In search of a democratic cultural “alternative”: Serbia's European heritage from Dositej Obradović to OTPOR

Abstract

Developments in Serbia's democratic consolidation over the past six years have been both ongoing and progressive. Yet the establishment of a widely shared and collectively accepted political culture that has departed from the ethnocentric and euroskeptic narratives of the Milošević era remains incomplete. Additionally, the failure by Serbian socio-political elites in appropriating alternative narratives of Serbian history and culture that demonstrate a tradition of shared values and identities with other European communities has stymied public acceptance of Serbia's European integration and public trust among its leaders. This paper argues that Serbian socio-political elites can appropriate narratives and symbols of Serbian collective identity that have been either sidelined or neglected by previously established ethnocentric narratives, and ascribe new systems of meaning and codes of behavior that qualify European liberal democratic values. I argue that a plentiful reservoir of democratic capital can be found in the histories of Serbian communities in Vojvodina over the past three centuries, and the urban cosmopolitanism of Belgrade from the late 1860s up to the present period.

Keywords:

• Serbia
• Belgrade
• Vojvodina
• democratic consolidation
• political culture

Acknowledgements

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN) conference, hosted at Columbia University 14–16 April 2011. I would like to thank my fellow ASN panelists and especially the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and editorial suggestions that helped me clarify many of the theoretical aspects of this manuscript as it developed into a larger article.

Notes

Serbia formally signed the Stabilization and Association Agreement on April 29, 2008. Full ratification by all EU members had been stalled primarily by the Netherlands insisting Serbia fulfill all outstanding obligations to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). On May 26, 2011 Ratko Mladić, former Bosnian Serb Army Chief of Staff, was arrested and extradited to the Hague five days later. Goran Hadžić, former President of the Republic of Serbian Krajina and the last remaining fugitive at large, was also captured by Serbian authorities on July 20, 2011 and extradited to the Hague two days later. On October 12, 2011 the European Commission recommended that Serbia be granted official EU candidate status, which was expected to be formally granted that December. But recent conflicts in northern Kosovo between local Serbs and KFOR soldiers over disputes surrounding freedom of movement and operation of EULEX, the EU-based administrative authority in Kosovo, prompted Germany to postpone Serbia's EU candidate status until the following year.

See for instance the report by the International Crisis Group, which identifies a significant degree of financial funding and political support for local Serb institutions by Belgrade, but also acknowledges perceptible rivalries between local party officials eager to retain strong influence in day to day matters of administration and state officials in Belgrade interested in maintaining authority over these officials as a way of claiming sovereign legitimacy over at least this compact area of Kosovo.

According to the Serbian government's Office for EU Integration, only 53% of respondents polled in June 2011 would “support accession of our country to the European Union.” By October, the level of support had further dropped to 46%, the lowest level of support since 2000 (B92, “Opposition Leader”).

See Dahl (35–43), in which he identifies five general criteria for democracy: effective participation for debate and cooperation by all elected officials, equality of voting, “enlightened understanding” in which both elected officials and citizens have access to information concerning the benefits and potential consequences of policies as well as alternative ideas, control and management of policy, and full universal suffrage. I use Aronoff's (“Political Culture”) definition of political culture as shared meanings that are socially constructed, and that either affirm or challenge the legitimacy of political institutions, offices, and procedures of a polity. As such, “political culture is employed to establish or contest the legitimate parameters of collective identity.”

Aside from newspaper editorials and international officials continuing to note the need for Serbia to “come to grips with its past” so many times the statement has become almost clichéd, even recognized scholars like Ramet continue to hold surprisingly sweeping beliefs that “it is widely understood that xenophobic nationalism is a vital part of Serbian culture today” (42).

For the purposes of this article, I define narrative as a conscious connection of previously unstructured and possibly even unrelated events, figures, and ideas into a seemingly emplotted framework of logic and reference. I understand symbols as the tools of narrative, both tangible – as in the form of monuments, commemorations, and rituals – and intangible – such as feelings of belonging, patriotism, and tradition. For a sociological study on the development of narratives, both community and national, see Zerubavel. For a study on the uses of cultural symbols in political identity, see Swidler.

The term “usable democratic legacy” is taken from Linz and Stepan (452) though the emphasis in their work on legacies is more focused on institutional legacies instead of cultural. Institutional legacies certainly have a profound influence “for the transition paths available and the tasks different countries face when they begin their struggles to develop consolidated democracies” (55). But in an important article, Kubik presents an alternative argument of “cultural legacies” that are not automatically “received from” the past but are rather “transmitted” by political and social actors (“Cultural Legacies”). Cultural legacies may be “transmitted” in a particular way to reflect conditions from institutional legacies, but they are fashioned by contemporary agents for current purposes. They are not unavoidable, and uncontrollable, obstacles that forever make a state and its society a prisoner of the past.

