(The papaer is available as Word document here.)
Abstract:
The paper analyzes the role of the specific form of anti-war activism in Serbia
as the vanishing mediator between socialist Yugoslavism, based on the inclusion
of others and embodied in the slogan “brotherhood and unity”, and a new
phenomenon, named autochauvinism, which is characterized by a radical form of
exclusion of (or from) “their own”, understood as a threatening, culturally “contaminated”
community opposed to modernity, the world and history. These are simultaneously
two fundamental, albeit fluid and somewhat self-contradictory, features of self-image
and ideological frameworks that have successively conditioned the dynamics of
public life in Serbia, primarily through elitist intellectual and political
circles, characterized by class and social privileges and self-understood as
leftist and/or liberal. The author shows that this change in the last decade of
the 20th century cannot be understood without taking into account the impact of
the characteristic form of anti-war activism as a mediator between two stable
states, as well as that a direct transition from the first to the second was
not possible. The change did not occur as a result of some secondary actions of
the vanishing mediator, but was a consequence of the interpretation of the
causes of the wars and the background of the "Serbian" war crimes on
which the anti-war movement based its activities. The author highlights the differences
between the two phenomena and the threads that connect them, above all the
understanding of Serbian negative exceptionalism and uniqueness, as well as the
related perceptions of modernization processes and their correct outcome.
Keywords:
vanishing mediator, socialist Yugoslavism, autochauvinism, anti-war movement,
war crimes, negative exceptionalism, modernity
THE OTHER SERBS
AGAINST DIFFERENT EUROPEANS
“I presuppose the death, and even the existence (that
is, what is worse) of the old, cursed dog, to the life of the warmongering
intellectual scum: for crimes against people of other nations, but also for
crimes against their own nation, for tens of thousands of dead and displaced
Serbs, I am convinced, those gentlemen will answer to the Serbian people, and
that in the hour of their reckoning with themselves. I am waiting for that
hour. I believe in it. Until that time, how can I say that this world is my
world?”
Radomir Konstantinović, in the address to the “Fourth
Assembly of Citizens of Serbian Nationality of Bosnia and Herzegovina”, in
Sarajevo, June 22, 1997 (Konstantinović, 2003, p. 137)
Radomir
Konstantinović, the main ideologue of the anti-war movement, said in 2002, on
the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the founding of “the Belgrade Circle”:
“The Second Serbia is a Serbia that does not reconcile itself to crime” (Iz
arhive, 2015).
The self-proclaimed “Second/Other Serbia”, an informal group of
prominent individuals, organizations and associations supported by Western
power centers, was characterized by anti-nationalist political and cultural
activism, but “the real reason these original Second Serbians converged [was] a
courageous opposition to the war and war crimes, in the midst of the war
hysteria that took over the majority, i.e. the First Serbia” (Kišjuhas, 2022). The
fact that the founders and flag bearers of “the Second Serbia”, who emphasized
that they were “citizens”, some claiming to be “apatrides”, presented as its opposite,
the negative of its own exceptionalism and the main enemy, the rest of Serbia, allegedly
incorrigible “people”, which they called “the First Serbia”, and not the levers
of the regime, marked its legacy, an important aspect of which I examine in
this paper.
The
question of when “the Second Serbia” disappeared is more complex than the
question of when this assemblage was created, marginal in its size but central judging
by the elite social and political location it quickly occupied. Nevertheless,
in the circles of leading promoters and inheritors of the ideas it gave birth
to, in 2022 agreement crystallized that “the Second Serbia” no longer exists,
i.e. that it is no longer “institutionally united”, but that “in our society,
there are still professors, intellectuals, writers, artists, journalists,
doctors, lawyers, activists, and anti-fascists who inherit the ideas of the
Second Serbia from those legendary sessions” of “the Belgrade Circle”, to which
its origin is linked (Kišjuhas, 2022). Instead, we have a Serbia where a
growing number of citizens believe not so much that Serbia is not their “world”,
or that it is not “the world”, but that it does not
deserve to exist. It is a Serbia that does not reconcile itself either with the
Serbs or with Serbia. In this paper, I look at the genesis of autochauvinism, a
phenomenon that arises as a radical, dystopian response of part of the elite to
modernization challenges in a differently European society adjacent to the
West. It marked that “brave new world”, a Serbia inhabited by “citizens” whom,
following their self-understanding, I called accidental Serbs.
THE
ROLE OF VANISHING MEDIATOR
The
issue of historical change has preoccupied researchers in various disciplines.
One of the questions is related to the origin of a new phenomenon, state or
order. Namely, historicism leads us to think synchronically, within an
independent, self-contained system, similar to language “in which every part is
dependent for its meaning on every other part” (Butler, 2005, p. 76). It helps us to see that
events are connected and that “the past and the future are intertwined,” but it
does not indicate to us what enabled the emergence of a new stable state of the
observed system (Butler, 2005, p. 76). To understand the roots of the new we
need “[t]he diachronic perspective [that] deals with phenomena that are
unrelated to systems although they do condition them” (Saussure, 1959, p. 85). Moreover,
a narrowly historicist approach may prevent us from recognizing that the
catalyst that made the new state possible may be diachronic, external. In other words, we tend to
reduce the sequence of diachronic phenomena, which are not connected to a
system, to synchronic ones and observe only the dynamics within the system in
which the change occurred. Only when we step away can we understand why the historical
fissure appeared. The agent that enabled the change, “a ‘missing link’ in the
chain”, the intermediary between two stable states, cannot be identified using the
synchronic historicist approach (Žižek, 2002, p. 198). It is absent from the
picture it created, although “the status of the ‘missing link’ is not only
epistemological but primarily ontological” (Žižek, 2002, p. 198). Instead of
indicating the origin of the new, it delivers an image of emptiness. It seems that
something came out of nothing.
Frederic
Jameson analyzed Max Weber’s interpretation of the emergence of capitalism,
which he considered to be Weber’s central insight, and described Protestantism
as “a vanishing mediator” of capitalism,[8] “a
kind of overall bracket or framework within which change takes place” (1973, p.
78). The concept was later used to
understand “big” historical transformations, but also
how “a small, almost indiscernible action leads to a vast and seemingly
unrelated reaction,” to major changes in societies around the world (Butler,
2005, p. 77). Jameson
says “that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a
rationalization of innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reason
for being and disappears from the historical scene. It is thus in the strictest
sense of the word a catalytic agent which permits an exchange of energies
between two otherwise mutually exclusive term” (1973, p. 78). Later, Slavoj
Žižek, who analyzed a plethora of vanishing mediators and developed a more
nuanced interpretation, pointed out that it is not only needed but essential, that
the change would not have happened without it at all (Buchanan, 2014, p. 263). Also,
“[t]his something that cannot be integrated into the existing ideological” and
other frameworks, is often not easy to name, so Žižek speaks of “the New” and
says that “[t]o find proper names for this New is the task ahead” (2002, pp. 270-271).
WHY
THE TERM AUTOCHAUVINISM
One
of the first problems that arise when we are faced with a new phenomenon is how
to name it.
