ‘civil’ historians
to trace continuities between the current blockage of Europeanisation and earlier failures
of modernisation in Serbia. These efforts suffered from a number of biases and conceptual
weaknesses. Operating with the essentialist idea of an unchanging Serbian ‘premodern
political culture’ and the teleological notion of liberal modernisation as the only
modernisation worth of the name, Stojanović constructs a Manichean account of Serbia’s
modern history as a recurrent struggle between ‘modernising’ and ‘Europeanising’ (i.e.
liberal), and ‘anti-modern’ and ‘anti-European’ (all other) ideologies and forces. This
narrative reduces the variety of complex, historically and culturally constituted, and often
ambiguous perspectives on modernisation to the binary of ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-’ positions and
internalises and essentialises the failure of modernisation as an immutable ‘premodern
culture.’ A significant, if ambiguous role is accorded to the state – on the one hand, it is
argued to be the primary mover of modernisation in Serbia, on the other hand, it is said to
have largely failed to extend its modernising impact beyond its own institutions to the
society and economy.
The final section will turn to the hegemonic and anti-modern role of the ‘state’ in this
‘civil’ narrative about the recurrent Serbian failure to develop. I will show that the concept
of the state employed here is pre-theoretical and confusing, and suggest ways of
rethinking the relationships between the state and modernisation through an engagement
with recent theories of the state and modernity in anthropology and other disciplines. It
will allow us to see that the dichotomies of traditional/modern and Serbian/European, but
also those of state/society and state/economy, are themselves effects of modern practices
of representation and government and as such inhibit rather than enhance understanding
when employed as analytical instruments. Finally, some possible directions for future
research on state formation in Serbia in the nineteenth century as well as the process of
6
Europeanisation in the present based on these theoretical insights will be suggested.
The narrative and the reality of ‘European Serbia’
The policy narrative of ‘European Serbia’ assumed a hegemonic status with the victory of
the ‘For a European Serbia’ coalition, led by the Democratic Party, in the May 2008
parliamentary elections. With billboards claiming that ‘Europe means jobs for 200,000
unemployed’ or ‘Europe means a safe future,’ the coalition clearly made EU integration the
centrepiece of its programme, in contrast to the anti-EU stance of its main contender, the
Serbian Radical Party. Accordingly, the elections were interpreted both at home and
abroad as a historical choice between ‘pro-European’ and ‘nationalist’ forces.7 The same
applied to presidential elections a few months earlier which resulted in the re-election of
Boris Tadić, the Democratic Party leader and, by a general consensus, the true head of
the Democrat-led government of 2008–2012. The Democrats’ signature catchphrase
became the categorical statement that ‘Europe (or EU) has no alternative’ which they
repeated in the run-up to the elections and later.8 It resonated so strongly that an
informal group which organised several protests against Serbia’s slow progress toward the
EU called itself the Europe Has No Alternative Movement, and two opposition leaders
Vojislav Koštunica and Tomislav Nikolić felt compelled to jointly declare that ‘Europe has
an alternative.’9
The government did not stop at rhetoric and pursued EU membership more
energetically than its predecessors. During its incumbency, three major Serbian war-crime
suspects were arrested and extradited to the International Criminal Tribunal for Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY) which had long been a key precondition for any advance in the process
of integration. In September 2008, the National Assembly ratified the Stabilisation and
Association Agreement (SAA) and the Interim Agreement (IA) with the EU, signed a half
year earlier. Serbia started unilaterally to implement the IA from the beginning of 2009,
7
Elizabeth Pond, ‘Serbia’s Choice,’ Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 51 (2009), 123–136.
‘Nikad nisam rekao da EU nema alternativu!’, Istinomer (25 November 2011)
<http://istinomer.rs/izjava/nikad-nisam-rekao-da-eu-nema-alternativu/> [accessed 2 May 2013].
9
M. R. Milenković, ‘Saglasni da Evropa ima alternativu,’ Danas (20 September 2010)
<http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/politika/saglasni_da_evropa_ima_alternativu_.56.html?news_id=199774>
[accessed 2 May 2013].
8
7
thus partially liberalising its trade with the EU. In December 2009, the EU also started to
implement the IA and abolished visas for Serbian nationals traveling to the Schengen
Area. At that time, too, Serbia officially applied for membership. In October 2011, the
European Commission (EC) recommended that Serbia be granted the status of a
‘candidate’ which the European Council did in March 2012. Between 2008 and 2012, more
than eight hundred new laws and other norms were adopted or amended in order to meet
the EU ‘recommendations’ and harmonise the Serbian legal system with EU law.10 And
although the accession talks had not even begun, the EU was already stimulating and
supporting institutional transformations of the state.
While the politicians typically emphasised, in rather vague terms, the supposed
economic benefits of integration (EU funds, jobs, foreign investments) which would
enhance general welfare, they often identified it with a reform of the state and society as
such. Policy circles interpreted the process, to use a formulation I repeatedly while doing
fieldwork at the government’s Office for Cooperation with Civil Society, as the ‘engine of
reform.’ Serbia 2020, a policy paper which defined developmental goals to be reached by
2020, was modelled after the Europe 2020 strategy ‘in order to ensure full coordination of
socio-economic and political goals in the country with the process of joining the [EU].’ 11 At
a Democratic Party conference in 2011, President Tadić equated EU integration to a
‘project of the modernisation of Serbia.’12 The ‘European Integration’ section of the
parliament’s website read:
The road to EU is seen as a road to a more modern society, a stable democracy with a
developed economy, while political and economic requirements set by the European
Union – since they coincide with preconditions for a successful political and economic
transformation – are viewed as means instead of an end to development.13
However, there was a general feeling that the purchase of this narrative on the
reality was, mildly put, limited. While Serbia was supposedly ascending to a Europeanised
10
‘Nacionalni program za integraciju do sada u celini ispunjen 81 odsto,’ Kancelarija za evropske integracije
(3 September 2012) <http://www.seio.gov.rs/vesti.145.html?newsid=1289> [accessed 2 May 2013].
11
‘Serbia 2020: Concept of Serbian Development by the Year 2020 (draft for public debate),’ December
2010, p. 1.
12
‘Odustajanje od EU bila bi katastrofa,’ Press Online (4 September 2011)
<http://www.pressonline.rs/info/politika/174136/odustajanje-od-eu-bilo-bi-katastrofa.html> [accessed 2
May 2013].
13
‘European Integration,’ National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia (n.d.)
<http://www.parlament.gov.rs/activities/european-integration.606.html> [accessed 26 June 2011].
8
modernity, it was routinely represented – and seen by its citizens of all kinds of social
backgrounds and ideological commitments – as a country ‘at the very bottom’ (na samom
dnu). The uneven progress that the economy made since 2000 on rather shaky grounds 14
was to a great extent obliterated by the global crisis which reached Serbia by autumn of
2008. The already high unemployment, hitting young people especially hard, has almost
doubled and reached 25.5 percent by April 2012, while employment fell to the lowest level
since 2000.15 Caught between price hikes and stagnating salaries of some €400 in average
(and even less in the huge informal sector), most people experienced a painful decline in
their living standard. I heard them describe Serbia as a ‘sad country’ which has ‘fallen to
ruin’ (propala je), with ‘misery and sorrow’ (jad i čemer) everywhere you look. They felt
that ‘corruption’ was still endemic in politics, business (indeed, in the collusion of the two)
and almost all branches of the public sector. Wavering between irony and anger, people
traded stories about incompetent, lazy and unfriendly civil servants, stupid and greedy
politicians, and pathetic conditions in hospitals, schools, and police stations. In this
context, it does not seem far-fetched to assume that the discrepancy between the
promises and tangible benefits of integration would be at least one of the main
contributing factors to the recent dramatic drop in general public support for accession
from the high of 73 percent in November 2009 to the low of 41 percent in December
2012.16
It was in this historical conjuncture that ‘civil’ intellectuals came forward with their
critique of the process of Europeanisation and that I elicited the views of the ordinary rank
and file of ‘civil society’ on the same subject. But before these can be introduced and
analysed, the sources of this critique in the Other Serbia and ‘civil society’ must be
identified and contextualised in relation to ‘Europe.’
14
For a brief overview, see: Milica Uvalic, ‘Serbia’s Transition to Market Economy: Why Has the Model Not
Delivered?’, Montenegrin Journal of Economics, 8 (2012), 87–98.
15
‘Database,’ Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (n.d.)
<http://webrzs.stat.gov.rs/WebSite/public/ReportView.aspx> [accessed 2 May 2013].
16
‘European Orientation of the Citizens of Serbia: Trends,’ Serbian European Integration Office (December
2012),
<http://seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/nacionalna_dokumenta/istrazivanja_javnog_mnjenja/opinion_poll_13.
pdf> [accessed 2 May 2013].
9
‘Europe’ and the ‘civil orientation’ in Serbia
The roots of the Other Serbia, also known as Civil Serbia,17 go back to the early 1990s. In
that period of wars, hyperinflation and the consolidation of the Milošević regime, a fraction
of cultural, intellectual and political elites has mobilised around and for anti-war, antinationalist, liberal, anti-populist, and pro-EU politics – which, by transference, has itself
become known as ‘civil orientation.’ As the attributes of this orientation suggest, this was
in the same time a mobilisation against the (nationalist, illiberal, populist, etc.) politics and
values of what the Other Serbia dubbed ‘First Serbia’ (Prva Srbija) of the Milošević regime
and its supporters. Here are the origins of the dichotomy of ‘two Serbias,’ according to
which the Serbian society is divided to two camps by a deep but clean cut which is
simultaneously political, social and cultural.18 One aspect of this dichotomy is that the
‘First Serbia’ looks up to Russia while the ‘Other Serbia’ to ‘Europe’ and the West more
broadly.
As an attempt at folk social science, this dichotomy was always highly debatable –
not because the particular divisions and differences that it purported to interpret would
not be real, but because it split them into two monolithic categories which hardly describe
the complexity of the Serbian society. Nevertheless, it proved tenacious, and with it the
firmly established connection between the ‘civil’ and ‘Europe.’ In his preface to the 2002
reissue of two seminal compilations of talks by Other Serbia members from 1992–1993,19
the philosopher Radomir Konstantinović wrote: ‘The “Other Serbia” – that is, the European
Serbia – is a marginal Serbia, even today, and precisely as such – marginal – it is the only
possible future of Serbia.’20 The somewhat messianic tone (‘the only possible future’)
17
Other similar terms of reference include ‘civil public’ and ‘democratic public.’
Slobodan Naumović, ‘The Ethnology of Transformation as Transformed Ethnology: The Serbian Case,’
Ethnologia Balkanica, 6 (2002), 7–37 (pp. 25–26); idem, ‘The Social Origins and Political Uses of Popular
Narratives on Serbian Disunity,’ Filozofija i društvo, 16 (2005), 65–104; Stef Jansen, ‘The Streets of Beograd.
Urban Space and Protest Identities in Serbia,’ Political Geography, 20 (2001), 35–55. In this context, it is
worth mentioning that the adjective građanski means ‘civil’ as well ‘bourgeois,’ and as its equivalents in
other European languages it is derived from the word for ‘city’ (grad). This establishes strong cultural links
between civility, urbanity, and middle-class identity.
19
Druga Srbija, ed. by Ivan Čolović and Alojša Mimica (Beograd: Plato, 1992); Intelektualci i rat, ed. by Ivan
Čolović and Alojša Mimica (Beograd: Centar za antiratnu akciju, 1993).
20
Radomir Konstantinović, ‘Druga Srbija je Srbija koja se ne miri sa zločinom,’ in Druga Srbija: deset godina
posle (1992–2002), ed. by Alojša Mimica (Beograd: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2002), pp. 10–
12 (p. 11).
18
10
should not surprise us since, as we will see, Europeanisation and modernisation are, at
least from the ‘civil’ perspective, coterminous.
In the 2000s, a narrower group of influential public intellectuals – academics, artists,
think-tankers, lawyers, journalists, NGO leaders – continued to identify as the Civil/Other
Serbia.21 Simultaneously with their original professions, some members of this ‘current’
Civil Serbia have been politicians earlier (Vesna Pešić, Nenad Prokić, Biljana Srbljanović) or
still were at the time of writing (Miljenko Dereta, Latinka Perović, Nikola Samardžić). In
recent years, they were active almost exclusively in the Liberal Democratic Party. But
more often, they have been leaders of ‘civil society’ – founders and long-time directors of
human rights groups (Sonja Biserko, Nataša Kandić, the late Biljana Kovačević Vučo) and
other major Serbian NGOs (Miljenko Dereta, the late Vojin Dimitrijević, Sonja Liht, Borka
Pavičević). In some cases, they made one or more career moves between ‘civil’ and
‘political society.’ Thus, they were able to shape the interpretation and practice of ‘civil’
politics through their strong media presence,22 NGO activities, academic or journalistic
writing, and/or participation in institutional politics.
