![]() |
Taken on the nine hour journey from Belgrade to Sarajevo |
Not very long after Austria-Hungary's
declaration of War on Serbia in 1914, the renowned Slavicist R.W.
Seton-Watson gave a speech in London in support of "gallant
little Serbia", issuing extensive commendation of the Serb
military effort as proof of what can be achieved by sincere national
feeling in the face of heavy odds. In happy contrast with his more
ethnically 'complex' Balkan neighbours, the Serb is "gay,
genial, open, hospitable, very
friendly to strangers, talkative, not to say garrulous, but after
interminable and quite needless talk about what is to be done, ready
to do it with a rush". We are told without irony that the Serb
peasant is in fact "a perfect gentleman". Fortunately for
Serbia "so far as purity of race is concerned, she probably
holds the primacy among all Slav races."1
Seton-Watson
exemplifies the tendency, even among Balkan boosters, to conceive of
ethno-linguistic groups in eastern Europe as self-contained nations,
each with unique racial characteristics and certain rights pertaining
to them specifically as
nations. This strand of 'nation-thinking' is not only capable of
celebrating certain social groups, but can also, through caricature
and social denigration, heap scorn upon others. By conceiving of each
group as a historically-wronged, oppressed nation, broader
solidarities are systematically neglected. In their history of
eastern Europe, Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries put the stunted,
shabby appearance of the Balkan peninsula down to the endless toing
and froing of the European powers across its surface. A pretty
well-evidenced conclusion, to be sure, but one that is used either to
condemn or dismiss the complex, multi-ethnic, informal networks of
social institutions that have prevailed in the absence of
western-style nation statehood. A relative paucity of formal state
and civil institutions is taken as the diminution of life as such, a
tragic loss of which little else can be said.
![]() |
The Danube, Belgrade, Serbia |
The
absence of stable, formally legitimate democracy, through which
meddling ethnic passions can be contained by the rule of law, is not,
they stress, down to inherent racial character; rather, they claim,
that the ability of democracy to take root (ever is there recourse to
the growing-tree metaphor) is proscribed by the cultural soil from
which it sprouts. Democracy takes stability as its great
precondition, allergic and vulnerable as it is to any expression of
tumult, and thus depends entirely on the organic, "unplanned or
fortuitous prior existence and/or rapid emergence of more
horizontally structured civil societies and civil economies"2
- i.e. those afforded to the historical 'West' alone. Aside from the
pleasingly Habermasian ring of terms like 'horizontal civil society'
it is hard to glean much substance from them. In any case, the theme is clear: the
leisurely accretion of constitutionally-bound freedoms is a luxury
that can ill be afforded in eastern Europe. Paroxysms and crises are the fate of those unfortunate enough to be excluded from the wealthy western powers. Never does it occur to them that such rare
democratic flowering might in fact be a flaw implicit in this
particular notion of democracy!
Such
ruminations on the nature and qualities of the democratic order
assume a heightened importance in a country such as Serbia, where in
2003 the assassination of the prime minister, Zoran
Đinđić, resulted
in the declaration of a state of emergency. Đinđić,
predictably lauded throughout the west for his tough neoliberalism,
stood at the helm of a deeply anti-democratic, state-centric
westernization movement. The state of emergency, enabling the police
to arrest and imprison anyone they felt like for up to thirty days,
acted as just such a stereotypical Balkan hindrance to democracy.
Even before this Đinđić had been every bit as opportunistically
power-hungry as Slobodan Milošević, transforming parliament by
illegally booting out low-attendance MPs and acquiring greater
political influence through the same clientelistic channels as his
predecessor. 3The
goal of course was somewhat different: the final dismantling of the
ailing social enterprises which still made up the bulk of the
Yugoslav economy, in favour of total expropriation and enclosure
under 'pure' market conditions. The largely invisible masses subject
to "structural unemployment" in socialist Yugoslavia
became, in the early years of the 2000s, "structurally
unemployable" in the new economy. Those out of work officially
number over 20% of the population, which can prove fatally
destructive in a country where, under the relatively
industrial-democratic system of Titoist Yugoslavia, "employment
status determined identities" and the "workplace was the
centre of one's social universe"4.
Owing to its unique, strategic position in the world economy and its
macro-economic experiment with 'market socialism', the entire federal
state apparatus of the old Yugoslavia was directed towards managing
the influx of foreign capital. Throughout the 1970s and 80s this
amounted to harsh retrenchment in the face of an increasingly
volatile global economy.5
Susan Woodward and Perry Anderson are surely not the only
commentators to have observed that, as Poland was getting its debts
cancelled, the squeeze was put on Yugoslavia in the late 80s. We all
know what happened after the money dried up.
