EDITORS NOTES
Robert Rotenberg   DePaul University

INFORMAL RELATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE:  HOW EASTERN EUROPEAN CLIQUES AND STATES MUTUALLY RESPOND
Janine R. Wedel   George Washington University

WHOSE CITY IS MOSCOW TODAY?
Anatoly M. Khazanov   University of Wisconsin/ Madison

RE-IMAGINING RUSSIAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS
Hugh Gusterson   Massachusetts Institute of Technology

COLONIZATION OR LIBERATION: THE PARADOX OF NGO'S IN POSTSOCIALIST STATES
Julie Hemment  Cornell University

"SWORN VIRGINS": CASES OF SOCIALLY ACCEPTED GENDER CHANGE
Antonia Young   Colgate University and Bradford University, UK

PROSPECTS FOR TRANSNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY FOLLOWING THE ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION IN A CONTESTED BORDERLAND
Robert Gary Minnich   University of Bergen

HISTORICAL MYTH AND THE INVENTION OF  POLITICAL FOLKLORE IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIA
Karl Kaser   University of Graz, Graz  Joel M. Halpern   University of Massachusetts

PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE ABOUT PRACTICE: RETURNING HOME TO THE CROATIAN DANUBE BASIN
Maja Povrzanovic   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

THE TOPSY TURVY DAYS WERE THERE AGAIN  STUDENT AND CIVIL PROTEST IN BELGRADE AND SERBIA, 1996/1997
Mirjana Prosic-Dvornic   Midland, MI

THE YOUNG AND A SOCIETY: AN EXAMPLE FROM ZAGREB
Sanja Kalapos   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

BOOK REVIEW: LASZLO KURTI AND JULIET  LANGMAN (EDS.): BEYOND BORDERS. REMAKING CULTURAL  IDENTITIES  IN  THE  NEW  EAST  AND  CENTRAL EUROPE
Alexandra Bitusikova   Banska Bistrica, Slovakia

Please address all requests for membership in the East European Anthropology Group ($15/yr. for full-time faculty and  professionals, $10/yr for students and part-time faculty; European subscribers should write for special rates.), institutional subscriptions to the Review ($20), or additional copies of this special Issue ($20) to the managing editor:
The Web Page for the Anthropology of East Europe Review/East European Anthropology Group contains links to most of the previously published articles.  It can be found at this URL:
condor.depaul.edu/~rrotenbe/aeer/
Robert Rotenberg, International Studies Program, DePaul University, 2320 North Kenmore Ave, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. Phone: 773/325-7460; Fax 773/325-7452;
Email: rrotenbe@wppost.depaul.edu.
Evá Huseby-Darvas (EEAG), Behavioral Science Dept., University of Michigan, Dearborn, MI  48128 evdarvas@umich.edu.
Nancy Ries (SOYUZ), Anthropology, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY 13346; Email: nries@mail.colgate.edu
László Kürti, Film and Book Review Editor, Department of Political Science, Eotvos Lorand University, Egyetem ter. 1-3, 1056 Budapest; Email: lkurti@helka.iif.hu
© DePaul University  1998
ISSN: 1054-4720
 
 

EDITORS NOTES:
Robert Rotenberg
DePaul University

 This issue is full of remarkable papers.  I am very pleased that Janine Wedel has agreed to let us publish one of her papers on East European cliques.  This papers have attracted a lot of attention the last few years, both in anthropological and policy circles.  Anatoly Khazanov brings us up to date on the atmosphere in Moscow today.  Hugh Gusterson raises some interesting issues about the way in which Russian scientists are perceived by American scientists and the press.  Julie Hemmert provides a novel view of NGO’s in East European states.  Antonia Young offers a fascinating account of Albanian women taking on life-long male roles as so-called "sworn virgins." Bob Minnich brings us up to date on the development of civil society in Slovenia.  Karl Kaiser and Joel Halpern analyze the contemporary Serbian myths surrounding Kosovo.  Maja Povrzanovic unpacks the contemporary discourse on returnees in Croatia.  Mirjana Prosic-Dvornic offers her views of the student and civil protests in Belgrade in 96-97. Sanja Kalapos gives us an account of contemporary youth issues in Zagreb.  We also have a review of Kürti and Langman’s collection of papers on remaking cultural identities, by Alexandra Bitusikova.  I think this is the first time that half of the papers were produced by authors resident in North America and half were produced by authors in Eurupe.

A Note from Bulgaria:
Our Society has been conducting anthropological research in Eastern Europe
since 1989. In this regard I would like to invite you to visit our web site http://www.cit.bg/home/bsrcs and if possible to suggest it to your readers. We also organize a field course "Mountain Pastoralism: A Field-Course With A Muslim Community In The Balkans (Bulgaria) 15 July -10 August 1998",   http://www.cit.bg/home/bsrcs/announce.htm that might be of interest for some of you and your readers.

Yours sincerely,
Petia Mankova
 
 

INFORMAL RELATIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE: HOW EASTERN EUROPEAN CLIQUES AND STATES MUTUALLY RESPOND
Janine R. Wedel
George Washington University

 In the 1990s, there has been widespread talk in eastern Europe of "clans," "Mafia," and other informal groups and networks.  People in the region use these terms to describe groups that wield influence and run things.  When used in the West, however, these terms often connote criminality in the form of high–profile activities such as money laundering, capital flight, and trafficking in drugs, weaponry, and prostitutes.  Western observers often fail to appreciate the relationships that underpin these activities; informal groups and networks not only enable the activities but also can shape the development of the state.  Further, most clans are not criminal, at least not to this extent, and the fact that the same terms mean quite different things fosters Western misconceptions of eastern Europe.

