https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9216-7569
ABSTRACT
In this unusual contribution, three prominent younger scholars of the post-Yugoslav region discuss through a series of letters what was socialist Yugoslavia as political community and what came to replace it. Igor Štiks claims that every political community, past and present, is based on the citizenship argument that imposes itself as hegemonic. He explains why we are together as community in the first place, who belongs, and who is excluded. Štiks tries to understand what arguments socialist Yugoslavia was built on and what were the arguments used to subvert and finally destroy it. Ivan Đorđević responds by highlighting how the new states were built on a combination of ethnic nationalism and savage capitalism, resulting in a series of disasters. Biljana Đorđević explains the life of her post-Yugoslav generation and its sense of gloom. All three authors contrast political events with their own destinies that were determined by where (Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vranje) and when (in 1977 and 1984) they were born, and under what circumstances, personal and political, they came of age. Besides their attempts to understand Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the new post-Yugoslav reality, they reflect upon what the Yugoslav socialist legacy could mean for emancipatory movements in the twenty-first century.
RÉSUMÉ
Dans cette contribution originale, trois jeunes chercheurs éminents originaires de la région post-yougoslave échangent à travers une correspondance sur la nature de la Yougoslavie socialiste et l’évolution des pays post-yougoslaves en tant que communautés politiques. Igor Štiks analyse la construction des communautés politiques passées et présentes, soulignant l’importance de l’argument de la citoyenneté qui s’impose comme hégémonique. Il explore les arguments sur lesquels reposait la Yougoslavie socialiste ainsi que ceux qui l’ont déstabilisée jusqu’à sa destruction. Ivan Đorđević réagit en mettant en lumière la manière dont les nouveaux États se sont formés à travers un mélange de nationalisme ethnique et de capitalisme débridé, entraînant une série de catastrophes. Biljana Đorđević témoigne de la vie de sa génération post-yougoslave et de son sentiment de morosité. Les trois auteurs établissent des parallèles entre les événements politiques et leur propre expérience personnelle, façonnée par leur lieu (Sarajevo, Belgrade, Vranje) et leur année de naissance (1977 et 1984), ainsi que par les circonstances individuelles et politiques de leur passage à l’âge adulte. Ils interrogent également le potentiel que pourrait avoir l’héritage socialiste yougoslave pour les mouvements émancipateurs du vingt-et-unième siècle.
Prologue
Michael Walzer once wrote that the fundamental questions a political community must answer are “who is in, and who is out?” or, who is included and who is excluded from this community.Footnote1 Yet, it seems to me that there is a question that precedes who is on this or that side of the border; it is “why are we together at all?” How did this happen? How did a given political community occur, and why does it still exist? Do we all agree with the given legal, political, social, and territorial order of the country of which we are citizens? Perhaps we wish things were different, and some among us might want to belong to other communities and countries, either ones that exist or ones that have yet to be created. We also often encounter the nostalgic striving to belong to communities from the past. Many among us wish they could have remained citizens of socialist Yugoslavia rather than being forced to become and remain citizens of its successor countries. Others, on the contrary, would go back to the time of the racial laws enacted during the Second World War, still others all the way back to the nineteenth century, and some would prefer being subjects of a monarch rather than citizens of a republic. Although it is difficult to reach a consensus on these crucial questions, what nevertheless seems necessary for any community is to answer the question of why that community exists at all and then convince its members (or at least enough of them) that they indeed belong together. The answer to the question of why we are together, is what I call the citizenship argument.
Communities exist and sustain themselves through the citizenship argument, that is, through the narrative about why we are together, why we recognize each other as “us,” members of the same community, in contrast to those who are not, as well as through the legal regulation of citizenship, which defines the status of citizens and their ensuing rights and obligations. The relation between narrative and legal codification is crucial for modern states. Yet, as we mentioned, there are constant tensions and conflicts about the citizenship argument in many communities. We can infer that all political communities result from the hegemonic citizenship argument at a particular moment. That hegemonic argument stands in continuous debate with counter-hegemonic arguments, including radically different alternatives, as well as with the arguments upon which our community has been built in the past. Thus, no community is ever entirely stable, nor could it ever be. The collision among those various citizenship arguments can lead to crisis, which in turn can overturn hegemonic positions and thus produce a political change, namely interior or exterior redefinitions of political community. And even when there is general agreement on the fundamental citizenship argument, there is still an open question of how to organize such a community.
Yugoslavia – in both its iterations, as a kingdom and as a socialist federation – along with the post-Yugoslav states that emerged from its ruins, provide us with a wealth of material, as well as a whole slew of arguments answering two fundamental questions of this correspondence: why together, why apart? The Croatian translation of my monograph Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship (Bloomsbury, 2015) was entitled National, Citizen, Foreigner, Enemy (Fraktura, 2016). I maintain that these four figures remain crucial for understanding the last one hundred years of, as Danilo Kiš put it, our “common history.” And I wish to return to them here, through letters to my friends Ivan Đorđević and Biljana Đorđević.Footnote2
What was the country in which we were born? A letter to Ivan Đorđević
Dear Ivan,
We were both born in 1977, you in Belgrade, and I in Sarajevo, in a country called the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). I am writing you now about this country, as well as about those countries that arose from its remains. But we must return first a hundred years back, all the way to that “echo of a pistol-shot,” as Lawrence Durrell wrote in his poem “Sarajevo;” back to those famous footprints into which as a child I would place my own feet, imagining that fatal moment, both terrifying and exalting. It was our local connection with world history. On that very spot, on the banks of the Miljacka, from which, as Vojo Dimtrijević’s monument placed above the footprints said, “Gavrilo Princip, with his gunshot, expressed a people’s struggle against tyranny and the centuries-long yearning of our peoples for freedom.”