The available terms do not have satisfactory meaning and do not point to either
the important implications of the new phenomenon or the extent to which it is
radical. For example, beyond psychology, where it has been used in the context
of the self-worth of individuals, the concept of “self-hate” appears in the
early 20th century in the interpretations of the dynamics in the Jewish
diaspora in Germany and the newly formed Austrian republic, at the western core
and source of modernity, and, outside of psychology, has remained closely
linked to the Jews, primarily to the challenges of acculturation and its
(im)possibility in an “inherently antisemitic world” (Gilman, 2021, p. xii). A
new, more complex and striking phenomenon – embodied in the synergy of
attitudes and interpretations by which alienated “citizens” suggest the
conclusion that “the people” from which they sprung deserve to disappear, that it
represents a legitimate target – occurred in Serbia, on the slandered periphery
of Europe, in the “motherland”, i.e., in the “national home” of а Slavic people located at the thankless, receiving
end of the globalization of modernity. It is inseparable from the understanding
of part of the elite that in Serbia modernization processes which, like in
other non-Western societies, were delayed and therefore reproductive, experienced
a final, historic failure and that the cause lies in the Serbs themselves. Jewish
self-hatred is described “as a dramatic case ‘of the psychology of a suffering
minority’“ where, according to Theodor Lessing, the philosopher who introduced
the concept after the end of the First World War, it is about “the tragedy of
the Jew who tries to flee from himself and his Jewishness” (according to Reitter,
2021, pp. 161; 154). In Serbia, within the ethnic majority, at the turn of the
millennia, things went much further than flight, self-denial and hatred. It is
no longer about elitist excesses – a scattered set of dehumanizing attitudes
and hotchpotch disqualifications of “the masses”, as well as the part of the
elite that is proud of being Serbian – but about the existence of a new, naturalized,
coherent system of thought.
Part
of the intelligentsia ended up with a (self)understanding that shares some important
features with auto-racism and auto-orientalism, a concept developed within the
framework of postcolonial criticism.[13] However,
the term “auto-orientalism” is too narrow, tied to perceptions and
representations, and problematic in many ways, not least because Serbia did not
experience classical form of colonialism. Postcolonial theory
approaches Europe in a Western-centric way, and that is why, although it is
useful when we talk about the Western view of Serbia and the Balkans, it has
been very slippery. It easily becomes desubjectivizing, because if we dare to
talk about us and our difference in relation to the West, we risk being
disqualified due to the alleged “orientalization of Serbia” (Lazarević-Radak,
2010, p. 265). The term also leads us to understand autochthonous
disqualifications as derivative, although they do not represent the
internalization of the Western gaze. Namely, the “Palanka” (Konstantinović,
1991) is a “sister” and not a “daughter”
of Ruritania (Goldsworthy, 1998, p. 10); the “Serbian beasts” (Dinić, 2010) do
not inhabit the “Wild East of Europe” but the “small Serbian Reich” (Sušnica,
2016) and the “Orthodox Jamahiriya” (Mirko Đorđević: Ovo je pravoslavna džamahirija, 2011). Finally, it is confusing,
because the “auto-orientalization” of one’s own, more precisely of the despised
and rejected “one’s own”, implies a simultaneous “auto-occidentalization”
of oneself, in the sense of egocentric Occidentalism and constitutive “Occidentophilia” (Salhi, 2013, p. 273), usually based
on an idealized image of the West.
As
for “auto-racism”, the concept of “racism without race”, that is, without
conspicuous racial differences, did not take root in the Balkans and was rarely
used as a determinant of “rejection of difference” (Elseewi, 2019, p. 196). Also,
the term “racism” carries connotations of inferiority but, in itself, not of a
fatal threat. The new phenomenon in Serbia was more reminiscent of “classic”
chauvinism. At the same time, it is possible to add the prefix “auto” to the
term “chauvinism” – which indicates that “the Other”, which also means the
despised, slandered enemy from the chauvinist imagination, is understood as
internal – thanks to the fact that it acquired a new meaning. The
transformation involved changing the object of chauvinism, it no longer refers
to “us” but to “them”, which implies a change in the relationship it refers to
– instead of “extreme” love for us, “extreme” contempt for them. Regardless of this
change, a “civic” redefinition of referent subjectivity, the “primary ‘We’
group” (Sekelj, 2001, pp. 143-144), the idealized common identity – which also
means redefinition of the exalted, adored “We” of chauvinism in the earlier
sense of the word – took place in Serbia. The ethnic “We” was replaced by a
reduced, citizenist, narcissistic “We”, in
which one’s own aesthetic and ideological “clones” were included. At the same
time, the ethnic “We” was transformed into the main enemy, “the Other”, that
is, into the excluded and despised, “notorious They” (Žikić, 2007, p. 77), and
became the object of chauvinistic contempt, a chauvinism in the new sense of
the word. The idolatrous attitude towards the egocentric, elevated “We” makes
autochauvinism a form of chauvinism in the original sense of “extreme” love,
and it can also be viewed as civic chauvinism.
FROM
INCLUSION OF OTHERS TO EXCLUSION OF ONE’S OWN
In this paper, I analyze the role
of a specific form of anti-war activism during the nineties of the 20th century
as a vanishing mediator between two phenomena that conditioned the
self-understanding of members of the alienated elite and the dynamics of social
and political life in Serbia. The first is the last actually existing
Yugoslavism, we can call it Titoist or socialist, while the other is
autochauvinism.
Here I want to point out their opposing operating principles – one is an inclusionary
mechanism, the highly specific, non-identitarian, internationalist and
ideological understanding of “brotherhood and unity”, while the other is an exclusionary
and dehumanizing vehicle, (cultured) “cultural decontamination”. They are sublimations of
the two phenomena and illustrate the nature of historical change, but they also
point to the importance of self-understanding in opposition to Serbianness,
which was a constant in the process of transformation from the logic of
inclusion of “others” to the logic of exclusion of “one’s own” or, in other
words, self-exclusion from “one’s own”. I am focused, on the one hand, on a
change that was not a consequence of wider historical processes, although the
new, post-Cold War zeitgeist, especially the belief in the “end of history” (Fukuyama,
1989), favored the catalytic effect of the vanishing mediator, while, on the
other hand, the fact that it is a new phenomenon does not mean that it does not
have deep roots. For historical, cultural and, even, purely geographic reasons,
Serbian elites were prone to fall into autochauvinism. In this paper I point
out that it was not inevitable, and that before the second half of the nineties
one cannot speak of autochauvinism.
In order to better
understand why this “fall” occurred, I highlight a number of related identity
dimensions of the two phenomena, as well as the role that the identification of
Europe with the West, or rather with its idealized image, played in shaping a
culturally insensitive, unitary vision of “the correct” modern Europeans with
whom the inhabitants of Serbia, a differently European society shaped by
non-European influences, cannot fit in. There is a continuity
between the two elite milieus that sustained the two phenomena and from which
they drew their political and social strength. Both are characterized by
the related class, social and educational status of their privileged members,
as well as, it can be said, fanatical and constitutive in the sense of
identity, loyalty to compatible sources of cultural capital and related
ideological support, understood as leftist. Also, both milieus were
formed in a political constellation whose important underpinning was, in
essence, exogenous, and the logic of the subjugation of Serbia was
crypto-colonial and “Serbophobic”. First it was the personal
regime of Josip Broz, which under the slogan “After Tito, Tito” was maintained
even after his death, then, during the mediation of anti-war activism, Western
donations, and, after the changes on October 5, 2000, the autocolonial matrix
which was managed by the West through a series of anti-political and
anti-democratic interventions.