Similarly to ‘Civil Serbia,’ the hegemonic native understanding of ‘civil society’ in
Serbia was also consolidated in the early 1990. In most instances of habitual everyday
use, it refers to ‘nongovernmental organisations’23 which were established from the 1990s
onwards, typically with significant Western support.24 Most of these NGOs had strongly
identified with the described set of ‘civil’ political values. This was far from unique – in
many, though not all, postsocialist countries in the 1990s, the idea of ‘civil society’ was
21
‘Other Serbia’ was the title of one of the sections of pescanik.net, the website of the radio show and later
webcast Peščanik. The title was in use from 2007, when the website was created, until 2009. The section, as
well as the website and the radio show in general, has been the outlet for views of ‘intellectuals of civil
orientation.’ See: ‘O nama,’ Peščanik (n.d.) <http://pescanik.net/o-nama/> [accessed 2 May 2013]. On the
origins and post-2000 transformations of the Other Serbia from a perspective of its ideological opponent,
see: Slobodan Antonić, ‘Izvorna i projektovana Druga Srbija I,’ Pečat (2 March 2010)
<http://www.pecat.co.rs/2010/03/slobodan-antonic-izvorna-i-projektovana-druga-srbija-i/> [accessed 2 May
2013); idem, ‘Izvorna i projektovana Druga Srbija II,’ Pečat (12 March 2010)
<http://www.pecat.co.rs/2010/03/slobodan-antonic-izvorna-i-projektovana-druga-srbija-ii/> [accessed 2
May 2013).
22
In recent years, apart from Peščanik, they have been probably most likely to publish their texts in the
Danas daily, the Vreme weekly and the Republika monthly or to appear in various talk-shows of the B92 TV.
23
The quotations marks are meant to signal that this is a casual rather than legal term. In terms of their
legal status, NGOs in Serbia are actually either ‘associations of citizens’ (udruženja građana) or less often
‘foundations’ (fondacije). However, not all associations of citizens (e.g., sports associations) are considered
NGOs. ‘Nongovernmental organisation’ (nevladina organizacija) thus typically denotes a particular kind of
association or foundation: established from the 1990s onwards, implementing ‘projects,’ often with foreign
funding, and usually pursuing goals consistent with the ‘civil orientation.’
24
Bojan Bilić, ‘A Concept That Is Everything and Nothing: Why Not to Study (Post-) Yugoslav Anti-war and
Pacifist Contention from a Civil Society Perspective,’ Sociologija, 53 (2011), 297–322.
11
closely intertwined with a political programme of ‘joining’ or ‘returning to Europe’ and, in
the same time, opposed to invocations of the (ethnic) nation. 25 However, the Serbian
context of an openly hostile relationship between the state and ‘civil society’ in the 1990s
might have made this political aspect of civil-society identity stronger than elsewhere. At
times, the regime went so far as to attempt to actively repress NGOs that it considered
threatening by methods such as intimidation, raids in the offices and so on.
In the post-2000 period, the NGO world captured by the term expanded and became
much more heterogenous socially, politically, and functionally, so that today ‘civil society’
seems to refer to something broader than the more elite and exclusive Civil Serbia. 26 In
my experience, the range of views to which its members subscribe is actually rather wide
and one individual can hold, in various contexts and in relation to specific issues, a
combination of nationalist, cosmopolitan, liberal, or authoritarian opinions. To an
anthropologist, this does not come as a surprise. Nevertheless, the strong historical and
social linkages with the Civil Serbia, as well as the ideological rallying point represented by
the sufficiently loose and uncritically used adjective ‘civil,’27 have reproduced and
normalised the normative meaning of ‘civil society’ that it shares with the Civil Serbia,
including its pro-EU orientation.
Apart from the ‘civil’ actors themselves, their domestic adversaries 28 have also
maintained the association between the ‘civil orientation’ and pro-EU attitudes. These
more or less nationalist academics and commentators have come up with a variety of
25
Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), pp. 104–129.
26
My contention is that the socioeconomic referent of ‘civil society’ in most contexts is what I suggested to
call ‘NGO class’ – a fraction of middle class which found haven from the turmoil of ‘transition’ in NGOs but
whose particular social and educational capital also enabled many individuals to circulate or simultaneously
hold positions in NGOs, politics, and public administration. See Mikuš, ‘What Reform?’
27
In academic writing, this has been far from a purely domestic phenomenon. For instance, Sabrina Ramet,
a leading political scientist working on Serbia, recently classified media, parties, politicians, and other actors
in Serbia according to the organising dichotomy of ‘civic values’ (corresponding to ‘ethnic tolerance,
interconfessional harmony, human equality, tolerance of sexual minorities, and the rule of law’ and
‘associated, in people’s minds, with entry into the European Union’) and ‘uncivic values’ (‘nationalism,
irredentism, chauvinism,’ ‘associated with alliance with Russia rather than with the EU’). ‘Serbia’s Corrupt
Path to the Rule of Law: An Introduction,’ in Civic and Uncivic Values: Serbia in the Post-Milošević Era, ed.
by Ola Listhaug, Sabrina P. Ramet and Dragana Dulić (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011),
pp. 3–19 (p. 3). The problem with this is of course that the highly perspectival and historically and
socioculturally specific amalgamate of meanings is uncritically adopted as an analytical device, rather than
being itself subjected to analysis. It is therefore unsurprising that some of the particular results of this
pigeonholing exercise (such as the claim that the NIN weekly is ‘ultra-nationalist’) are rather astonishing.
28
For instance, Слободан Антонић, Срби и Евро-Срби (Београд: Чигоја штампа, 2007); idem, Културни
рат у Срвији (Београд: Завод за уџбенике, 2008); Mario Kalik, ‘Liberalni fašizam i rasizam u Srbiji,’ Nova
srpska politička misao (2008), <http://starisajt.nspm.rs/koment_2007/2008_kalik12.htm> [accessed 2 May
2013]; Mirjana Radojičić, ‘Srbija u procesima evroatlantskih integracija – između traumatičnog iskustva i
real-političke nužnosti,’ Filozofija i društvo, 17 (2006), 135–148.
12
derogatory labels such as ‘civilism’ (građanizam), ‘civilist extremism’ (građanistički
ekstremizam) or possibly most evocatively ‘liberal fascism’ to denote the ideology of the
Civil Serbia and its allies in institutional politics (especially the Liberal Democratic Party).
Always careful to select the most extreme quotes to paint a diabolic image of the enemy,
Slobodan Antonić accused these ‘Euro-Serbs’ of an uncritical admiration and unbridled
submissiveness in relation to the EU (even at the expense of Serbian national interests)
combined with an almost racist disdain for ‘ordinary Serbs’ that they considered primitive
and uncivilised.29 While these authors have primarily targeted the Liberal Democrats and
the Other-Serbian elites, they occasionally did not hesitate to take the next step toward
generalising about the ‘mondialism of our civil society’30 or ironically branding the ‘civilist
NGO sector’ as one of the ‘self-declared “European forces.”’31
Finally, the post-Milošević political establishment also contributed to nurturing the
stereotype. For instance, in his 2002 speech on the ‘role of nongovernmental
organisations in a democratic society,’ Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić noted their importance
for building a broad support for a ‘modern system and a European Serbia.’ 32 In 2005, the
government’s European Integration Office signed a Memorandum on Cooperation in the
European Integration Process with thirty NGOs.33 The government’s strategy of presenting
integration to the public likewise expects ‘organisations of civil society’ to participate in
‘communication activities’ and provide ‘constructive criticism’ of reforms undertaken on the
‘path to the EU.’34 As I will argue in my forthcoming thesis, ‘civil society’ indeed did not
spurn the opportunities for a greater cooperation with the state offered by the integration
process, but the actual ability of various NGOs to do so was very unequal. 35 However, the
case of the Europe Has No Alternative Movement shows that parts of ‘civil society’ did not
only cooperate with the government, but engaged in acts of outright veneration of its
29
30
Срби и Евро-Срби.
Veljko Lalić, ‘Raspamećuj,’ Press Online (29 May 2011) <http://www.pressonline.rs/info/komentardana/162924/raspamecuj.html> [accessed 2 May 2013].
31
Slobodan Antonić, ‘Politička korektnost na hotentotski način,’ Nova srpska politička misao (20 February
2011) <http://mail.nspm.rs/kolumne-slobodana-antonica/politicka-korektnost-na-hotentotskinacin.html?alphabet=l> [accessed 2 May 2013].
32
‘Uloga nevladinih organizacija u demokratskom društvu,’ in Budućnost civilnog društva u Srbiji, ed. by
Žarko Paunović (Beograd: MilenijuM – Centar za razvoj građanskog društva, 2007), pp. 9–12 (p. 12).
33
‘Меморандум о сарадњи у процесу европских интеграција,’ Канцеларија за европске интеграције (12
July 2005) <www.seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/Vesti/Memorandum o saradnji u procesu evropskih
integracija.doc> [accessed on 2 May 2013]; ‘NVO i Kancelarija potpisali Memorandum o saradnji,’
Kancelarija za evropske integracije (12 July 2005) <http://www.seio.gov.rs/vesti.145.html?newsid=252>
[accessed 2 May 2013].
34
‘Стратегија комуникације о приступању Републике Србије Европској унији,’ p. 13.
35
Mikuš, ‘What Reform?’
13
integration policy. As another illustration, since 2000, the European Movement in Serbia
(EMinS), a well-endowed pro-EU NGO close to the government, and another NGO called
the First European House Čukarica have been awarding the ‘Greatest European of the
Year’ (Najevropljanin godine) prize for ‘strenuous and successful work oriented to a faster
and more comprehensive integration of our country to Europe.’36 A number of politicians,
typically from the Democratic Party, received the award. EMinS pulled out of the project in
2008, explaining that it was impossible to agree with the First European House on ‘clear
rules, procedures and structure of organs which choose the awardees.’37 However, the
other organisation continued to award the prizes, including to a number of (mostly
Democrat) ministers of the 2008–2012 government.
Europeanisation as a modernisation myth and its ‘civil’
critique
For Dubravka Stojanović, ‘modernisation’ and ‘Europeanisation,’ two expressions that she
often uses in one breath,38 clearly represent near synonyms both in Serbia’s past and
present. Broadly in line with the policy narrative of ‘European Serbia,’ Stojanović interprets
Europeanisation as equivalent to a comprehensive and in-depth modernisation of the
state, economy and society. ‘Europe has its conditions. (...) I understand it as a bar raised
high that motivates for faster changes to which there is resistance in slower and
insufficiently modernised societies.’39 According to Stojanović, modernisation in Serbia
occurs by virtue of adopting ‘European values’ and institutions which she defines especially
as individualism, rationalism, liberal democracy (as seen from her emphasis on the rule of
law or ‘legal state,’ separation of powers, proceduralism, civil rights and liberties, and
strong ‘civil society’), and liberal capitalism (as seen from her dismissal of alternative
economic ideologies and both historical and current policies curtailing capitalist
36
‘Nagrada Najevropljanin godine,’ Evropski pokret u Srbiji (n.d.)
<http://emins.org/sr/mreza/najevropljanin.html> [accessed 2 May 2013].
37
‘Evropski pokret u Srbiji ne učestvuje u organizaciji nagrade “Najevropljanin godine,”” Evropski pokret u
Srbiji (24 February 2009) <http://emins.org/sr/mreza/downloads/090224-saopstenje.pdf> [accessed 2 May
2013].
38
See examples in her Ulje na vodi: ogledi iz istorije sadašnjosti Srbije (Beograd: Čigoja štampa, 2010), pp.
17, 77–78.
39
Ljiljana Begenišić, ‘Stojanović: Elita se plaši Evrope,’ Novosti (4 February 2012)
<www.novosti.rs/vesti/naslovna/aktuelno.290.html> [accessed 2 April 2013]
14
development).40 Accordingly, in a text entitled Steeplechase: Political Culture as the
Obstacle to the Modernisation of Serbia, she argued that the 2008 elections had revealed
that
...the society is dangerously divided into two practically equal parts which see the
future development of their state in two diametrically different manners. While about a
half of the citizens has opted for European integration, the other half has voted for
political parties of a decidedly anti-European orientation. This also meant a division
over all key questions of future development. It was an expression of deep
disagreements over essential problems such as transition, privatisation, foreign
investments, Euro-Atlantic integration, legal state, market economy...41
This quote, apart from rehearsing the narrative of ‘two Serbias’ in the context of EU
integration, also points to Stojanović’s generally pessimistic interpretation of the
achievements of Europeanisation which the post-2000 political elites proclaimed to be
Serbia’s strategical goal. In her recent media appearances42 as well as in her scholarly
work,43 Stojanović argued that politicians and other kinds of elites, including the ‘proEuropean’ government in 2008–2012, only claimed to work toward European integration.
They pursued a ‘formal,’ not a ‘substantial’ (suštinski) integration, which is why they failed
to carry out the required reforms or only did so very slowly and unwillingly. The reason
for this blockage of Europeanisation was that the elites were actually ‘afraid of Europe’
because closer integration inevitably implied the introduction of ‘rules’ bound to subvert
their unchecked power:
...I dubbed it ‘elite alliance’ in an attempt to explain a society where it is in the interest
40
‘Such society [as Serbia of the 19th century] provided a whole range of conditions suitable for creating
and consolidating populist, collectivist and egalitarian ideational concepts close to Russian populism which
were fundamentally opposed to the Western ideational models and the European system of values. The
ideology formulated already in the 1860s was anathema to the ideals of individualism and rationalism so it
was, naturally, also anti-European.’ Ulje na vodi, p. 76.
41
Ibid., p. 59.
42
Begenišić, ‘Stojanović’; Dejan Kožul, ‘Intervju – Dubravka Stojanović,’ Peščanik (6 November 2012)
<http://www.pescanik.net/2012/11/intervju-dubravka-stojanovic-2/> [accessed 2 April 2013]; Vesna Lapčić,
‘Njihova pravila i naša posla,’ Ekonom:east, 568 (7 April 2011), 16–19; Ljubinka Malešević, ‘Istorijski
automatizam,’ Peščanik (20 February 2012) < http://pescanik.net/2012/02/istorijski-automatizam/>
[accessed on 3 May 2013]; Rade Stanić, ‘Evropa nas mami, ali se stidimo,’ Press Online (16 January 2011)
<http://www.pressonline.rs/info/politika/147629/evropa-nas-mami-ali-se-stidimo.html> [accessed 7 April
2013].
