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“There's Nothing Anyone Can Do About It“: Participation, Apathy, and “Successful” Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Abstract

This article investigates rconparticipation in politics as a rich set of moral, political, and cultural engagements. Contrary to the idea of apathy as an absence of political and social progress, Jessica Greenberg argues that nonparticipation can be an expression of complex and sophisticated responses to changing sociopolitical contexts. Greenberg also examines how such responses are affected by the global deployment of normative models of democratic success and failure. Starting with both policy and academic discourse about civic participation and popular Serbian narratives about politics and European belonging, Greenberg integrates the ethnographic material from her fieldwork in Serbia to illuminate the context in which such ideas reinforce understandings of democratic policies as elitist, corrupt, morally suspect, and disempowering. In conclusion, she suggests that researchers and practitioners should interrogate their own roles in creating and deploying frameworks for political success and failure and the impact these frameworks have on the lived experience of democracy.

Type
Postsocialisms Unbound: Douglas Rogers, Special Section Guest Editor
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

I would like to thank Mark D. Steinberg, Douglas Rogers, and the three anonymous reviewers for Slavic Review for their close readings and extensive critical engagement with this piece. Dilip Gaonkar, Benjamin Lee, Keith Brown and Elizabeth Levy Paluck provided crucial feedback on earlier versions of this article. James Holston and Elizabeth Dunn offered helpful discussant comments on shorter versions. Research was made possible with support from the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship for East European Studies; the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship; and the International Research and Exchanges Board Individual Advanced Research Opportunities Fellowship. Writing was made possible through the support of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. Opinions expressed in this article are solely my own, as are any errors.

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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.

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6. Coles, Democratic Designs; Rivkin-Fish, Michele, Women's Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Bloomington, 2005)Google Scholar. Such moralizing frameworks often mobilize categories of gender to naturalize particular social hierarchies or relations “appropriate“ to new democratic orders. See Gal, Susan and Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Helms, Elissa, “Gendered Transformations of State Power: Masculinity, International Intervention, and the Bosnian Police,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 3 (July 2006): 343-61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 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 Jansen, Stef, “The Privatization of Home and Hope: Return, Reforms and the Foreign Intervention in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Dialectical Anthropology 30 (2006): 177-99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stubbs, Paul, “Community Development in Contemporary Croatia: Globalisation, Neoliberalism and NGOisation,” in Dominelli, Lena, ed., Revitalising Communities in a Globalising World (Burlington, Vt., 2007), 243-64Google Scholar.

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13. For more information on the Club of Madrid, see www.clubmadrid.org/cmadrid/ index.php?id=l (last accessed 1 December 2009).

14. Previous support for democratization was explicitly focused on support for the anti-Milošević movement. See Carothers, Critical Mission.

15. Get out the vote campaigns were particularly significant in die 2000 presidential elections. These campaigns were especially targeted at young voters, who were a key factor in Milošević's electoral defeat.

16. For an example of how policy and NGO frameworks are taken up in scholarly analysis, see Tilly, Charles, Democracy (Cambridge, Eng., 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which relies heavily on Freedom House analysis and categories.

17. Guilhot, Nicolas, The Democracy Makers: Human Rights and International Order (New York, 2005), 11, 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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19. 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.

20. Lee, Benjamin and LiPuma, Edward, “Cultures of Circulation: The Imaginations of Modernity,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 191 Google Scholar. 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.

21. 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 Milošević. 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 Djindjić; 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 fora 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.

22. Guilhot, Democracy Makers.

23. Brown, Transacting Transition; Carothers, Critical Mission.

24. Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, 1993)Google Scholar; Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of America Community (New York, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Brown, Transacting, Transition; DeFilippis, James, “Symposium on Social Capital: An Introduction,” Antipode 34, no. 4 (September 2002): 790-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fine, Ben, Social Capital versus Social Theory: Political Economy and Social Science at the Turn of the Millennium (London, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayer, Margit and Rankin, Katherine N., “Social Capital and (Community) Development: A North/South Perspective,” AntipodeM, no. 4 (September 2002): 804-08CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Interestingly, Putnam takes up the question of postsocialist societies direcdy. 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 democratizadon and economic development. Palermo may represent the future of Moscow.” Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work, 183 Google Scholar. Such dystopic visions of postsocialist futures lend a certain urgency to the work of creating democratic and civic cultures in formerly socialist Europe.

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28. Greer, Paddy, Murphy, Anne, Øgård, Morton, and Rodriguez, Jose Manual, Guide to Participatory Democracy in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia and Montenegro (Strasbourg, France, 2005), 17 Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 14.

30. 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 Google Scholar.

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32. Ibid., 119,117.