The assumption underlying many "transition" studies– that Western models of institutional change are directly applicable– further impairs understanding of the role of eastern European informal groups and networks.  Models employed to explain institutional change are often inadequate because they fail to appreciate the role of informal relationships, their historical foundations, and their ability to shape the nature of the state.  Conventional vocabularies from comparative politics, public administration, and sociology appear insufficient to probe changing state–private and political–administrative relations in complex administrative states.

During precarious moments of legal, administrative, political, and economic transformation, old systems of social relations, such as the informal groups and networks that functioned under communism and helped to ensure stability, can be broken up.  These informal systems also can be crucial supports for, or obstacles to, the development of new types of institutions.  Informal relationships may be as likely to shape and circumvent state and other formal institutions as the latter are likely to reorganize or overcome the former.

The impetus for this paper comes as a response to attempts by a few anthropologists and socialists of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to characterize informal groups and networks so that their roles in shaping markets and institutions might be more readily understood.  Implicit in these attempts is the recognition (1) that these informal groups and networks are critical to the shaping of markets, institutions, and society; (2) that they are complex in their social organization, and (3) that, so far, Western concepts have been inadequate to describe them.

Dirty Togetherness

The way in which these terms are used in eastern Europe, as opposed to the West, implies differences in social organization.  Ideas of bureaucratic authority and rationality incline Westerners to focus on activities and apply labels such as crime and corruption.  But the legacy of communism predisposes eastern Europeans toward interpreting these same phenomenon in terms of relationships among people, what Polish sociologist Adam Podgorecki (1987) calls "dirty togetherness."  Whereas the Western starting point is often what; the Eastern one tends to be who; who is connected to whom.  "Dirty togetherness" is about who (relationships) and what that implies about what (activities).  The local focus on relationships is worthy of our respect, not just because it is a native category, but because it tells something about how eastern European societies are organized– and how they are changing.

In the past few years, the term clan, originating in Moscow, has proliferated throughout much of the region.  The notion of clan has a long legacy in Russia.  It can be traced to the 14th century, according to Nancy Kollmann (1987), who argues that clans played a pivotal role in the making of the Muscovite political system from 1345 to 1547.¹   This usage appears to have a parallel in Russia today, where clan is widely used to describe the expansive influence of a certain political–economic elite.  Although members of this elite are not typically bound by bloodlines, they are connected by long–standing association and common experience and also have incentives for working together.

In Russia clan has a southern Soviet and negative connotation of family togetherness and operating in concert.  In Moscow in the mid–1980s, the intelligentsia elite used the word clan to disparage Uzbek political groups.

The idea of clans has been adopted from the Russian contempo-rary usage by Western scholars, journalists, and policymakers, especial-ly after Thomas Graham (1995, 1996), a senior political officer at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, wrote a ground–breaking article, published first in the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta and later in Harpers, suggesting that Russia is run by rival clans with largely unchecked influence.  Since Graham's article, there has been a proliferation of this usage in the Western literature.  Articles in the Washington Post and The New York Times now refer to clans in the former Soviet Union almost as readily as they might to political parties.

Mafia, like clans, also has spread throughout the region.  Eastern Europeans subsume a wide variety of groups and activities under Mafia, including:  (1) former nomenklatura (communist) managers who transferred state factories to themselves at fire sale prices; (2) officials who accept bribes; (3) ex–convicts with their own armed police or common street criminals; and (4) ethnic Mafia, in which Poles talk of a Russian Mafia, and Russians of a Chechnyan Mafia, and so on.

The legacy of communism has encouraged clans and Mafia both as suggestive idioms in eastern European life and as powerful agents reorganizing market and state institutions since the fall of communism.

Why have these idioms become so powerful and so prevalent?  What accounts for their resonance in eastern European life?  I have identified four reasons:

(1) The legacy of relative income equality.  In contrast to the relative equality that eastern Europeans came to expect under communism, a huge divide has developed between a few people with enormous wealth and the vast majority of the population with little by comparison.  Yet these societies continue to aspire, to a large degree, toward more equitable distribution of wealth.  The previous scarcity of resources, the newfound huge current disparities, and the fact that such disparities are publicly known, in contrast to the past, all contribute to the belief that people with privilege have achieved that privilege through dubious means and at the expense of those less fortunate.

(2) The legacy of little street crime.  Visible, dangerous, and sometimes organized crime, much of it in unpredictable patterns, has exploded in societies with little experience of street crime but some exposure to Western depictions of the Mafia in television and movies.  This invokes the association of Mafia, which might be expected to be behind these crimes.

(3) The legacy of suspicion.  Because state propaganda under communism was untrustworthy and contradicted by everyday life, eastern Europeans learned to "live in the lie," as Vaclav Havel (1985) described it, to doubt official explanations.  And, because so much had to be "arranged" under the table in economies of shortage, many transactions were shrouded in secrecy.  Everyday life required considerable political skill.  Who was doing and getting what and people's real motivations and loyalties were often not what they appeared.  This led to seemingly interminable speculation and suspicion at all levels of society –– from an academic's or bureaucrat's interpretation of her colleague's promotion to a citizens explanation for his neighbor's good fortune.