43
Ulje na vodi, pp. 75–84.
15
of allied elites that modernisation not occur. A society backward and ruleless as this
suits politicians as well as tycoons, financial magnates, monopolists, but also
intellectuals, the church and many others. In such a society they easily secure a
monopoly position, nobody is strong enough to oppose them, and the elite sees an
interest in underdevelopment.44
I will revisit Stojanović’s argument about the causes of this blocked Europeanisation
below. What I wish to emphasise now that is that most members of ‘civil society’ I worked
with agreed with her perception that such blockage was evident. When I asked them for
their opinion on integration, a recurring motive in their replies was that in order to
harmonise the Serbian and European legal systems, a swath of laws had been adopted,
often ‘in a sped-up procedure,’ but then they were not actually implemented. Politicians
adopted the laws because they wanted to please the EU and create an ‘illusion of reform’
(privid reforme), as one NGO worker called it, not because they cared whether citizens
would benefit from better laws. The transposition from European to national legislation
was described as ‘formal,’ ‘mechanical,’ ‘copy and paste,’ without necessary adjustments
to the Serbian law and conditions being made.
The establishment of ‘independent regulatory bodies’ (nezavisna regulatorna tela)
was another frequently quoted example of formalist quasi-reforms conducted for the EU
audience. My interlocutors typically used this and similar terms to denote five institutions
established since 2004: the Ombudsman, the Commissioner for Free Access to Public
Information and for Data Protection, the State Audit Institution, the Anti-corruption
Agency, and the Equality Protection Commissioner. The EU has been recommending and
welcoming the establishment of these and other regulatory bodies but it also criticised
their lack of resources and the insufficient follow-up to their recommendations and
decisions.45 I heard time and again how some of these institutions had been established
but not given adequate ‘offices’ or even ‘chairs’ for years, or how other institutions refused
to cooperate with them (e.g., provide required information). Some participants speculated
that politicians had probably only agreed to set them up because they expected to find
ways of marginalising them later.
44
Lapčić, ‘Njihova pravila,’ p. 18.
European Commission, ‘Serbia 2009 Progress Report,’ pp. 9–10; idem, ‘Serbia 2010 Progress Report,’ pp.
8–9; idem, ‘Analytical report accompanying the document: Communication from the Commission to the
European Council and the Parliament: Commission opinion on Serbia’s application for membership of the
European Union’ (12 October 2011), pp. 15–16.
45
16
Another point over which there was a clear consensus and which was also made by
Stojanović was that the integration process was advancing too slowly. Given that it was
interpreted as the ‘engine of reform,’ this observation overlapped with the general
discontent with the sluggish and punctuated pace of reforms since 2000. My interlocutors
argued that the legacies of Milošević and the socialist Yugoslavia still posed a heavy
burden. In that context, many opined that deep-going, systemic changes were needed to
bring about a speedy transformation, but these were not the priority for political elites
preoccupied with ‘daily politics’ (dnevna politika) in order to stay in power. Ana,46 an exNGO worker who joined a government body, expressed it in the following manner:
It’s like this [government] building in which we find ourselves now, built almost 40
years ago, and since then – nothing. That’s all tiny repairs, tiny cosmetics, but nothing
substantial has been changed in this building. (...) [T]erribly many things should be
done here, I believe that in Serbia one should first work systemically, change things
systemically...
Similarly, two NGO workers from a small South Serbian town argued that the
government focused on meeting EU criteria which were ‘marginal’ and ‘not a priority,’ such
as the harmonisation of vehicle registration plates, instead of addressing the ‘main things’
like corruption.
Also targeting the politicians’ orientation to ‘politicking’ (politikantstvo) was the
disapproval of their frequent announcements of when Serbia should join the EU, described
as ‘bidding with deadlines/years’ (licitiranje sa rokovima/godinama). Since several such
timeframes had already proven unrealistic, the interviewees argued, the practice was only
making people frustrated and apathetic about the whole matter. It was also taking the
need for reforms out of focus. Closely related to this was the claim that politicians were
primarily using the accession as an ‘election slogan’ or ‘election topic’ to mobilise voters.
It’s an election topic with which people can be mobilised, and it’s again that possibility
to sell them a better life. Masses then believe in that. People don’t realise at all that
you first have to work on yourself and on the state so that you live better, and it’s
again that story, like, we’ll enter and it’ll be better right away.
46
Wherever practicable, research participants are anonymised.
17
(consultant working on EU-funded projects, Slovak-Serbian fund grantee in his
twenties living in Belgrade)
Thus, my interlocutors implied the point that Stojanović explicitly argued – that
politicians were not truly committed to European integration because it was not in their
interest. They also suggested that this lack of commitment and proper understanding was
a wider social phenomenon. As an NGO worker from a mid-sized Western Serbian city put
it, ‘an average citizen of Serbia, when you say “EU” or “European integration,” in his head
he has an idea he’s driving a jeep, and nothing else.’ They were not aware of ‘more
important aspects,’ such as that ‘everyone cannot throw garbage wherever they please.’
Dubravka Stojanović also argued that ‘what is presented to the people is that Europe
should give money and Serbia should give Mladić [one of the Serb war-crime suspects
wanted in the Hague].’47 For my interlocutors, the problem with this was that it devalued
the truly significant benefits of integration which they described with words like ‘order’
(red), ‘discipline’ or ‘system.’ They argued that this was a chance for Serbia to ‘put itself to
order’ (da se uredi), to become a ‘legal state’ and ‘orderly society’ (uređeno društvo)
where ‘laws and rules are being respected.’ A parallel with Stojanović’s emphasis on the
rule of law and the institutionalisation of politics as the pillars of European modernity is
evident.
This does not exhaust all that my research participants had to say about the subject.
But before continuing, it makes sense to step back and take a critical look at these
narratives about Europeanisation. Although ‘civil’ intellectuals and the broader ‘civil society’
circles tend to criticise Europeanisation as actually occurring government effort, their
understanding of Europeanisation as modernisation is essentially consistent with the
government’s narrative of ‘European Serbia.’ For an anthropologist, it is immediately
apparent that this rests on a set of highly problematic assumptions. To begin with, it is
assumed there is one system of values and governance practiced in ‘Europe’ and another
one practiced in Serbia. Of course, this is a dichotomy which fails to consider how the
economic, political, and cultural discrepancies between ‘Europe’ and the Balkans, as well
as the perception of the latter’s ‘backwardness’ and need for ‘progress,’ were themselves
constituted by the close historical relationship of the Balkans with (Western and Central)
‘Europe’ which dates from before the Ottoman occupation and continued to evolve under
47
Lapčić, ‘Njihova pravila,’ p. 18.
18
it.48
This is not to say that I support employing some kind of world-system or
dependency theory to reduce the causes which delayed the transformations like
industrialisation and urbanisation commonly, if misleadingly, equated with modernisation,
to the (semi-) peripheral or ‘satellite’ relationship of the Balkans to the centres of
European capitalism.49 A number of circumstances which cannot be properly addressed
here complicate such a conclusion. For instance, it has been suggested that some
important economic and demographic discrepancies from the Western Europe which have
likely contributed to the ‘underdevelopment’ of the Balkans had been consolidated already
by the end of the fifteenth century, i.e. even before the Ottoman occupation of much of
the region.50 The status of both Habsburg and Ottoman-dominated parts of the Balkans as
respective ‘imperial borderlands’ over the next five centuries has left them overwhelmingly
agrarian and rural – a legacy which the young Serbian nation-state found difficult to break
with.51 However, as much as I would certainly argue for a complex and non-determinist
explanation of the delay and shallowness of modernisation thus narrowly understood, I
also hold that among the factors to be included in such an explanation must be the
continuity of a semi-peripheral mode of Serbia’s integration into European and global
capitalism.52 This can be seen from: the extreme trade dependency of Serbia upon
Austria-Hungary as a single foreign market in the pre-1914 period;53 the unequal terms of
that relationship;54 the continuing predominance of manufactures in imports and
agricultural products and minerals in exports in the first Yugoslavia which left it still
predominantly agrarian on the eve of the World War II;55 the dependence of fast
industrialisation and the growth of consumption in the socialist Yugoslavia on external
48
Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia; John Lampe, ‘Imperial Borderlands or Capitalist Periphery? Redefining
Balkan Backwardness,’ in The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe, ed. by Daniel Chirot (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), pp. 177–209; Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, updated edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
49
For one earlier attempt in that direction, see John B. Allcock, ‘Aspects of the Development of Capitalism in
Yugoslavia: the Role of the State in the Formation of a “Satellite” Economy,’ in An Historical Geography of
the Balkans, ed. by Francis W. Carter (London: Academic Press, 1977), pp. 535–580.
50
Lampe, ‘Imperial Borderlands.’
51
Мари-Жанин Чалић, Социјална историја Србије 1815–1941 (Београд: Clio, 2004). Also available in
German: Marie-Janine Calic, Sozialgeschichte Serbiens, 1815-1941: der Aufhaltsame Fortschritt während der
Industrialisierung (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1994).
52
Traian Stoianovich, Balkan Worlds: the First and Last Europe (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), pp. 100–103,
288–293.
53
John R. Lampe and Marvin R. Jackson, Balkan Economic History, 1550–1950: From Imperial Borderlands
to Developing Nations (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
54
Michael Boro Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia 1804–1918, Vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), p. 411.
55
Чалић, Социјална историја, p. 410
19
credit (especially from Western sources), escalating in the foreign debt crisis and IMFsponsored stabilisation programmes in the 1980s;56 and most recently the fragile credit
and consumption-driven recovery in the post-2000 period, again producing a growing
debt, trade and current account deficits, extremely high unemployment, and limited
reindustrialisation.57 In sum, Serbia and the Balkans have been for a long time an internal
other of Europe both ideationally and materially, and the interpretation of Europeanisation
as an external source of modernisation obscures the true nature of this transnational
relationship of marginality and subordination. This is the reason why many discussions of
‘late modernisation’ tend to fall back on essentialisation inherent to Balkanism – but more
on that later.
There are further issue with the adjective ‘European’ which, used as it is without any
specification, suggests that there is a single and homogenous value system and
governance style which can be unproblematically considered ‘European.’ However, this is
far from obvious. As anthropologists have documented, even the possibly most European
of Europeans – EU bureaucrats – subscribe to the idea that there are persistent
differences between European national cultures (to brush further levels of complexity
aside) in relation to precisely such values as rationalism or commitment to rules.58 Others
have suggested that there are multiple European political modernities differentiated by, on
the one hand, their more ‘statist’ or more ‘civil society’ model of organising authority and,
on the other hand, their more corporate or more associational form of organising
society.59 Bearing that in mind, to declare as ‘European’ a set of values and institutions
more likely to be associated with certain national cultures and polities than others is to
further totalise the meaning of ‘Europe.’ Through emphasising individualism and
rationalism as purportedly universal modern and European values, Stojanović might be
reproducing the kind of ‘Protestant bias’ which, as Chris Hann has recently argued, had
distorted our thinking about modernity as such and led to the habit of implicitly treating
56
David A. Dyker, Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development, and Debt (London: Routledge, 1990); Milivojević,
Marko, The Yugoslav Hard Currency Debt and the Process of Economic Reform Since 1948 (Bradford:
University of Bradford, 1985); Susan Woodward, Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of
Yugoslavia, 1945–1990 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
57
Martin Upchurch and Darko Marinković, ‘Serbia from the 2000 October Revolution to the Crash,’ in First
the Transition, Then the Crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s, ed. by Gareth Dale (London: Pluto, 2011), pp.
229–250; Uvalic, ‘Serbia’s Transition.’
58
Marc Abélès, ‘Identity and Borders: an Anthropological Approach to EU Institutions,’ Twenty-First Century
Papers: On-Line Working Papers from the Center for 21st Century Studies, 4 (2004), Milwaukee: University
of Wisconsin.
59
Ronald L. Jepperson, ‘Political Modernities: Disentangling Two Underlying Dimensions of Institutional
Differentiation,’ Sociological Theory, 20 (2002), 61–85.
20
particularly Protestant ideas as ‘the template of modernity, both positive and normative.’60
Indeed, such conflation of the positive and the normative (and, related to that, of etic and
emic perspectives) in Stojanović’s work is apparent and will become even more so in the
discussion of her interpretation of Serbia’s failure to modernise in the past.
An alternative reading of the meaning of the ‘European’ in these narratives is that it
actually refers to the EU as the bearer of a unified European culture and value system.
One may only assume that is the case in Stojanović’s historiography since the empirical
detail and analytical depth of her treatment of Serbia is not paralleled by her approach to
‘Europe’ which emerges as somewhat of a black-box concept whose content is seemingly
self-evident. Nevertheless, the propensity to use ‘Europeanisation’ interchangeably with
EU-isation suggests that this interpretation is well-founded. Such usage glosses over the
fact that the relationship between Europeanisation and the development of the EU is not
one of perfect equivalence.61 Even if the two processes could be equated, it ignores the
ongoing and deepening contestation over the form and content of the EU as an emergent
form of statehood. There is no reflection of the fact that a common European identity is
being actively (and apparently not very successfully) engineered by cultural policies of the
EU rather than found ‘out there.’62 Finally, the gap between ‘European values’ (which the
EU readily appropriated as its own) and European practices is also left unaddressed,
despite indications that actual decision-making in EU institutions often bears little
resemblance to its stated norms of democracy, transparency, formalisation and
inclusiveness.63 If, as Stojanović suggests, one of the key issues faced by Serbia today is
the ‘problem of democratisation,’64 it cannot be taken for granted that the EU is the
remedy. More broadly, one might examine the observable effects of European integration
and how do they meet its various (not always necessarily compatible) developmental
objectives, such as ‘convergence,’ ‘social cohesion’ or even GDP growth and fiscal
60
‘Personhood, Christianity, Modernity,’ Anthropology of This Century, 3 (January 2012)
<http://www.aotcpress.com/articles/personhood-christianity-modernity/> [accessed 3 May 2013].