The main thread
that connects Titoist Yugoslavism and Serbian autochauvinism is a
characteristic understanding of a unique, difficult to do away with, according
to many, impossible to do away with and uncontrollable, Serbian reverse,
negative exceptionalism, or one can also say negative uniqueness. Relying on
the ideas of Radomir Konstantinović, anti-war activists presented that
exceptionalism as something that is not only the core of the petrified Serbian
being, but also its sanctified, fully embraced fate. For example, as part of “[t]he
fiery condemnations of Serbia’s stalled social and intellectual development and
its accompanying predilection for barbaric violence” (Cox,
2017, p. 59), Konstantinović in Philosophy of the Palanka equates
Serbia with the unworldly, monstrous “Palanka” – depicted as a land both bound and
imbued with its “spirit” and reduced to that “spirit” in a way that “even when
it declares it a curse, it wants that exceptionality”, exceptionality from
history that leaves “time beyond the hill, where worldly chaos starts” – and
writes that it “seeks to transform this misfortune into privilege” (1991, p. 7).
The mortal enemy from the imaginary of socialist Yugoslavism and Serbian
autochauvinism is the same. It is internal on two connected levels – on the
level of the state, that is its largest constituent nation, the Serbs, and on
the level of their “spirit”, both the alleged ontological and cognitive foundations
and the self-appraisal of the vast majority of the defamed “people”, expelled in
this elitist phantasy not just from “the world” but also, as I will show later,
from the realm of humanity.
Anti-war activism
raised the image of the fatal Serbian danger to a higher level from several
different angles – from the size of the threat, to the extent of its
(in)removability, to the expanded understanding of to whom and to what it
represents a mortal threat. This change, which was
brought about by the vanishing mediator, is not related to the image of the “Serbian
side of the war” (Popov, 1996) and the Serbocentric interpretation of the
causes of the wars (Biserko, 1993) but to the suggested interpretation of the
causes and background of “Serbian” crimes. They are presented as, primarily, conditioned
by culture and identity, the result of a “contaminated” mentality, which allegedly made
Serbs predisposed, uniquely receptive to “genocidal” policies. Their political
background is framed as secondary, which is the claim present in the analyzes
of Western authors. Key determinants of
Serbian identity, “our cultural model, that Palanka-populist cultural model” (Filip David, in Kulturni
model u medijima, 2005), are framed as
generators of “genocidal” gravity, an anti-civilizational force that only real
citizens, understood as Westerners-like Übermensch,
who have the will and strength to self-deny their Serbianism and eradicate themselves
from it, are able to resist.
In the next part
of the paper, I point out the characteristics of Yugoslavism and the related
self-understanding in socialist Serbia that enabled a vanishing mediator to
act. Then, in the central part of the paper, the catalytic effect of the
dominant, citizenist form of anti-war activism during the nineties is observed. The focus is,
primarily, on the formative and representative attitudes of ideologues and “icons”
of the two main, partially interconnected, branches of the anti-war movement –
Radomir Konstantinović and Latinka Perović, of the (neo)liberal
/(post)communist branch, and Žarana Papić, of the feminist one – as well as on the
perception of their key ideas, in order to illustrate the mechanisms of
mediation during a period in which many certainties of social life were
suspended – one can say the singularity of war, one of “the punctuations of
crisis, conflict, change, and open-ended potentiality”, “moments of transition”
or “holes in time” (Wegner, 2002, p. 10), i.e. the parentheses of the social history
in which the vanishing mediator operated. I point out that in the narratives of
prominent anti-war activists, the ritualized mentions of Serbian nationalism
and the role of proudly Serbian elites were a veil that hid the cultural-racist
interpretation of war crimes. It contained an inversion of nationalist
exceptionalism and a matrix of negative essentialization of the (Serbian) “people”, framed as the opposite of
“citizens”, supposedly good in themselves, positive exceptions from Serbian
negative exceptionalism, and identified with the
image of the self inserted into the anti-war frame. In the last part of the
paper, the focus is on the characteristics of autochauvinism, its specificity,
one might say exceptionality, which sets it apart from related phenomena that I
have had an insight into. At the very end, I point
to the “fate” of the anti-war mediator, which, left in the year 2000 without
the reason for which it was created, disappears from the historical picture but
does not cease to exist.
THE RESHAPING OF
YUGOSLAVISM IN FEAR OF THE SERBS AND SERBIA
Yugoslavism
was attractive to elites in Serbia for various reasons, but in its different
incarnations, even more present than the “Slavic connection”, the “family
resemblance” of the South Slavic peoples, was one important, although regularly
neglected, aspect related to the aspiration of the elites to “civilize” and
“modernize” Serbia. Yugoslavism, not only in
its socialist version, was also understood as a practice through which a “civilizing
process” could be carried out, as Norbert Elias (2000) described a set of
psychological, sociological, (culturally) cultural, educational and
disciplinary aspects of modern state-building, which was a much more
comprehensive, one might even say totalizing, project than can be concluded
from the dominant state-centric and ethno-centric perspectives. The “civilizing”
dimension of Yugoslavism was pronounced in the areas that belonged to the “dark”
Ottoman Empire and which (more) belatedly faced the “light” of the
Enlightenment.
In this sense, socialist Yugoslavism was also a modernization (sub)ideology,
similar to nationalism or socialism, and especially “transition”, a programmatic
platform that operates “at the level of ideology” (Golubchikov, 2016, p. 607), and
“Europeanization”, the matrix of the new, neoliberal civilizing process “described
as the Western Balkans’ ‘return’ to Europe” (Bacevic, 2014, p. 13). Perception of Yugoslavism
as, in Serbia, a failed “civilizing process” and a failed modernization
(sub)ideology is important for understanding the fabric of the anti-war
movement in the 1990s, primarily the view of the nature of the difference
between the “two Serbias” as not so much civilizational as expressed in the
measure of “human-likeness”, as well as the reasons why the anti-war movement
could become the vanishing mediator of autochauvinism.
Reshaped since the
end of the 1950s in accordance with Edvard Kardelj’s understanding that “[t]he
essence of Yugoslavism ‘can only be socialist interest and socialist
consciousness’” and that “‘what deeply unites the Yugoslav peoples... is that
which is universal in them and not what is in
them narrowly national’” (in Marković, 2001, p. 18), socialist Yugoslavism
became so ideologized, diluted and emptied of its identity-related meaning that
it can be said that a fluid Yugoslav feeling was the only common content of all
historical forms of Yugoslavism. [43] But,
despite the anti-identity turn of the leadership of the party in relation to
Yugoslavism, there remained a widespread understanding, primarily among the
youth, “that the Yugoslav
identity is more ‘progressive’ and better than the individual national identity” (Marković, 2001, p. 20).[44] Unlike
other republics, in Serbia it was much more binary (good/bad;
progressive/backward) than hierarchical (better/worse; more progressive), as
Serbian cadres acted in fear of being accused of being “integral Yugoslavs”
(Marković, 2001, p. 23), which in Titoist jargon was one of the synonyms for
the specter of Greater Serbian hegemony. Bearing in mind the narrow ideological
and status, to some extent generational, base of the anti-war movement during
the 1990s, this contradictory attitude towards Yugoslavism is important for
understanding the catalytic effect of the vanishing mediator. On top of that, within
the anti-war movement, Serbianism was understood not only as the culprit for
the breakup of Yugoslavia, but also as the obstacle to the formation of a
meaningful, functional Yugoslavism.