Suspicion was widely circulated through informal networks, which were the lifeblood of economic and political survival.  This kind of thinking has encouraged people today to interpret life's vicissitudes in terms of the influence of clans and Mafia.  Katherine Verdery (1996:220) points out that, "Talk of Mafia is like talk of witchcraft.  [It is] a way of attributing difficult social problems to malevolent and unseen forces."  With the label Mafia, one points the finger at a certain person or group such as business competitors or political opposition, and suggests they are under the spell of sinister powers.  Much like witchcraft, being labeled as Mafia is an irrefutable indictment.

(4) The legacy of informal organization under communism.  Experience with communist social organization appears to have fostered the tendency to think in terms of clans and Mafia.  Eastern Europeans have a lot of experience with networks that connected themselves and their groups to the state bureaucracy and economy.  These relation-ships were "particularistic" –– dependent on individual connections and criteria –– rather than "universalistic," in which connections and criteria are independent of a particular social relationship.²   Based on this experience, eastern Europeans tend to expect the world to work through particularistic relationships, and that makes groups that interpenetrate business and government appear clan–like.

However, although experience with communist social organization may encourage the tendency to think in terms of Mafia and clans, that experience does not necessarily lead to the social organization associated with a Sicilian–style Mafia or other informal social organization.

The State and the Power of the Communist Past

With regard to present–day social organization, the legacy of communism again is critical.  And in analyzing the organization of eastern European informal groups and networks, a critical element is the role of the state.

Under communism, the key to state power was its expansionist bureaucracy that monopolized the allocation of resources (Verdery 1991, 1996).  In a shortage economy in which demand always outpaced supply (Kornai 1980), control over resources insured state power.  Anthropologists of Central and Eastern Europe have pointed out the transformation of state distribution systems and formal bureaucratic procedures under socialism through extensive use of informal social networks (e.g., Hann 1980 and 1985, Kideckel 1982 and 1993, Sampson 1986, Wedel 1986 and 1992).  These networks connected individuals and groups to the state economy and bureaucracy and also pervaded these institutions.  Further east, patronage networks virtually ran various regions of the Soviet Union (e.g., Albini, Rogers, Shabalin, Kutushev, Moiseev, and Anderson 1995, Fainsod 1975, Hough 1969, Hough and Fainsod 1979, Orttung 1995, and Ruble 1990).  Although not explicitly institutionalized, these relationships were regularized and exhibited clear patterns.  Anthropologists attempted to map some of them.

Although communist regimes collapsed in 1989 (Central and Eastern Europe) and 1991 (Soviet Union), informal groups and networks did not.  Many groups, empowered by the erosion of the centralized state and enticed by myriad new opportunities for making money and wielding influence, rose to the occasion and seized the opportunity to fill the vacuum.  The state might have collapsed, but not "dirty togetherness."  Such informal groups could serve as crucial supports for, or obstacles to, the development of new institutions.

What do we know about the informal groups and networks that have filled the vacuum?  Groups and networks variously called clans, Mafia, unruly coalitions, restructuring networks, suzerainties,³ social circles, and other names, help shape society, politics, and business.

The term unruly coalitions was coined by Katherine Verdery (1996:193) to describe Romanian elite networks.  According to Verdery, unruly coalitions are "loose clusterings of elite [largely former Communist Party apparatus], neither institutionalized nor otherwise formally recognized, who cooperate to pursue or control resources."  Verdery (1996:194) writes that "what defines unruly coalitions in contrast to political parties is that they are less institutionalized, less visible, less legitimate."

David Stark (1996) writes of restructuring networks that shape Hungarian privatization processes.  He identifies the resulting property forms in Hungary as neither private nor collective but "recombinant" property.  He describes how Hungarian firms develop institutional cross–ownership, with managers of several firms acquiring interests in one another's companies.  This makes clear that only people with extensive inside information and hence networks have the knowledge to participate in such schemes.

With regard to Poland (1992:13–14), I have discussed the srodowisko, or social circle, as a driving force in political and economic life.  The circle is dense and multiplex; its members operate in many arenas and have multiple functions vis-a-vis one another.  In the post–communist period, members of a few elite social circles have put their fingers in a multiplicity of pies –– in politics, business, foundations.  Members are "institutional nomads," as Polish sociologists Antoni Kaminski and Joanna Kurczewska put it (1994:132–153), because circumstances demand loyalty to the circle but not necessarily to the formal positions the circle's members occupy, which typically are multiple.

The social circle served –– and, to a large degree, still serves –– to organize Polish politics and business.  For example, members of the various post–communist governments belong to previously existing and identifiable social circles.  While leaders of the first post–communist government of Tadeusz Mazowiecki largely hail from a Krakow Catholic intelligentsia circle, those of the government of Jan Krzysztof Bielecki come from a Gdansk circle.

Further east, I (1996, 1997a, 1997b) have written about the decade–old "St. Petersburg Clan," which has become one of Russia's most powerful clans.  The St. Petersburg Clan traces its roots to the mid–1980s, to university and club activities in what was then called Leningrad.  The chief figure in the group, Anatoly Chubais, is currently the second most powerful man in Russia after President Boris Yeltsin.  Chubais was St. Petersburg's deputy mayor before being brought to Moscow in 1991 to help execute economic policy.  Chubais recruited his group of energetic young male associates from St. Petersburg.