I assume that as a child from Belgrade, you went to other school outings and other historical spots, but I nevertheless feel that the message always was or was supposed to be the same: all the various streams of our histories, sometimes running counter or away from each other, really flowed into one another, towards a society for whose freedom and equality that fateful shot was fired. We were both born in a political system that claimed to represent the final stage of our peoples’ historical development. After all, what was supposed to come after that system? Only stateless socialism, maybe. That was the only future one could imagine from the logic of that very system. A return to the old was unthinkable. We, too, believed in all this, celebrating 29 November – Republic Day – or 25 May – the Day of Youth and also the official birthday of Tito – in school reviews, family outings, and jamborees, by participating in the elementary school pupils’ competition about “Tito’s Revolutionary Paths,” by learning about the heroic death of Ahmet Fetahagić, the Spanish Civil War volunteer after whom my school was named… We held dear our immediate fatherland, Bosnia, and our broader fatherland, Yugoslavia. We had socialism and self-management, whatever these words meant to us as children. Perhaps the fact that we could read Karlo Štajner’s shocking memoir Seven Thousand Days in Siberia, in which this Austrian-Yugoslav revolutionary recounts his experiences in Stalin’s gulags, meant that we lived true socialism, while they, the Russians and the others… something much worse. We were both Tito’s “No” to Stalin and the Cominform, and, as we already knew then, the infamous prisoner island Goli Otok. Sipping cappuccinos in Trieste was the privilege of Yugoslav socialism that we were all proud of, both those who actually had that cappuccino on Piazza d’Italia as well as those who never left their villages.
To me personally, geography was reduced to the space between Sarajevo and Dalmatia. The discovery of the rest of the world, beyond these imaginary limits, fell within the domain of an immediate future, awaited with excitement and joy. This adventure was supposed to begin for our generation, dear Ivan, sometime around 1990, 1991… at the tender age of 13, 14. It never happened.
Today, we are both in the world of academia, where it seems that we often act as archaeologists digging through the rubble, trying to fathom, each in his own way, how and why all of that took place. In the year of our birth, the American researcher Dennison Rusinow summarized “the Yugoslav experiment” in the following way:
The history of Yugoslavia during the quarter-century since the experiment with a “separate road” began in 1949 has therefore actually “proved” nothing except the astounding flexibility and adaptability of the Yugoslavs, both leaders and led, and an impatient, apparently inexhaustible, and often bewildering willingness to experiment.Footnote3
Such experimentation, playing with highly flammable political elements, required various arguments in answering the question, why be together? The famous shot in Sarajevo in 1914 led ultimately to the unification of the “Slavic South” in late 1918. Then also we could hear various arguments. If we are to be together in a common state, the question was, how to be together, unitarily or federally? There were two camps: one advocating a unitary state, mostly supported by Serbian political parties, and the other, coming from mostly Croatian and Slovene parties, but also the communists, demanding a federal solution. Later, there were also those who did not think Yugoslavia should exist at all, such as extreme Croatian and Macedonian nationalists, but also the communists who took the Soviet line between 1924 and 1934 that monarchical Yugoslavia was a mere product of Versailles and should thus be partitioned. (They would come to regret holding those views later.)
Still, the vision of a federal Yugoslavia would emerge victorious from World War II. In the course of the war, the federal argument would have to overcome various other programs or, if you will, competing citizenship arguments, above all Yugoslav unitarism, but also various nationalist, Nazi-fascist agendas of ethnonational and ethnically cleansed states; such was the Ustaša-led Independent State of Croatia, or the imagined Great Serbia, either within Yugoslavia or without it, as sought by the Chetniks of Draža Mihailović. That victory, won at tremendous sacrifice, rested on a formula comprising three promises made by the communists at the start of the rebellion against the Nazi-fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. The first was the liberation of the country from the occupiers and Quislings; the second concerned a just solution to the national question; the third, no less important than the first two, was the promise of social emancipation.
I am enclosing in this letter the poem “Sun in the Hands,” by Jovan Popović, who enthusiastically wrote about the postwar construction of this new country:
He concludes his ode with the following verses:
This “we,” this “ours,” this “for us”… – how did this political community come about? From a legal standpoint, citizenship (just like today in the European Union) was given on two levels: citizenship of each federal republic and of the federation. On the level of republics, the dominant principle was civic, i.e. republican: republican citizens were persons either born in that federal republic or of parents who were from there, regardless of ethnic origin. The federal republics, apart from Bosnia and Herzegovina, were defined by the constitutive national group, with the ethnic balances mostly respected. Federal citizenship, on the other hand, was supranational.
