Читать книгу Divided We Stand: Discourses on Identity in ‘First’ and ‘Other’ Serbia - Ana Omaljev - Страница 9

As Obradović notes, much public dialogue in Serbia is dominated by actors representing directly opposing sides of an issue (e.g. pro- and anti-International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), pro- and anti-EU, rural/urban dichotomies) with the effect that the debate appears both polarized and polarizing.[10] Scholarly works on Serbia have described it as a society divided between liberal and illiberal, or civic and uncivic values.[11] The polarization between “First” and “Other” Serbia, as Ramet noted back in 2011, has frequently been cited as an illustration of the lack of agreement in Serbia on issues such as EU integration, attitudes toward the ICTY, apportioning responsibility for war crimes, and other issues arising from Serbia’s wartime past.[12] However, as this manuscript is going to print, the situation is quite the reverse: the Progressives, who are former Radicals, openly support Serbia’s path to EU accession and the left-leaning intellectuals, influenced by the Greek financial crisis, oppose EU accession on anti-imperialist grounds. This post-2012 polarization will be further addressed in the conclusion. Still, although often couched in social and cultural terms, the driving force behind these “cognitive divisions”, as they have been described by Edward Said,[13] was and is remarkably political. Suggestions have often been made, after 2000, that as much as the civil society activists and other liberals are working hard to expose Serbia’s complicity in the war crimes of the 1990s on the one hand, the revisionists are working equally hard to deny Serbian responsibility for war crimes and genocide on the other.[14] I propose to transcend this, at first glance, seemingly complex choice by deconstructing the dualist logic employed by First and Other Serbia and exposing the manner in which these positions toward Europe have forged, and are even now forging, Serbian national, political and cultural identities.

Public debates among Serbia’s elites after 2000 persistently refer, either implicitly or explicitly, to rearticulating the notion of the Serbian nation and its place in Europe and history in order to legitimize the government’s political decisions and foreign policy choices. The issue of Serbia belonging to Europe or not remains highly contentious in elite discourses, regardless of the actual state of Serbia’s relations with particular EU member states at any given moment. First and Other Serbia elites and political leaders have constructed a conception of the European Union, and a much broader concept of Europe, in a plethora of ways. What can be characterized as the anti-European position, in its many forms, has formulated Europe as a definitive threat to Serbian national interests, as an attack on national sovereignty in respect of Kosovo, and lastly, in cultural sense, as an attempt to supplant the traditional values associated with the Serbian Orthodox Church with a European foreign-imposed secular identity. Such reluctance to embrace the European project, it has been argued, stems from a variety of sources including the legacy of Serbian’s proud history as a dominant force in the region, the distinctive character of the Serbian collective experience, and the relationship between the Serbian and the Yugoslav identities.[15] The ever-present theme is that Serbia has a difficult geopolitical position in the mental map of Europe: that it is neither here nor there, that it is East for the West, and West for the East. This resulted in a specific in-between historical narrative and strong national myths. The constant state of transition in recent decades contributed to a strong sense of what Malksoo calls liminality, which she describes as “the twentieth-century political predicament of Eastern Europe.” The problems associated with displacement, and resulting uncertainty, resentment and general longing are all features of this “liminal character.”[16] Additionally, during the course of the last two decades, First Serbia’s intelligentsia has continuously questioned whether Serbia belongs to Europe, and consequently has questioned Serbia’s EU candidacy on essentialist grounds. Even so, throughout the period since October 5, 2000 and the change of regime, the question of whether Serbia is European and “who Serbs ought to be” has been at the heart of debates among public figures, intellectuals, journalists, writers and distinguished scholars. If Serbia is to gain closer ties with Europe there is a fear, that comes both from the radical left and right, that this would bring economic slavery, political repression and hardship. In contrast, certain figures over the years have stressed the economic importance of the EU, and of Serbia being part of the European trading bloc, and have advocated the vision of Serbia in Europe far beyond the narrow interests of the inward-looking elite. For instance, former head of the Office for EU integration, Milica Delević, has repeatedly stressed that Serbia needs to make an assessment of Serbian national interests which recognizes that the EU is its biggest economic partner and its largest source of foreign investment[17]. Delević has said that, “we are in Europe, we are surrounded with those countries that wish to be there, and Europe is our destiny.”[18] Also, current Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić recently emphasized that Serbia will not abandon the European path, because, in his view, EU membership represents the best type of society: “I think that is the best possible kind of society that we could aspire to. We already feel as a part of the European family.”[19] This ongoing identity debate about the character of Serbian society takes center stage domestically, but is also aimed at foreign audiences and Serbian diaspora.

