The Serbian Progressive Party's re-articulation of the Kosovo myth within the internal dialogue on Kosovo, 2017–2018

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the re-articulation of the Kosovo myth, specifically Serbia's claim to the territory of Kosovo, within the so-called internal dialogue on Kosovo initiated in 2017 by Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić. It asks what elements are re-articulated and through which practices, in an effort to institute a counter-hegemonic project of partitioning Northern Kosovo from the rest of the territory. This is mainly achieved through de-mythologizing, de-emotionalizing/rationalizing and economizing Serbia's approach to Kosovo. Within this counter-hegemonic project, Vučić is constituted as an empty signifier, incarnating a solution to the Kosovo-Serbia dispute, whatever content it might take on. Re-articulation of the Kosovo myth involves both transposing Serbia's claim to the territory from Southern and Central to Northern Kosovo, and dis-articulating the Kosovo discourse from the sedimented affects of love and pride that constitute it. The article offers a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth, conceptualizing it as a discourse in poststructuralist terms and focusing on citationality and re-articulation of its elements in other discursive constellations. Such a reading has implications for re-thinking national myths as bounded narratives of the past, by examining how their elements can constitute even counter-hegemonic projects aimed at the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Kosovo
• myth
• internal dialogue
• SNS
• Aleksandar Vučić
• partition

1. Introduction

This article offers a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth and examines the re-articulation of the myth in light of recent political changes in Serbia since 2017 when Aleksandar Vučić became president and the Serbian Progressive Party (Sprska Napredna Stranka; SNS) solidified their power. Preserving Kosovo as part of Serbia has been the official policy of the Serbian Government ever since the UN administration of Kosovo began in 1999. This is reflected in numerous resolutions, declarations, and decisions of the Serbian Government and Parliament and even Serbia's 2006 Constitution, which contains a preamble on Kosovo as its indivisible part and claims that all government resources must be directed toward preserving it within Serbia (National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia, 2006). Kosovo's importance is not only reflected in official state policy (Subotić, 2016) but it can be understood as the place and space where Serbian nationhood and statehood emerged. This symbolic importance is echoed by the Kosovo myth (Bieber, 2002; Čolović, 2002, 2017; Pavlović & Atanasovski, 2016), which centers on the tales of the Kosovo Battle of 1389 on the Field of the Blackbirds, in which Christian forces lost against the Ottomans.

In current scholarship, the Kosovo myth is examined as a national myth, a specific reading of history, or a ‘past that has been condensed into [a] founding story’ (Assmann, 1990, p. 10). Some research treats it as a narrative with certain fixed boundaries and reference points in the past (Atanasovski, 2019; Bakić-Hayden, 2004; Čolović, 2017; Pavlović & Atanasovski, 2016), or as a (founding) story with political implications (Bakić-Hayden, 2004; Čolović, 2017; Judah, 2000; Pavlović & Atanasovski, 2016). In the battle, Prince Lazar deliberately loses against the Ottomans to ensure an eternal place for all Serbs in Heaven. This is where the term ‘Heavenly people’ (nebeski narod) comes from, which is often heard in Serbian nationalist rhetoric to designate Serbs as a chosen people (Anzulović, 1999; Pavlović, 2009). The myth has been related to Serbian nationalism (Bazić, 2012; Bieber, 2002; Čolović, 2017), as a ‘sacralised story of the Battle of Kosovo formed in the nineteenth century in the framework of nationalist discourses' (Čolović, 2017, p. 20). As such, Kosovo becomes a sacralised place in the Serbian political collective (Ejdus & Subotić, 2014), an ethnoscape, a landscape ‘endowed with poetic ethnic meaning through […] the territorialization of ethnic memories’ (Smith, 1999, p. 16). A strand of literature offers a historical perspective on the myth, seeing it as contingent, varying in importance for Serbian elites and state politics throughout history (Pavlović & Atanasovski, 2016; Pešić, 2019). Less scholarship considers how the Kosovo myth features in contemporary politics of Serbia (for exceptions, see Ejdus, 2020; Vranić, 2019) since it is often discarded as an ‘issue of the past.’ It is entirely absent from discussions on the subversion of dominant hegemonic orders since the Kosovo myth can be characterized as a hegemonic narrative par excellence, which I call a social imaginary. I aim to fill a research gap by deconstructing the myth, reading it – somewhat counterintuitively – as the foundation for counter-hegemonic political projects, i.e. those that go against the narrative that Kosovo is Serbia. This opens up questions on the connection between myth and history dominant in memory studies. According to Assmann (2008, p. 68), myth refers to

an idea, an event, a person, a narrative that has acquired a symbolic value and is engraved and transmitted in memory. […] [I]t is used to distinguish between the object of historical knowledge on the one hand and collectively remembered events on the other.

By understanding myths as discourses with constitutive elements, this article enables re-reading national myths as re-articulations and performative practices that both constitute ‘the past’ and can be directed toward ‘the future.’