Along these legal definitions of citizenship status, we must admit that sovereignty was defined in a rather complex and original way. This was a country in which the sovereign was the working class and the working people, Yugoslav nations and nationalities, as well as all citizens of Yugoslavia. Political activity was open to members of the Party, itself broken down, that is, federalized, into the Leagues of Communists of each republic (and later autonomous provinces as well). It was also open to members of unions and members of the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, youth organizations, etc. There were elections, as well as a system of delegating power from below within the system of self-management, which was meant to supplant, as argued by Yugoslavia’s main theorist Edvard Kardelj, unfair bourgeois parliamentarism, which, in the words of your grandfather Jovan, made “‘the representative man’ treat his fellow man as a means in his struggle to obtain power and privileges.” Today, living in such “representative” democracies, we know what he meant.
Socialist Yugoslavia remains the greatest experiment in economic democracy ever conducted. Through self-management of their workplaces and factories, each working citizen was included in decision-making mechanisms with greater or lesser intensity, to greater or lesser effect. When it comes to the relationship between the federation and the federal units, the federal citizenship argument, in my view, dominated from 1945 to 1967. However, starting with the constitutional changes adopted between 1967 and 1971 and definitely after the last Yugoslav constitution of 1974, it was supplemented by the confederal citizenship argument that allowed for increasingly greater power of the federal units compared to the federal centre.
This political-legal structure hung over us when we were ceremoniously accepted into the Pioneers like all other schoolchildren in 1984. It appeared to almost anyone who watched Yugoslav Prime Minister Branko Mikulić declare the opening of the Winter Olympics that year in Sarajevo that this political structure, although founded on complicated balances, would stand and hold for a long time. For us in Sarajevo, it was the crucial year of the mythic Olimpijada – of which I remember naught but a single hockey match, and one in which I could not catch a glimpse of the puck even once. Our home windows on the tenth floor of a skyscraper offered us a direct view of the Olympic flame at the Koševo stadium; it kept us awake for 15 days – leaving us in a post-Olympic jetlag, I guess until the war, eight years later…
How quickly thereafter everything began to fall apart. You would certainly recall how that Yugoslav building shook, its façade cracking, how swiftly the doors to the promised future were shut. Much was cooked up directly in intellectual kitchens and salons, in literary debates that turned up the temperature on ethnic tensions. You yourself went on to map out the nationalist fandom, in which stadium terrace chanting announced the forthcoming unravelling.
We were told that the first multi-party elections brought democracy. It surely brought a near complete delegitimization of the Yugoslav socialist (con)federal argument, leaving the three wartime promises in doubt. It suddenly became unclear whether we truly became free back in 1945, or, as was proclaimed by various nationalists but also some liberal pundits, whether we fell under the totalitarianism of a-national Bolsheviks. The national question, accordingly, not only was not solved, but was only now being “brought in from the cold.” As for social emancipation, equality, self-management – these were summarily discarded in the complete euphoria that followed the fall of the Wall, with the free market barging in as an empty signifier of fantasies of limitless consumerism.
Still, we must address here the fall, the falling apart, the tearing apart – which were the result, I insist, of the reversal in hegemonic argument. Ethnic nationalism became the dominant argument that put forth, obviously successfully, that the only political community within which representative democracy is possible is not one of republican civic communities, no less the one on the level of federal Yugoslavia – this “unfinished state” – but rather, exclusively in the fold of ethnonational communities. The ethnonational argument, with the help of liberal-democratic mechanisms of majority rule, thus undermined and then destroyed institutionally existing communities on the level of federal units and the whole federation.
Which is how the two of us, after 15 years, stopped being part of the same political community, without anyone asking us (or countless others, for that matter) what we wanted, and without being able to do anything about it. We were split, my dear Ivan, by someone else’s hand. I am grateful that life has brought me to your city, Belgrade, and that, regardless of our different citizenships now, and the fact that I am officially a foreigner here, we found the right side of the barricade, where being together does not rely on IDs or shifting political geography, but on a shared utopian horizon where a new political community might be born, in which, again, “our forces” will “work as we want,” and “as we want they” will “work – for us.”
Yours,
Igor
The post-Yugoslav winter of discontent: Ivan’s reply
Dear Igor,
Thank you for the poem by Jovan Popović you sent me; I truly enjoyed reading it. I thought a lot about the poem’s intense energy, bursting forth, an energy that testifies to a faith in a society in which solidarity is a fundamental pillar and moving force. Today, such a notion appears unreal and utopian. But Igor, I thought about something else as well. You and I are the same age. You write about how we grew up believing in a vision of society founded on the legacy of an epic struggle for freedom and for building the country. You remember a time when we were first in school in the mid-eighties, when we listened to and recited poems like the one you sent me. If you also recall, our feeling towards the mythical miner, a symbol of the Yugoslav working class, from poems diminished over time, feeling his effort was in vain, that it made no sense. Endlessly repeating the phrases that still subsisted at the time, I felt that I was participating in some meaningless ritual, purged of any content or significance, a shell and empty form, in which neither our teachers nor parents had any faith. The only miner we might have seen at the time did not extract ore to build up our country, but stood in the mine hole, struggling for the existence of an essentially different community: one in which his ethnic group or nation would take a central place. Seeing all this, we were unaware that before our very eyes, a whole system was dissipating, withdrawing before a radically different imaginary of how and on what foundations the community whose members we were ought to function.