With the post–Soviet economy under contention, the St. Petersburg Clan competes for control and resources, operates in multiple spheres, and has a wide scope of influence.  With its source of money and power base largely the West, the Clan acquired a broad portfolio, operated largely through decree, and set up still other means of bypassing democratic processes including a network of "private" organizations funded by the West.  These organizations (ostensibly formed to conduct economic reform activities) serve as the Clan's political resource to allocate in the communist tradition, through patronage networks like those that virtually ran the Soviet Union.

All these informal groups and networks –– Romanian unruly coalitions, Hungarian restructuring networks, Polish social circles, and Russian clans –– appear to have some common features.  I have identified the following four characteristics.

First, these informal groups and networks mediate spheres.  They mediate state and private sectors, as well as bureaucracy and private enterprise, through both horizontal and vertical linkages that penetrate government and bureaucracy.  This is why the conventional vocabularies from comparative politics, public administration, and sociology are inadequate to probe changing state–private and political–administrative relations in complex administrative states.  Two conventions often distort our analysis:  The conceptualizing of institutional change in terms of sharp polar opposites (e.g., state versus private, centralized versus decentralized, bureaucratic versus market) and in terms of sharp discontinuities⁴ rather than complex and altering interactions of the new and the old.  Informal groups and networks defy accurate conceptualization in terms of polar opposites or discontinuities.

Second, informal groups and networks operate in many arenas.  Because they are active in many arenas beyond the political, it is misleading to assume they are just another form of interest group, faction, or coalition –– as these terms are understood in Western social science.  The potential influence of the social circle or clan, for example, is much more widespread and monopolistic than that of interest groups, factions, or coalitions.  Far from being confined to the political or economic realm, social circles and clans are multidimensional and multifaceted.

Because terms like interest group, faction, and coalition are inadequate to analyze these groups and networks and the social organization of which they are part, different concepts are needed.  I argue that clans are "cliques" made up of dense⁵ and multiplex⁶  networks whose members have a common identity, a la Boissevain (1974:-174).  Boissevain explains that the clique has both an objective existence, in that "it forms a cluster of persons all of whom are linked to each other," and a subjective one, "for members as well as nonmembers are conscious of its common identity."

A clique is a strategic alliance that responds to changing circumstances.  Cliques remain together not just because of long–standing collaboration.  They promote common interests (Ryan 1978:41) through strategic concentration of power and resources.  Cliques generate mutual benefits and further the interests of their members (Ryan 1978:41), and they strategically concentrate power and resources unto themselves.  (This use of clique should not be confused with the Russian klyka, which has a decidedly pejorative connotation.)

Third, informal groups and networks can wield extensive influence because of the contexts in which they are operating:  where, to varying degrees, the rule of law is weakly established, "the rules are what you make them," and interpretation and enforcement of the law is subject to much manipulation.

Fourth, it is the clique, not the individual, that typically makes the choices about how to respond to new opportunities.   Operating as part of a strategic alliance enables members of the clique to survive and thrive in an environment of uncertainty and indeterminacy.  This is a different unit of economic analysis than is usually considered –– and yet another problem with conventional models.  Westerners in particular tend to think of individuals as the primary unit to take advantage of economic opportunities.  But in eastern Europe, the unit of analysis of responses to economic incentives is not necessarily the individual –– it is often the clique.

Emerging Clique–State Relationships

What kinds of relationships are emerging between cliques and states and how are cliques shaping the nature of the region's states?  Have informal groups and networks replaced the former centralized state, or simply penetrated it to some degree?  In what ways?  To what extent are they merely using the state for their own purposes, and to what extent are they reorganizing it?  To what extent do informal groups drive formal institutions –– not the other way around?

A key difference appears to lie in (1) the nature of vertical linkages and (2) the degree of penetration of state bodies and authorities, which depends to some degree on traditions and incentives for the rule of law.  I have observed two distinct patterns of clique–state relationships.

One form of clique–state relations is the "partially appropriated state" in which Polish social circles (and, I believe, also Hungarian restructuring networks and Romanian unruly coalitions) take over from the state, or privatize, certain functions or spheres.  In Poland, for example, legislative initiatives since 1989 have, as Antoni Kaminski (1996:4) writes:
led to the creation of formally non–governmental bodies engaged in profit-making activities which involve the resources of the state, and which rely on the coercive powers of the state administration.  They allow for the establishment, between public and private domains, of corporate bodies with undefined functions and responsibility which create legal opportunities:

– for the appropriation of public resources by private groups and institutions, through the spread of political corruption;

– for an indirect enlargement of the dominion of the "state" through founding of institutions that in appearance are private, but in fact are part of the ("appropriated" by the ruling parties) public domain.

The result is that, while the state is incapacitated because it has delegated decision–making to organizations under the guise of "self–government," parts of the state have simply been appropriated by private groups.  Under the "partially appropriated state," informal groups and networks clearly deal with relevant state authorities, or what is left of them, but the group as such is not synonymous with the authorities.

By contrast, the "clan–state" assumes the communist state's former monopoly on power and control over resources.  While occupying multiple institutions, members of the clan maintain dense and multiplex ties.  Members of the clan are dispersed, but, as Russian sociologist Olga Kryshtanovskaya (1997:2) put it, "[they] have their men everywhere."

The notion of a "clan–state" builds on the observation a la Graham that Russia is run by rival clans with largely unchecked influence.  Certain clans are so closely identified with particular ministries or institutional segments of government, such as privatization, that their agendas sometimes seem identical.  Meanwhile competing clans have equal ties with other segments of government such as the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance.  With rivalry between clans within the executive branch, the Russian government is not a level playing field that can ensure impartiality under the rule of law.