61
John Borneman and Nick Fowler, ‘Europeanization,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 26 (1997), 487–514.
62
Cris Shore, ‘Inventing the “People’s Europe”: Critical Approaches to European Community “Cultural
Policy,”’ Man, 28 (1993), 779–800; idem, ‘Governing Europe: European Union Audiovisual Policy and the
Politics of Identity,’ in Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power , ed. by Cris
Shore and Susan Wright (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 126–149; idem, Building Europe: The Cultural
Politics of European Integration (London: Routledge, 2000).
63
Thomas Christiansen and Simona Piattoni, eds, Informal Governance in the European Union (Cheltenham:
Edward Elgar, 2003); Fritz W. Scharpf, ‘Monetary Union, Fiscal Crisis and the Preemption of Democracy,’
MPIfG Discussion Paper 11/11 (July 2011), Cologne: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies; Cris
Shore, ‘“Government without Statehood”? Anthropological Perspectives on Governance and Sovereignty in
the European Union,’ European Law Journal, 12 (2006), 709–724.
64
Ulje na vodi, p. 25.
21
sustainability.
The last point leads us directly to the probably most problematic assumption which is
again simultaneously positive and normative – that this totalised and idealised ‘European’
modernity represents the only possible and desirable horizon of Serbia’s future
transformations. It suggests that modernisation is a more or less generic affair in which a
society’s success is judged by the speed and quality of its inevitable approximation of the
single (‘European’) model of modernity. To do justice to Stojanović, in her earlier work on
the ideas of democracy in Serbia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, she
explicitly subscribed to a ‘dynamic’ theory of modernisation which recognises various
articulations and combinations of the modern and the traditional in each specific case of
modernisation.65 While this dispenses with at least some of the tunnel vision inherent to
the crudest versions of the modernisation theory, it does nothing to problematise the
traditional/modern dichotomy or question the singularity of modernity. Modernisation
might and indeed is acknowledged to have been dynamic and uneven, but its ultimate
destination is still the single European modernity. There is no recognition of non-European
(colonial) roots of many foundational elements of ‘European’ modernity, such as the
modern bourgeois individual66 or capitalist industrial organisation.67 Neither is there any
engagement with the current debates about ‘multiple’ or ‘plural’ modernities.’ 68 What we
end up with is thus a historically informed, more fine-grained and dynamic update of the
evolutionist modernisation theories of the 1950s and 1960s. (European) modernity and
(local) tradition might combine in complex and often unique ways but the conceptual
dichotomy of the modern and the traditional itself is not questioned.
Bearing all of this in mind, I would now like to suggest an alternative approach to the
narrative of ‘European Serbia’ which is critical of its premises but helps understand its
tenacity. Anthropologists have suggested that policies contain implicit or explicit
65
Србија и демократија. Историјска студија о ”златном добу српске демократије” (Београд: Удружење
за друштвену историју, 2003), pp. 408–409.
66
Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,’
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (1989), 134–161; idem, ‘Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers:
European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia,’ in Tensions of Empire:
Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997), pp. 198–237.
67
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking Penguin,
1985).
68
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, ‘Multiple Modernities,’ Daedalus, 129 (2000), 1–29; Bjørn Thomassen,
‘Anthropology, Multiple Modernities and the Axial Age Debate,’ Anthropological Theory, 10 (2010), 321–342.
22
articulations of models of society and are, in that sense, akin to ‘myths.’69 To the extent
that the policy of Europeanisation was conceived by both politicians and the ‘civil’ critics as
a unilinear and teleological societal movement toward the preconceived (‘European’)
model of affluent, advanced and better-governed society, it was a classic modernisation
myth. The metaphor is useful for the case at hand precisely because of the double sense
of the term myth. In the popular understanding, it is a false or factually inaccurate
account of things that has nevertheless come to be believed, while anthropologists stress
its social function of a cosmological blueprint which sets categories and meanings for the
interpretation of experience.70
Indeed, while many of my research participants, as I showed, saw the myth as
empirically false, they continued to consider it ideally truthful. In other words, although
they rejected that European integration had until now brought Serbia much in the way of
modernisation, they did not abandon a hope for ‘genuine’ or, in Stojanović’s terms,
‘substantial’ Europeanisation.71 For its success, they argued, both politicians and ‘people’
would need to undergo an inner, rather than just superficial, metamorphosis. As
individuals, they would have to start thinking critically about their society and ‘working on
themselves.’ As a polity, Serbia would need to have and pursue its own ‘strategy’ of
development. Therefore, they argued, accession was important for Serbia as a ‘means’ of
modernisation, not the ‘goal’ in itself. But noting the lack of domestic capacity for selftransformation, they believed it was an indispensable means. Even one of the very few
interviewees who identified herself as Eurosceptic commented:
[I]t’s key that at some point our politicians recognise the need for our own individual
development and not development with the aim of joining the EU. (...) I think that
they spend too much attention and energy, literally every day they spend time on the
requirements of the EU. Now, considering their quality, that’s maybe good...
(NGO worker, Slovak-Serbian fund grantee in her twenties living near Belgrade)
This applied to ‘ordinary people’ too:
69
Cris Shore and Susan Wright, ‘Policy: a New Field of Anthropology,’ in Anthropology of Policy, pp. 3–39 (p.
7).
70
James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian
Copperbelt (University of California Press, 1999), pp. 13–14.
71
Also see Denisa Kostovicova, ‘Civil Society and Post-Communist Democratization: Facing a Double
Challenge in Post-Milošević Serbia,’ Journal of Civil Society, 2 (2006), 21–37 (p. 30).
23
I advocate the kind of stance that if we, everyone of us, put our own backyards to
order, houses, parks and the like, and that applies also to the state, its enterprises, the
whole system, we wouldn’t even need Europe. But unfortunately, we evidently aren’t
capable of putting the situation in the society to order ourselves. That’s why Europe is
more than necessary for us.
(male NGO worker living in a mid-sized Western Serbian city)
While my research participants underlined that individual and national agency was
crucial if Serbia was to modernise, they also routinely noted that such agency was lacking.
Thus, it was better to have the corrupt politicians and unruly citizens under the watchful
eye of the EU. And, as some of my interlocutors argued with a resigned optimism, even all
the laws adopted and institutions established ‘because of the EU’ would incrementally,
‘little by little,’ move Serbia toward modernity. Stojanović, too, has argued that ‘without
the European pressure, our politicians would hardly implement reforms that are painful for
them but useful for citizens.’72 This type of commentary reinstated and even reinforced
the idea that EU integration is the only possible path to modernisation. The reason for the
myth’s persistence despite its tenuous hold on observable reality must be sought not only
in its omnipresence in public discourses, but also in the way it plays on and perpetuates
some deeply ingrained ideational frames which make its assumptions appear self-evident.
First, several closely intertwined temporal framings deserve to be mentioned. The
dominant representation of Serbia in the 2000s was one of a ‘transitional’ country in at
least three different senses – it was ‘post-conflict,’ ‘post-authoritarian,’ and ‘postsocialist.’
Here as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the grand explanatory scheme of ‘transition’
and ‘catching up’ served to instil the teleological and evolutionist idea of a predetermined
movement toward a single destination – Western-style free-market capitalism and liberal
democracy.73 Serbia’s case was specific in that in the 1990s it did not undergo the kind of
neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ administered by most other governments with the aid and
guidance of foreign actors. Instead, the transformation to a crony capitalist economy took
place under the Milošević regime and in the context of war, hyperinflation and economic
72
Begenišić, ‘Stojanović.’
Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds, Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the
Postsocialist World (Anham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); Manduhai Buyandelgeriyn, ‘Post-Post-Transition
Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths,’ Annual Review of Anthropology, 37 (2008), 235–250.
73
24
sanctions which kept Serbia relatively isolated politically and economically. The
transitological way of thinking about these processes led to their revealing, if misleading,
labelling as ‘blocked transformation.’74 The ruin to which the country was brought by 2000
lent additional obviousness to the notion that after the regime change, the only
progressive option was to embark on the familiar path of ‘transition,’ if a ‘belated’ one
(zakasnela tranzicija).75 This was represented as inevitably entailing political and economic
integration with ‘Europe’ (i.e., the EU) and the mimesis of its institutional, legal, social,
and moral models. And that, in turn, was enabled by the translation of a second, spatial
set of framings into the temporal logic of ‘transition.’ In the process, the widespread
spatial metaphors of ‘path to Europe’ or ‘return to Europe’ assume a distinctly evolutionary
meaning.
Even before the 1990s, similar equation of ‘Europeanisation’ with modernisation
proved appealing in peripheral Southern European countries such as Greece76 and Italy77
where it helped secure a broad societal support for EU membership. Similar ideational
dynamics were more recently replicated in the ten postsocialist Eastern European
countries which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Here, the transition framing was coupled
with the established ‘Orientalist discourse that assumes an essential difference between
Europe and Eastern Europe, and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance
from, and a lack of, Europeanness.’78 The (self-) representation of these countries has
been and continues to be one of diligent, thought still not fully accomplished, students of
Western European norms.
Putting Iceland aside, the EU’s most likely next expansion in the studied period was
to the region of ‘Western Balkans’ – a label it had itself invented for the former Yugoslavia
minus Slovenia, plus Albania. The hegemonic discourse on the Europeanisation of the
region rehearses the familiar themes. In much academic writing, the EU is portrayed as
acting benevolently as a ‘magnet and source of inspiration’ for these countries’ ‘efforts to
74
E.g. Mladen Lazić, Čekajući kapitalizam: nastanak novih klasnih odnosa u Srbiji (Beograd: JP Službeni
glasnik, 2011).
75
For a rare domestic critique, see Vladimir Vuletić, Dragan Stanojević and Jelisaveta Vukelić, ‘Srpska
tranzicija u sociološkom ogledalu,’ in Dometi tranzicije: od socijalizma ka kapitalizmu, ed. by Srećko
Mihailović (Beograd: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2011), pp. 327–342.
76
Kevin Featherstone, ‘“Europeanization” and the Centre Periphery: the Case of Greece in the 1990s,’ South
European Society & Politics, 3 (1998), 23–39.
77
Marco Giuliani, ‘Europeanization and Italy,’ paper presented to the 6th Biennial Conference of the
European Community Studies Association, Pittsburg (2–5 June 1999).
78
Merje Kuus, ‘Europe’s Eastern Expansion and the Reinscription of Otherness in East-Central Europe,’
Progress in Human Geography, 28 (2004), 472–489 (p. 474). Also see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994).
25
build modern states and societies.’79 However, specific for the Europeanisation discourse
in the region is how this process is often contrasted with, and portrayed as superseding,
the previous stage of ‘Balkanisation’ which is made to refer to the violent and authoritarian
nation-state building in the 1990s.80 This kind of framing clearly derives its self-evident
truth-value from the deeply entrenched discourse of Balkanism which marks these former
Ottoman territories as Europe’s Orient – backward, irrational, violent. But while Orient and
Europe were traditionally understood as two ‘completed antiworlds,’ the hegemonic
representation of the Balkans is rather transitional – it is a bridge between Europe and
Orient as well as between stages of growth, and as such it tended to be labeled as
‘semideveloped, semicolonial, semicivilized, semioriental.’81 Balkanism has been a major
force in shaping how Balkan peoples understand themselves and their ranks in continental
hierarchies of development.82
Serbia has not escaped the influence of Balkanism.83 As the modern Serbian nationstate has been forming and gradually achieving independence in the nineteenth century,
its position changed from one of a border province of the Ottoman Empire to the rural
periphery of industrialised Europe. ‘Europe’ (i.e. Western and Central Europe) served as
the constant frame of reference against which Serbs calibrated their own (lack of)
economic, political, institutional, technological, and cultural progress, and the model after
which they sought to model their laws, institutions, way of life and material culture. 84 The
habitus of self-scrutiny through the ‘European gaze’ sat uneasily with the Romantic
celebration of the Serbian authentic and unique way of being.85 This ambivalent
relationship with ‘Europe’ or the ‘West’ which informs the ways Serbs think and talk about
79
Dimitar Bechev, ‘Constructing South East Europe: the Politics of Regional Identity in the Balkans,’ RAMSES
Working Paper 1/06 (March 2006), Oxford: European Studies Centre, University of Oxford, p. 23. Also see
Othon Anastasakis, ‘Europeanization of the Balkans,’ Brown Journal of World Affairs, 12 (2005), 77–88.
80
E.g. Dorian Jano, ‘From “Balkanization” to “Europeanization”: Stages of Western Balkans Complex
Transformations,’ L’Europe en Formation, 3/4 (2008), 55–69.
81
Todorova, Imagining, p. 16.
82
Milica Bakić-Hayden, ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,’ Slavic Review, 54 (1995),
917–931; Milica Bakić-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”:
Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics,’ Slavic Review, 51 (1992), 1–15.