The principles that determined this “new age” we are well acquainted with today. The people and ethnicities that comprised Yugoslavia took to war to resolve the problem that the political elites at the end of the eighties thought was unavoidable, to untie the dysfunctional knot of the political community called the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. Ethnopolitical entrepreneurs used war to achieve their dreams, constructing countries in which their ethnic group dominates, only to do everything they could to try to enter the new supranational community that is the European Union, in basic principle so similar to the one they once were part of.Footnote5 The principles of nationalist masters of war still dominate across the territory of the former country, shoulder to shoulder with neoliberal ideology, that is, the marketplace as the other sacred cow to which, somewhat oxymoronically, “proud” members of the nation bow, accepting obediently savage capitalism. I, too, struggling against Milošević’s nationalist madness in the 1990s, believed that once liberal democracy and market economy arrived, they would pull us out of the mud in which we found ourselves. I stopped believing in that fairy tale a long time ago.
However, for me, the question of what happened in the last quarter century is not the only relevant one. Your letter, Igor, forced me to think about something else, something we all think we know very well – how this former country lived and breathed, and according to what principles it functioned. I must admit that I am not at all sure how the idea from which socialist Yugoslavia emerged during World War II is understood today. It might not have been the ideal imagined community and certainly had all kinds of problems. Still, I feel that the principles from which the country developed and on which it stood are worth considering today more than ever, if for no other reason than to see what it is that we have gained with the subsequent alternative that challenged and rejected these principles.
You write that the People’s Liberation Army formulated three basic promises during World War II: the liberation of the country, the resolution of the national question, and social emancipation. Your letter also clearly speaks about how this functioned in practice while Yugoslavia still existed. You made me think about what remains of this legacy today.
I’ll start with the liberation of the country. First, I have the impression that we no longer know who were the forces that liberated Serbia. Children learn in school that all the fighters operating in Serbia at the time were antifascists, to the point that we might soon declare the German occupiers as antifascists. The process of devaluing the role of the Partisans in the liberation of Yugoslavia has reached a new high with the rehabilitation of Dragoljub “Draža” Mihailović, along with other obscure Chetnik leaders; staggering hypocrisy, where alleged improprieties in the legal process (under review by the courts in the last few years) essentially reflect onto the political field and, in practice, strip Mihailović and the like of any responsibility for collaboration and crimes. Formal justification has produced a political consequence on par with the rehabilitation of Marshal Philippe Pétain in France, whose trial would have almost certainly been found not fair, if following similar judicial principles. Except that in France, at least not for the time being, there isn’t even a hint of such a thing. Owing to these rehabilitations, antifascism, the fundamental legacy of liberation, has become an empty reference, a space that literally anyone can occupy. Such relativization will ultimately have as its consequence the majority opinion that we were never even liberated, as we heard the former president of Croatia Kolinda Grabar Kitarović recently say. Draža Mihailović and the like, in this context, are not at all important as persons, they are sort of anti-communist totems, whose only function is to delegitimize the alleged communist usurpation of the struggle against fascism.
This very issue points to the crucial consensus political elites arrived at across the former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. Anti-communism was and remained just about the only point on which they all agreed; anyone’s actions, whether the fascist followers of the notorious Serbian collaborator Dimitrije Ljotić, the Ustaše, the Chetniks, and other forces that used to collaborate with Germans during the Second World War, can be relativized and justified if they were anti-communist. The solution to the national question offered by the communist government in the form of the motto “brotherhood and unity,” thus setting up a controlled sovereignty, could never fit into the vision provided by nationalist elites. For their part, they consistently discredited any attempt to potentially rethink the idea of the political community on which Yugoslavia was grounded; for them, it was merely a communist relict and thus supreme evil. What I want to ask you, Igor, is: “what did we all achieve by this?” Has the national question been resolved since? A huge number of dead, displaced, crimes committed, and towns razed are the horrible consequences of it all. But what I think about today, Igor, are the political consequences of establishing a nationalist hegemony. In the dominant narrative today, any mention of potential solutions provided by the SFRY is heresy, entirely discounted through association with the spectre of communism. The space in which one is allowed to act is limited to a narrow ideal of the nation and a new system where the brutal market has no alternative, and where any other model and any other vision are rejected out of hand, as we know, as a communist utopia.
At this point, Igor, we arrive at the third promise, social emancipation. What did the vision of the creators of that country offer? Equality for women, workers’ rights, and the right to dignity for all citizens regardless of ethnicity, race, or religion. What remains of this today now that we have vanquished the communist spectre? Closed factories, a race to the bottom in which any work, poorly paid and even unpaid, is an unreachable goal for many; a deeply patriarchal society; and, above all, a complete lack of hope for any alternative. The fear of the future has subsumed all of us, fear without hope, in societies where the only ideology is the exclusion of alternatives. In societies whose members, whenever needed, again raise their national flags because the brutal reality of being on the European periphery offers them only this, as a short-term escape from reality in which their “proud” nations’ tiny existence is indeed irrelevant.
So, I ask you, Igor, as they used to say, “what now, comrades?” Somehow, I think that it is time to begin once again to imagine Yugoslavia. Not as a real political community, but as a vision and idea upon which it rested. Perhaps this can be the starting point for thinking about the alternative, in which antifascism will be no empty signifier, where the highest achievement will not be that we are not killing each other, and where climbing the social ladder will not mean pushing those around us into the abyss. Our generation still remembers Yugoslavia, but some other generations after us, who grew up in other political regimes and were fed on different visions, should be reminded of the foundation of that community in which we all used to live. We should all think again about Jovan Popović’s lines:
My dear Igor, I deeply believe that this message is more current and relevant than ever today.