33. Greenberg, Jessica and Muehlebach, Andrea, “The Old World and Its New Economy: Notes on the ‘Third Age’ in Western Europe Today,” in Cole, Jennifer and Durham, Deborah, eds., Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington, 2007), 190213 Google Scholar.

34. Calhoun, Craig, “Nationalism and Cultures of Democracy,” Public Culture 19, no. 1 (2007): 151-73CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 153.

35. On this last point, see Holmes, Douglas, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism (Princeton, 2000)Google Scholar. 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 Balibar, Etienne, We the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (Princeton, 2004)Google Scholar; Shore, Cris, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of Integration (London, 2000)Google Scholar. 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, Darian-Smith, Eve, Bridging Divides: The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar. Peebles, Gustav, “The Search for Sound Currencies: An Anthropological Approach to the European Monetary Union” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003)Google Scholar. 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. See Brenner, Neil, “Globalisation as Reterritorialisation: The Re-scaling of Urban Governance in the European Union,” Urban Studies 36, no. 3 (March 1999): 431-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bobjessop, , “Liberalism, Neoliberalism, and Urban Governance: A State-Theoretical Perspective,” Antipode 34, no. 3 (July 2002)Google Scholar; Muehlebach, Andrea, “The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare State and Ethical Citizenship in Contemporary Italy” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2007)Google Scholar. 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.“

36. Greer, , Murphy, , Øgård, , and Rodriguez, , Guide to Participatory Democracy, 117 Google Scholar.

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40. For the particular social and political significance of footballers in Serbia, see Čolović, Ivan, Politics of Identity in Serbia: Essay in Political Anthropology (New York, 2002)Google Scholar. To view an example of Mile fighting the European Union in the opening credits, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=EglvAwTrI0s (last accessed 1 December 2009).

41. For an analysis of the ways in which the Balkan's relationship to Europe is gendered, see Helms, “Gendered Transformations of State Power.“

42. Greenberg, Jessica, “'Goodbye Serbian Kennedy': Zoran Djindjic and the New Democratic Masculinity,” East European Politics and Societies 20, no. 1 (February 2006): 126-51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. 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 Bakić-Hayden, Milica, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917-31Google Scholar.

44. 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. See Rajić, Ljubiša, “Koraks, Prva i Druga Srbija,“ Vrerne 785 (19 January 2006) at www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=440050 (last accessed1 December 2009)Google Scholar. 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.“ Gligorov, Vladimir, “Besciljna spoljna politika,” Peščanik, 23 March 2008 at http://www.pescanik.net/content/view/70/95/ (last accessed 1 December 2009)Google Scholar. This and all other translations are mine.

45. Spasić, Ivana, “Politika i Svakodnevni ZŽivot u Srbiji 2005: Odnos Prema Političkoj Sferi, Promena Društevenog Poretka, Javnost,“Ft'fozq/yaiZ)ra.sfoo2 (2005): 4574 Google Scholar; Golubović, Zagorka, “Rezultati Demokratske Tranzicije Kroz Prizmu Gradana Srbije 2005,” Filozofija i Društvo2 (2005): 1344 Google Scholar.

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47. Author's fieldnotes from rally at Sports Hall Cair, Niš, 11 November 2003.

48. 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.

49. 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, Zielonka, Jan, “The Quality of Democracy after Joining the European Union,” East European Politics and Societies 21, no. 1 (February 2007): 162-80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Wedel, , Collision and Collusion, 101 Google Scholar. See also Hemment, , Empowering Women, in Russia, 5864 Google Scholar, on the ways in which internationally funded democracy initiatives ironically shore up existing social hierarchies and bolster the status of elites.

51. 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).

52. 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.

53. 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 classstruggle, through which people exercise power and dominance by mobilizing unequally distributed resources of political, social, and cultural capital. See Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1984)Google Scholar. For an in-depth comparison of competing theories of social capital (including Putnam and Bourdieu), see Fine, Social Capital versus Social Theory.

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57. Lloyd, David and Thomas, Paul, Culture and the State (New York, 1998)Google Scholar. See also Kelly, John and Kaplan, Martha, Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonialization (Chicago, 2001)Google Scholar for the mobilization of similar arguments in colonial contexts.

58. See, for example, Mosca, Gaetano, The Ruling Class (New York, 1939)Google Scholar; Gasset, Jose Ortega, Revolt of the Masses (1932; New York, 1957)Google Scholar.

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61. Pateman, , Participation and Democratic Theory, 42 Google Scholar.

62. 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 McBride, William, From Yugoslav Praxis to Global Pathos (Lanham, Md., 2001)Google Scholar; 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.

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72. Ibid.; Rose-Ackerman, Susan, “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): 3147 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the European Union policy priorities on youth, see also the European Commission program on youth atec.europa.eii/youth/index_en.htm (last accessed 1 December 2009).

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