83
Marko Živković, Serbia’s Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2011), pp. 42–93.
84
Roumen Daskalov, ‘Ideas about, and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans,’ East European Quarterly,
31 (1997), 141–180; Стојановић, Србија; idem, Калдрма и асфалт: урбанизација и европеизација
Београда 1890–1914 (Београд: Удружење за друштвену историју, 2008); Gale Stokes, Politics as
Development: the Emergence of Political Parties in the Nineteenth-Century Serbia (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1990), pp. 25–26, 162–166.
85
Mattijs van de Port, Gypsies, Wars & Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and its Discontents in a
Serbian Town (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1998), pp. 83–86.
26
themselves86 came to the fore in the 1990s with the resurgence of nationalism and
neotraditionalism. The dichotomy of ‘two Serbias’ can be seen as an essentialisation of this
ambivalence. Those identifying as the Other Serbia, as well as many foreign
commentators, interpreted the wars and nationalism as the return of the Balkan non- and
anti-European tendencies, thus Balkanising their First Serbia opponents and the Milošević
regime (who, in turn, accused the Other Serbia of ‘mondialism’ and servility to the
West).87 The Other Serbians discussed the events ‘as if they felt constantly under
European scrutiny and had to justify their actions to Europe’88 and expressed
disappointment that ‘Europe’ did not intervene against Milošević.89 As this paper argues,
such reifications have continued to inform liberal discourses on Serbia’s past and present
predicaments and future aspirations in the post-2000 period.
After the regime change, the ‘return to Europe’ became one of the programmatic
tenets of the first post-Milošević government of PM Đinđić. However, the relationship of
political elites to ‘Europe’ continued to be fraught with tensions, related especially to how
the EU and major European powers handled the issue of Kosovo90 and the failure of the
ICTY to deliver ‘transitional justice’ and ‘reconciliation’ in the region.91 Yet all the anger,
frustration and feelings of injustice did not lead to a formulation of a coherent alternative
vision of national development, but rather nationalist outbursts devoid of a programme of
action. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the various elite factions either
actively pursued or passively accepted EU accession as the ‘only credible and realistic
external objective’92 and ‘political if not economic and geo-strategic escape mechanism
from the region’s troubled past and present’93 from the socialist, authoritarian and violent
past. While the process has more or less stalled under the incumbency of the nationalist
86
Mattijs van de Port, ‘“It Takes a Serb to Know a Serb”: Uncovering the Roots of Obstinate Otherness in
Serbia,’ Critique of Anthropology, 19 (1999), 7–30; Zala Volčič, ‘The Notion of “the West” in the Serbian
National Imaginary,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8 (2005), 155–175.
87
Internationally, Serbs tend to be seen as particularly responsible and even ‘collectively guilty’ for the
Yugoslav wars. As a result, they ended up being more ‘Balkanised’ than the other belligerents. See Janine N.
Clark, Serbia in the Shadow of Milošević: the Legacy of Conflict in the Balkans (London: Tauris Academic
Studies, 2008).
88
Van de Port, Gypsies, p. 74.
89
Stef Jansen, ‘Victims, Underdogs, and Rebels: Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest,’
Critique of Anthropology, 20 (2000), 393–418 (p. 402).
90
Anna Di Lellio, ‘The Missing Democratic Revolution and Serbia’s Anti-European Choice: 1989–2008,’
International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society , 22 (2009), 373–384.
91
Clark, Serbia; Robert M. Hayden, ‘What’s Reconciliation Got to Do with It? The International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as Antiwar Profiteer,’ Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding , 5
(2011), 313–330.
92
Anastasakis, ‘Europeanization,’ p. 82.
93
Geoffrey Pridham, ‘EU Accession and Domestic Politics: Policy Consensus and Interactive Dynamics in
Central and Eastern Europe,’ Perspective on European Politics and Society, 1 (2000), 49–74 (p. 59).
27
PM Koštunica in 2004–2007, he and his allies, for all their rhetoric, never abandoned it. It
would seem that for the elites, ‘Europe’ had ‘had no alternative’ even before the
Democrats declared so.94
As for ‘ordinary people,’ anthropologists working in Serbia and other post-Yugoslav
countries documented how many talked about their expectations of ‘normal’ life in terms
of a ‘return to Europe’ or other similar metaphors of collective movement to it. For
instance, Jessica Greenberg argued that the student activists she worked with in the early
2000s saw Serbia’s EU membership ‘as a mechanism to circulate the entire country into
Europe through a collective relocation that promises normalcy (...) on a national scale.’95
Stef Jansen made similar observations in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. 96 These
authors emphasised that ‘Europe’ was associated especially with ‘normalcy.’ Opinion polls
conducted in late 2011 showed that most common positive associations with the EU –
‘more employment opportunities’ and ‘path to a better future for young people’ – were
indeed related to better life.97
In sum, then, the general ideational context in Serbia would seem favourable for the
pursuance of Europeanisation. The ‘civil’ critique of its failure thus inevitably provokes the
question – what went wrong? Where does the anti-EU alliance and the social antagonism
over integration come from? The historians close to the Civil Serbia, of whom Stojanović98
has been inspired by Foucault’s idea of the ‘history of the present’ and Braudel’s concept
of longue durée, tended to look for the roots of these present issues in Serbia’a past. This
argument about a continuity of Serbian anti-modernism is the subject of the next section.
94
Also see Mladen Lazić and Vladimir Vuletić, ‘The Nation State and the EU in the Perceptions of Political and
Economic Elites: the Case of Serbia in Comparative Perspective,’ Europe-Asia Studies, 61 (2009), 987–1001.
95
‘Citizen Youth: Student Organizations and the Making of Democracy in Postsocialist Serbia’ (doctoral
thesis, University of Chicago, 2007), p. 99; also see idem, ‘On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and
State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia,’ American Anthropologist, 113 (2011), 88–100.
96
‘After the Red Passport: towards an Anthropology of the Everyday Geopolitics of Entrapment in the EU’s
“Immediate Outside,”’ Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15 (2009), 815–832; idem, ‘Towards
an Economy of Hope in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Or, on Not Moving Well Enough,’ paper presented at
Wenner-Gren Symposium Crisis, Value, and Hope: Rethinking the Economy, Sintra, 14–20 September 2012.
97
‘European Orientation of the Citizens of the Republic of Serbia: Trends,’ Serbian European Integration
Office (January 2012),
<http://seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/nacionalna_dokumenta/istrazivanja_javnog_mnjenja/opinionpoll_dec
ember_2011.pdf> [accessed 3 May 2013].
98
Ulje na vodi, pp. 9–22.
28
Serbian history as a Manichean struggle of anti-modernism
and modernism
In her historiography, Stojanović argued there is a long-term continuity of a deeply
ingrained ‘premodern political culture’ in Serbia ever since its gradual achievement of
independence in the nineteenth century. She defined this culture as a ‘deep’ layer of
political thought and a ‘kind of political mentality [which] endures under varied political
systems.’99 As such, it ‘pervaded’ the modern institutions imported to Serbia in the
nineteenth century and filled a ‘democratic form’ with an ‘authoritarian content.’ 100 (I will
return below to this dichotomy of form/content and the idea of ‘culture’ spilling over into
‘institutions’ that are themselves culture-free.) According to Stojanović, one of the
characteristics of the premodern culture is the perception of politics as war and of political
opponents as ‘blood enemies.’101 The lack of respect for rules, together with highly
personal relationships within the narrow political elite of the time, is then argued to have
led to a formation of the ‘party state’ (partijska država) whose highly conflictual politics
were largely determined by the interests of client groups masquerading as political
parties.102
Stojanović argued that the premodern political culture is in ‘the deepest possible
relationship’ with an ideological formation which has dominated Serbian political thought
over past two centuries and which was, as she acknowledged, identified by the likeminded historian Latinka Perović.103 This is a ‘sturdy’, ‘deep’ and ‘closed ideological system’
whose genealogy is traced from early Serbian socialism and radicalism of the last third of
99
Србија, p. 12.
100
‘In the Quicksand: Political Institutions in Serbia at the End of the Long 19th c.,’ in Society, Politics and
State Formation in Southeastern Europe during the 19th Century, ed. by Tassos Anastassiadis and Nathalie
Clayer (Athens: Alpha Bank Historical Archives, 2011), pp. 205–231 (p. 207).
101
Ibid., p. 208.
102
Ibid., pp. 212–214.
103
Ulje na vodi, p. 71. Apart from her academic vocation, Perović had been the Secretary General and one
of the leading members of the ‘liberal’ current in the Serbian Communist Party in the late 1960s and early
1970s (to be removed in a purge in 1972). Currently, she is a member of the Political Committee of the
Liberal Democratic Party, the party of choice of the Civil Serbia. She has been characterised as the éminence
grise and the ideological ‘Mother of the Other Serbia’ and criticised for ‘us[ing] the Serb history as a crystal
ball for seeing the black “Serbian” future.’ Зоран Ћирјаковић, ‘Мајка друге Србије,’ НИН, 2885 (13 April
2006); also see idem, Непријатељи и саборци Латинке Перовић,’ НИН, 2886 (19 April 2006). Stojanović
has described Perović as her long-time friend, collaborator and intellectual tutor who has revealed the ‘key
continuities’ in the Serbian history to her: ‘The history of ideas that Latinka Perović taught me to see and
reconstruct revealed the essence of the mistakes which had led Serbia to the fatal path on which it found
itself in the 1990s.‘ Ulje na vodi, p. 21. Recently, Perović has written an afterword for Stojanović’s Ulje na
vodi while Stojanović has contributed a chapter to the edited collection in honour of Perović’s 75th birthday.
29
the nineteenth century through interwar and war-time fascisoid ideologies to communism
and finally nationalism of the last three decades.104 Its continuity is described as follows:
In economic reforms, the ideology saw a rupture of the social unity of the Serbian
peasant nation; in the institution of the modern and legal state, it has seen a negation
of the people’s state in which one must create, on behalf of the people, the unity of
the legislative, executive and judicial government which is the foundation of every
authoritarian order. The socially homogenous peasantry is the basis of political monism
which negates pluralism. The egalitarian and collectivist state is identified with an
ethnic state (...). Thus the egalitarian, collectivist ideology linked with nationalism
became the basis of both left and right totalitarianisms which alternate in the history of
modern Serbia.105
As this suggests, the criterion for subsuming this rather heterogenous set of
ideologies and ‘totalitarian’ regimes under one expansive ‘ideology’ is their difference from
liberalism – hence their recurrent condemnations in the works of Stojanović, Perović and
others as ‘populist,’ ‘anti-individualist,’ and ‘collectivist.’ That this age-old and
indestructible Serbian ‘ideological system’ is further described as ‘anti-modern’ and ‘antiEuropean’ reflects a normative bias according to which the only modernisation and
modernity worth of the name are particularly liberal modernisation and modernity. 106 This
is evident from privileging the rule of law, freedom of the individual, and the mutual
autonomy of the state, (capitalist) economy and (civil) society as the attributes of true
modernisation. Unsurprisingly, this is a viewpoint which I also found to be prevalent in the
wider ‘civil-society’ discourse. When I asked my interlocutors what kind of state/country
(država) Serbia should become, recurrent themes in their replies were that it should
become a ‘legal state’ with ‘free market’ and ‘free society,’ one which is ‘less politicised,’
‘more efficient’, where ‘laws are being implemented’ and where ‘politics doesn’t dominate
the economy.’
In scholarly work, this bias has repercussions for classifying particular political
104
105
Ulje na vodi, pp. 71–72.
Ibid., p. 72.
Although such understanding is often explicitly argued, at times it seems to be even implied as natural:
‘The sphere of politics was therefore the first domain in which the process of modernisation has started.
Liberal political concepts began to appear in Serbia very early...’ Ibid. p. 28.
106
30
ideologies and forces as modernising or anti-modern. Thus, both Stojanović107 and
Perović108 make clear that it was the Liberals and the Progressives who were responsible
for modernising constitutional and institutional reforms in the nineteenth and early
twentieth century. For instance, Stojanović argues that the 1888 Constitution, as the
pinnacle of Serbia’s political modernisation, was ‘by its liberal essence’ closest to a
Progressive constitution draft and it was only a ‘Radical-oriented historiography’ that later
erroneously gave the credit to the Radicals.109 Elsewhere, she reserves a special praise for
the Progressives as the only political grouping of the time which did not simultaneously
subscribe to mutually contradictory ‘layers of political thought,’ such as ‘patriarchal’ and
‘modern’ or ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualist’110 – in other words, only their ideology was fully
and consistently modern. By a general consensus, the Progressives (also known as Young
Conservatives) were the best-educated and most Westernised part of the political elite
who, unlike the Liberals and the Radicals, found the idea that some ‘traditional’ institutions
of the Serbian society could be a sound basis for its modernisation ridiculous; instead,
they argued for a pure and fast programme of Westernisation.111 As for the Radicals with
their original programme of local self-government and agrarian socialism (later largely
abandoned), they are accused, very much in line with their historical political adversaries,
of being the main bearers of the anti-modern ideology112 and the main perpetrators of
power abuses who have subverted the proper functioning of institutions.113
The foundational importance of this opposition for modern Serbian politics is even
more explicitly argued by Perović. According to her, the ‘Serbian society in previous two
centuries’ is characterised by a struggle of two ‘historical tendencies’ that are at
loggerheads over Serbia’s relationship to the Western Europe and modernity. The
107
108
Ibid., pp. 29–30.