Yours,
Ivan
Understanding history, imagining alternatives: a letter to Biljana Đorđević
Dear Biljana,
I address you as a slightly younger colleague but also as a theorist who researches the questions of the constitution and functioning of political communities and the problem of democracy. I am writing to you, then, as to one who belongs to the younger generation, whose only political reality and political geography was the one that arose after 1991 and the disappearance of Yugoslavia. I wish to discuss with you what was constituted after that disappearance, and what were the arguments that took centre stage in the new communities, as well as the counterarguments against them today.
First, I want to describe the political communities in which we live now, and then speak about how we live in them, and what are the possibilities for both my and your generations to make any changes to the given state of affairs.
I wrote to your colleague and friend Ivan Đorđević about socialist Yugoslavia as a federal state that rested on a supranational principle. In our lifetimes, we witnessed the dissolution of one supranational community, only for some of the remnant countries (as of now, only two) to turn around and enter a new (European) union that, in general, follows the same principle. From having Bosnian and Yugoslav citizenship in the early nineties, I found myself with dual Bosnian and Croatian citizenship, and through the latter, I am also a European citizen today who enjoys certain privileges (mostly of mobility) of the supranational European citizenship. What does this mean? Well, I have a different status and rights depending on which passport I take out. Perhaps – although not really perhaps, but certainly – my interest in questions of citizenship is tied to my experiences of various administrative statuses. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, and on occasion during the process, I was either or both a full citizen, temporary and permanent resident, a legal and illegal immigrant, stateless, as well as a refugee. Frequent changes of address, both voluntary and involuntary, have bestowed upon me various administrative personae. I am still, at least, so I believe, the same person. Now, who’s the fool here? The world in which schizophrenic statuses proliferate, or someone who tries to remain calm to make sure he or she presents the right piece of paper at the right moment?
Let’s revisit the question of what has replaced the supranational principle. In general, we have observed and continue to witness a struggle between the civic and ethnocentric arguments, with the latter prevailing. The first would, at least in theory, have to promote the legal equality of all citizens united by citizenship and ignore specific ethnocultural identities. This principle has some problems because, not infrequently, it results in the civic principle really favouring the dominant group. The ethnocentric argument foregrounds the very group identity and differentiates between the majority (to whom the state belongs, that is, the ethnic group possesses it constitutionally) and the minority or minorities, which are provided with minority or culturally sensitive rights. The matter is clear. The fundamental community, the ethnic group, the people, or ethnocultural nation dominates the state culturally, socially, and economically, which often has two consequences: an openly discriminatory state, allowed to discriminate and, as we know from recent history, expel or even exterminate those it dislikes; or in the case of relative democracy, what I call (following the Israeli political scientist Sammy Smooha) an ethnic democracy.Footnote6 Here, we encounter the fourth – multiethnic – argument, mostly reserved for peace-keeping interventions into so-called ethnic conflicts. It involves multiethnic or consociational structures that often lead to petrified ethno-federalist solutions. The ethnocentric principle is, in these situations, thus shifted from the state to sub-state levels and functions there, just like in regular ethnocentric states. Briefly, one does everything to avoid being in the position of a minority in these sub-state units, despite the overall state structure, on paper, guaranteeing equality and rights.
Leaving aside that, in actual legal-political systems, we often see a combination of these arguments, let us try to clearly name what we are talking about. Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia are all to varying degrees ethnocentric states, if you ask me. We can often hear civic arguments in these countries which demand equality for all citizens, sometimes a call for greater multiethnicity, and on occasion (as in the case of Vojvodina) even a demand for greater autonomy. The multiethnic argument dominates, as I mentioned, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, the latter having, after the 2001 conflict, turned from an ethnocentric state into a consociational one. And some in North Macedonia still demand a return to ethnocentrism and unitarism, while others seek even more multiethnic territorial rights. Still others, in the minority, want a civic state. In Bosnia, we encounter various counterarguments to the Dayton agreement, from the civic and unitarist to the separatist. Kosovo, for its part, has a rather homogenous population, yet it is constitutionally slightly oddly defined as a civic and, at the same time, multiethnic state. On the one hand, this stands in contrast to the argument that Kosovo is just another Albanian state and as such could unite with Albania; while on the other hand, on Serbian side, there is a demand to respect multiethnicity with constitutional rearrangements like in Bosnia, and some even talk about partition. Finally, the only constitutionally designated civic state is Montenegro. Perhaps because those Montenegrins who feel they are ethnonationally Montenegrin do not comprise the majority, or because they thus resist the demands for multiethnic rights coming mostly from the Serbian minority.
What does this spectrum of the major citizenship arguments reveal? Perhaps the majorities seek to clearly establish their dominance whenever they can, from legal solutions to state symbols. And they are mostly successful in this, if not on the state level, because they, for example, share a state with other ethnic groups, then on the sub-state level. Minorities are constantly seeking the multiethnic argument for the recognition of their difference, seeking greater rights. The civic argument is generally reserved for the anti-nationalist, liberal, or left-leaning civil society and personalities.