I argue that myths do not only anchor nations, but also other political collectives. Since the Kosovo myth has been predominantly examined in connection to how it can mobilize national(ist) collectives throughout history (Čolović, 2017; Pavlović & Atanasovski, 2016) or today (Ejdus, 2020; Vranić, 2019), I aim to demonstrate that myths can anchor identifications with the politics of a specific party or leader, typical in populist discourses (Laclau, 2005). The re-articulation of the Kosovo myth helped anchor the counter-hegemonic politics of the newly elected President of Serbia Aleksandar Vučić within the so-called internal dialogue on Kosovo. This dialogue was initiated to rethink the state practice toward Kosovo after its declaration of independence in 2008 and its increasing international recognition as a state. One notable result of this was the idea of partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines, and potentially swapping territories between Serbia and Kosovo. Northern Kosovo, predominantly Serb-populated, would be incorporated into Serbia, and the rest of Kosovo, predominantly Albanian-populated, would be recognized as Kosovan. This debate polarized the political field in Serbia for and against Vučić's vision of partition. In this polarization, national affiliation was substituted with affiliation to Vučić's politics, since he was attempting to change a deeply rooted narrative around Kosovo.

Unlike, for instance, Slobodan Milošević's use of the Kosovo myth in the Field of the Blackbirds near Gazimestan on Vidovdan (St Vitus’ Day) in 1989 (Bieber, 2002), Vučić's vision relied on countering the idea that (all of) Kosovo is Serbian, which he transformed into a political project. Some previous leaders attempted to solve the Kosovo issue through the partition (notably, Dobrica Ćosić, Zoran Đinđić, and Ivica Dačić), but unlike those leaders, Vučić managed to mobilize state resources and systematically polarize public debate on this issue. The internal dialogue is a testament to that.

This research also contributes to a growing field of memory politics of the right (Caramani & Manucci, 2019; Couperus & Tortola, 2019; Finchelstein, 2017) by examining how national myths re-emerge in conservative and right-wing regimes, such as Hungary (Feischmidt, 2020) – or Serbia. Scholarship in this field predominantly focuses on how actors glorify or erase the past; instead, I show how they promote an alternative discourse that draws from the past but is aimed at the future, de-mythologizing the past. Myths can ground collectives and build community, not around the nation, but around party and leader politics, a nexus that has not been examined before. Aleksandar Vučić's and his SNS party's discourse on Kosovo demonstrates this.

The article will be structured as follows: after the introduction, I briefly explain the theoretical framework, then the methodological premises. The core of the article is an analysis of the internal dialogue's discourse, in which re-articulations of the Kosovo myth link to the counter-hegemonic project of Vučić and his party. I conclude by summarizing the findings, situate them in the current context of politics in Serbia and offer avenues for future research.

2. Theoretical framework: re-articulation, performativity, citationality

My deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth is based on Essex school discourse theory (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), performativity (Butler, 1988, 1990, 1993), and deconstruction (Derrida, 1982, 1988; Hollywood, 2002). The guiding assumption is that no discourse precedes articulation, but all discourses emerge in a constitutive interplay between articulatory and performative practices. Hence, articulation is central to meaning-making (DeLuca, 1999). Continuous and habitualized articulations (understood as performativity) sustain discourses as sedimented, as taken for granted. However, performativity is also constituted by ‘failure,’ since something can always be re-articulated in a new light (Butler, 2010). Iterability (the sign's repeatability in different contexts) connects to the Derridean notion of différance (Derrida, 1982, 1988), as a re-articulation of something familiar (i.e. naturalized discourses), into something else, something different, whose meaning both differs and defers from the familiar (Hollywood, 2002).

If the Kosovo myth is conceptualized as a discourse in Essex school, poststructuralist terms, i.e. as a set of moments that are contingently grounded and always subject to re-articulation and change (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985), it cannot be a stable narrative as previous scholars have outlined. Repetition of a discourse creates a dissonance between the original statement and what is repeated (citationality), carrying traces of the original message into the practice of repetition. Since no discourses precede articulation, the very act of articulation establishes the Kosovo myth anew each time it is brought about, leaving room for performatively dis-articulating and re-articulating it in a new light. Even the myth itself re-articulates something prior, namely the Battle of Kosovo that has been embedded into Serbian nationalizing political projects throughout history.

Without using deconstruction as a method, I rely here on a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth as an entry point into the discussion on originality and repetition. The myth is never a stable discourse that has reference points in the past, but its constitutive elements can be re-articulated into other discursive constellations and even counter-hegemonic projects aimed at the future. One of those projects is the internal dialogue on Kosovo that initiated the idea of partitioning Northern Kosovo.

3. Methodological framework

The article relies on the Essex school assumption that all social practices are discursive practices, meaning that our social reality, be it discursive or material, can be analysed as discourse (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002), and is underpinned by subjects’ affective investment in these discourses (Laclau, 2005).