Između anarhije i autokratije: Srpsko društvo na prelazima vekova (XIX-XXI) (Beograd: Helsinški odbor
za ljudska prava u Srbiji, 2006), pp. 20–23.
109
Ulje na vodi, p. 30. According to Michael Boro Petrovich, the Constitution was essentially a compromise
between the Radicals and the Progressives in terms of decentralisation and strong local self-government
demanded by the Radicals. A History, p. 446. Milan St. Protić argues that the Constitution was largely
drafted by Radical intellectuals and as such it expressed Radical ideas, but it was formally accepted by all
political parties of the time. ‘Serbian Radicalism 1881–1903: Political Thought and Practice,’ Balcanica, 38
(2007), 173–191 (p. 176). Dušan T. Bataković also makes the latter point but has it that the Constitution
was drafted by a single person, the Radical constitutional lawyer Milovan Đ. Milovanović. ‘French Influence in
Serbia 1835–1914: Four Generations of “Parisians,”’ Balcanica, 41 (2010), 93–129 (pp. 114–115). Even
Perović argues that the Constitution was drafted by a committee whose members were chosen by the king
and in which all political parties were represented. Između anarhije, p. 233.
110
Србија, pp. 173–174.
111
Stokes, Politics, p. 229.
112
Ulje na vodi, pp. 103–105.
113
‘In the Quicksand,’ pp. 220–221.
31
‘patriarchal,’ ‘Eastern’ or ‘Slavophile’ tendency, historically represented by the Radicals, has
always advocated the building of a ‘people’s state’ (narodna država), defined along the
lines quoted above. The ‘modern’ and ‘Western’ tendency of the Liberals and Progressives
has logically aspired to create a ‘modern state’ in line with Western European models.114
This dichotomy which had crystallised in the nineteenth century has then continued to
inform Serbian politics up to now.115
My intention here is not to examine the validity of the particular factual claims made
in these works. I rather wish to point to an all-too-elegant character of the conclusions
reached by the ‘civil’ intellectuals. As the Serbian historian Miloš Ković recently argued,
one of the characteristic themes of revisionist works in recent international historiography
on Serbian nineteenth century has been the conflict between the backward peasant
society represented by the Radicals and the modernising and Europeanising Progressive
elite and bureaucracy.116 According to Ković, the construction of this ‘manichean division’
was framed by dated modernisation theories and based on a selective and partial
presentation of Serbian radicalism which neglects the broader European context of its
emergence at the expense of early Russian influences.117 The ideological evolution of all
political parties including the Radicals, the gap between their abstract ideals and
pragmatic actions, and their vigorous internal debates (sometimes leading to splintering)
indeed complicate the forcing of partisan ideologies and programmes into a dichotomous
framing. Yet another Serbian historian Predrag J. Marković 118 has detected precisely such
tendency in the works of Stojanović, Perović as well as Olga Popović-Obradović.119
I will mention but few further arguments that problematise this construction. If
Stojanović herself argues that the ‘premodern political culture’ and the narrowness and
homology of various kinds of elites led to the formation of non-representative and selfinterested parties, this must surely apply also to the Progressives. In fact, it might apply to
them even more since the Radicals, as Stojanović admits, 120 were the only ‘broad popular
114
115
Između anarhije, pp. 18–21.
Ibid., pp. 24–29.
‘Imagining the Serbs: Revisionism in the Recent Historiography of Nineteenth-Century Serbian History,’
Balcanica, 43 (2012), 324–356 (pp. 333–339).
117
Also see Augusta Dimou, Entangled Paths Toward Modernity: Contextualizing Socialism and Nationalism
in the Balkans (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009), pp. 65–69.
118
‘Dugo putovanje ka kući,’ Vreme, 991–992 (29 December 2009)
<http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=905100> [accessed 3 May 2013].
119
For a characteristic example, see her ‘(Jedno)partijska država,’ Helsinška povela, 103–104 (January–
February 2007), 35–40.
120
Србија, p. 252.
116
32
movement’ of its time! In his study of Serbian politics in 1869–83, Gale Stokes contends
along the lines similar to Stojanović’s that parties did not represent various socioeconomic
groups and interests, but rather cohorts of educated men who rallied around individual
leaders and certain basic ideals. Beneath their ideological differences, controlling the state
as ‘the richest and strongest element in society’ was the fundamental practical goal for all
parties.121 Thus, the Liberals were actually not very liberal; for instance, Jovan Ristić,
probably the most important Liberal statesman, was inspired by the example of Prussia
rather than those of England or France, and ‘believed that society should take its lead
from the government, and not vice versa.’122 In this context, one should also point out
that neither of the political parties shied away from using repressive and extra-legal
methods to win elections and persecute their opponents. Petrovich argues that the Radical
regime established in 1888 has merely taken to the extreme the tendency of all previous
governments (Conservative, Liberal, and Progressive) to purge the civil service of their
enemies and appoint their own followers.123 Moreover, he also notes that the regime has
adopted a number of liberal laws which implemented the civil rights guaranteed by the
1888 Constitution.124 Indeed, the liberal origin of much of the Radical ideology is
evident.125 In her older work, Stojanović also admitted e.g. the strong orientation of the
Radicals to the idea of ‘progress.’126 However, unlike other historians who approach early
Serbian socialism and radicalism as simply one among several contending alternative
strategies of modernisation127 – which does not prevent them from pointing to its internal
contradictions and conservative implications in practice – the ‘civil’ Serbian historians are
led by their commitment to liberalism to opt for its branding as anti-modern.
But there is a bigger problem than the Manichean account of history. This is the
121
Politics, p. 201. In fact, Stojanović makes very similar conclusions at least in one place: ‘Serbian parties
took their names and programs from European models, thereby linking themselves to key concepts of the
time: liberalism, conservatism, radicalism, social democracy. However, their internal organization, their
quasi-military discipline and hierarchy, the perpetuity of their leaders, and the lack of internal fractions and
debate, made these organizations look more like feuding families than the building blocks of democracy. (...)
[P]arties were not formed as representatives of different parts of a politically conscious civil society. On the
contrary, they were formed within the narrow political elite of the capital city, through the gathering of likeminded acquaintances...’ ‘In the Quicksand,’ p. 211. If these characteristics applied to all political parties, as
this quote clearly implies, it begs the question of how this sits with the purported crucial difference between
the Progressives and the Radicals.
122
Politics, p. 11.
123
Petrovich, A History, p. 450.
124
Ibid., p. 452.
125
Diana Mishkova, ‘Liberalism and Tradition in the Nineteenth-Century Balkans: Towards History and
Methodology of Political Transfer,’ East European Politics & Societies, 26 (2012), 668–692.
126
Србија, pp. 116–121.
127
Daskalov, ‘Ideas’; Dimou, Entangled Paths.
33
willingness to not just draw parallels, but construct a direct genetic relationship between
the anti-modern ideology more than a century ago and its purported recent mutations. For
instance, in Stojanović’s already quoted work opened by the assertions that the 2008
elections revealed a profound division of the society over Europeanisation and hence
future development, she continues to argue that the Serbian modern history was
characterised by a fast pace of changes, but this
...has remained on the surface. It failed to stimulate a substantial modernisation of the
society and change the matrices of the premodern system of values which continued
to dominate the public sphere. (...) The fact that some present-day political
circumstances, dilemmas or problems are practically identical to those which troubled
the citizens of Serbia in the end of the nineteenth century stems from [the fact] that
the way the system works had underwent completely imperceptible changes since
then. It has remained almost untouched by the changes in the sphere of political
history, encapsulated in the membrane of the premodern political culture which proved
sturdier than the quick succession of challenges it faced.128
This seems strangely ahistorical for an argument coming from a historian, even one
inspired by the idea of longue durée. Is it really the case that the Serbian society has
avoided modernisation (‘substantial’ or not), that some of the political problems today are
identical with those in the end of the nineteenth century, that the system works basically
the same? I cannot help but express my skepticism. These claims of immutability rest on
the concept of a ‘premodern political culture’ based on the kind of understanding of
‘culture’ as bounded, homogenous and stable which anthropologists had been moving
away from at least since the 1980s.129 Such conceptualisation is essentialist and
overemphasises continuity at the expense of change. It is one thing to claim that there
was something like a premodern political culture in the undeniably agrarian and weakly
differentiated Serbian society of the nineteenth century, and another to argue that such
culture survives ‘almost untouched’ by the next century or so of rapid industrialisation,
urbanisation and shifts of the global context, state forms and dominant ideologies, and
even itself works as a ‘membrane’ which prevents the political system from changing! The
128
129
Ulje na vodi, pp. 60–61, 71–72.
For a review of these debates, see Christoph Brumann, ‘Writing for Culture: Why a Successful Concept
Should Not Be Discarded,’ Current Anthropology, 40 (1999), S1–S27.
34
legacies of the socialist Yugoslavia and the Milošević regime (including their geopolitical
positions before and after the Cold War) seem intuitively much more relevant for the
present developments, but to the limited extent that they are discussed by the ‘civil’
historians, they are mostly made to fit into the grand scheme of continuity, leaving little
room for rupture, contingency and individual agency.
The political implications of such an argument for Serbia’s prospects for
modernisation are also troubling – it is only through replacing its ever-premodern political
culture with the modern/‘European’ values, institutions, legal models etc. that it can ever
overcome the curse of backwardness. There are no chances for an indigenous
transformation of culture apart from some minor changes ‘on the surface,’ an example of
which, as we are told, is the shift from fascism to socialism. Serbia’s failure to modernise
can only be its failure to Europeanise. (Hence the neglect of a broader transnational
context at the expense of endogenous circumstances in these explanations of the
development gap.) Not incidentally, these conclusions do not get very far from those
reached by the Progressives in the nineteenth century. But if the import of ready-made
solutions from the outside tended to fail then, whence the optimism that self-colonisation
will deliver today? In the next section, I will suggest that the inadequacies of this
analytical framework could be rectified by an engagement with contemporary theories of
modernity and the ‘state.’ This is necessary because the relationship of the state, (civil)
society and economy has a prominent but rather paradoxical place in Stojanović’s
argument about the recurrent Serbian failure to modernise.
Toward rethinking modernisation and the ‘state’ in Serbia
Together with a number of other historians and sociologists working on Serbia,130
Stojanović repeatedly emphasised that in the twentieth, but especially nineteenth
centuries the state and political institutions 131 represented the modernising force in the
backward Serbian society:
130
E.g. Чалић, Социјална историја; Lazić, Čekajući kapitalizam, pp. 57–127; Stokes, Politics.
Especially modern political parties established already in the early 1880s, only a few year after Joseph
Chamberlain had formed the National Liberal Federation in Great Britain, ‘considered to be the first modern
political party.’ ‘In the Quicksand,’ p. 211; also see Stokes, Politics.
131
35
Political modernisation preceded a social and economic modernisation which has
gradually created a strong contrast between state institutions based on models taken
from the West and the weakly dynamic, agrarian and poor society which resisted the
differentiation of social groups, functional specialisation and structural transformation
(...). [T]he state emerged as the substitute of society, it was the primary mover of
modernisation and development, the most important source of wealth, prestige and
influence.132
According to Stojanović, this central modernising role of the state is reflected in the
rapidly evolving state form – constitutional and legal solutions adopted in Serbia, following
especially Belgian, French and English models, were among the most liberal and advanced
in Europe.133 Moreover, civil servants are noted to have constituted much of the social
base of other functionally defined kinds of elites – intellectual, political, and economic.134
The state has actually directly produced much of the intellectual and technical elites by
funding their education abroad.135
However, the state is said to have braked modernisation as much as it directed it. On
the one hand, Stojanović’s liberal framework logically marks its ‘hypertrophied’ role as a
problem. The homology of different kinds of elites and their state-dependent character
imply relative weakness of the kind of independent and powerful ‘civil society’ which had
succeeded to constrain state power in Western European liberal regimes.136 On the other
hand, although the state often took drastic steps to modernise its own institutions, it kept
from acting with the same vigour in relation to the society in order to ‘speed up its exit
from the premodern condition.’137 Evoked as the evidence for this are various laws which
132
133
Србија, p. 410.
‘Throughout the 19th century, Serbia gradually established a liberal legislature and institutions, and this
trend accelerated after the 1878 independence. The laws protecting freedom of the press and freedom of
association that were passed during the 1880s provided the conditions necessary for formulating a liberal
1888 constitution, based on the Belgian model. That constitution remained in effect for six years and was reinstituted after the 1903 dynastic change, beginning the period that is referred to in Serbian historiography
as “the Golden Age of Serbian democracy.” It provided for the clear separation of powers and introduced
democratic procedures based on the most developed European systems of the time. The introduction of
quasi-universal male suffrage and the adoption of liberal laws in regard to freedom of the press, of assembly
and speech, provided the foundations for a democratic system of representative government’ ‘In the
Quicksand,’ p. 2006. Also see Србија, pp. 186, 383–391.
134
Also see Бојана Миљковић-Катић, Структура градког становништва Србије средином XIX века
(Београд: Историјски институт, 2002).
135
Also see Љубинка Трговчевић, Планирана елита: о студентима из Србије на европским
универзитетима у 19. веку (Београд: Историјски институт, 2003).
136
Калдрма и асфалт, pp. 174–279; Ulje na vodi, 37–41; ‘In the Quicksand,’ p. 212.
137
Ulje na vodi, p. 33.