And what of the supranational argument? It has become tethered to the European Union, so one’s relation to that argument is closely related to the functioning of the EU itself. Interestingly, ethnic nationalists have been able to make EU integration compatible with their agenda both in the Balkans and in Central Europe. Liberal and leftist anti-nationalists would also support the supranational argument, especially those from divided countries seeking peace and stability through a supranational framework (although even they are increasingly aware that the welfare promised by joining the EU is a daydream).
Dear Biljana, you and your generation grew up and live (although some have already left their countries or are imminently planning to) in political communities where these four arguments are constantly tested. Still, I would like to address your generation through you about the ideological conflict over social and class relations in these countries, as well as about their general socio-economic conditions. Allow me to boil it down to two old arguments: the socialist and the capitalist.
Our colleague Ivan Đorđević and I witnessed the last years of the Yugoslav socialist self-management in the late 1980s, already ensnared in the problem of reduced growth, foreign debt, and austerity measures. Allow me to simplify further – it seems to me that the Yugoslav system was abolished via a clever ruse: naïve voters hungry for a multi-party system as a guarantee of plurality and democracy were promised not only that they would maintain all their material privileges of self-managing socialism, but that their purchasing power would allow them to buy ever more stuff. I needn’t even speak of the promise of happiness of going to the polls only once in every four years.
Please excuse my irony, but the results are evident: they lost what they had, while what they desired became available only to a minority who could afford it. It’s a sad outcome. From the socialist argument that held the working class and working people a bearer of sovereignty equal to federal units and Yugoslav peoples, and which supported a supranational Yugoslav community and, even further, in the name of solidarity, international struggles of oppressed peoples – we have arrived at homogeneous ethnonational communities as the fundamental arenas of representative democracy, inextricably tied to neoliberally engineered societies of class hierarchies.
In this landscape, determined strongly by ethnonational communities, the liberal vision would at least demand respect for legal equality and human rights. For avowed liberals, the end of the so-called post-socialist transition was to be found in membership of the European Union. Thus, without calling into question capitalism itself, the liberal argument insists on civic values within a supranational framework of the European Union. That is the limit of this vision, many even taking it as the end of history itself.
Yet, I want to ask you about a new actor that unexpectedly entered the stage in the last 10 years or so, comprising mostly people of your generation. We find them throughout nearly the entire post-Yugoslav space, resolutely ruining the fun for right-wing ethnonationalists and neo-liberals equally. This new subject questions not only the dominant ethnonational character of these states (as ethnically, gender, and sexually discriminatory) but also the capitalist restructuring of these societies that resulted in class conflict and social injustice. This new argument, born today by new progressive and left movements, perhaps accepts territorial borders as given – they are not interested in rebuilding Yugoslavia – but it oversteps them through regional and internationalist action, insisting that every political community must also be a community of not only legally, but also politically and socially equal citizens who themselves produce new democratic forms of self-governance.
To bring my letter to a close, I would like to underscore the emancipatory struggle that has begun and that brings together our two generations. Is this a utopian vision? Perhaps. Still, I believe in it, just as I believe in the rebellion that will, like in a poem by Yugoslav surrealist and revolutionary Oskar Davičo, “come one day to replace the night,” and then –
Yours,
Igor
Different generations, different aspirations: Biljana’s reply
Dear Igor,
Indeed, Igor, thus wrote Oskar Davičo in his poem “In memory of Svetozar Marković’s prison days” at the time. But I was not a Tito’s Pioneer like you and Ivan… When I started school in 1991, my teacher was a refugee from Bosnia, so it cannot be surprising that she, probably contravening the school syllabus, showed us a map of broken-up Yugoslavia. My second-grade desk-mate and I debated who our parents would vote for – Slobodan Milošević or Milan Panić? We had no idea what any of it meant, but we talked nevertheless, repeating the conversations of adults. The last time I was truly afraid was in March 1999. By 2001, when in the town where I grew up, I saw tanks in the park in which I took my first steps, it was already unseemly to be afraid. I was a teenager who believed in the 5 October 2000 revolution that overthrew Milošević, and the subsequent sobering was rather painful. I visited Zagreb for the first time in 2006 to participate in a documentary about post-Yugoslav children.
Some think that generations are separated from one another in the way that countries are, and they should, therefore, be granted a right to self-determination. My generation has had that right entirely withheld. Others have determined our fate for us and now claim no alternative exists. I do not think of myself as representative of my generation, but I do think I share with it the absence of a belief in the “one day, one day” from Davičo’s poem. We believe in now or never – in part because of the time discounting, but also owing to the inability to struggle for an uncertain and distant future in which we will no longer be present, and partly owing to the general disappointment and paralyzing pessimism of our generation. In this sense, we are the product of our time.
We would not be like this were it not for you and, above all, what came before your generation – we are constituted by the confusion of all previous processes and events, emerging from the politics of hope and despair. In the same way, our children will be constituted by our right and wrong decisions. For this, seemingly paradoxically, we should not struggle for their future but, above all, for ours. To defend and once again reclaim the sovereignty we are due as citizens and the people, we need to protect “enough and as good” public goods for them. We owe them that much, even if we did not receive anything like this.