Under the clan–state, the clan uses state resources and authorities (to the extent they can be separately defined in a given instance) but also keeps state authorities far enough away so that they cannot interfere with the clan's acquiring and allocating of resources, but close enough to insure that no rivals can draw on the resources.  This enables the clan to bypass sources of authority and influence that might otherwise apply, and thereby enhance its own.  The strength of the clan lies in its ability to circumvent, connect, override, and otherwise reorganize political and economic institutions and authorities.

The clan–state model appears to recreate the "dual system" of communism in which state organizations had counterpart Communist Party organizations that wielded the real influence, albeit de facto.  The St.Petersburg Clan, for example, set up a series of Western–funded "private" organizations run by the Clan whose actions in lieu of the Russian government include negotiating  loans from the International Monetary Fund.  By providing a model for shadow government that persisted beyond its own supposed collapse, the communist dual system appears to have smoothed the way for the clan–state.

Clan–State or Partially Appropriated State?

Several key characteristics distinguish the "clan–state" from the "partially appropriated state."

The first question concerns the degree to which independently sustainable institutions can be built.  Do state authorities have the capacity to remain separate from the institutions and agendas of cliques?  Does the agenda of the clan differ from that of state authorities?  (In some instances the two may appear to be indistinguishable because they are so strongly identified with each other.  The ability of "state" bodies to influence and execute policies depends more on particularistic ties than on formal authority.)  Do clan members empower state institutions, or can state authority empower the clan?  The real source of influence is the clan:  Thus, when the clan departs, the institutions it empowered lose their influence or disappear altogether.

The clan–state model allows for maximum deniability.  If the state is criticized, activities can be attributed to the clan.  If the clan is criticized, activities can be attributed to the state.  This setup not only facilitates deniability, it institutionalizes it and, indeed, may be the closest thing to institutionalization that exists under the clan–state model.

Under the partially appropriated state model, informal groups and cliques use state actors, who are passive, corruptible, and "bought."  For example, cliques in Poland may use or help to place non–clique members in Parliament.  However, under the clan–state model, state actors associated with clans are actually doing the "buying."  In Russia, clan members occupy positions in the executive branch as a clan and are clearly buying.

The partially appropriated state model exists in the context of a weak state. Verdery describes a state in which "the center has lost control over political and economic processes, and the structures of domination are segmented."  In the clan–state model, on the other hand, ministries– indeed, entire segments of government– are ruled by certain powerful clans.  This can hardly be called a "weak" state.

The second question concerns the shape of the rule of law and how is can be used and manipulated.  The clan–state operates in a context where the rule of law and democracy are not possible because there is little separation of the clan from the state.  The same people with the same agenda comprise the clan and the relevant state authorities.  The clan is at once the judge, jury, and legislature.  The system is weak in constitutional terms and lacks outside accountability, visibility, and means of representation for those under its control.

The third question pertains to horizontal ties.  What is the legacy of and potential for the development of counteracting horizontal ties?  In addition to differences in the nature of vertical linkages, there are critical differences in the nature of horizontal ties.

Here Poland and Russia represent diverse social organizational and cultural conditions that influence the existence and capacity of horizontal linkages.  While Poland has traditions of collective action and horizontal ties (e.g., Wedel 1986, 1992), Russia largely lacks such recent traditions.  While the Polish church has served as a major catalyst for organizing horizontally, the Orthodox church in Russia, under communism, did not play such a role.  Poles are noted for their flouting of the law in the face of attempted vertical control, but Soviet rule was credited with effective vertical control.

Indeed, the existence and capacity of horizontal ties that can counteract attempted vertical control appear to differ fundamentally in the appropriated state model, as compared with the clan–state model.  For example, in Moscow businesses are known to pay some 30 percent of their turnover to "Mafia" groups that control and have divided up the city through force, collusion, and/or monopoly power.  In stark contrast to what may be possible in Moscow, in July 1994, I observed business people in Warsaw's Old Town who, in response to "Mafia" attempts to collect protection money and to lax responses on the part of local police, actually shut down their shops for several days at the height of the tourist season, in protest.⁷

What is the potential in these two contexts for an "anti–mafia movement" as Schneider and Schneider (1994) have described for Sicily?  The history and recent experience of horizontal organization suggests that, unlike in Poland, in Russia, there appears to be little potential for an "anti–clan movement."  I would speculate that, in Poland, such a movement would pattern itself after the informal social circles that began to speak out around issues in the latter half of the 1980s.  Experience suggests that these circles can be quite effective in counteracting attempted vertical organization.

The nature of vertical linkages and the existence of potentially counteracting horizontal ties clearly affects the shape of the rule of law and the mutual responses of eastern European cliques and states.  And the relationships that are emerging between eastern European cliques and states have enormous implications for the future shape of eastern European states, societies, politics, and economics.

Textnotes

1. According to Kollman, the Muscovite political system was grounded in affinitive relations, kinship ties, marriage alliances, and clans, notably the "Boyar clan".

2. An example of a particularistic relationship is one in which a job applicant is known to be married to a powerful person. A universalistic relationship is one in which, using the job applicant example, the applicant may not be asked if he or she is married, let alone the identity of the spouse.

3. Caroline Humphrey (1991:8) writes of "organizations and enterprises in the [former Soviet] regions, run in a personal way almost as 'suzerainties' by local bosses."