Methodologically, I use discourse-theoretical analysis (DTA; Carpentier et al., 2019), which sensitizes Essex school concepts, above all discourse, but also articulation, nodal points, political/performative practices, hegemony, and empty signifiers. These sensitizing concepts support the qualitative interpretation of social phenomena; as heuristic devices, they help the researcher grasp the dynamics of meaning-making in discourse. Discourse can be understood both as an articulatory practice and as a structured totality that incorporates language and materiality. Since any discursive totality is only contingently grounded, nodal points are signifiers that ground a discourse momentarily, while political/performative practices are interventions and articulations that aim to institute, stabilize, or de-stabilize certain meanings. This can relate to dis-articulating discourses from certain affects that underpin it, often done through drawing antagonistic frontiers toward the other (Carpentier, 2018).

Lastly, empty signifiers relate to hegemony, understood as a struggle to arrest the play of difference in the world into a monolithic vision, offering a coherent and structured narrative of our contingent social reality. As Howarth (2015, p. 11) points out, the ‘struggle for hegemony is […] conceived in terms of the production of “empty signifiers,” which function to represent the “absent fullness” of an ontologically lacking social order.’ In ‘generalized social disorder […] “order” becomes the name of an absent fullness’ (Laclau, 1995, p. 89). In other words, empty signifiers are absences from the discourse: in a situation of contestation or conflict, a ‘solution’ might be the empty signifier, while the debate revolves around which nodal points can act as that solution. The ‘presence of an absence’ that the empty signifier embodies enables the identification of subjects with it. Empty signifiers hold together an entire chain of nodal points that embody diverse demands (Laclau, 1996). They enable the ‘identification of the unity of the group with the name of the leader’ (Laclau, 2005, p. 100), which is typical of populist discourses. The body of the leader can become an empty signifier, since discourses encompass materiality, which the body is part of. The body can act as a container that accommodates a range of demands, i.e. nodal points, and stand in place of the solution. In the analysis, the leader Vučić incarnates a solution to the Kosovo-Serbia dispute, whatever its particular content.

As DTA advocates for a combination of qualitative content analysis with these sensitizing concepts, I coded using Atlas.ti, a qualitative data analysis software, to identify: nodal points anchoring the Kosovo myth as a hegemonic discourse (e.g. ‘the Kosovo pledge,’ ‘love for Kosovo,’ ‘pride,’ etc.); nodal points anchoring Vučić's counter-hegemonic project on Kosovo (e.g. ‘Vučić as a solution,’ ‘partition,’ ‘Northern Kosovo’); articulations/political practices that de-stabilized the hegemonic Kosovo myth (e.g. ‘de-mythologization,’ ‘rationalization,’ etc.); and empty signifiers (e.g. ‘compromise solution’). The original corpus consisted of 2150 articles on Kosovo from the daily Danas and 307 manual transcriptions of the news show Dnevnik 2, collected between May 2017 when Vučić became president, and September 2018 when the internal dialogue officially ended. The analysis yielded 320 Kosovo-related quotations by SNS members of the government; the most representative claims feature in the analysis below.

4. The internal dialogue on Kosovo

Two days after Aleksandar Vučić came to office as President of Serbia on 31 May 2017, he initiated the internal dialogue by announcing that during his presidency, he wanted to ‘open up a social dialogue about the Constitution, our attitude toward Kosovo and Metohija and the region’ (RTS, 2017d). Consequently, Vučić published an authored text in the daily newspaper Blic on 24 July 2017, in which he called on various segments of Serbian society to debate on finding a solution to the Kosovo issue. In the ensuing months, a working group was formed in the Serbian Government to assist the dialogue with academics, economists, and political experts; health, education, and sports institutions/organizations; and civil society representatives (Radna grupa – Unutrašnji dijalog, 2017). Marko Đurić, a prominent SNS member and head of the government's Office for Kosovo and Metohija, led the group, explaining that the internal dialogue was initiated because of the Brussels agreement had not been implemented and as a response to all segments of the Kosovo Albanian society prioritizing the statehood question (personal correspondence, November 2017). Hence, the internal dialogue occurred not only during official roundtables, but as a larger debate in the public media. This dialogue intersects with the official Belgrade–Pristina dialogue mediated by the EU, which even welcomed it in their reports (EU Stabilisation and Association Council, 2017, november 16). Any solution reached within the Brussels dialogue needed the Serbian public to accept it, specifically because the Kosovo question is coupled with the Serbian Constitution that can only change through a referendum. This is why the internal and the Brussels dialogue discourses cannot be fully separated.