Titoist
Yugoslavism was shaped as a negative of Serbianism and that was why “Serbian Yugoslavism had to confront
‘Greater Serbianism’“ (Štiks, 2015, p. 29). In the words of Latinka Perović,
secretary of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, “[t]he
social forces that carried out the socialist revolution are fully aware of the
opposite tendency – in fact, the continuity of the historical conception and
politics of the Greater Serbian bourgeoisie. Like the Serbian people itself,
other peoples, inevitably and justifiably, think about it, because they had
difficult historical experiences with it. To deny it in the past is only an
attempt to conceal its outgrowths in the present” (1972, p. 50). In addition to the claim
that the socialist “solution” to the national question was the only one rather
than the best and that socialist patriotism was the right measure of national
identity in mature Titoist Yugoslavism, its main determinant was
fear of “a symbiosis between ‘Serbianism’ and ‘Yugoslavism’” (Pešić, 1996, pp. 12;
15). In Serbia, the promotion
of Yugoslavism had a specific (anti)identity effect, which was helped by the
image of the Serbian exception, related to the fact that “communist atheism
possesses an extensive religious potential” and that it should be viewed as a form
of “apophatic theology”, while “[t]he new socialist religion” claimed that “what
had existed before the revolution had been evil” (Nikolić & Dobrivojević,
2017, p. 263-265).
The fate of Yugoslavism may have been
sealed as early as 1962, when the Executive Committee of the Central Committee
of the League of Communist of Yugoslavia (LCY) accepted Kardelj’s Serb-skeptic
position that one of the things against which “we need to fight most decisively” is “that another nationalism is being smuggled under
the name of... one false Yugoslavism” (Marković, 2001, pp. 24-25). It is particularly significant how the
Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia responded to the new
dictum and how it redefined the dominant understanding of Yugoslavism in
Serbia. Even before the removal of Aleksandar Ranković, within the “group that
dealt with the party’s national politics”, where some of the key actors were “the
so-called liberals who will come to power after 1968”, who would later have a
formative ideological role in the anti-war movement, the understanding of “Yugoslavism
as an expression of the ethnic kinship of the people of Yugoslavia” was
criticized because... such an attitude “often represents a milder... form of flirting
with the backward integralist essence of that term” (in Marković, 2001, p.
31-32). In a situation where Serbian communists, unlike their comrades in other
republics, could not turn to “national self-affirmation” after the fall of
Ranković (in Marković, 2001, p. 33), it should not be surprising that they
embraced economism and a narrow,
censorious, politically illiberal, quasi-market “liberalism”. This, along with the characteristic attitude towards
Serbianism, primarily the way the party
ideologues in Serbia reconciled their aversion to Yugoslavism and love for
Yugoslavia, were important foundations on which the anti-war movement was later
placed.
“According
to the LCY, the ‘Serbian bourgeoisie’ was both a class and national oppressor.
Thus... it attempted to move the new Yugoslavian project as far away from
Serbian influence as it could” (Pešić, 1996, p. 9). Such an image of the
internal enemy and the greatest danger did not allow a border to be drawn
between the Serbian bourgeoisie, Greater Serbian hegemonism, Serbian
nationalism, Serbs and Serbianism. Everything merged into a dark picture of the
unavertable Serbian threat to Yugoslavia. Accompanied by the framing of other
nations as inherently “oppressed”, Serbianism was presented as a unique
threatening exception in a way that, in important aspects, represented the
opposite of the nationalist self-understanding and idea of exceptionalism
contained in it. That is why socialist Yugoslavism in Serbia, as well as in all
other areas where a significant number of Serbs lived, had an anti-nationalist
dimension that did not exist in the Yugoslavisms of other nations. Moreover, there was a constant tendency to present the
nationalisms of other Yugoslav nations and national minorities as reactive, a
product of a “feeling of being threatened”
that was linked not only to Serbianism but also to Yugoslavism (Marković, 2001,
pp. 30-31).
It
is not surprising that the rise of Serbian nationalism in the first years of the
domination of Slobodan Milošević, from the position of President of the
Presidency of the Central Committee of the League of Communists of Serbia, was
represented as the revival of the latent Serbian threat, the “vampirization” of
Greater Serbian hegemonism (Selinić, 2018, p. 106),
although, to a large extent, it
represented a reaction to various decisions, including the Constitution of
1974, made as a consequence of the perception of Serbianism as an unprecedented
danger, as well as “the very specific treatment [of Serbia] after the
liberation” and “the utter inability and unwillingness of Serbian Communists to
protect Serbian national interests” (Nikolić & Dobrivojević, 2017, pp. 257;
262). When, at the end of the nineties, Žarana Papić, a leading feminist
anti-war activist, does not deny historical
realities, she relativizes them with quotation marks (“trauma”) and by invoking
the specter of “historical hegemonic position” in order to tie it into the
post-Titoist picture, where there is no longer a Serbian bourgeoisie and the
hegemony is explicitly tied to the Serbs: “By encouraging pro-fascist
nationalism, Milošević (mis)used Serbian ‘trauma’ under Tito (and the tragic
fate of Serbs during World War II) and used it as the deadliest weapon against
all other nations. Instead of the easy democratic liberation of the Serbs from the
Shangri-La illusion of ideological brotherhood and unity, and especially
from their historical hegemonic position and dispersive location, their
awakening was as if from an ‘uncontrolled’ cultural delirium tremens: after
1987, the Serbs did not know exactly who they were, but they were fully
prepared to reveal it by hating others, or by being coldly disinterested in
their fate” (Papić, 1999/2014, p. 55). Trauma is the deadliest tool in this
image of a homogenized ethnic specter, colored with fascist tones, where co-nationals
either hate others or are indifferent.
Instead of being driven by the fact that “[b]y
virtually every relevant criterion...
Yugoslavia was the most complicated of the new states of interwar
East-Central Europe” (Rothchild, 1974, p. 201) the evolution of socialist
Yugoslavism was driven by the fear of Serbianism. Therefore, it went from the “myth
of partisan Yugoslavism” (Nikolić, 2015) to “the redefinition of Yugoslavism in
less cultural, less national and less political terms and the perception of
Yugoslavia not as a state but more and more so as a ‘community’, ‘organization’
or ‘conglomerate’” (Štiks, 2015, p. 90). Over time, Titoist Yugoslavism
was transformed into a “type of internationalism” (Marković, 2001, p. 18),
which laid the foundations, after the change of ideological determinants in the
late 1980s and early 1990s, for it to easily mutate into a cosmopolitan, westernized
post-Yugoslav civic self-understanding, which it is not complementary to
Serbianness, but opposed to it. With the disintegration of the League of
Communists of Yugoslavia, and then of Yugoslavia itself, from the
characteristic position on socialist Yugoslavism, expressed as early as
September 1960 at the meeting of the Ideological Commission of the Central
Committee of the party, which says that “behind the term Yugoslav there is
always a certain national affiliation” (Marković, 2001, p. 22), the term “Yugoslav” was removed was removed from
the self-understanding of the (post)communist elites.[49] At the same time, self-identification with the Serbian
nationality became increasingly repulsive to an important part of the
intellectual and political elite, and to some it became unacceptable; a taboo
identity. During the wars of the 1990s, the vanishing mediator directed
newborn, identity-deprived “citizens” towards a standpoint that a decade later
was named autochauvinistic (Ćirjaković, 2006).