36
obstructed capitalist development, especially in the agrarian sector (by preventing peasant
smallholders from falling to landlessness etc.), ‘petrified’ the existing social and economic
relationships, and slowed down the process of capitalist social differentiation. Thus,
although this is not explicitly addressed, the paradoxical role of the state is phrased in
terms of a deviation from two rather different kinds of normative expectations: the
classical liberal demand of a minimal interference of the state in the market and ‘civil
society,’ and the more recent, neoliberal expectation that the state steps in to produce
these supposedly autonomous spheres, in this particular instance in the name of
modernisation. That the considerable stride taken from the one to the other is not
acknowledged should not surprise us. The attempts to revive the core propositions of
eighteenth-century liberal political theory and political economy have always tended to
present them as ‘eternal truths – concepts of markets and individuals being merely
descriptive of an ideal state of nature’138 – while in reality (state) intervention was often
necessary to produce them.
In the course of the twentieth century, Stojanović’s argument continues, the state
gradually lost even the kind of ambiguous modernising potential it had had the century
before. In the first Yugoslavia, the conflict between the constituent nations provoked an
abolishment of earlier democratic achievements and a turn to authoritarianism. In the
second
Yugoslavia,
the
state
has
started
the
‘process
of
forced,
communist
modernisation,’ resulting in fast industrialisation and social change which, however, did
not actually bring Serbia closer to the developed West. The causes for this, apart from the
economic model doomed to failure, are found in the initial destruction of the ‘pre-war
urban and rural elites’ as the ‘strata which could have played some role in a civil
modernisation of the country,’ as well as the fact that socialist urbanisation was rather a
‘rurbanisation’ which failed to create an ‘actual urban population.’ 139 The seemingly lively
forms of ‘civil society’ emerging in the 1980s proved too weak to prevent Milošević’s rise
138
Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin, ‘After Neoliberalism: Analysing the Present,’ in After
Neoliberalism? The Kilburn Manifesto, ed. by Stuart Hall, Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin (2013), p. 13
<http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/s53hallmasseyrustin.pdf> [accessed 3 May 2013]. For
a discussion of this ambiguity within liberalism, see Barry Hindess, ‘Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy:
Variations on a Governmental Theme,’ Economy and Society, 22 (1993), 300–313.
139
This part of the argument is clearly based on a positivist idea of the rural/urban divide. For constructivist
and critical engagements with this subject in the Serbian and Yugoslav contexts, see e.g. Stef Jansen,
‘Who’s Afraid of White Socks? Towards a Critical Understanding of Post-Yugoslav Urban Self-Perceptions,’
Ethnologia Balkanica, 9 (2005), 151–167; Andrei Simić, ‘Conventional Wisdom and Milošević’s Serbia,’
Anthropology of East Europe Review, 18 (2000); Ivana Spasić, ‘ASFALT: the Construction of Urbanity in
Everyday Discourse in Serbia,’ Ethnologia Balkanica, 10 (2006), 211–227.
37
to power. Thus, Stojanović concludes, Serbia has experienced a kind of ‘regression’ –
while the nineteenth-century political elite at least tried to modernise and liberalise the
state, the later development was increasingly characterised by ‘anti-modernising projects’
and an ‘authoritarian political culture.’ The reason must be sought in the internal
contradictions of Serbia’s development – shortly, the society failed to keep pace with the
modernisation of the state and politics, and those groups said to have a special interest in
modernisation and democratisation (‘actual’ urbanites, urban and rural elites) remained
too weak.140 Similarly, Stojanović argued in an interview that the relationship of the state
and society today is practically the same as in the so-called ‘Golden Age of Serbian
Democracy’ in the beginning of the twentieth century – formally, there are parties, the
press, and the freedom of speech, but civil society is too weak to counter the inherently
authoritarian tendencies of the state and bring about democratisation: ‘Over here,
everybody has always depended on the state, even those who were a bit richer. Now, as
long as it stays like that, there isn’t anyone to effectively challenge the state.’141 This has
repercussions for modernisation in general since the state is a key power resource
employed by the anti-modern ‘elite alliance’:
Various kinds of elites constitute [the alliance]. In the first place, it is the political elite
which does not wish to split up the political pie and therefore strives to create a
grandiose coalition in which everybody will eventually find themselves and thus restore
one-party state under the mask of a multiparty system (višepartizam).142
These arguments once again show that Stojanović works with a particular and
teleological idea of modernisation which leads her to conceive different developmental
pathways and strategies in terms of deviation, incompleteness or absence of
modernisation. For instance, specifically socialist forms of modernisation ideology143 are
treated as practically irrelevant for analysis; it is only the failure of the socialist Yugoslav
regime to live up to the preconceived idea of modernisation which seems to matter. The
predetermination of the Yugoslav economy for failure is considered as proved by its
terminal crisis, though this was conditioned by the economy’s articulation with global
140
141
Ulje na vodi, pp. 47–57.
Stanić, ‘Evropa.’
Ibid.
143
Marie-Janine Calic, Dietmar Neutatz, and Julia Obertreis, eds, The Crisis of Socialist Modernity: the Soviet
Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011).
142
38
capitalism (and the particular way that the debt crisis was managed) as well as its internal
contradictions.144 Despite its very real effects in terms of economic and human
development, its broad legitimacy and the lasting impact it has left on the categories and
expectations of many inhabitants of the post-Yugoslav space,145 socialist modernisation
can only be recognised as ‘forced’ and devalued as a detour on the road to the real
modernity.
But at this point I would like to turn attention to the concept of the state employed,
rather intuitively than with an explicit theoretical elaboration, by Stojanović. Clearly, the
state is understood in the argument summed up above as a coherent and unitary entity
which is unproblematically distinct from the society. As such, it is easily represented as an
agent – of limited and unbalanced modernisation and liberalisation in the nineteenth
century, growing authoritarianism and ‘forced’ socialist modernisation in the twentieth
century, and blocked Europeanisation in the present. In the same time, it is treated as
itself an expression and sign of modernity (liberal state, ‘legal state’) or lack of the same
(‘party state,’ ‘people’s state’), sometimes even in the same historical period. Its
relationship with the society is equally paradoxical. On the one hand, it is said to have
been a Leviathan-like ‘substitute of society,’ the master of all kinds of elites and the
economy (which, however, it failed to put to a good use and modernise the economy and
society). On the other hand, it appears to have been effectively overtaken by the society:
‘the privileging of the party state over the rule of law’ in the fin-de-siècle Serbia resulted
from ‘decisions and interests of client groups within political parties [being] more
important than procedures and laws.’146 The tendency to subsume various and sometimes
contradictory functions, agencies and tendencies in ‘the’ state result in a puzzling blanket
concept which obscures more than it explains. For instance, the chapter in which
Stojanović argues that the Western European constitutional and legal models were
imported to Serbia only as a ‘democratic form (...) filled with authoritarian content,’ 147 as
the contemporaries were also aware, ends rather unexpectedly in the following optimistic
observation:
144
Socialist modernisation ‘did change the society but being based on social ownership, it could not have
created a modern economy ready for the market competition.’ Stanić, ‘Evropa’ (added emphasis).
145
146
147
Jansen, ‘Towards an Economy.’
‘In the Quicksand,’, p. 213.
Ibid., p. 207.
39
More than a decade after the introduction of parliamentary democracy in Serbia in the early
20th century, the system began to function by itself, independent of political agents and
even against their will. Increasingly, there were situations in which parliamentary rules
functioned by themselves, despite all attempts to circumvent it. (...) [A] modern institutional
framework does not have to be the consequence of, but could also be the condition for
democratic development.148
Thus, we see state institutions evolving, in the space of one or two decades, from
the imported modern forms ‘pervaded’ and ‘jammed’ by the premodern culture (‘party
state’) to the actors of democratic development which somehow ‘function by itself.’ This
mysterious transition from the objectification of the state to its subjectification is hardly
elucidated by the comment that modern institutions can be as much the consequence as
the condition of development; this merely restates the conceptual confusion.
For several decades, such reified idea of the state has been under severe criticism.
The sociologist Philip Abrams has influentially argued that the state, in the form in which it
had been typically conceived, ‘is not the reality which stands behind the mask of political
practice [but] is itself the mask which prevents our seeing political practice as it is.’149 He
proposed to disarticulate ‘the state’ into two distinct objects of study: the state-system,
defined as the observable ‘nexus of practice and institutional structure centred in
government,’ and the state-idea – the notion that there is such an entity as the state,
variously promoted and believed in different societies at different times. While the statesystem, on closer inspection, often proves to be a diffuse set of institutions and practices
whose limits are difficult to define, the state-idea is what lends the state its symbolic
identity and semblance of coherence. According to Abrams, such conceptualisation would
allow us to empirically examine what we can and should examine – particular statesystems and state-ideas and their relationships to other, non-state forms of power –
without reifying the state as an entity, agent or function ‘over and above’ the state-system
and the state-idea.
However, two decades later, the political scientist Timothy Mitchell 150 pointed to a
methodological problem with Abrams’ suggestion. Namely, if the coherence and identity of
148
Ibid., p. 277.
Philip Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State (1977),’ Journal of Historical Sociology, 1
(1988), 58–89 (p. 82).
150
‘Society, economy and the state effect,’ in State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn, ed. by
George Steinmetz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 76–97.
149
40
the state come from the state-idea, how does one define the boundaries of the statesystem after subtracting the state-idea from it? Mitchell proposes not to separate the
material (concrete, real) forms of the state from the ideological (abstract, illusory) forms
but rather see these as two aspects of the same process in which ‘mundane material
practices’ (Foucault’s ‘disciplines’ – localised, polyvalent techniques of government
producing particular kinds of subjects) take on the ‘appearance of an abstract, nonmaterial
form.’151 At the same time as the methods of discipline and government become ‘internal,’
they assume the appearance of external ‘structures’;
the production of modern
individuality and the ‘structural effect’ of the state as an apparatus set apart from the
society are mutually complementary.152 Mitchell gives the familiar Foucauldian example of
modern military techniques which have produced, on the one hand, the disciplined soldier
subject, and on the other hand, the armed unit which seemed somehow greater than the
sum of its parts, as if it was a structure with an existence separate and even superior to
the individual soldiers who made it up. Such ‘two-dimensional effect’ has been
characteristic of modern government in general and given rise to such omnipresent
binaries as individual versus apparatus, practice versus institution, or indeed society
versus state:
The precise specification of space and function that characterize modern institutions,
the coordination of these functions into hierarchical arrangements, the organization of
supervision and surveillance, the marking out of time into schedules and programs, all
contribute to constructing a world that appears to consist not of a complex of social
practices but of a binary order: on the one hand individuals and their activities, on the
other an inert ‘structure’ that somehow stands apart from individuals, precedes them,
and contains and gives a framework to their lives.153
According to Mitchell, a theory of the state should strive not to fix these distinctions
but historicise them, as well as those between state and ‘society’ and ‘economy.’ 154 And
151
Ibid., p. 77.
Ibid., p. 89.
153
Ibid., p. 89.
154
The crucial question then becomes how ‘“the state” comes to assume its vertical position as the supreme
authority that manages all other institutional forms that social relations take,’ including those known as the
economy or civil society. The quote is from Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta, ‘Introduction,’ in The
Anthropology of the State, ed. by Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta (Blackwell, 2006), 1–41 (p. 9, original
emphasis). Also see Thomas Blom Hansen and Fin Stepputat, ‘Introduction: States of Imagination,’ in States
152
41
while he did not lay a particular emphasis on that point, he identified the historicity of the
state effect as particularly modern. Further clues for interpreting the modernity of the
state can be found in other Mitchell’s texts155 where he attempted to find an analytical
alternative both to ‘a singular modernity that defines all other histories in its terms’ – a
tendency infiltrating even the efforts to de-centre the Eurocentric geography of modernity
– as well as to ‘the easy pluralism of alternative modernities’156 which still implicitly
presumes a shared unity in relation to which alternatives can be defined. Mitchell accepts
that the project of modernity is characterised by singularity and universalism which
enabled its endless replication across varied settings. However, this is also the source of
its chronically incomplete realisation. If the emergence of the modern (the Western, the
capitalist) hinges on marginalising and subordinating what remains different to it, this
‘constitutive outside’ has an uncanny way of creeping back in and mutating and diverting
modernity. The universalism of modernity always remains an impossible one, subverted by
the very forms of difference on which it depends; the plural and discrepant histories
lurking behind each staging of the global history of modernity subvert its singular narrative
logic. Mitchell brands this constitution of modernity as ‘representation,’ in the sense of
social practices which introduce to lived experience ‘what seems an absolute distinction
between image (or meaning, or plan, or structure) and reality, and thus a distinctive
apprehension of the real.’157 The emergence of the ‘state’ as a structure external to
practice follows the general logic of this staging of modernity.
Stojanović’s
analysis
of the
relationships
between
the
state, society
and
modernisation mirrors the binaries identified by Mitchell: on the one hand, there are the
abstract ‘forms’ and designs of the state (‘rule of law,’ ‘civil society,’ universal ‘individual’),
on the other hand, the concreteness of traditional, ‘petrified’ social relationships and
values that resist and infiltrate the state, thus undermining its modernising projects.
Stojanović’s concern to explain Serbia’s deviations from the preconceived path to (liberal)
modernity, and to find remedies for the same, prevents her from seeing that this
dichotomy is itself a product of modernist representation. Her emphasis on the
development of the state-idea (institutions, laws, rules, representations) at the expense of
of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State , ed. by Thomas Blom Hansen and Fin
Stepputat (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1–38.
155
‘Introduction’ and ‘The Stage of Modernity,’ in Questions of Modernity, ed. by Timothy Mitchell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. xi-xxvii, 1–34.