Since the dialogue was primarily carried out by the SNS-led regime in Serbia, I will briefly introduce the party's background. Scholars put many labels on the SNS, from center-right (Spasojević, 2019), center-right and populist (Vranić, 2019), right-wing and pro-EU (Dragojlov, 2018), to moderate (Castaldo, 2020). More recently, researchers have pointed out the authoritarian tendencies of the SNS-led regime, such as the shrinking space for media freedom, or non-fair elections (Bieber, 2018, 2020; Castaldo, 2020). Although the SNS describes itself as ‘a political organization with a clear democratic orientation’ (SNS, 2011), it originated from a schism in the extreme right Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka; SRS) in 2008 (Dragojlov, 2018), when Tomislav Nikolić and Aleksandar Vučić decided to form a more moderate pro-EU party called Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). It won the majority in the 2012 parliamentary election, and secured the presidency under Nikolić (Stojić, 2013). In the 2014 election, Vučić secured the premiership, won the presidency in 2017, and has been in power ever since, with the SNS winning an absolute majority in the most recent 2020 election, which the opposition largely boycotted, arguing that it was not free or fair.

Since 2017 when Vučić became president, the opposition in Serbia has become increasingly marginalized, media freedoms limited, and the conditions for free and fair elections worsened due to SNS's exploitation of state resources (Castaldo, 2020). Strong leader politics is cultivated in Vučić's Serbia (Lavrič & Bieber, 2021) and the image of Vučić as a strongman is often compared to Orban's image in Hungary (Enyedi, 2020). Vučić's subjectivity as a ‘strong’ leader is constituted by his affiliation with the former nationalist regime of Milošević (holding the prominent position of Minister of Information between 1998 and 2000), his former ties to radical right-wing politics in Serbia, and his calls for economic stability and progress toward the EU.

The debate initiated within the internal dialogue on Kosovo has further polarized the political field in Serbia along the lines of supporting Vučić's politics or opposing it. Political community was built around a leader, not around the nation. Although national affiliation is still important (in delineating Serbs from Albanians), the nodal point of the discourse is Vučić himself and his politics, since even some Serbs (members of the national community) were cast out as ‘others’ and helpers of Albanians if they did not support Vučić's solutions. This refers to the nationalist opposition, some Kosovo Serbs opposing Vučić, and some members of the Orthodox Church. Given the prevalence of Vučić as an articulatory subject in the material (252 of 320 quotations), most attention in the analysis will be devoted to him, as well as some of his supporters from SNS, such as Marko Đurić and Ana Brnabić.

4.1. Connection between the Kosovo myth and the idea of partitioning Northern Kosovo

To map out the nodal points of the Kosovo myth and how they are re-articulated into other discourses (e.g. partition) through citationality, I rely on existing literature, which shows that the Kosovo myth entangles with Serbian nationalism to form a distinct claim to the territory (Anzulović, 1999; Bieber, 2002; Čolović, 2017; Ejdus & Subotić, 2014). I argue that the Kosovo myth has turned into a social imaginary in Serbia, that is, a sedimented and hegemonic horizon that ‘structures a field of intelligibility’ (Laclau, 1990, p. 64) of what can be said, felt, and practiced in relation to Kosovo. Current scholarship agrees on the importance of Kosovo for Serbian conceptions of self-identity (Bieber, 2002; Čolović, 2002, 2017; Vujačić, 2015). Across the political spectrum, it is almost unimaginable to articulate Kosovo as not Serbian or Serbia's (Spasojević, 2016; Vranić, 2019), which also translates into Serbian foreign policy as a ‘fight’ to preserve it (Ejdus, 2014; Subotić, 2016). The Kosovo social imaginary structures the claim to Kosovo being Serbian and its nodal points are: the notion of the territory of Kosovo being Serbian (and Serbia's); a historic right to that territory; the Serbian people who live, have lived, and have died there, constituting the territory as eternally Serbian, even if not under the sovereign control of Serbia; and the so-called Kosovo pledge, which Prince Lazar's army took before the Kosovo Battle to give their lives defending Kosovo. In current political practice, this pledge is often re-articulated as a vow to fight for Kosovo and never give it up, united as a political/national collective. These nodal points are affectively invested with love for Kosovo as a sacred place and symbolic space, and pride in the pledge to never give it up. Thus, Kosovo is invested with strong affective meanings and the imaginary relies heavily on Serbia's (affective) claim to the place.

The claim to territory is the essential element that, through citationality and re-articulation, connects the Kosovo myth, the Kosovo social imaginary to the recent idea of partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines. Partition might seem counterintuitive to the territorial claim, since, if Kosovo is partitioned, the largest portion of the territory would belong to Kosovo Albanians. However, Serbia merely seeks to condense its claim in a portion of territory where it can exert governance – Northern Kosovo, which becomes the locus of political contestation initiated by the internal dialogue, not abandon its territorial claim altogether. By politicizing Northern over Central and Southern Kosovo (site of the Kosovo Battle and most Serbian cultural/religious heritage), the partition discourse re-articulates the myth in a new light. The claim to Kosovo is transposed to its Northern part, where it is anchored by nodal points of the majority Serb population, economic gain, and political rationality, as I will demonstrate.