Although the content of the debates has changed following moments of crisis and to take account of unfolding historical events including the assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjić[20] in 2003, Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, and Serbia’s full EU membership candidate status in early 2012, the issue of how the domestic intelligentsia first perceives and second represents Serbia’s Europeanness remains extremely complex. The subject of my close consideration in this book is this contestation of Europe that results in the extreme contestation of national identity. In general, national identity can be found in policies, laws, culture, film, national myths, and collective historic remembrance. Yet, more importantly, national identity is this psychological “we” feeling, of connectedness and belonging, that binds the nation together. This study highlights the ways in which both past and current politics in Serbia reflect the uneasy relationship between history, nation, Europe and identity. All four concepts remain politically contested because Serbian elites have yet to reach agreement on an accepted model of political community. Since the fall of Milošević and the democratic elections in 2001, the normative goal of the governmental apparatus has been to promote EU accession. At the beginning of the decade there was almost universal agreement as to the necessity of joining the EU, but by the end of 2005 there was no longer such a consensus among democratic circles and political parties. Yet the current Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić, previously a vehement anti-European, has since had a change of political course and since 2008 has fully supported Serbia’s European path. Vučić said, “EU accession is the only possible path for our country—this is what I said to President Vladimir Putin and what I have said in Brussels, Belgrade, Paris, everywhere.”[21] I will reveal this process of fluidity and change as I analyze the perceptions of Europe which have, at various times, been held by actors of First and Other Serbia. These public debates create a nation’s conception of itself that largely determines what that nation can achieve in wider international politics.

A focus on Serbia is relevant to the broader debate on EU expansion and ever closer union precisely because Serbia is not a major political power or primary shaper of the EU integration process but, quite the contrary, it is a country on the margins, an outsider whose own post-conflict affairs are intrinsically linked to Europe’s perception of it. In the aftermath of the Milošević regime, the democratic ethos was not entirely fostered and encouraged by the newly-elected democratic government. Consequently, Serbia has struggled to reconcile its relations with Europe in light of its war-torn past. In this respect, Serbia shares certain similarities with parts of Eastern Europe that are seen as lacking a broadly shared narrative of post-authoritarian identity, as there is “a lack of symbolic closure of the state socialist period and the negotiation-based transition.”[22] Furthermore, the issue of Kosovo, which has been described as “the most expensive Serbian word,”[23] has been at the forefront of political debate since 2007 and also features centrally in the debate on Europe. Whether Serbia would choose Kosovo over Europe was one of the burning issues in the aftermath of Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, and ever since. As a result, the lack of a widely shared narrative of post-authoritarian democratic identity, coupled with the loss of Kosovo, have buttressed the foundation of the illiberal public sphere such that it is stronger than even before. Yet, not only has Other Serbia failed to provide a set of instrumental post-conflict narratives and national symbols to effectively supplant authoritarian ones, but also the rhetorical device of politically correct speech has been misappropriated by the associates of the nationalists of First Serbia. In this light, following Dragović-Soso, this book will argue that the 2002 and 2003 Vreme debates confirmed the existence of two alternative narratives of the Serb experience of the wars of the 1990s, and two deeply opposed visions of the roles played by the West and by Europe in Serbia’s democratic transition.[24] Yet, I add that the legitimacy of liberal or nationalist discourse is dependent on the extent to which elites succeed in shaping their strategies and goals to correspond with the prior construction of collective identity. Rather than simply identifying First and Other Serbia as two monolithic constructions of identity, this book investigates the extent to which the two constructions can be seen to be changing over time and how this difference is located in spatial and temporal constructions of identity. Hansen notes, in the light of Europeanization in Central and Eastern Europe, the frequent construction of the Other as temporally progressing, toward the (Western) Self.[25] This is a central theme of these Central and Eastern European development discourses as well as in discourses of democratization and human rights.[26] Is the Serbian Self being constructed as progressing toward the European Other or away from it, as Europe and the West are increasingly portrayed as villains? This issue raises a series of new questions which this book will attempt to answer.