156
‘Introduction,’ p. xii.
157
Ibid., p. xiii.
42
statist practices leads to contradictory claims such as that the state, though speedily
modernising itself and being a complete social hegemon, failed to modernise the society.
Finally, a certain modernist tendency to fetishise abstractions produces an analysis of
practices in a constant reference to the norms and blueprints they should follow,
preventing us from asking different questions about their nature. This is not to suggest
that we should discount the state as an object of historical research. However, it needs to
be disarticulated into empirically observable objects of study – mundane statist practices
and localised instances of state formation to be examined primarily as they were, in all
their social and cultural embeddedness, and not only as they should have been (but
usually never were).
Finally, one should mention recent anthropological approaches to the state which
take cues from the work of Abrams, Mitchell and others as well as from general
anthropological theory. In an influential chapter, Sharma and Gupta158 suggested that
anthropologists engage with states as cultural artefacts while also framing them by
transnational dynamics. The first point expands on Mitchell’s observations in a
characteristically anthropological manner, emphasising that cultural processes of state
formation may constitute states as culturally different. Methodologically, it involves an
interest in everyday state practices (such as those of various bureaucracies) and
representations (discourses on the state in the media or political campaigning, state
symbolism and iconography) through which different categories of people encounter and
get to know the state in myriad different ways. The second point calls for a recognition of
the profound transformation of the nation-state in an age where globally circulating
neoliberal discourses, international financial organisations and NGOs, and transnational
governance and regulatory regimes redefine both ideological norms and legal and material
limits within which states perform their traditional roles or delegate them to ‘non-state’
actors. Both of these suggestions turn our focus away from the nation-state – the first to
the microlevel of social practice whose reification ‘the state’ is, the second to the broader
transnational context that methodological nationalism of much research on the state
tended to overlook.
Let me briefly suggest some ways of reconsidering the issues addressed by
Stojanović in the light of this alternative research programme. In relation to the cultural
constitution of the modern Serbian state, it would begin from the recognition of how the
158
‘Introduction.’
43
early explicit discourses of the nation-state were intimately related to discourses of
modernity and modernisation. While this organic relationship was to varying degrees
characteristic for most modern states, in the newly independent states in the Ottoman
Balkans it has manifested in a specific form which equated modernisation with
‘Europeanisation’ – the process of ‘catching up’ and directly importing constitutional, legal,
and institutional models, but also technology, knowledge, material culture, consumption
habits etc. from Western and Central Europe. In the practice of state-building, a quite
literal expression of this was the fact that many civil servants, especially in the earliest
period when a suitable domestic cadre was lacking, were foreigners, mostly Austrian and
Hungarian Serbs.159 The emerging native elites – which were, as has been noted above,
typically dependent on state employment and/or politically active – were also
overwhelmingly foreign-educated.
From the start, then, the conditions were ripe for the kind of representation which
emphasises the break and difference between modernity and tradition, here accentuated
by the former’s origins which were considered unambiguously foreign. But in the same
time, these claims of rupture have been continually subverted by conspicuous continuities.
Interestingly, the contemporaries tended to make note of this in terms highly reminiscent
of Mitchell’s – those of Western culture-less and universal state ‘forms’ that were
infiltrated and corrupted by local ‘Oriental’ habits and practices. While Stojanović and
other ‘civil’ historians are aware of these issues, they do not make the next step toward
seeing them as symptoms of the inherently cultural character of state formation which
involves modifications, adaptations and reworking of imported foreign models. Instead,
they tended to approach the subject from a normative position which largely considers
these negotiations between the modern and the traditional as undesirable deviations and
is thus rather close to the outlook of the most passionate Serbian Westernisers of the
nineteenth century. In that way, one particular insider manner of representing and
legitimating the nascent state informs the analysis. Even more troublesome is the
ahistorical and essentialising extension of the same perspective to the present-day Serbia.
It would be more productive to revisit the commonalities and differences between the
nineteenth-century political positions beyond the modernising/anti-modern binary, as
richly layered discourse which is an invaluable source of information on native, culturally
159
Michael Boro Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia 1804–1918, Vol. I (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 142, 192; Traian Stoianovich, ‘The Pattern of Serbian Intellectual Evolution, 1830–
1880,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History, 1 (1959), 242–271.
44
informed perspectives on the state, modernity and tradition.
These issues also need to be examined in a close relationship to everyday state
practices and encounters of various categories of people with the state in this formative
period. These themes have been so far on the margins of the existing research which was
predominantly concerned with elite politics; this might be partly explained by the difficulty
of a historical study of mundane, inconspicuous everyday practices. The focus of
Stojanović’s specifically has been largely on ideas, ideologies, legal reforms and political
struggles at the level of the central government; a partial exception is especially her book
on urbanisation and Europeanisation of Belgrade in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.160 However, such explorations are necessary to move from the reification of the
state as a unitary agent or structure distinct and autonomous from the society (at least
ideally) to its more realistic conceptualisation as a heterogenous, more or less fragmented
and sometimes conflicted set of agencies and institutions thoroughly enmeshed with their
surrounding society. Nation-state building in Serbia coincided with the development of
statistics and its attendant objects of study (national society and national economy), the
mushrooming of various associations for which the government created conditions by
adopting liberal laws on the freedom of association, and the emergence of the national
capitalist economy, aided by various government interventions, such as tariff protection,
subsidisation of the industry, direct ownership,161 and so on. This suggests that the
emergence of the ‘state,’ ‘(civil) society’ and the ‘economy’ – spheres whose mutual
autonomy and boundaries are taken for granted in the ‘civil’ historiography 162 – are part
and parcel of the same modernising process. Further clues for future research along these
lines could be found for instance in the patrimonialism of the first autonomous Serbian
regime of the Prince Miloš Obrenović under which the distinction between the public
property of the state and the private property of Miloš was almost non-existent and the
formation of local authorities often copied the extension of clientelistic networks of either
Miloš or the local headmen who challenged him.163 In the second half of the nineteenth
160
161
Калдрма и асфалт.
The state was involved especially in military industry and its associated branches. Чалић, Србија, pp.
149–151.
162
In fact, Stojanović even argued that in Serbia they were too separate from each other, although this
contradicts her comments about the ‘hypertrophied’ role of the state quoted above. ‘One of those
specificities is the fact that in Serbia, as well as in most other Balkan countries, three spheres – the sphere
of the state, the sphere of various forms of civil society, and the sphere of the society – developed
practically independently from each other, without actual mutual relationships.’ Ulje na vodi, p. 28.
163
Сахара Тетсуја, ‘Патронско-клијентелистичке мреже и стварање српске државе почетком 19. века,’
Годишњак за друштвену историју, 6 (1999), 1–12. ‘Many headmen (starešine) became rich and developed
45
century, the strong influence of the interests of informal networks on political parties, on
the one hand, and the political control of banks and other economic institutions, on the
other hand – phenomena noted also by Stojanović – suggest that various elements of the
state-system were likely to serve as instruments of emergent (capitalist) forms of
inequality and domination and to be widely perceived as their expression.164 In this
context, one should note the significant economic benefits granted to civil servants (giving
rise to state-dependent middle classes and elites) and the haughtily paternalist, if not
openly authoritarian, attitude toward the masses that was shared by governments of
various ideological allegiances. The early Radical proposals for a decentralised, nonbureaucratic state based on strong local self-government could be, with due reservations,
considered representative of the popular perceptions of the state. Such ‘populist’ critiques
and visions might have been anti-bureaucratic and at times anti-Western, but not
necessarily anti-modern or even anti-state. These historical positions need to be carefully
disentangled, rather than merged in a timeless Serbian anti-modern ideology, before their
mutual relationships and potential continuities with later ideologies can be clarified.
The relationship of the ‘state’ and modernisation is equally in need of extensive
rethinking in the contemporary context of the European integration of Serbia. As a first
step, analysis must be decoupled from the narratives equating ‘Europeanisation’ with
modernisation. This prevents any kind of critical perspective on integration as it engenders
an automatic assumption that this is an inherently benevolent process of state
improvement and that the causes for its slow pace and low quality are to be sought
exclusively at the level of the nation-state (which is misconceived as fully sovereign and
autonomous) and never in the process itself, EU institutions or the broader transnational
context. Second, it is necessary to disarticulate the reified concept of the state and
examine its cultural and social constitution as outlined above. Third, Europeanisation
should be seen not as one coherent process of EU institutions impacting on the Serbian
state, but rather as a two-way encounter in which integration transforms but is also itself
businesses thanks especially due to their role in governing the state...’ Миљковић-Катић, Структура, p. 85,
quoted in Lazić, Čekajući kapitalizam, p. 116.
164
In a useful review of relevant research, Lazić argues that the continuity of an essentially ‘state-capitalist’
character of the social, political and economic order in Serbia can be traced from the nineteenth century
through the interwar Yugoslavia and that it facilitated the establishment of the socialist but equally statecentric order in the post-war period. Lazić, Čekajući kapitalizam, pp. 99–127. The statist nature of capitalism
in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia was reflected in the central regulatory and organising role of the state in
industry, commerce, and finance and its primacy as an employer and investor as well as in the overlapping
social base and common interests of political elites and the bourgeoisie. Also see Smiljana Đurović, Državna
intervencija u industriji Jugoslavije, 1918–1941 (Beograd: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1986).
46
being refracted by the manifold domestic discourses and representations of the state,
statist practices and institutions, as well as ‘non-state’ groups and networks operating
within, through or on behalf of the state-system.165 For instance, the policy of European
integration may be easily presented as corresponding to the principles of other discourses
of state reform currently circulating in Serbia (such as those of anti-corruption, ‘order’,
streamlining the state etc.) and as such they serve some political interests while
threatening others. Those in various state, state-owned or state-dependent institutions,
organisations, businesses and so forth may support or resist integration according to their
expectations to benefit or suffer from the process and the attendant reforms. The same
applies to the institutions and networks that are based in the seemingly separate spheres
of the economy and civil society but are in fact often closely politically, economically
and/or socially connected to parts of the state. The concept of ‘elite alliance’ suggested by
Stojanović goes, to some extent, in this direction. However, the claim there is a general
anti-EU and anti-modern elite alliance seems, by now, thoroughly refuted by the even
more vigorous pursuance of EU membership by the new government of Ivica Dačić as well
as by the existing empirical research on the attitudes of business and political elites to the
EU.166 It seems more likely that there are multiple ‘elite alliances’ supporting as well
resisting integration. These can be assumed to extend not only across various institutional
orders and spheres of social life at home, but also across national borders as they ally with
or become integrated into various transnational (political, business, criminal, policy, expert
etc.) networks. The task then becomes to map the anatomy and development of these
alliances, describe their public (self-) representations and group identities, define their
interests, resources and strategies, and eventually proceed to a diagnosis of the
momentary ‘state of play.’ Unfortunately, though fragmented knowledges about these
various issues exist in and out of the academia, the project of connecting them has not
even begun. This paper is intended as a modest conceptual prompt toward its inception.
165
This means seeing European integration as truly transnational in a sense which is simultaneously local:
‘The local turns out not only to be influenced by the transnational but to be a specific site of the
materialization of transnational processes. That is to say, the local not only is transnational, but also, there is
no transnational that does not have specific and particular local enactments.’ Nina Glick-Schiller,
‘Introduction: What Can Transnational Studies Offer the Analysis of Localized Conflict and Protest?’ Focaal –
European Journal of Anthropology, 47 (2006), 3–17 (p. 9). On a similar approach to Europeanisation, see
Noemi Lendvai, ‘Europeanization of Social Policy? Prospects and Challenges for South East Europe,’ in Social
Policy and International Interventions in South East Europe, ed. by Bob Deacon and Paul Stubbs
(Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2007), pp. 22–44 (pp. 26–28).
166
Lazić and Vuletić, ‘The Nation State.’
47
In lieu of conclusions
In late socialist and postsocialist Europe, the idea and practice of ‘civil society’ has been
firmly welded to the blueprint of ‘transition’ to the universal and the only possible
destination of liberal democracy and liberal capitalism. It should therefore come as no
surprise that the proponents of ‘civility’ would adopt the position of guardians of this
preordained programme of transformation and critique real-world developments which
deviate from it. Nevertheless, this analysis of their analyses did not argue ‘against’
liberalism or question the legitimacy of promoting liberal views and supporting EU
accession. If anything, it argued for a critical and autonomous political thought whose
future, in a Europe where ‘zombie’ neoliberalism167 continues to preach the gospel of ‘no
alternative’ to more of the same which produced this new normality of crisis, depends
more than ever on our ability to test liberal verities about the world, transcend the state’s
own categories, and free the discussion of the EU project from manipulations of identity
politics. There are always alternatives; our mission as critical scholars is to examine the
conditions of their (in)visibility. The ‘civil orientation’ in Serbia has, to a considerable
extent, come to stand for progressive, democratic and cosmopolitan politics, and as such
it must itself become an object of questioning. Such critique, in fact, has been already
launched from various quarters, but it has often tended to be either reactionary or
fragmented. Though this paper could not discuss it, in private, informal contexts I found
activists and NGO workers to reflect on and position themselves in relation to various
political issues in ways which departed from the established ‘civil’ perspective. Many felt
that some concerns which made perfect sense in the recent past have become, in a
changed context, little short of constraining orthodoxy. The time has come to explode the
old boundaries of civility.
167
Jamie Peck, Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner, ‘Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontens,’ Antipode, 41 (2009),
94–116 (p. 105).
48
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Working Paper, No. 7
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