4.2. Introducing the idea of partition

The idea of partitioning Kosovo along ethnic lines was a political re-activation of an old idea. Even the late Prime Minister of Serbia Zoran Đinđić advocated partition in the early 2000s, although it was not a favorable option then (Danas, 2018a; RTS, 2017e). In the 1990s, former President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Dobrica Ćosić advocated it (elaborated in his books Kosovo, 2004, and Kosovo 1966–2013, 2013). Even in 2013, during the height of negotiations before the Brussels agreement was reached, former Prime Minister Ivica Dačić claimed that ‘partition or delineation’ are ‘the only possible solutions’ (RTS, 2013). Vučić officially articulated the idea of razgraničenje (which can be translated as partition, delineation or re-bordering) on 9 August 2018, after the official roundtables of the internal dialogue ended (Danas, 2018f). As he announced on 26 July 2017, just a few days after the dialogue began, he would state his own suggestion once he had heard all proposals from the public (Valtner, 2017), which might indicate that the dialogue was envisioned as a platform to justify an existing idea of partition.

As my discourse analysis revealed, the internal dialogue destabilized and aimed to politicize previously sedimented meanings, that is, to ‘de-mythologize’ and ‘de-emotionalize/rationalize’ Serbian politics toward Kosovo. This was tied to a new vision of a future in which Serbia is imagined as economically prosperous and part of the EU; for this, the ‘mythological’ and ‘emotional’ approach to Kosovo posed an obstacle. Hence, an attempt was made to substitute the Kosovo social imaginary with the imaginary of EU integration. This new social imaginary is incarnated in the empty signifier of a ‘compromise solution’ to the Kosovo issue – an absent solution that would ensure that both Serbia and Kosovo are equally satisfied and dissatisfied, lift all obstacles in Serbia's path toward the EU, and ensure an economically prosperous future. Within this dialogue, various nodal points articulated by the SNS represent the compromise, but most importantly, razgraničenje.

Razgraničenje transposes Serbia's claim to Kosovo (as Serbian) from a symbolic into a physical realm (Northern Kosovo as Serbian) – and calls for substituting ‘our past’ with ‘our future.’ As the dialogue progressed in 2018, Vučić himself came to embody the solution, his body acting as an empty signifier onto which demands could be inscribed. As members of his party emphasized, with Vučić Serbia had the unique opportunity to reach a compromise and Vučić, with his broad public support, could implement such a solution (Milovan Drecun, personal correspondence, June 2018).

4.3. De-mythologizing the Kosovo issue

De-mythologizing the Kosovo issue involves situating ‘myth’ in ‘the past’ and contrasting it with ‘the future,’ ‘reality,’ factual ‘history’ and material gain. Upon taking office, Vučić called for a ‘social dialogue about the Constitution, our attitude toward Kosovo and Metohija and the region’ and that Serbia should renounce its ‘mythical approach’ to Kosovo (RTS, 2017d):

Our attitude should be harmonized with the problems of daily life, with issues our people from Kosovo and Metohija face, with what we consider to be factual interests of our state. […] Let us put things into a rational perspective, on a national level.

A crucial aspect of the internal dialogue was the intended change to the preamble on Kosovo in Serbia’s Constitution.

Vučić called for societal talks with the aim to reach an ‘agreement’ that would testify to ‘our effort to do something for our country’: ‘if [the internal dialogue] fails, then it means that we have once again prioritized the country of our forefathers, instead of the country of our children’ (RTS, 2017d). The juxtaposition between past, in which the Kosovo myth is situated, and future, where renouncing it is articulated, recurs in Vučić's statements. During the celebration of St Vitus’ Day (Vidovdan) that has symbolic significance for the re-articulation of the Kosovo myth, Vučić claimed that Vidovdan should not remain a myth, but become ‘our clear history which will give us the material from which we can build up a better future’ (RTS, 2017c). By prioritizing ‘history’ over ‘myth,’ Vučić attempts to commit the reading of Vidovdan to a ‘factual,’ historic domain, and to guide Serbia toward its future. Vučić also stated that he believes ‘even Prince Lazar would want us to fight for an earthly Serbia and not a heavenly one,’ an earthly Serbia that is characterized by ‘labour, the number of meters we build in highways and railroads both in Serbia and Kosovo, new jobs, and especially new people we give birth to’ (RTS, 2017c). This juxtaposition of ‘myth’ and ‘reality’ is part of the logic of ‘de-mythologizing’ Serbian politics toward Kosovo. It is also about transposing it from the symbolic into a physical realm, where the earthly is equated with materiality and economic progress (highways, roads, jobs, a larger national collective), and the heavenly with ‘overcome’ ideas that should remain in the past. A similar logic can be recognized in Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabić's statements; she said she wished ‘that the Serbian society accepts a different reality and changed circumstances, and turns toward the future, while leaving the past and the myths of the 1990s in the previous century’ (RTS, 2017b).