Answering your question “why are we in this together,” or “who are we and why are we together at all,” as preceding the question “who is in and who is out,” I would like to say that the question “who is in” is contextually inseparable from “why are we together.” The issue of delimiting who is within or accepted as a full member of the community is also always the issue of drawing internal and external borders and determining nationals and citizens, and who are those who define and redefine the political. Who comprises a people truly capable of self-governance? The question of who constitutes a people and how it is constituted at its inception, how to determine who is in and who is out, is at once the question of what can mobilize a people at the moment of collective actions, which then further innovate and construct novel answers for the political community in question.
The citizenship argument, as you call it, or arguments about citizenship, as I do (insisting on external and internal borders among citizens and between citizens and non-citizens), is no longer the topic we should be debating much – although the civic, ethnonational, multiethnic, and supranational arguments are by no means unimportant. Still, they increasingly hide the fact that we are becoming political non-sovereigns of our political communities and that even the fiction of a people no longer legitimizes policies. In that sense, such arguments about citizenship become superfluous when unmasked: the civic at best hides liberal nationalism; the multiethnic hides plural ethnonationalism and ethnonationalist division of spoils. In contrast, the supranational argument increasingly hides imperial capitalist cosmopolitanism and our utter irrelevance and peripheral nature. The argument that has not been mentioned at all in the last 30 years (three-quarters of my life) is the socialist argument of citizenship and the capitalist argument of citizenship, and what these two mean at all. Only in the context of these arguments does it make sense even to ask the question of the liberal, multiethnic, or supranational arguments. The socialist vision was systematically delegitimized, while the capitalist is the tacit foundation of the arguments of which you wrote.
You asked me for my opinion on the new subject that has arisen, but it’s difficult to categorize it at the moment. I believe it will eventually become a form of constituent power, and I refer to it as the “demos.” My main question is: who is included in this “demos” and who is excluded, and what are the reasons for this? According to the Oxford political theorist David Miller, some of the qualities and relations necessary for the demos/a people – those who are in something together – are sympathetic identification, an underlying agreement on ethical principles, interpersonal trust, and the stability of the group.Footnote7 It is commonplace to think that by expanding the boundaries of the demos, either through spatial distance or cultural diversity, solidarity among its members loosens. Our post-Yugoslav political constructions have narrowed the borders of their demoi, but also of solidarity, and do not represent the best examples of this claim.
Igor, we must now work on a new democratic argument by reconstituting a different demos. It must be a subject of more inclusive democracy based on potential alliances among various progressive forces. Democratic borders are constituted within the scope of two kinds of social relations – relations of political solidarity and of political power. Two explanations of constituting democratic boundaries correspond to different methodological and philosophical approaches: the “idealistic” one, drawing on normative ideals of a solidary democratic unit, and the “realistic” approach, which derives political borders from empirical facts about power structures. The latter is really about, to paraphrase Terry Macdonald, “who exercises power over whom?” Our task is to coordinate the limits of political solidarity with those of power because the meaning of democratic self-governance is for communities of political solidarity to hold power over their boundaries.
But what is the starting point of this coordination? Is it a normative ideal or a realistic evaluation of the situation? We must attempt to reconstruct structures of power to reach our ideal of a community separated from other communities through solidary ties rather than accept the reconstruction of normative ideals, thus legitimizing the current structure of power. But, Igor, let us admit this too – our situation is tragic. Apart from becoming non-sovereigns, we are becoming superfluous people – we are all not even necessary to this system for its maintenance until we become a risk. Let’s not talk of utopia; it does not arrive. But the tragedy of our situation can be liberating and unite us in creating everyday utopias. We must admit the limits of our capabilities for solidarity and mutual recognition, but we must work on ourselves and others to expand and deepen these solidary ties. Wars have destroyed so much and so profoundly, and that was the only way to make things as they are now.
Accepting that the potential hegemony of a new democratic argument of citizenship could be contingent, partial, and exclusionary, and that it is subject to further contestation, is a sign of permanent and radical commitment to ideals of equality and inclusivity. The process of the delegitimization of socialism, which you write about, has played a significant role in shaping us. It took time for many to free themselves from it, and to question the teachings of fathers who once taught Marxism in schools only to later remove all Marxist content from the syllabus. It is now our responsibility to adopt a more reflective stance towards both socialism, which we did not actually experience, and the transitional post-democracy we experience daily, in order to build radical democracy every day.
All of this is premised on our hopes of becoming an actively engaged majority. Many today, instead of saying “now” or “one day,” say never – “it is all in vain,” or “there is no longer any reason to be together,” or again, “we want out.” Their reasons vary – some believe the problem to be that arguments of citizenship have all failed, and some are bitter about being told they have rights they de facto do not have and believe they will have them elsewhere.
Things “will not be beautifully inevitable one day, one day …,” and such a promise that it will be better in the long run even strangles the political in the same way as the alleged rationality and objectivity of a claim that there is no alternative. But we do not have to acquiesce to corruptive impotence, and we do not have to agree that we are superfluous people. Resistances in the form of protest and movement are the beginning of pushing the limits of solidarity and expanding the demos; it is important, however, to tackle the question of “and then what?” How will the self-constituting actor reconstitute the community? What will need to be torn down, what should be transformed, and what will be protected?