This is the conclusion I ultimately based my dissertation on (Rossi). I significantly draw from the conclusions reached by Laitin's “two-faces of culture model” that incorporates both culture as a system of limited, yet flexible, meaning from the works of Clifford Geertz, and culture as a form of social and political practice for contemporary narrative as argued by Abner Cohen (1–20).

Poland is the major exception to this comparison. See Kubik Power.

For the sake of brevity for an already lengthy paper, I am leaving out discussions on recoding symbols for Kosovo, which would require a separate study for proper explanation and analysis. Kosovo, like Serbian Orthodoxy, is inextricably linked with, and will remain an integral part of Serbian history and identity. However, the prospects of appropriating a narrative around Kosovo that is compatible with both Serbian ethics and European values of democracy and co-fraternity will remain elusive as long as a settlement with the ethnic Albanian community, which utilizes similarly contentious and ethnocentric narratives of historiography, is incomplete. Additionally, this task requires intensive efforts by both sides at “de-coding” highly developed narratives that existed long before, but were institutionally strengthened by the events of the last twenty years. Suffice to say, the flexibility for re-interpreting narratives that have gained a certain degree of autonomy from political actors is highly limited, but not impossible.

This event, known as the Velika seoba Srba (Great Serbian Migration) is itself a celebrated event in Serbian collective memory, most directly symbolized through a painting of the same name by the Serbian artist Paja Jovanović in 1896. Historical memory of the Great Migration of 1690 is often linked to additional narratives of repeated Serbian collective suffering in Kosovo and ethnic persecution. Yet for all the symbolism of commemorating where Serbs migrated from, it is surprising that little focus has been given to where Serbs migrated to and what became of these communities.

Though Arsenije III was the Patriarch of a reconstituted autonomous Serbian Orthodox Church within the Ottoman Empire, his move to Austria in fact removed him as “Patriarch” in Peć, the historical center of the Church. Serbian patriarchs continued to administer in Peć until 1766 when it was reabsorbed into the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. The Metropolitanate in Karlovci was thus an acknowledgement of its technically subordinate role to Peć at least until 1766.

The first Serbian Reading Room was founded in 1841 in Irig, a town a few kilometers from Novi Sad. By 1870, there were twenty-one Serbian Reading Rooms throughout Vojvodina, all of whose primary aims were to preserve Serbian language and literature amid increasingly oppressive Magyarization. See Kimball, 364.

The word matica literally means “queen-bee”. However it can also be understood as “home”, “source”, or “headquarters”. In this case, a rough translation could be “Home of the Serbs”, or even “Serbian Source”.

Sava Tekelija (1761–1842), was the first Serb doctor of law, and a great Serbian benefactor and philanthropist. He was also present at the Assembly of Temesvár (modern day Timişoara) in 1790, in which its Serbian and Romanian participants advocated the administrative autonomy of Banat, its formal separation from the Hungarian Kingdom, and the recognition of equal rights and political privileges for Serbs and Romanians throughout the Empire.

Miloš Popović. Srpske Novine no. 91 13 Nov. 1843 (qtd. in Karanovich 177).

Cited by Svetislav Šumarević. Čitalište Belgrade, 1938: 25 (qtd. in Karanovich 179).

Srpske Novine 31 May 1846 (qtd. in Karanovich 180).

According to Srpske Novine, in 1856 Serbia received 138 different foreign newspapers: 5 in Serbian (Vojvodina), 1 in Bulgarian, 2 in Croatian, 4 in Russian, 1 in Czech, 3 in Polish, 3 in Modern Greek, 84 in German, 7 in English, 21 in French, 4 in Italian, 2 in Hungarian, and 1 in Turkish. Serbia received more foreign newspapers than newspapers published at home. The only two newspapers in Serbia were Srpske Novine (Serbian News), and Šumadinka (Šumadijan Woman). See Karanovich, 181.

It is also worth noting that the Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti (SANU) is the same institute in the late 1980s and early 1990s that spearheaded a series of controversial historical narratives associated with the Serbian national revival in the twilight of Yugoslavia's existence; the most (in)famous being the 1986 Memorandum, which decried the entire postwar Yugoslav state project as an attempt at weakening, dividing, and ultimately subjugating the Serbian nation by making them demographic minorities in a series of sub-state republics and autonomous provinces controlled by non-Serb communities. Today, SANU continues to function as one of Serbia's premier intellectual centers, and while it has mostly eschewed the nationalistic rhetoric of the 1990s, it is still regarded as a conservative think-tank by social scientists in Serbia and elsewhere, despite its more liberal-oriented beginnings.

Among the works translated into Serbia were Nikolai Chernyshevskii's What Is to Be Done? (1869), Borzoi Turgenev's Smoke, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons (1869), Nikolai Gogol's Inspector General, and Taras Bulba (1870), and Dead Souls (1872), Rousseau's Emile (1872), Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus (1872), Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and Quatrevinght-treize (1872), Alphonse de Lamartine's History of the Girondists (1875), Ernst Haeckel's Natural History of Creation (1875), and Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1879). See Petrovich, 512–513.