De-mythologizing involves juxtaposing historical record with a ‘mythologized’ view of Kosovo: ‘We Serbs tell ourselves that for 600 years now, we have kept the entire Kosovo and Metohija under our control, but my question is: how come our consul was murdered in 1890 […]? Were they consuls in their own country, in their own territory?’ (RTS, 2018g). Vučić is referring to the Consulate of the Kingdom of Serbia in Pristina formed in 1889, while the Kosovo Vilayet was under Ottoman rule, which was later integrated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes after the First World War. Vučić establishes a historical equivalence between the Serbian and Kosovar states now and these territories in the twentieth century. By doing so, he questions the assumption that Kosovo has always been Serbian by emphasizing ‘factual’ historical record of consuls representing Serbia in what was essentially a different state/empire.

This involves re-articulating integral elements of the Kosovo myth, such as the sanctity of the territory. Vučić increasingly conflicted with the Serbian Orthodox Church (SOC), the main subject behind constituting Kosovo as a holy land. The conflict was only with those representatives of the SOC who opposed Vučić's ‘compromise.’ When the Church issued a declaration opposing partition, Vučić (RTS, 2018h) said: ‘Everyone talks about the holy land, but no one wants to live in the holy land.’ It is evident that the symbolic ownership of entire Kosovo lost its appeal in Vučić's attempt to institute his counter-hegemonic project of partition. The sanctity of the land (heavenly Serbia) is juxtaposed with the reality of life (earthly Serbia), reconsidering Serbia's efforts to preserve more than Northern Kosovo.

The importance of Northern Kosovo was clear from Vučić's piece for Blic, which initiated the internal dialogue. He called all citizens of Serbia to reconsider their attitudes toward Kosovo (Vučić, 2017):

It is time for us as a nation to stop putting our heads in the sand, and try to be realistic, not to allow ourselves to lose, or hand over to somebody what we already have, but also not to wait to regain something that we have already lost long ago. […] We Serbs did not want to be responsible enough to understand the strength and desires of Albanian [national interests]. […] The solution does not lie in our myths and conflicts, nor does it lie in denying and negating all our national and state interests.

Although Northern Kosovo is not explicitly mentioned, it is considered the only area where Serbia ‘already has’ a degree of governance through its institutional framework. Given that Northern Kosovo is directly adjacent to the Serbian border/boundary and has a history of resisting integration into the Kosovo state framework, it can be argued that Vučić is referring to this area because he links ‘what we already have’ and ‘what we have lost long ago’ to Serbian and Albanian national/state interests. He might also be referring to the Serbian medieval cultural heritage in Kosovo, but Northern Kosovo becomes the locus of contestation from 2018, articulated by Vučić as important in ‘territorial’ and ‘strategic’ terms, due to the ‘Serb population that lives there,’ its energy infrastructure, and natural wealth (RTS, 2018c).

4.4. De-emotionalizing/rationalizing the Kosovo issue

In the internal dialogue, the SOC has perhaps most prominently articulated Kosovo as an emotional issue of the entire Serbian nation that the state needs to respect and uphold. For instance, Vladika Porfirije (RTS, 2018f) said that the question of Kosovo and Metohija was so important and painful, that we could not allow it to be misused for individual or political party interests, calling Kosovo the ‘most costly [precious] Serbian word,’ a saying that has resonated many times in Serbian public discourse. De-emotionalizing/rationalizing Serbia's approach to Kosovo calls this assumption in question. In the internal dialogue, many emphasized the need for a ‘rational’ or ‘realistic’ approach instead of an emotional one. At the fourth roundtable of the dialogue gathering prominent academics, former diplomats, and political analysts, some questioned whether emotions should prevail when trying to find a durable solution for Kosovo (RTS, 2017a). Vučić expressed his concern ‘that the decisions we make [regarding Kosovo] are too emotional instead of rational and that we are prouder of our past instead of thinking of our future’ (Danas, 2018e). Similarly, in April 2018, he stated that (RTS, 2018d)

we have to act responsibly and not simply say “we will not accept anything [on the table].” No, we have to participate in the negotiations and we have to fight and try to find a solution. We need not fear a solution.

The counter-hegemonic project of razgraničenje aims to dis-articulate the meaning of Kosovo in Serbia from the sedimented affects that constitute the Kosovo social imaginary, in the attempt to institute an alternative vision of Serbia's future that is marked by economic progress and EU membership. De-emotionalizing Kosovo helps draw antagonistic frontiers between those who support Vučić's suggestions, and those who do not. Criticizing the public's reluctance to accept the ‘truth’ about Kosovo, Vučić has claimed that ‘emotions have always prevailed with us instead of responsibility and a serious attitude [ozbiljnost],’ voicing skepticism over the number of ‘responsible people’ who would accept a rational solution (RTS, 2018e). Hence, his supporters are articulated as rational, responsible and part of the political ‘us,’ while his emotional and irresponsible opponents are part of the political ‘them.’ A rational approach to Kosovo is framed as good for the future of Serbia, while an emotional approach is not.