4. These tendencies derive from the classical social theories of the 19th century and from the structural-functionalist "integration" models of sociological theory employed by many fields. These models reinforce this tradition of dichotomous thought through their assumption that effective institutionalization of a new system requires a tight and standardized mode of integration.

5. The networks that comprise the clique are "dense" in that members of a person's network are in touch with one another independently of that person.

6. Members are connected to each other for multiple purposes. Thus the networks that comprise the clique are "multiplex" (rather than "single-stranded"), in that members relate to each other in multiple capacities - political, economic, and social.

7. Accounts of this episode were reported in local newspapers and in the New York Times ("Warsaw Tourist Shops Close to Protect Against Crime," Aug. 7, 1994, A-11).

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Stark, David
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              and Societies 4 (Fall), Pp. 351-92.
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              vol. 101, Pp. 993-1027.

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              Europeennes de Sociologie, Vol. 35, no.2., Pp. 224-258.

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    Comments Appreciated!
Respond to:
Janine R. Wedel, Associate Research Professor,
Department of Anthropology; and Research Fellow, Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies
Address:  Department of Anthropology, 2110 G Street, NW, Washington D.C. 20052.
Phone: 202-994-6346  Fax: 202-994-6097
E-mail:  jwedel@gwis2.circ.gwu.edu
 
 

WHOSE CITY IS MOSCOW TODAY?
Anatoly M. Khazanov
University of Wisconsin/Madison

 In many respects, Moscow is becoming a normal city.  It is being filled with different forms of life and social activity that were previously invisible or forbidden.  The market economy has brought the city new types of buildings, such as commercial banks and offices, luxury hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, vending stalls, boutiques, casinos, private clubs, etc.  Street artists, just like those in Paris and London, have appeared throughout the city, each one eager to paint the portraits of all those who wish.  Thanks to the importation of consumer goods, durables, and foodstuffs, Muscovites have gained access to commodities which over the years have been in short supply.  Vendors in private shops and stores are urgently trying to learn proper retail etiquette, and sometimes even crack a smile when helping customers.  Hotel personnel are gradually getting used to the idea that their business is to cater to their patrons, rather than keeping vigil over their guests' Moral behavior or political sympathies.

Eating at cafes and restaurants is no longer a problem.  While in the 1980's there were only 300 restaurants in the city, by 1997 their number had increased to 1200 (Itogi, November 4, 1997: 36), and by the beginning of 1998 to more than 1500 (Den’gi, N 2, January 28, 1998-.38). Although the mayor of Moscow has complained that this was still ten times less than in major European megalopolises, a remarkable progress is quite evident.  Moreover, waiters have begun to rejoice each time that customers sit at their table.

Not so long ago it was practically impossible to find a place where one could quickly get an inexpensive snack.  To satisfy this demand, the idea of fast food was imported from the West. McDonald's came first, and created quite a stir as a symbol of the Western standards of service and of the Western way of life.  Pizza Hut, Steak House, Baskin Robbins, and others followed suit.  In addition, vendors selling hot food and beverages also appeared on Moscow's streets.  Signboards advertising hot dogs - often accompanied by the Russian goriachie sosiski (hot sausages) for explanation - became quite common.

This rapid Western expansion into services that had previously not existed in Moscow provoked a desire to promote against it something decidedly Russian.  Thus, another fast food chain appeared called Ruvskoe Bistro (Russian Bistro), aimed at competing with McDonald's and similar cheap restaurants by offering fast food Russian cuisine.  This was considered so important that the first outlet of the new chain was solemnly opened by Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov, and President Yeltsin was one of the first patrons.  Ironically, the word bistro is of French origin, but this was disputed on curious legendary grounds.  Allegedly, the Russian Cossacks who came to Paris after their victorious campaign against Napoleon were always in a hurry when they demanded food service, often saying hyviro, hyviro (quickly, quickly)- thus giving a name to the idea of the small snack bar, or bistro.

Most potholes on Moscow's streets have disappeared, while traffic jams have become as commonplace as in New York or Paris.  Every year the number of cars in Moscow is increasing by about 300 thousand (Nezavisimaia gazeta, October 31, 1997).  The total has already reached 2 million; in addition about 200 thousand more belonging to visitors are pre in the city every day (Simptom, N 8 (44), 1996: 15).¹  However, pedestrians and drivers have yet to learn to respect one another, and pedestrians do not have the right of way.

Moscow after dark has become a city full of bright streetlights, marquees, and a bustling nightlife; especially in comparison with the Soviet era.  Russian language editions of Playboy, Penthouse,and Vogue fill newspaper kiosks.  Even more serious publications, such as the New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and Le Monde have become readily accessible in Moscow.

In the last few years the level of inflation in Russia has considerably lowered.  Nevertheless, Muscovites still trust the dollar considerably more than the ruble.  Among the most frequent of signs seen on the streets of Moscow today is Obmen valiuty, often accompanied by the English equivalent, "Currency exchange."  Advertisements for consumer goods have partly taken the place of advertisements for ideas and, as in the West, present the world as one large shop window packed with consumer items.  Moreover, ads for cigarettes, hard liquor, and Coca Cola are encountered on Moscow's streets more often than on the streets of any Western city.  A neon billboard, measuring about 200 square meters, advertises Coca-Cola on Novyi Arbat Avenue.  It is even larger than similar billboards in New York's Times Square and London's Piccadilly Circus (Nezavisimaia gazeta, November 21, 1997).  These achievements of modem Western civilization have preceded other Western traditions, such as respect for the law and the timely payment of wages, in coming to the
Russian capital.