The
“anti-bureaucratic revolution”, by means of which “a large power vacuum”
created after “[t]he death of Tito and the change of political generations” was
filled in Serbia (Vladisavljević, 2008, p. 1), and in whose shadow the
multi-party system was born, made the new self-understanding of urban elites
acquire a pronounced anti-people dimension, which built upon the
rural/urban dichotomy, reaffirmed by the suspicion of the Yugoslav communists
towards the peasantry. Animosity towards the
people – which was reevaluated and turned from “good” working people, into “bad” Serbian people – colored the interpretations of
the breakup of Yugoslavia offered by anti-war activists. However, even with this
anti-people “addition”, the Serbophobic fabric of socialist Yugoslavism alone cannot
explain how, from the principle “the pestilent individuals will be eradicated”,
which marked the first years of socialism in Serbia (Nikolić, 2004), one comes to
the understanding that a pestilent nation exists that deserves to be
eradicated.
CITIZENIST
WAR AGAINST THE INTERNAL ENEMY
The
birth of the anti-war movement from the ashes of Yugoslavism and 1968
radicalism
The
first registered anti-war organization in Serbia was the “Center for Anti-War
Action”, founded in December 1991 in Belgrade. Although the divisions, which
soon began, were largely related to personal ambitions, the main ideological
dispute, which contributed to some of the founders leaving the Center, was
between the understanding that “an equal ‘share’ of responsibility should be
assigned to the representatives of all republican political elites” versus “those
who did not want to relativize the primary responsibility of the Serbian regime”
for the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia (Bilić, 2012a, p. 41), which soon
became the position of the citizenist anti-war movement in Serbia in both of
its intertwined branches. The more prominent,
intellectualist “Second Serbia”, was made up of a large number of so-called
non-governmental organizations and citizens’ associations, where the role of
ideological source and arbiter of the “correct” anti-war positions was taken by
the “Belgrade Circle”, described as an “association of independent
intellectuals”, and the smaller but more emphatically anti-war, feminist movement,
was made up from “autonomous anti-war women’s groups”, where the leading role
was played by “Women in Black”, described as a “women’s peace group with a
feminist - anti-militaristic orientation,” whose members “from the very
foundation of the organization articulated a radically anti-nationalist
attitude that sometimes insufficiently appreciates the complexity of
trans-republican interactions of nationalist feeling” (Bilić, 2012b, p. 19). From
the beginning, the anti-war movement in Serbia was characterized by a much “more
hierarchical (leadership)” structure than in Croatia, and a pronounced tendency
to fragmentation, as opposed to multiplication in Croatia (Bilić, 2012a, p.
46). In Serbia, the backbone was older,
already established pro-Yugoslav activists, mostly former dissidents and veterans
who participated in the protests of 1968 (Bilić, 2012a, p. 46). They introduced
a radical, self-righteous and uncompromising note, while experienced communist
cadres, losers in the intra-party conflict that preceded the “anti-bureaucratic
revolution”, brought a dose of bitterness and anger into the movement. Since
pro-Yugoslav implied opposition to pro-Serbian, the old, inconsistent
anti-nationalism and the new citizenist self-image became the main ideological and
identity markers of the actions of Yugonostalgic anti-war groups, organizations
and associations that embodied anti-war activism in Serbia.
Great
teachers and their introductory lessons
At
the very beginning, the anti-war movement found its fulcrum in Philosophy of
the Palanka, the second edition of which was printed in 1991. The book
offers an extremely (auto)orientalist, Serbocentric image of supreme evil and
is the culmination of attempts to formulate a “deep”, non-ideological,
scholarly rationalization of the Serbophobic fabric of socialist Yugoslavism. It
should also be kept in mind that Philosophy of the Palanka sprung up as
an early articulation of the pessimistic attitude of the Serbian intellectual
elite regarding the possibility of Serbia ever becoming modern. Unable to acknowledge,
on the one hand, our intra-European cultural and historical difference and its
consequences and, on the other hand, the particular, provincial nature of the
image of modernity with which Serbia’s progress was compared, Konstantinović
set out to look for the cause of the looming failure within Serbia and the
Serbs and ended up with a cultural-racist image of submission to an Oriental
monster that he named “the spirit of Palanka”. Its explication contains the
original matrix of negative essentialization, which was taken up and developed
by the anti-war movement. This essentialism is not controversial in itself, not
least because constructionism can produce more persistent negative essentializations.
The main problem with the essentialism of the ideologues of the anti-war
movement is not that it is negative, but that they essentialize history, and
that is why Serbian non-Western history appears to them as non- or
anti-history. Namely, they understood “history as an unbroken continuum that
transports, across cultures and through time” different categories, including
modernity and the political and other norms that constitute it, “without in any
way (re)defining or indeed (re)constituting them. History itself is theorized
as essential, and thus unchanging; its essence is to generate change but not
itself to be changed” (Fuss, 1989, p. 3).
The
awakening of satanized Serbian nationalism, then the “Serbian” wars, the first
in Europe after the fairytale-like “end of history”, a powerful illusion that,
crucially, reset the historical picture, “erased” the crimes that preceded the
imagined end, and, finally, the “Serbian” war crimes, inserted into that new
image of history as an empty, innocent, “no man’s land” cleansed of historical
evil – made Konstantinović’s essentialist matrix, two decades after the original
publication of Philosophy of the Palanka, acquire an aura of revelation.
The book was understood as the final truth about Serbia’s incompatibility with
modernity, civilization and history, not only with its “end”, and it became the
holy book of the new, citizenist understanding that Serbian negative uniqueness
goes beyond the post-Yugoslav framework. Konstantinović, a
prominent Titoist intellectual, was perceived as a “living saint” (Kaić, 2013,
p. 50), the “great teacher” of Serbian activists who identified themselves with
the “thinking population” (Marković, 2012) and was celebrated as a “voice of
conscience” and a “man of substance”, who has been living in “inner exile since
Milošević came to power” (David, 2003, p. 46).
