"There's nothing anyone can do about It": participation, apathy, and "successful" democratic transition in postsocialist Serbia

Slavic Review

Volumn 69, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 41-64

  Greenberg, Jessica ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 77950486057     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0037677900016697     Document Type: Article

References (122)

1. Matthew Gutmann, The Romance of Democracy: Compliant Defiance in Contemporary Mexico (Berkeley, 2002), 21.
2. The long-term fieldwork on which this article is based was conducted over a period of eighteen months between 2002 and 2004. Research was conducted in Novi Sad, Niš, and Belgrade and focused mainly on university student organizations, faculty, administrators, and participants in Serbian nongovernmental sectors.
3. Thanks to Benjamin Lee, Dilip Gaonkar, Olga Sezneva, Brian Edwards, David Wittenberg, Lars Toender, and Nasrin Kader for helping me to strengthen the analysis of this incident.
4. Keith Brown, ed., Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia (Bloomfield, Conn., 2006);
5. Thomas Carothers, Critical Mission: Essays on Democracy Promotion (Washington, D.C., 2004);
6. Kimberly Coles, Democratic Designs: International Intervention and Electoral Practices in Postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina (Ann Arbor, 2007);
7. Julie Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs (Bloomington, 2007);
8. Steven Sampson, "The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania," in Chris M. Hann and Elizabeth Dunn, eds., Civil Society: Challenging Western Models (New York, 1996);
9. Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe (New York, 1998).
10. See, for example, Paul Stubbs, "Civil Society or Ubleha," in Helena Rill, Tamara Smidling, and Ana Bitoljanu, eds., Twenty Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change: Peacebuildingin the Region of the Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade, 2007), 215-228
11. Coles, Democratic Designs;
12. Michele Rivkin-Fish, Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Bloomington, 2005). Such moralizing frameworks often mobilize categories of gender to naturalize particular social hierarchies or relations "appropriate" to new democratic orders.
13. See Susan Gal and Gail Kligman, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2000);
14. Elissa Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police," Nationalities Papers 34, no.3 (July 2006): 343-61;
15. Rivkin-Fish, Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia. Another area of relevant critique examines how international frameworks for transition, democratization, and reconstruction displace locally urgent questions of social and economic justice, as well as locally grounded forms of political engagement. See Stef Jansen, "The Privatization of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina," Dialectical Anthropology 30 (2006): 177-99;
16. Paul Stubbs, "Community Development in Contemporary Croatia: Globalisation, Neoliberalism and NGOisation," in Lena Dominelli, ed., Revitalising Communities in a Globalising World (Burlington, Vt., 2007), 243-264
17. Ana Dević, "Transnationalization of Civil Society in Kosovo: International and Local Limits of Peace and Multiculturalism," Ethnopolitics 5, no.3 (September 2006): 257-73;
18. Andrew Gilbert, "Foreign Audiority and the Politics of Impartiality in Postwar BosniaHerzegovina" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008).
19. Charles Hale, "Neoliberal Multiculturalism: The Remaking of Cultural Rights and Racial Dominance in Central America," Political and Legal Anthropology Review 28, no.1 (2005): 10-28;
20. Lauren Leve, "Between Jessie Helms and Ram Bahadur: Participation and Empowerment in Women's Literacy Programming in Nepal," Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24, no. 1 (2001): 108-28;
21. John L. Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, "Postcolonial Politics and Discourses of Democracy in Southern Africa: An Anthropological Reflection on African Political Modernities," Journal of Anthropological Research 53, no. 2 (1997): 123-46;
22. Julia Paley, Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile (Berkeley, 2001).
23. Gutmann, Romance of Democracy, 21.
24. Coles, Democratic Designs.
25. Brown, Transacting Transition;
26. Carothers, Critical Mission. On nation-building, see Francis Fukuyama, ed., Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq (Baltimore, 2006).
27. Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik, and Milada Anna Vachudova, "Democracy in the Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?" East European Politics and Societies 21, no.1 (February 2007): 22 (emphasis added).