Yours,
Biljana
Epilogue: Igor’s reply to Biljana and Ivan
Dear Biljana, dear Ivan,
Thank you for your letters. After reading Ivan’s, I wondered again what this second Yugoslavia was. What did that name designate? What was it grounded in, and how did it exist for 45 years, which is no small matter for political entities? Three of its legacies, I believe, stand above the rest and survive despite everything: antifascism, self-management, and non-alignment. These are topics to which we are certain to return, given the ways of the world.
Dear Biljana, thank you for a sobering yet encouraging letter. A veil has been lifted; nobody can pretend otherwise. What hides behind official narratives, these citizenship arguments on which these communities rest are nothing other than narratives, fictions, even just plain old lies… My letter to you ended with a call for, let us call it, a “noble lie,” a call to action driven by utopian ideals according to which reality should be shaped through a struggle destined to contain missteps, incompleteness, repetition, and the impossibility of realizing its own guiding ideas.
By underscoring the tragedy of the current moment, you invoke the defeat that determined the entire left tradition from about the time of my and Ivan’s birth. This is the defeat of the idea that emancipatory, sweeping social change is possible. The French Revolution, as François Furet vaingloriously put it, is over. We could respond with the old joke that the news of the death of the French Revolution was a little premature.
History, clearly, marches on, dear Biljana and dear Ivan. With it, the struggles we have written about to one another, which begin with the quotidian question, “what shall we do today?” What shall we do with our lives, here and now, every day, to resist the decimation of life and the proliferation of superfluous people, that is, turning us into such superfluous people? How can we offer this struggle, this resistance, a vision of a political community to come, one to which we wish to belong and for which it would be worth sacrificing?
Answers to these questions can be found only by including others into our correspondence.
Yours,
Igor
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Notes on contributors
Igor Štiks
Igor Štiks is a professor at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade and a senior research fellow at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana (research group “Social Contract in the 21st Century,” funded by the Slovenian Research Agency, P6-0400). He is the author of Nations and Citizens in Yugoslavia and the Post-Yugoslav States: One Hundred Years of Citizenship (2015) and The New Balkan Left: Struggles, Successes, Failures (with K. Stojaković, 2021).
Ivan Đorđević
Ivan Đorđević is a cultural anthropologist and senior research associate at the Institute of Ethnography of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In his book An Anthropologist Among the Football Fans (2015) he focuses on the role of sport in constructing national identities in former Yugoslavia. His recent work is related to disadvantaged Roma communities.
Biljana Đorđević
Biljana Đorđević is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Belgrade. Her academic work focuses on democratic theory, citizenship, and participation. She has been an MP in the Serbian parliament as a member of the Green-Left Front since 2022.
Notes
1. Walzer, “Exclusion, Injustice,” 55.
2. This correspondence was initially read in public, at the invitation of Tatomir Toroman, at the Museum of Yugoslavia, as part of the series “Conversations about Yugoslavia” on 11 June 2015. The event included the cast of the play “Nije to crvena, to je krv” (That’s not red paint, that’s blood) (directed by Bojan Đorđev, produced by the company Teorija koja hoda, 2014), with Yugoslav revolutionary poetry read by Ana Mandić and Miloš Đurović. At the invitation of Predrag Šarčević, the reading of the correspondence was recorded on 29 May 2017 and broadcast on 7 June 2017 by Radio Belgrade 3. The correspondence appeared in its original (Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian) version under the title “Zašto zajedno, zašto odvojeno?” in Tragovi, the Zagreb-based journal dedicated to Serbian and Croatian topics, as well as in the edited volume Jugoslavija: zašto i kako? It was translated into English by Edward Djordjevic. The authors further edited it for this publication.
3. Rusinow, Yugoslav Experiment, 344.
4. All verses in this text are translated by the authors.
5. On ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, see Brubaker, “Ethnicity without Groups,” 166–67.
6. See Smooha, “Model of Ethnic Democracy.”
7. Miller, “Democracy’s Domain.”
Bibliography
- Brubaker, Rogers. “Ethnicity without Groups.” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 2 (2002): 163–189. doi:10.1017/S0003975602001066.
- Miller, David. “Democracy’s Domain.” Philosophy and Public Affairs 37, no. 3 (2009): 201–228. doi:10.1111/j.1088-4963.2009.01158.x.
- Rusinow, Dennison. The Yugoslav Experiment, 1948–1974. Berkley: University of California Press, 1977.
- Smooha, Sammy. “The Model of Ethnic Democracy.” In The Fate of Ethnic Democracy in Post-Communist Europe, edited by Sammy Smooha and Priit Jarve, 13–60. Budapest: Local Government and Public Service Reform Initiative, 2005.
- Štiks, Igor, Ivan Đorđević, and Biljana Đorđević. “Zašto zajedno, zašto odvojeno? Epistolarna rasprava o Jugoslaviji i ovima posle nje.” In Jugoslavija: Zašto i kako? edited by Ildiko Erdei, Branislav Dimitrijević, and Tatomir Toroman, 322–340. Belgrade: Muzej Jugoslavije, 2019.
- Štiks, Igor, Ivan Đorđević, and Biljana Đorđević. “Zašto zajedno, zašto odvojeno? Epistolarna rasprava o Jugoslaviji i ovima posle nje.” Tragovi 2, no. 2 (2019): 182–201.
- Walzer, Michael. “Exclusion, Injustice and the Democratic State.” Dissent 40, no. 2 (1993): 55–64.