“The
Second Serbia” thus emerges as a new, second “world that will place Philosophy
of the Palanka at its center and which will arise as a reaction to one other
unpleasant world in the wake of the post-Yugoslav wars” (Kaić, 2013, p. 50). Philosophy of the
Palanka “becomes a kind of semi-transparent Bible of the Second Serbia”,
where, simplified, it is understood as a kind of almost ‘prophetic’, ingenious anticipation
for everything that happened in the nineties”, while “nationalist and palankist becomes everything that
is part of the first world, the First Serbia, and the book is mostly read and
understood as a phenomenology of those people, their mentality, that is, those
who are completely different from ‘us’, or from whom, at least, ‘we’ from the
anti-world try to distinguish ourselves” (Kaić, 2013, str. 50). In “the Second
Serbia” the book was viewed as a crystal ball, the key to a “critical deciphering”
and understanding of the Serbian side of the war as the only relevant side, and
of the crimes committed. “The question is what really happened in the last
twenty odd years in these Balkan, ex-Yugoslav and/or Serbian areas? It’s hard
to believe that the most appropriate answer to that question can be found in a
book that was written and published forty years ago (more precisely, 1969)” (Belančić, 2008, p. 99). A later edition was promoted
as “a vivid radiogram of an alienated retro-mentality, for us it is just as
important as, even if only partially, a critical vision of our culture” (Sabrana dela Radomira Кonstantinovića; tom 8., 2019). With the
help of the insights of other “teachers” among the anti-war activists, framed,
like Konstantinović himself, as objective, uncompromising and “brave in
knowledge, thought and expression”, and cemented with the platitude that “one
should only look in one’s own backyard”, the crimes have been presented as a
dialectical necessity, a logical consequence of Serbian history and the
genocidal climax of the palankist retro-mentality.
There
are numerous examples of interpretations of the breakup of Yugoslavia in which
the political background is pushed into the shadow of the non-Western
determinants of Serbian identity and the institutions that embody them. “The
ethno-religious dimension of wars is emphasized more than it was earlier. That
can be explained through the notable role of the Serbian Orthodox Church in the
final two decades of the 20th century, a role that was more national-political
than religious... The Serbian Orthodox Church, as one of the churches of the
East, was also based on this organic principle. It appears as a bearer of
national identity and is linked with the state... Realization of an
ethno-national state goes hand in hand with constant wars for territories and
ethnic cleansing” (Perović, 2004, pp. 122-123). At the same time, an,
apparently non-Serbocentric, identification of nationalism with fascism is
carried out. “It appeared that the formula for the
survival of Yugoslavia was finally found
in the Constitution of 1974... Meanwhile, nationalists vanquished in the
antifascist war.... were all getting ready for revenge. This broad alliance
whose members were all prompted by different motives, gradually grew from a
tactical alliance to a strategic one. But it still remained very vague. The cristalisation
took place in Serbia” (Perović, 1993, pp. 62-63). In the early
articulations of the anti-war point of view, the roots of two important aspects
of autochauvinism can be recognized – the understanding that the Serbs are “in
opposition to the whole world” and that they themselves are to blame for every
punishment they receive: “The policy of [the dispersed Serbs’] rulers, at odds
with the times, has put Serbia in opposition to the whole world and, in turn,
the latter has punished Serbia by isolating it and den[y]ing it the
achievements of modern civilisation. There is no alternative unless Serbia
undergoes a [r]uthless self-analysys. To defer this, will only
increase the tragedy. Before becoming the gravest world patient, Yugoslavia was
defeated from the inside” (Perović, 1993, p. 63).
From
discursive nazification to the image of final fascisation
For
understanding the mediation of anti-war activism, articulations of the attribute
Serbian in the condemnations and interpretations of war crimes committed by
Serbs are crucial. They have three main discursive
aspects – nazification, bestialization and medicalization (or
pathologization), the fantasy of a collective “disease” for which there is no
cure or a Serb “patient” who refuses
those prescribed by citizenist “diagnosticians and therapists” (Stojanović, 2010, p. 291). It was accompanied by
infantilization
and representations of Serbia as a “Gaswagen”, “Mordor” and a “sewer”, which
can be described as faecesalization, as well as fantasies about conspiracy,
poisoning, flood, pestilence and infestation, which, by the way, have been
standard elements of chauvinist and (proto)fascist narratives, which – before
imperial feminism, homonationalism and autocolonialism – were mainly created by
“male fantasies” (Theweleit, 1983). The enemy thus framed was
presented by activist anti-war scholars as demonstrably opposed not only to
modernity but also to humanity – contaminated in a way that impedes
decontamination. In other words, it was suggested that there were no political
solutions for a country that had reached a “tragic intellectual and cultural
impasse” (David, 2003, p. 47). All three key discursive strategies with the
help of which the vanishing mediator performed its catalytic action have a
basis in the Philosophy of the Palanka, but
Konstantinović’s main contribution is related to the thesis about “Serbian
Nazism” and its alleged “necessity” (1991, pp. 366-397). Keeping in mind the
limited length of this paper, I will focus solely on discursive nazification.
Beforehand,
it should be pointed out that an important feature of Philosophy of the Palanka
is the mystifying manner in which the book was written. It opens the text to
conflicting interpretations, including claims that Konstantinović is not saying
what he says, but, at the same time, requires “translation” not so much into
the language of politics as into a usable language. While descending from the “highest” its “interpreters”
have not always been able to control their righteous fervor – sometimes it seems
more anti-Serb than anti-war. This is where the
tendency of the elitists to start from the highest before they go very low,
which feeds the illusion that the well-read “have style”, comes to the fore. It serves to disqualify those closest to them, who are
usually the only “masses” that the virtuous “cosmopolitans” know. In that
privileged world, the shabby and cheap becomes seductive more easily when it
leans on the highest, on the insight offered as philosophical thought distilled
from the pinnacles of the Western canon, for example from “reading Hegel”. By
mimicking Konstantinović, his successors have been trying to hide the banality
of their autochauvinism with a fog of philosophizing. In a text in which he imitates
Konstantinović’s ketman, a characteristic strategy of obfuscating an
unacceptable image of a supreme negative exception, so that he himself can
violate liberal taboos, Sreten Ugričić leaves the possibility that a repeated “killer”,
who is the personification of a Serb, becomes human by becoming a “deserter”
(2009). All that is needed is the will, such as the one Ugričić had, so that
things would turn around and the “killer” would be written out of the “nation
of voluntary subjects, perpetrators, consumers” and become an “error in the
algorithm” (2009). He encourages the “killer”, and
other potential deserters from Serbianism: “They can’t do anything to you. You
are not like them anymore. You are human-like” (Ugričić,
2009). Ugričić links the narcissistic image of Serbian “human-likeness"
to his “feat”, the will that allowed him to exclude himself from the uniqueness
of the people whose members were “denied human-likeness by birth” (2009). He “wanted”
and says that wanting is “enough for human-likeness, for a feat, for being
human” (Ugričić, 2009). The Serbs, whom Ugričić’s ketman renamed “many people
in the world”, are “those who suppress their human-likeness, who cancel that
unstable idea, that will, that task, that choice, that freedom” (2009).