4.5. Economizing the Kosovo issue

Making Kosovo an economic question is a stepping stone toward realizing Vučić's counter-hegemonic project. By articulating Kosovo as an obstacle toward economic prosperity, current political practice becomes unsustainable. Vučić explicitly articulates a compromise solution and the betterment of the economy as interdependent (RTS, 2018b):

I am sure that if we reached some kind of a compromise with the Albanians, one which we would be equally satisfied or dissatisfied with, our trade exchange with Germany would reach seven or eight billion. […] We would lower unemployment by five percent in a year and a half. That means our salaries would be much higher. […] They would reach 500 EUR by the beginning of next year without any problems.

Part of this vision of a better future is substituting ‘old’ narratives around Kosovo with economic prosperity, primarily as part of Serbia's EU integration process, within which it could reach a compromise with the Albanians. At the same time, Northern Kosovo is ‘economized,’ with an overemphasis on its natural wealth and Serbia's energy gain from its hydropower plant Gazivode (RTS, 2018c).

4.6. Re-articulating political frontiers within the partition project

The bedrock of the project's logic of articulation is the re-drawing of political frontiers between ‘us’ (who support Vučić's solution) and ‘them’ (who oppose it) – a polarization typical of populist discourses (Laclau, 2005). A moment that further antagonized Serbs and Albanians was the arrest of Marko Đurić in late March 2018, when he entered Kosovo illegally to participate in a roundtable of the internal dialogue in North Mitrovica; Đurić emphasized the ‘brutality’ of his arrest and ‘savagery’ of the Albanians (Simić, 2018). He has also frequently called for Serb unity in seeking a compromise (RTS, 2018a), and has not shied away from politicizing Northern Kosovo, for instance supporting the unilateral formation of the Community of Serb Municipalities in Northern Kosovo after his arrest (Fonet, 2018).

Once the question of partitioning the North gained traction in the dialogue by the end of July and beginning of August 2018, an increasing number of Kosovo Serbs started to voice their concern about it. Apart from the SOC, a number of North Kosovo (and Serbia) NGOs compiled a letter sent to Federica Mogherini, the EU mediator in the Brussels dialogue, to rethink the EU's support of re-drawing Kosovo's borders. They warned about the ‘dangerous principle of ethnic ownership of territory,’ which could create a chain reaction in the region and an exodus of people with the ‘wrong ethnicity’ into the new ethnically claimed territories (Radio Slobodna Evropa, 2018).

Between 3 and 4 August 2018, various Serbian and Kosovan actors increasingly warned about the possibility of incidents in Northern Kosovo that would enable partitioning it (Tasić, 2018). For instance, the SOC warned about an ‘incident, either in the form of the proclamation of the alleged autonomy of the North or the takeover of Lake Gazivode by the Kosovo police’ which would ‘directly serve to […] cement the territorial division and permanently endanger the civilian population’ (Danas, 2018d). The opposition in Serbia also issued several statements about the necessity to prevent heightened tensions between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo (Danas, 2018b). To all of this, Vučić's responded that ‘there is no difference’ between ‘those who are in favour of an independent Kosovo as a whole, and those who think that we should still propagate tales from the time of Dušan's Tsardom’ (RTS, 2018i), when Kosovo was part of Serbian lands. By equating anyone who might be opposing Vučić's proposed compromise (opposition parties, NGOs, SOC, members of the international community, Albanians, etc.), with anyone who supports Kosovo as an independent state in its current borders, Vučić articulates a political ‘us’ around himself as a leader and the project he constitutes, not around national affiliation. Members of the same nation are labeled as opponents.

In this manner, Vučić acts as an empty signifier able to unify and accommodate a range of demands: a solution for the Kosovo question, a better future for Serbia and its offspring, economic prosperity, better international relations with great powers, etc. Illustrative of this is the North Kosovo leaders’ promise to support any solution offered by Vučić. Goran Rakić, the mayor of North Mitrovica and the leader of the Serbia-backed Kosovo-Serb party Srpska Lista, claimed: ‘we do not know what the compromise solution is, but we conveyed a message to President Aleksandar Vučić that he has our absolute support’ (Danas, 2018c). The trust does not lie with the Serbian Government or a specific plan, but with Vučić as a leader. Although no concrete solution is articulated (razgraničenje can mean a variety of things), the range of possible nodal points that could incarnate a tangible solution is bound by one commonality: Vučić as a leader, which constitutes him as an empty signifier. Vučić demands that political subjects do not trust in a specific plan, but in him and his ability to find a solution. This also refers to his party SNS, which did not voice any opposition to his Kosovo rhetoric in the timespan of the analysis – it, too, identified with the name and the body of the leader.