The craving of Muscovites for Western styles of life is reflected in the writing of advertisements.  Strictly speaking, advertisements - as Westerners understand them - have been found in Moscow for only about the past ten years.  Only after the August 1991 putsch did the ever-present masterpieces of Soviet agit-prop (agitation and propaganda), such as "The Party is our Helmsman The People and the Party are One," or the especially absurd "Lenin is More Alive Than Any Living Person," began to disappear from the streets and buildings of Moscow.  But Soviet advertisements were pure agitation and propaganda, even when they advertised goods and services.  These types of Soviet advertisements, such as "Fly Aeroflot," in essence substantiated the lack of choice, because in the USSR Aeroflot was a monopoly, and it was impossible for ordinary Soviet citizens to fly on Western airlines.

Western advertisements, apart from their direct goals, acquired some other functions in Moscow.  They demonstrate the possibility of choice in goods and services, and at the same time tempt Muscovites to embrace the consumer society.  It has become fashionable for advertisements to use English words.  The writing varies: sometimes in Latin characters, others in Cyrillic (often accompanied by an incorrect transliteration)- sometimes with two variations at once.  This occasionally has a humorous result.  A few years ago, along the respectable Kutuzovsky Prospect (Avenue), where I had once lived, I noticed a new, modest cafe under a strange name: Drim - a word written Cyrillic, but which does not exist in the Russian language.  No one in the cafe, even among the wait staff, knew what this word meant; and it took some time for me to realize that Drim was in fact a Russian transliteration of the English word, "Dream."

Purists and many in the power elite of Moscow have long been protesting the preponderance of foreign words in advertising, but still without real success, because the appearance of these words was far from accidental.  On the one hand, this is connected with the necessity to define new Western realities; on the other, to the desire to display in advertisements an aura of the Western way of life.  Thus, on the streets of Moscow appeared English words such as "SHOP" often written in Cyrillic, as an analog for the Russian magazin.  In the naming of stores, which in the eyes of their owners (though often not in practice) correspond to Western standards, the English words "supermarket" and "minimarket" are seen more and more often- as well as new, compound hybrid words; in which one part is Russian and the other the English "super" or "market." The French boutique has also come into fashion and represents a salon, in which expensive clothes, shoes, et cetera are sold.  The reaction to "Western dominance" in advertising is noticeable in the attempted return to pre-Revolutionary names, almost forgotten during Soviet times: lavka (a small shop), traktir (in the past, a cheap restaurant, a snack bar where hard liquor was sold, but today often a respectable restaurant serving Russian cuisine), trapeznaia (cafe), and others.

Russia is still in transition, and nowhere is this more evident than it its capital, despite the fact that in a way Moscow is even less Russia than New York is the United States, or Paris is France.  Even the Moscow authorities admit that "Russia is not Moscow yet."

The job market situation in Moscow is much better than in the rest of Russia and in many of the countries of the CIS.  By April, 1997, only 48,387 city-dwellers were registered as unemployed.  One should take into account, however, that official Russian statistics tend to I if significantly understate these figures.  According to some estimates, the true number of the unemployed in Moscow is close to seven percent of all able-bodied people (Simptom, N 11 (59), 1997: 8-9).  Also, every fifth employee in Moscow lives in the suburbs or in towns of the Moscow oblast’ (administrative region) (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996: 12).  Every day about 500 thousand of these people commute to the capital (Simptom, N 1(49), 1997-. 67).  But, if and when they lose their jobs, they are registered as unemployed not in Moscow, but in their place of residency (L'vov, 1997- 144).  Still, Moscow has avoided the perils of high permanent unemployment; and many workers from Ukraine, Moldova, and even from some regions of Russia come to Moscow eager to take, sometimes illegally, the available jobs - especially in construction - that are not appealing to Muscovites.

Moscow is much wealthier than the rest of Russia.  Contrary to what occurs in many other  regions of the country, pensions and wages to budget-dependent groups are usually paid without delay in Moscow.  The provision of budgetary resources per Muscovite is three times higher than for any Russian citizen living outside the capital (Bernstein, 1997:2).

Large state investments in Moscow's financial and credit institutions contributed to the rapid formation of this new sector in the city's economy- In the early period of market reforms, the State Central Bank provided low interest loans to Moscow banks, giving them access to cheap credit. High inflation rates in the initial years of reform were propitious to their activities.  Capital was accumulated easily and quickly.

It is no wonder that Moscow's tax base constitutes about 20-25 percent of the states' total revenue, even thought the capital accounts for only 6 percent of the country's population.²  Although Moscow's GNP represents 13.1 percent of the country's total (Nezavisimaia gazeta-Regiony, No. 1, October 1997:2), about 80 percent of Russia's financial capital and the lior’s share of foreign investments are concentrated in Moscow (Moskovskie novosti, December 14-2 1, 1997-. 18).  Thus, of the 6.7 billion dollars in foreign investments in Russia during the first half of 1997, 5.5 billion dollars (83 percent) was invested in Moscow.  In addition, most of the Russian monopolies and corporations have their headquarters in the capital, and are paying municipal and other
taxes there.