28. For more information on the Club of Madrid, see www.clubmadrid.org/ cmadrid/ index.php?id=1 (last accessed 1 December 2009).
29. Previous support for democratization was explicitly focused on support for the anti-Milošević movement. See Carothers, Critical Mission.
30. Get out the vote campaigns were particularly significant in the 2000 presidential elections. These campaigns were especially targeted at young voters, who were a key factor in Milošević's electoral defeat.
31. For an example of how policy and NGO frameworks are taken up in scholarly analysis, see Charles Tilly, Democracy (Cambridge, Eng., 2007), which relies heavily on Freedom House analysis and categories.
32. Nicolas Guilhot, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (New York, 2005), 11, 12.
33. Susan Gal, "Movements of Feminism: The Circulation of Discourses about Women," in Barbara Hobson, ed., Recognition Struggles and Social Movements: Contested Identities, Agency and Power (Cambridge, Eng., 2003), 96.
34. Consider, for example, the efforts of the Serbian government to introduce gradjansko vaspitanje, or citizen education programs into secondary schools in the early 2000s. I thank Milorad Lazić for this point.
35. Benjamin Lee and Edward LiPuma, "Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity," Public Culture 14, no.1 (Winter 2002): 191. In addition, Lee and LiPuma note, "Cultures of circulation are created and animated by the cultural forms that circulate through them, including- critically-the abstract nature of the forms that underwrite and propel the process of circulation itself" (192). Indeed in keeping with this analysis, it is worth noting that the very idea of the circulability or transferability of democratic programs and policies attributes an objective reality to democratic relations that is characteristic of liberal democratic models. It is worth considering that the abstract nature of a liberal democratic public (transcendent of relationally constituted, contested, and always socially embedded political practices) might be a critical condition for the emergence of a democratization industry reliant on the circulation of normative policy frameworks.
36. The dichotomy of success and failure has had a real impact on Serbian political discourse, limiting horizons for democratic action and curtailing possibilities for critical perspectives on Serbia's past and future. Serbia is often cited as an exemplary failure among transition countries, just as the Balkans more generally were cited as the case study in European civilization's failure in the 1990s. Serbia enjoyed a brief moment of success on the world stage as an example of electoral-democratic revolution after the 5 October 2000 ouster of Milosevic. But a refusal to comply with the Hague Tribunal and to make key arrests of indicted war criminals; a rise in nationalist, populist political parties; the 2003 assassination of Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic; and intransigence on negotiations for Kosovo's independence have landed Serbia back on the margins of democratic success stories in eastern Europe. This article is not intended to dispute the validity of these international demands for compliance. I am not arguing that, because international demands are embedded in relations of power, Serbia is any less responsible for its key role in the violence of the 1990s. Indeed it is crucial to make space in Serbian political discourse for a discussion of international relations of power that do not foreclose engagement with ethical questions of social and political responsibility. I seek to open up such a space by examining particular instantiations of how normative frameworks for liberal democracy have an impact on other aspects of political expression and possibility in Serbia-namely participation. In trying to break apart dichotomies of success and failure and participation and apathy, I hope to create some small space for considering social and political possibilities that are more complex than the either/or options to which Serbian political life has been reduced.
37. Guilhot, Democracy Makers.
38. Brown, Transacting Transition;
39. Carothers, Critical Mission.
40. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993);
41. Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of America Community (New York, 2000). See also
42. Brown, Transacting Transition;
43. James DeFilippis, "Symposium on Social Capital: An Introduction," Antipode 34, no.4 (September 2002): 790-95;
44. Ben Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium (London, 2001 ) ;
45. Margit Mayer and Katherine N. Rankin, "Social Capital and (Community) Development A North/South Perspective," Antipode 34, no. 4 (September 2002) : 804-808
46. Interestingly, Putnam takes up the question of postsocialist societies directly. Drawing on his case study of social capital in Italy, he notes that "without norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement, the Hobbesian outcome of the Mezzogiorno-amoral familism, clientelism, lawlessness, ineffective government, and economic stagnation-seems likelier than successful democratization and economic development. Palermo may represent the future of Moscow."
47. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work, 183. Such dystopic visions of postsocialist futures lend a certain urgency to the work of creating democratic and civic cultures in formerly socialist Europe.
48. Brown, Transaction Transition, 10.
49. DeFilippis, "Symposium on Social Capital," 794.
50. Paddy Greer, Anne Murphy, Morton Øgård, and Jose Manual Rodriguez, Guide to Participatory Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro (Strasbourg, France, 2005), 17.
51. Paddy Greer, Anne Murphy, Morton Øgård, and Jose Manual Rodriguez, Guide to Participatory Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro (Strasbourg, France, 2005), Ibid., 14.
52. Putnam distinguishes between bonding social capital, which is "inward looking and tend[s] to reinforce exclusive identities and homogenous groups," and bridging social capital, which is "outward looking and encompass [es] people across diverse social cleavages." Putnam, Bowling Alone, 22.
53. Greer, Murphy, Øgård, and Rodriguez, Guide to Participatory Democracy (Appendix A), 117-125
54. Greer, Murphy, Øgård, and Rodriguez, Guide to Participatory Democracy (Appendix A), Ibid., 119, 117.
55. Jessica Greenberg and Andrea Muehlebach, "The Old World and Its New Economy: Notes on the 'Third Age' in Western Europe Today," in Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, eds., Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington, 2007), 190-213.
56. Craig Calhoun, "Nationalism and Cultures of Democracy," Public Culture 19, no.1 (2007): 151-73, esp. 153.
57. On this last point, see Douglas Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, 2000). For the European Union member states, these questions have been exacerbated by the "democracy deficit," the failed ratification of a European Union constitution and attempts to create a European culture that supersedes national identities. On this point, see Etienne Balibar, We the People of Europe ? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004);
58. Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of Integration (London, 2000). Regional devolution, as well as the creation of regional areas, has also reconfigured European social and political geography, creating alternate communities that are both subnational, transnational, and European. See, for example,
59. Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley, 1999).
60. Gustav Peebles, "The Search for Sound Currencies: An Anthropological Approach to the European Monetary Union" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003). In addition, regionalization and local control are features of neoliberal restructuring in the European Union, the devolution of state responsibilities to local sites of governance and the production of autonomous, self-managing citizens.
61. See Neil Brenner, "Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union," Urban Studies 36, no.3 (March 1999): 431-51;
62. Bob Jessop, "Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective," Antipode 34, no. 3 (July 2002);
63. Andrea Muehlebach, "The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare State and Ethical Citizenship in Contemporary Italy" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007). Theories of social capital and the production of community delinked from nation-state belonging and modernist projects of social welfare have informed much of this debate and policy. On this, again see Muehlebach, "Moral Neoliberal."
64. Greer, Murphy, Øgård, and Rodriguez, Guide to Participatory Democracy, 117.
65. Michael Herzfeld, "The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism," South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no.4 (Fall 2002): 899-926.
66. StefJansen, "victims, Underdogs and Rebels: Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest," Critique of Anthropology 20, no.4 (December 2000): 393-419;
67. Zala Volčič, "The Notion of ' the West' in the Serbian National Imaginary," European Journal of Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (May 2005): 155-175
68. For a detailed analysis of Mile in relation to Serbian culture and politics, see Marko Živković, "'Mile vs. Transition': A Perfect Informant in the Slushy Swamp of Serbian Politics?" Social Identities 13, no.5 (September 2007): 597-610.
69. For the particular social and political significance of footballers in Serbia, see Ivan Čolović, Politics of Identity in Serbia: Essay in Political Anthropology (New York, 2002). To view an example of Mile fighting the European Union in the opening credits, see www.youtube .com/watch?v= EglvAwTrIOs (last accessed 1 December 2009).
70. For an analysis of the ways in which the Balkan's relationship to Europe is gendered, see Helms, "Gendered Transformations of State Power."