Western sources on Serbia under Petar I remain scarce, and this lack of information to non-Serb readers has kept most of this history relatively unknown. For a general history in English, see Petrovich, 534–611. For a recent study of the period in terms of political, cultural, social, and economic developments, see Stojanović, Kaldrma.

The similar ways of thinking between Skerlić and Obradović is clear in the following two passages. In 1902, Skerlić wrote “there are many people in our country who disclaim against the ‘rotten West’, and who talk with exaltation about some ‘Serbian’ and ‘Slav’ culture. They have taken from the ‘rotten West’ their clothes and habits, and institutions and appetites, but not that which makes the West so great, in which it really is a great teacher: a sense of individual dignity, liberty, initiative, that serene, enterprising, sober spirit which has built all civilization … and for us there is only one cure: to open wide our doors to the West and its ideas, the West which thinks, which acts, which creates, which lives a full and intensive life, the only one worthy of being called human life.” Skerlić, Feljtoni, skice i govori. Belgrade: 1964: 66–67 (qtd. in Čolović 101). Likewise, Obradović makes a clear testament to the value of Western political thought in writing “I would have my fellow countrymen venture to think freely in all matters, reflecting and passing judgment on all they hear. You know well, my dear friend, that all nations which merely cling to old opinion and customs must needs lie in eternal and hopeless darkness and stupidity … Not thinking, not reflecting, and making no use of the reason and intellect that God has given them, not taking example from the learned and enlightened nations, they remain forever in an endless and lamentable torpor.” Andrija Stojković. Životni put Dositeja Obradovića: od šegrta i kaludjera do filozofa i prosvetitelja i Karadjordjevog ministra prosvete. Belgrade, 1989: 211(qtd. in Fischer 74).

Cited by Noyes in Obradović (“Introduction”, 107).

Ibid., 282–283.

Srpski Književni Glasnik 23: 9 (1910): 715, qtd. in Miljoković-Djurić, 144–145.

Srpski Književni Glasnik, 32: 11 (1914): 872, qtd. in Miljoković-Djurić, 156.

Stojan Novaković. “Nakon sto godina..” Hrvatskosrpski almanah. Belgrade: n.p., 1911. Dositej Obradović 1811–1961. Ed. Mladen Leskovac. Belgrade: n.p., 1961, qtd. in Fischer, 67–68. The actual building commemorating Obradović in Belgrade today is an old small Turkish house, which functions as a modest museum to both him and Vuk Karadžić, the language reformer who lived a generation later.

For a general history of Serbia and the surrounding region during the 1848 revolutions, see Petrovich, 242–246; Krestić, 29–57; and Rapport, 140–151.

Karlovac is a town in northwestern Croatia, near Zagreb, and is not to be confused with the town of Sremski Karlovci, the seat of the Serbian Metropolitanate in Hapsburg lands. However, the name Sremski Karlovci is derived from Karlovac as roughly meaning “Karlovac in Srem”, similar to Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder, and Kosovska Mitrovica and Sremska Mitrovica.

Viktor Novak, “Kako su Hrvati i Srbi u Karlovcu 1848 zajednički proslavili Uskrs”, Politika, April 8, 9, 10, 11, 1939, qtd. in Krestić, 41.

The phrase “Belgrade is the world” carries two interesting meanings. In Serbian, the word “svet” (world) can also mean “sacred” or “holy”, which suggests that in attempting to voice their belief that Belgrade was more than just a Serbian city, its historical character and dynamics were what was “sacred” to them over the distant an unfamiliar Kosovo, which had been already heavily fused with nationalist symbolism as being “sacred” to the Serbian nation, though few Serbs had ever been there.

Gordy (104, n 2) defines “turbofolk” music as a subgenre of “neofolk” music that characterized much of the state-controlled media outlets of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Whereas “neofolk” music utilized “styles and structures borrowed from various folk forms combined with pop instrumentation and arrangements”, the more particular turbofolk music placed a primary emphasis on commercial dance and disco motifs to frame a reduced but still noticeable folk element. The term “turbofolk” was originally coined by the Serbian rock musician Antonije Pušić (Rambo Amadeus) as a derogatory and satirical term to describe the co-opting of folk forms and imagery with the state sponsored nationalism of the Milošević era. The term stuck as a music genre and is widely regarded as being associated with the glitz, glamour, and criminal elite of the 1990s. The genre is still widely popular throughout Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, but since 2000 has grown to resemble more mainstream pop-glamour music.

According to the EXIT website, the festival is proclaimed as a “State of EXIT”, which means “a state for those who share values, environmental awareness, and tolerance and are open to the different cultures and also want to make the world around them a better place.” EXIT – Exit History.

On the importance of “mnemonic reconciliation”, including references to literature noting the important relationship between the deepening of democratization and social memory, see Kubik and Linch. On the uses of providing “counter-hegemonic” meanings to highly familiar “canonical” narratives and symbols, see Brysk.