Vučić's new vision of Serbia's future was recapitulated in his speech in North Mitrovica on September 9, 2018, which the media called ‘Vučić's Gazimestan.’ Here, citationality can be recognized: the speech can be read as a performative re-articulation of Milošević's speech at Gazimestan (near the location of the Kosovo Battle) about 30 years prior. Like Milošević, Vučić is performing Kosovo as an important place for Serbia, but unlike Milošević, Vučić is accentuating only Northern Kosovo, in line with his project of razgraničenje. Throughout the internal dialogue, Vučić had emphasized the ‘strategic importance of this territory,’ with its many infrastructurally significant sites, natural wealth, and majority Serb population (RTS, 2018c). Vučić claimed that ‘myths, dreams, and premonitions are not my job, nor is my job a lunatic vision of Kosovo without Albanians, or even worse – without Serbs. Reality is my job’ (Predsednik Republike Srbije, 2018). This claim re-constituted him and his vision as rational, realistic, and responsible, contrary to previous political practice anchored by myths, dreams, and premonitions. To build bridges of trust, Serbia needs to become ‘great’ again:

Serbia is working hard, not fighting with anyone, because it invests in life, and does not throw resources around – because […] we are not burying [our children] like we did after the bombing [of 1999], because we are relying on knowledge, work, not on guns. […] My intention is for Serbia to be great, but not to conquer the Balkans and the world, but to conquer the future.

By re-appropriating the common conception of Greater Serbia that characterized Milošević's rule and its Kosovo politics, resulting in war and Kosovo's declaration of independence, Vučić re-articulates his own Kosovo politics as a break with previous practices. Instead of pursuing physical ownership of the entire Kosovo, which he calls mythical and unrealistic, Vučić is pursuing physical ownership of Northern Kosovo as its most important part. Through his speech in North Mitrovica and his visit to Northern Kosovo in September 2018, Northern Kosovo is performed as the most important part for Serbia, becoming Serbia's entire claim incarnate. This is evident in the material and political support of Srpska Lista in Northern Kosovo, which works closely with Vučić and his party. Although the partition discourse is framed as a progressive and future-oriented project (economic benefit, compromise solution, etc.) it is deeply antagonistic and rests on the idea of ethnic separation. Simultaneously, it antagonizes the broader political field in Serbia; everyone who opposes it is cast out of the political collective built around affiliation with the leader.

5. Conclusion

This article has offered a deconstructive reading of the Kosovo myth and mapped out how its constitutive elements, such as Serbia's claim to territory, are re-articulated to form a counter-hegemonic project of partitioning Kosovo. The partition project can be seen as a set of political practices that aimed to destabilize the notion of Kosovo being Serbia/n and dis-articulate the Kosovo social imaginary from the sedimented affects of love and pride that constitute it. The most important subject behind this re-articulation was Aleksandar Vučić, who aimed to de-mythologize, de-emotionalize/rationalize, and economize Serbia's approach to Kosovo.

This research shows that the Kosovo myth cannot be simply viewed as an issue of the past, or a fixed narrative, but must be understood as a discourse whose elements can even constitute a counter-hegemonic project such as partition. By reading national myths through discourse theory, this article opens up a discussion on (mis-)uses of the past. The ‘past’ does not simply wait to be used, but is re-constituted with each re-articulation, as the Kosovo myth shows. This blurs the boundaries between history as fact and myth as fictional retellings of factual events, which prompts us to consider the constitutive nature of discourse, with implications for re-reading other national myths.

The article contributes to a growing literature on memory politics of the right by focusing on the nexus between myths and other-than-national collectives, which can help us illuminate how authoritarian-style regimes can build affiliation with leader politics by, somewhat counterintuitively, de-mythologizing and historicizing past narratives. As I have demonstrated, the partition project rested on an antagonistic idea of ethnic separation, something that is typical in right-wing rhetoric (Stavrakakis et al., 2017), even though the project was framed as a progressive, future-oriented one.

On the level of this case study, although partition was never implemented and the Belgrade–Pristina dialogue remains ongoing (although losing momentum since late 2018), Kosovo has played a big role in helping Vučić and the SNS regime consolidate their power by polarizing the Serbian political landscape. The Kosovo issue became a defining subject of contestation for the SNS leadership during their rule. Kosovo still has great mobilizing potential in Serbia that is generated (and performed) at different defining moments. This potential is evident in the violent protests before the Serbian Parliament in July 2020, when some opposition protestors sang the famous song ‘Oh Kosovo, Kosovo!’ (Oj Kosovo, Kosovo!) and shouted ‘Arrest Vučić!’ and ‘Traitor!’ as a sign of Vučić ‘handing over’ Kosovo against the people's will (Danas, 2020). Although the protests came about as a reaction to the announced coronavirus lockdown and increasingly authoritarian governance, Kosovo was articulated as a demand against defining issues of Vučić's rule. Similar to the movement against Milošević in the 1990s, the opposition in Serbia is currently fragmented to the point where their only commonality is being against Vučić. This insight constitutes another research avenue, namely how the diverse aspects of Vučić's governance and Vučić himself as an empty signifier simultaneously fragmented and unified the political landscape in Serbia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Kone Foundation [grant number 201904639], Now-Time, Us-Space: Hegemonic Mobilisations in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Doctoal Programme in Political, Societal and Regional Changes at the University of Helsinki, Finland.