71. Jessica Greenberg, "'Goodbye Serbian Kennedy': Zoran Djindjic and the New Democratic Masculinity," East European Politics and Societies 20, no.1 (February 2006): 126-151
72. Gal and Kligman, Politics of Gender after Socialism. For an analysis of the recursive nature of east/west distinctions within Balkan political geography, see also Milica BakićHayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slawe Review 54, no.4 (Winter 1995): 917-931
73. Take, for example, the common notion of the "other" Serbia (druga Srbija) that pits a modern, intellectual, and urban European milieu against a backwards, nationalist, and culturally retrograde social layer.
74. See Ljubiša Rajić, "Koraks, Prva i Draga Srbija," Vreme 785 (19 January 2006) at www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=440050 (last accessed 1 December 2009). The dichotomy is perhaps most stark in recent controversies around Kosovo's independence. Economist Vladimir Gligorov frames the stakes precisely in a column on Serbian foreign policy in the progressive online journal Peščanik. In characterizing Serbian politics as divided between two irreconcilable "pro-European" or nationalist extremes, he notes, "Serbian foreign policy, at least officially, gravitates towards the realization of two central goals: preservation of Kosovo within Serbia and membership in the European Union. . . . Unfortunately, the state of Serbian foreign affairs is the result of avoiding the choice between pro-European and the nationalist policies/politics."
75. Vladimir Gligorov, "Besciljna spoljna politika," Peščanik, 23 March 2008 at http://www. pescanik.net/content/view/ 70/95/ (last accessed 1 December 2009). This and all other translations are mine.
76. Ivana Spasić, "Politika i Svakodnevni Život u Srbiji 2005: Odnos Prema Političkoj Sferi, Promena Društevenog Poretka, Javnost, "Filozofija," i Društvo 2 (2005): 45-74;
77. Zagorka Golubović, "Rezultati Demokratske Tranzicije Kroz Prizmu Gradana Srbije 2005," Filozofija i Društvo 2 (2005): 13-44.
78. Spasić, "Politika i Svakodnevni Život u Srbiji 2005," 50.
79. Author's fieldnotes from rally at Sports Hall Cair, Niš, 11 November 2003.
80. The argument that the world was watching was also mobilized in encouraging ratification of Serbia's first post-Milošević constitution in the fall of 2006.
81. It is ironic that the ultimate goal of citizen control, participation, and accountability is joining the European Union, an organization in which the general democratic deficit and the displacement of political decision-making to regulatory agencies and technocratic processes have put direct citizen control further out of reach. See, for example, Jan Zielonka, "The Quality of Democracy after Joining the European Union," East European Politics and Societies 21, no.1 (February 2007) : 162-180
82. Wedel, Collision and Collusion, 101.
83. See also Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia, 58-64, on the ways in which internationally funded democracy initiatives ironically shore up existing social hierarchies and bolster the status of elites.
84. For example, in 2006 a Serbian nationalist tabloid, Kurir, published direct threats to three internationally renowned NGO activists. See B92, "Serbian Tabloids Mark Targets," 4 September 2006, at www.b92.net/eng/news/society-article.php?yyyy=2006&mm =09&dd=04&nav- id=36486 (last accessed 1 December 2009).
85. In Serbia, the student resistance movement Otpor's transformation into a political party is exemplary: The group lost significant popular support once it formally entered into party politics. The sudden appearance of democratic opposition figures in positions of power after 5 October 2000 continued to fuel popular perception of significant connections between the independent NGO sector and formal governance.
86. This field of contestation is more akin to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "social capital" than to Putnam's. Bourdieu writes of a contested field of social relations, rooted in class struggle, through which people exercise power and dominance by mobilizing unequally distributed resources of political, social, and cultural capital. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). For an in-depth comparison of competing theories of social capital (including Putnam and Bourdieu), see Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory.
87. Fukuyama, ed., Nation-Building Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72, no.3 (Summer 1993): 22-49.
88. Guilhot, Democracy Makers, 5-6 (emphasis in the original).
89. John Markoff, "Where and When Was Democracy Invented?" Comparative Studies in Society and History 41, no.4 (October 1999): 660-690
90. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York, 1998).
91. See also John Kelly and Martha Kaplan, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonialization (Chicago, 2001) for the mobilization of similar arguments in colonial contexts.