It
is a peculiar irony that the very centralizing federal apparatus, so
emasculated as IMF funding dried up in the 80s, has become the main
vehicle for enforcing privatization. Not to mention the use of the
managerial bureaucracy as a weapon against the organized working
class they once represented. After the violent nationalist explosion
of the 1990s, and the universal condemnation of Balkan nationalism,
it has once again become the respectable face of life in the
"transitional" Balkans. As Serbia re-enters the European
fold, new top-down ethnic partitions are being created (e.g. the
independence of Kosovo) in the name of national self-determination.
It seems as if the European cure to that famous Balkan malady
consists in fact of the same blade that struck it: more nationalism,
more Wilsonian (supervised) self-determination, greater alienation
between regional populations, greater openness to the whims of the
world market, greater atomization and disempowerment of the working
class.
![]() |
The rebuilt Stari Most, Mostar |
My
personal experience of the Balkans is woefully insufficient to enable
any speculation about what alternatives might be feasible there. The
polite Serbian girl at our hostel merely scolded us (quite
innocently) for electing to stay only one night in Belgrade but five
in Sarajevo. I meekly told her that I would be returning for one
extra night before catching my flight back to Warsaw. On my return I
sat for an hour in the morning in a cluttered lounge that doubled as
a bike-shed, talking about a boyfriend who hadn't bothered calling
for a week or two. A bright-eyed Australian told us that Serbs were,
indeed, the friendliest people he'd met in the whole of eastern
Europe. The brevity of our stay didn't prevent my girlfriend and
another friend of ours from enjoying the notoriously rowdy Belgrade
nightlife (a visit to the charmingly named 'Gun Club' won't be easily
forgotten). The disaster of national (and by extension ethnic)
self-determination for the Roma was evidenced everywhere. This has,
in its most egregious examples, resulted in ethnic-cleansing and the
housing of whole Roma communities on toxic land, with the further
result of irreversible brain damage among Roma children in Kosovo.6
In Mostar we were followed by one young teen with a bruised eye
gesturing to his mouth for food (as opposed to the usual requests for
money). Outside the main station in Sarajevo a boy, possibly as young
as four, pulled a knife on us. Everywhere the legacy of division -
social, political, geographical - was still extant. Particularly
gut-wrenching is the footage, looped continuously in a small museum
in Mostar, of the merciless pummelling of the Stari Most (Old Bridge)
by more than sixty shells. The prolonged, relentless attack, the
sound of slow crumbling, the ceaseless, determined fire, remains a
potent symbol of exactly
what devotion to a national cause can achieve.
But
there is another Balkans. Andrej Grubačić writes:
The
state-architects of Europe at the time [the 17th and 18th centuries]
were, in fact, obsessed with the demon of the Balkans, balkanization
being taken here in the sense of an alternative process of
territorial organization, decentralization, territorial autonomy and
federalism.7
This
alternative process of "constant fission and fusion"
challenged the "large, centralized, coercive systems" of
Europe, who were intent on "eliminating the threat of autonomous
political spaces that lack any permanently constituted coercive
authority" - i.e. a fully-fledged nation state on western lines.
However, it is by no means to endorse the cultural-determinist
account of Balkan history to recall the specific legacy of imperial
domination in the Balkans - a very real "coercive authority"
that has lasted throughout much of its history. While the Ottoman "millet system", through its
acceptance of the empire's relative institutional weaknesses, cleaved considerable space for
inter-communal economic and social interaction that avoided mediation by both the state and capital, the presence of
Europe's warring powers in the Balkans should not be forgotten. Any
account (and thereby implicit celebration of) the "anticolonial
and anti-statist struggles" of the Balkans must also record the
desperate trials into which its populations have been plunged.
Grubačić elevates the very real Balkan legacy of radical movements
for decentralized federalism and regional autonomy to the level of an
expression of the real tendencies of the whole of Balkan society. A
specifically Balkan concept of "civil society" - one
premised on autonomous political action independent of either the
state or the interests of the market - usurps the traditional
'discursive' liberal concept. This tradition of organised subversion,
for him, overdetermines all other regional legacies. But while more
liberal commentators mourn the unsophisticated civil society of the
Balkans, Grubačić's celebration of the intrinsic merit of Balkan
'alternatives' provides a radical tonic to the pernicious sympathy of
most western observers.
1The
text is available here: http://www.ebritic.com/?p=146369
2Bideleux
& Jeffries, History of Eastern Europe,
546
3Grubacic,
Don't Mourn, Balkanize!, 72
4Woodward,
'The Political Economy of Ethno-Nationalism', Socialist Register,
2003, 76
5For
the best accounts of the Yugoslav economic system and why it failed
see: Woodward or Estrin
6The
American activist for Roma people in Eastern Europe, Paul Polansky,
has helped publicize this. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7827031.stm and also his interview with
Andrej Grubacic, reprinted in Don't Mourn, Balkanize,
144-150
7Grubacic,
Don't Mourn, Balkanize!, 210
No comments:
Post a Comment