In
Philosophy of the Palanka, Konstantinović insists on the distinction
between “Serbian Nazism” (1991,
pp. 203; 366; 367; 368; 373; 375; 378; 383; 388; 397), as essentially
ontological, and German “National Socialism” (1991, pp. 366; 384), as
ideological. The book, in the words of a respected apologist, is “the crime
news [section]
of Central European and Balkan ‘Orientalness’“, it “presents the eerie Eastern
face of this region” and thus produces the image of a “collective Mephisto nested in an individual man” (Vegel, 2003, p
52). From the book’s pages
comes the interpretation of “Serbian Nazism” as necessary, ahistorical but
essential, inseparable from Serbian history and culture, in contrast to German “National
Socialism” understood as accidental, anti-historical but episodic, a dark page
of the glorious German history, essentially irrelevant no matter how
world-historical it was. In other words, Serbian Nazism is a mentality-based disaster
while German Nazism was an ideology-based disaster, brought to the great
Western nation by “only a small group of ‘criminals’ [who] had actively
organized the system and the politics of terror and mass murder as well as the
war efforts and war activities” (Lüdtke,1993, p. 561). That is why
(ideological) denazification was demanded in Germany, and “cultural
decontamination” is required in Serbia. At the same time, the
term “decontamination” – the key word of the anti-war discourse in Serbia and
the sublimation of the emerging phenomenon – in the context of “polluted”
human communities was introduced by Adolf Hitler, so one cannot speak of an
innovation but of an illustration of the extent to which anti-war activism in
Serbia was not only dehumanizing but also anti-anti-fascist. The understanding
of “Serbian Nazism” as both cultural Nazism and self-sustaining Nazism, i.e.,
self-Nazism, contributed to autochauvinism acquiring its most extreme feature –
a desire for the annihilation of “one’s own”.
Konstantinović’s
image of “Serbian Nazism” was complemented by a thesis about the “final fascisation”
of Serbian society. In a short introductory note to
Žarana Papić’s essay, the editors of a feminist “reader” write that she “looks
back at the social and political processes that she interprets as the final act
of the ‘fascisation’ of Serbian society”, that is, she interprets how “normalcy...
here will turn into a ‘consensus on fascist politics’“. In the essay Papić
writes: “The last decade (even earlier) in Serbia could be defined as a
specific historical process, as a ‘transition’ from pro-Yugoslav communism to
politically autistic, aggressive, pro-fascist collectivism. This is the reason
why, among other things, there has never been a significant democratic
alternative to Milosevic’s war policy based on an ‘ethnic struggle’ against
everyone. Even the so-called opposition ‘leaders’ could not refrain from
participating, each according to their abilities, in this ‘I-don’t-mind-if-you-are-cleansed’
game. The only political subjects in Serbia who dared to challenge that deadly
game, since the beginning of the wars in 1991, were some (now very
marginalized) female politicians and certain feminist and pacifist groups” (Papić,
1999/2014, p. 55). Papić claims that in Serbia “[the] culture of the normality
of fascism” was established, seeing it in “the specific mixture of politics,
culture, ‘mental powers’ and the pauperisation of life in Serbia, the mixture
of rural and urban, pre-modern and post-modern, pop culture and heroines, real
and virtual, mystical and ‘normal,’ etc.” (2002, p. 199). The way anti-war
activists framed “Serbian Nazism” and Serbian “ethnic nationalism, or more
precisely, ethno-fascist nationalism” (Papić, 2002, p. 192), shaped one of the,
politically, most important dimensions of imagined Serbian negative
exceptionalism – that Serbs have no right to nationalism, because, allegedly,
Serbian nationalism is Nazism in itself. Instead of approaching
politics as the art of the possible, or “the art of winning over the passions
of others” (according to Berman, 1996, p. 218), the vanishing mediator
inaugurated an anti-democratic understanding of Serbian politics as an
imperative to tame the passions of the people; as the art of subjugation.
Anti-war
war with our own people
Anti-war
activism in Serbia took the form of war – but not against the war, rather
against “our own people”: “it was in a way like fighting a war with our own
people, I felt like my enemies were here, not somewhere out there” (Jasmina Tešanović
in Fridman, 2011, p. 517). The main correlate of anti-war activism was
anti-nationalism, to the extent that it was
impossible to separate them. This is where the spirit of the seemingly
post-historical and post-ideological times comes to the fore, because it
reaffirmed and strengthened the already present Serbo-centric anti-nationalist
attitudes and interpretations and favored the naturalization and entrenchment
of autochauvinism. It revived “the project of categorically distinguishing
nationalisms”, the need to “implement clear distinctions between varieties of
nationalism” (Berman, 1996, p. 215), and it favored the selective
stigmatization of nationalisms and, therefore, of “their” nations. The
understanding that there are “good” and “bad” nationalisms has a long history, which
reveals “[t]he deep-rooted ambivalence evoked by nationalism” (Berman, 1996, p. 215). [78] The ever-present
appeal of its radical form, which anti-war circles in Serbia took over from the
understanding of socialist Yugoslavism, should be seen in the context of the
fact that this distinction acquired new, global dimensions and injections of
legitimacy “during decolonization, between good ‘self-determination’ within
colonial boundaries and bad ‘secession’ from newly independent states; and
after 1989, between good ‘emancipation’ from communism and bad ethnic ‘irredentism’“
(Berman, 1996, p. 215). At the same time, the post-colonial and post-communist
reaffirmation of selective anti-nationalism was strengthened locally, where the
problem of Serbian nationalism was framed as a problem “of imperial aspirations”
opposed to the new, liberal order, which not only revalued Western imperialism,
but went further and said that “[t]he major sin of the West Europeans was in
not realising in time that liberal and imperial were fighting to the death in
Yugoslavia” (Perović, 1993, p. 63), which is one of the early articulations of
the autocolonial standpoint. Activists
claimed to fight against “[v]arious
forms of hegemonistic nationalisms, national separatisms, chauvinist and racist
exclusion or marginalisation of (old and new) minority groups” (Papić, 2002, p.
193), but they did that in a manner that paved the way for the racist and
chauvinist exclusion of the majority in Serbia and provided powerful arguments
for not only the disenfranchisement but also the elimination of Serbian
minorities in neighboring countries.
AFTER
THE WAR CRIMES OF SERBIAN CHAUVINISTS, CHAUVINISM
OF
UNROOTED AND UPROOTED SERBS
“The old story
tells the truth
There is nowhere
good in а Sеrb
And I say the
living truth
There is nothing
better than a dead Serb.”
The closing verses
of the “Song to Srebrenica”, published in The Bulletin of Srebrenica, the periodical
of the Association of Citizens “Women of Srebrenica”, September 2005 (Ado,
2005, p. 15)
The
peculiarity of autochauvinism is not related to extreme hatred, contempt or
disgust for “one’s own”, fundamentally different, compatriots, that is, extreme
love and affinity for “truly” one’s own – the Serbs who are the same as “me”
but do not have the same name as “me”. What sets it apart from other forms of
elitist self-hatred, self-denial and self-ghettoization that I have encountered
over the past fifteen years, either in various sources or through personal
experiences in other non-Western societies – where the elites are more prone to
social “secessionism”, and expressions of contempt for the “masses”, than in
Western ones
– is neither belief in the incorrigibility of fellow countrymen, members of the
poorer and less educated classes, nor the intensity of disgust and contempt for
them. What makes autochauvinism unique – and why, perhaps, it does not even
need the designation “Serbian” – is the understanding of a significant number
of alienated “citizens” that “their own people”, the Serbs, carry within
themselves a mortal threat that is so great and difficult to remove, that they do
not deserve to exist. This is directly related to the way in which anti-war
activism redefined, strengthened and “elevated” the understanding of Serbian
negative exceptionalism. In other words, it suggested that the problem is such –
at the same time large, real and intractable within the time horizon – that
ethnic cleansing and other crimes can seem like a “way out”, legitimate
solutions from the point of view of the opposing nationalist (re)builders of
neighboring states and entities who listen to such attitudes, interpretations
and conclusions. That is why it is more meaningful and instructive to think
about autochauvinism as a phenomenon than about autochauvinists as individuals.