92. See, for example, Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York, 1939) ;
93. Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses (1932; New York, 1957).
94. See Carol Pateman's critical discussion of Joseph Schumpeter, Bernard Berelson, and Robert A. Dahl in the introduction to Carol Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge, Eng., 1970).
95. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, 1958).
96. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory, 42.
97. Participatory democratic theory was itself affected by the experience of radical democratic participation in the socialist world. For example, the Praxis group, a group of humanist Marxist scholars founded in Yugoslavia in the 1970s, was a source of both inspiration and scholarly exchange for participatory democratic theorists in the United States and western Europe. See William McBride, From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos (Lanham, Md., 2001);
98. Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory. It is thus ironic that Yugoslavia, once frequently cited as a "success story" in self-managed participatory democracy has now become a site to which external models of participatory practice are imported to ensure a successful "democratic transition." What began as an international theoretical and political project (constituted across east-west divides) was ultimately folded into a model of democracy that reinscribes relations of power and difference across those very boundaries.
99. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, 2008);
100. see also Sonia Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Re- Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder, Colo., 1998).
101. Anne Philips, Engendering Democracy (University Park, 1991), 121. In addition, for the impact of notions of participation in critical analysis in social psychology,
102. see Herbert C. Kelman and V Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Towards a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility (New Haven, 1989), 11.
103. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963), 4.
104. David S. Mason, Daniel N. Nelson, and Bohdan M. Szklarski, "Apathy and the Birth of Democracy: The Polish Struggle," East European Politics and Societies 5, no.2 (March 1991): 210;
105. see also Ellen Carnaghan, "Alienation, Apathy or Ambivalence? 'Don't Knows' and Democracy in Russia," Slavic Review 55, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 325-363
106. William Mishler and Richard Rose, "Trust, Distrust and Skepticism: Popular Evaluations of Civil and Political Institutions in Post-Communist Societies," Journal of Politics 59, no.2 (May 1997): 418-451 (Pubitemid 127092796)
107. Coles, Democratic Designs.
108. Guilhot, Democracy Makers, 15.
109. This link between moral transformation, liberalization, and democracy is certainly not new in (post) socialist Europe. Calls for civil society among east European dissidents were grounded in moral claims that decried the ethical degradations of socialist citizens, most famously by Czech dissident and later president, Vaclav Havel. See Vaclav Havel, "Power of the Powerless," in John Keane, ed., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern Europe (London, 1985).
110. See also Konrád György's notion of antipolitics in Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. Richard E. Allen (San Diego, 1984).
111. Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova, "Democracy in the Post-Communist World," 17 (emphasis added).
112. Ekiert, Kubik, and Vachudova, "Democracy in the Post-Communist World," 17 Ibid.;
113. Susan Rose-Ackerman, "From Elections to Democracy in Central Europe: Public Participation and the Role of Civil Society," East European Politics and Societies 21, no.1 (February 2007): 31-47. For the European Union policy priorities on youth, see also the European Commission program on youth at ec.europa.eu/youth/index-en.htm (last accessed 1 December 2009).
114. Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham, "Introduction," in Cole and Durham, eds., Generations and Globalization.
115. Jon E. Fox, "Missing the Mark: Nationalist Politics and Student Apathy," East European Politics and Societies 18, no.3 (August 2004): 381.
116. Jon E. Fox, "Missing the Mark: Nationalist Politics and Student Apathy," East European Politics and Societies 18, no.3 (August 2004): 381, Ibid.
117. Melissa Caldwell, Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia (Berkeley, 2004) ;
118. Elizabeth Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, 2004) ;
119. Lynne Haney, Inventing the Needy: Gender and the Politics of Welfare in Hungary (Berkeley, 2002);
120. Alaina Lemon,"'Your Eyes Are Green Like Dollars': Counterfeit Cash, National Substance and Currency Apartheid in 1990s Russia," Cultural Anthropology 13, no.1 (February 1998): 22-55;
121. Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul: An Exploration (Ithaca, 2000);
122. Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca, 2003).