The key is in the synergy, the cumulative effect, and not specific statements,
no matter how strident and monstrous some of them sound.
In
the Balkans, ethnicized “victims” and “perpetrators” of previous mass crimes have
not been physically separated, and the vision of “genocidal” solutions –
preventive, vengeful or, simply, state-building – does not live only in the
minds of Serbian chauvinists, as the image of the Serbian exception suggests. Here,
“never again”, as a rule, means “never again to us” and implies “one more time
to them” (Ćirjaković, 2021, p. 242). That is why autochauvinism is, at the same
time, chauvinism for others and in the name of others. In wars, it is usually
not members of the elite who fight and kill, but the poor, “subaltern”, “vulnerable”
people (Jones & Robins, 2009, p. 10), and that is why in the last instance,
the effectuation of the autochauvinist point of view, is not autogenocide but
genocide.
In
that sense, we can define autochauvinism from two complementary angles. First,
if we focus only on the “internal”, it can be said that autochauvinism
represents the belief of alienated members of the elite that they are
exceptions,
accompanied by the framing of compatriots as dehumanized habitats of culturally
and socially conditioned negative uniqueness for which they deserve to
disappear. Second, if we take into account the “external”, it can be said that Serbian
autochauvinism is an interpretive framework, woven from elitist interpretations
of imagined Serbian negative uniqueness, in which extremists from among other
nations can find reasons or justification for persecuting compatriots of
alienated members of the Serbian elite who established that framework and who
maintain it.
Considering the nature and strength of anti-Serbian sentiment in the region, I
think it is possible to offer an even more concise definition – autochauvinism
is a set of publicly expressed Serbian attitudes that offer legitimacy to the
understanding that a dead Serb is a good, the best or ideal Serb. In addition,
this definition contains an important part of the answer to the question: What
is the specificity of (Serbian) autochauvinism?
The
image of Serbian negative exceptionalism on which autochauvinism rests is not the
image from the time of socialist Yugoslavia, but a much darker portrayal that,
starting from it, was created by the ideologues, promoters and inspirers of the
citizenist anti-war movement. Without their effect, perhaps a phenomenon
reminiscent of autochauvinism would have arisen, which had some similarities
and resemblances to phenomena in other societies, so, maybe, it would not even
be named, but without entrenchment of the notion of perennial, self-sustaining
cultural contamination as the explanation of “Serbian” war crimes – there would
be no autochauvinism. In other words, if the anti-war movement had not offered
cultural-racist interpretations of the crimes of Serbian chauvinists and,
allegedly, of the insufficiently critical attitude of rooted, proud Serbs, “the
people”, towards them – there would be no chauvinism of accidental Serbs. The
unrooted (those who believe that they have never been culturally “contaminated”)
and uprooted (who believe they have had “culturally decontaminated”
themselves), are virtuous citizenists who tend to see themselves as part of a
separate, superior imagined community, a civic (super)nation which is not “chosen”
but which every “human”, “normal”, “uncontaminated" Serb had to choose.[84]
With
the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević, anti-war activism disappears from the
historical picture, but it does not cease to exist. It continues to operate
outside the mainstream, but its offshoots, and, especially, the narratives it
has shaped, condition important aspects of political life, transition and “Europeanization”,
guided by a narrow, Western-centric, culturally insensitive vision of “proper”
political and social modernity and therefore inappropriate to the Serbian context,
which is shaped by a different, non-Western history. It is important to point
out that both the transition and the ”Europeanization”, in reality, the
re-Europeanization of Serbia, are conditioned by a strengthened
belief in Serbian negative uniqueness, which was shaped by the actually
existing anti-war activism. Mostly skeptical of everything that requires
reliance on “the people”, including democracy, anti-war activists only shifted
the emphasis to some of the already existing aspects of their activities, where
the war was interpreted more as a consequence of other problems than as a
problem in itself. That is why we can talk not so much about transformation as
about evolution in the direction of human rights-related issues and, above all,
“memory activism” (Fridman, 2022), increasingly mixed with idealized “memory of
activism”, as well as the fight against “a culture of denial” (Fridman, 2011,
p. 509).[86]
Redefined that way, post-war activism in Serbia has relied on the neo-colonial
ideology of “transitional justice” (Ćirjaković, 2021, p. 237), and mostly
remained tied to the fluid idea of “facing the past” – understood as an
endless, primarily cognitive process, but only with the chosen past that fits
into the image of Serbian negative exceptionalism.
“[I]n
post-Milošević Serbia the same groups are still functioning as alternative
voices in their society and are still engaged in the struggle over the creation
of Serbia’s collective memory and future. As I heard repeatedly: ‘The main
battle today is a battle of interpretation... for the definitions of the wars,
of what happened. Our role was then, as it is today, to denounce the project’“
(Fridman, 2011, p. 519). Neither the researcher nor her interlocutors define “the
project”. The antagonism is directed at actors (“anyone who used violence”, “Milosević”
[sic], “the regime”, “a totalitarian regime”, “politicians who wanted to cover
up information”), means (“war”, “nationalism”, “violence”, “warmongering”, “the
perpetration of war crimes”, “the aggression”, “militarism”), accompanying
phenomena (“the circle of silence”, “the denial”, “the consensus”, “the apathy”)
and results (“war crimes”, “ethnic cleansing”) (Fridman, 2011) – but “the
project” is somehow missing, although, they believe it survived the wars. It is
not easy to resist the conclusion that the main goal of activism has been
personal, dissent in itself, and not social; more a desire to announce oneself
than to denounce “the project”, that appears to be timeless, eternal – just
like the imagined Serbian exception.
The
post-conflict routine was shaken up in 2012. In Serbia, various actors
interpreted the (un)expected results of the elections as a “restoration of the
old regime” (Jovanović & Vučićević, 2013, p. 8). This created the seductive
illusion of a "return of the nineties" and the intensification of
work on “the project”– and enabled the return of the vanishing mediator to the
historical stage. In its new, post-conflict and post-transition incarnation, it
channeled the growth of autochauvinism from a narrow, elitist framework, its
spread and rooting in the better-educated strata and its entry into the social
fabric. There has been a marked increase in
the number of people who do not see Serbia as their “world” and who
wonder whether Serbs deserve to exist, often rhetorically, with the
self-denialist answer that “they” do not lurking in the background. This second
life of the vanishing mediator – its catalytic effect that after 2012
encouraged such (self)understanding and shaped the culture of autochauvinism –
remains a topic for a subsequent paper.
Zoran
Ćirjaković
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“Necrophilia
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requirements of modern capitalist orders” (Križan, 2004).