However, while Moscow is the most affluent city in Russia, it is also the most expensive.  It has actually become one of the most expensive cities in the world.  While in New York City the price of office space is about 60 dollars per square meter, in Moscow the cost is around 100 dollars or more.  In this respect, Moscow is second in all the world only to London.  A modest dinner for two at an inexpensive restaurant costs at least 60 to 70 dollars, or even more.  No wonder that less than one percent of Muscovites eat at restaurants more or less regularly (Itogi, November 4, 1997- 8).  A taxi ride from Shermet'evo airport to downtown, a distance of about 17 miles, costs 70 dollars.  Although the official average monthly income per person in Moscow (250 dollars)³ is more than twice the average of the rest of the country, the subsistence minimum in the capital is also more than twice as high (Simptom, N 5 (41) 1996: 48; Pul's, N 36 (120) 1996:25; Trud, September 5-11, 1997- Moskovskii komsomolets, September 18,1997; Nezavisimaia gazeta, October 22 1997).

Income differentiation in contemporary Moscow, just as social variety, is much greater than in the Soviet period and continues to &,-row.  In 1992, the incomes of people in the top ten percent of earnings were 7.3 times higher than those in the lowest ten percent, in 1993 the difference was 13.3 times; in 1994 it was 28.3 times; in 1995, 31.6 times, and in 1996, 45 times.  In the rest of Russia, the average difference was 10. 5 times in 1995, and 13 times in 1996 (Pul’s,  N 36 (120),1996: 5-1 Simptom, N 5 (41), 1996:49; L'vov, 1997: 1 1 1).  Official publications of the Moscow authorities estimate that 2 to 3 percent of Muscovites are characterized as very wealthy, while an additional 10 to l2 percent are considered highly paid.  Fifteen to eighteen percent of Muscovites are considered middle class in terms of income; while 55 to 60 percent are poor, with the remaining population (I 8 to 20 percent) living below the poverty line (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996 - 6-7 Simptom, N II (59), 1997: 42).

The so-called New Russians consist of the emerging class of businessmen, bankers, and executives, the corrupt officials whose lifestyles do not correspond to their reported incomes, and the Mafiosi.  They keep their money in Swiss and British bank accounts, and are acquiring villas on the Cote d'Azur and in Switzerland, or in Londor’s Belgravia district.  In addition, scores, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of people who found employment in banking, financial institutions and other private companies, or who managed to open small businesses, have begunto enjoy high living standards, although only in comparison with the average Muscovite.⁴  Nevertheless, they open bank accounts, buy cars, and spend their vacations in Turkey and Cyprus.

Still, all of these people constitute but a minority of Moscow's nine million plus inhabitants.  They live side-by-side with about 2,200,000 elderly pensioners (Simptom, N 9 (57), 1997:18), who spend their declining years in financially trying circumstances.  In 1995, the average pension of a retired person amounted to a mere 45 percent of the subsistence minimum (L'vov, 1997: 102).  In addition, there are many hundreds of thousands of disabled persons in Moscow; about 200 thousand of whom are still able to work, but only 40 thousand of whom managed to find jobs (Moskovskie novosti, February 1-8, 1998: 21).  The lifestyle of well-to-do Muscovites contrasts with that of the millions of employees in those sectors of the economy which were adversely affected by reforms-, namely, in the military-industrial complex (about 25 percent of Moscow's industries consist of plants that produce military equipment - L'vov, 1997-.118), in machine building, metal working, and the automotive industry- as well as in public health, education, and the sciences.  Industrial enterprises in the city are now producing less than half the production of their heydays.  Still, in 1997, the recession continued (Trud, September 51 1, 1997).  Moscow is over-saturated with colleges, universities, and research institutions.  Eighty-four universities and other institutions of higher education (I 5 percent of Russia's total), with about 477 thousand students and about 80 thousand faculty are located in the capital.  In addition, by 1996, about 240 thousand people were employed in various research institutions.  Although in the period from 1991 to 1995, the number of scholars, scientists, researchers, and their staffs decreased by 53 percent, they still constitute more than 13 percent of Moscow’s labor force; while in Russia this sector makes up, on the whole, three percent (L'vov, 1997-. 118-119).  Almost all of Moscow's universities and research institutions are now facing formidable financial difficulties, and many of them are barely getting by.  Their personnel were accustomed to what in Soviet times amounted to middle and upper class incomes, while in 1996, their average wages amounted to only 63 percent of the city's average (L'vov, 1997-. 119).  Nowadays they constitute a part of the millions of people who live slightly above or near the poverty line and are characterized as the "new poor" (Simptom, N 5 (41), 1996: 52; Varoli, 1996: 8).⁵

Moscow's nouveaux riches have to share the city with the new and numerous underclass-. the beggars, the homeless, tramps, and more than 20 thousand prostitutes (several thousand of whom are aged 11 to 14 years, or even younger), who charge anything between 100 dollars to several thousand dollars for their services - rates higher than anywhere else in post-communist Europe (Komsomol'skaia pravda, March 26, 1997).  They also have to share it with refugees and involuntary migrants, mainly from Azerbaidjan, Georgia, Tadjlkistan, Moldova, and Chechnia.  According to official statistics, these people number only 15 thousand, but more reliable sources place their number at more than 100 thousand (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996: 9; Simptom, N 1 (49), 1997: 67).  These people are persecuted by the Moscow authorities, who want them to leave the city, and are harassed by the Moscow police as easy prey for extortion.  Ordinary Muscovites also do not harbor kind feelings for the refugees, migrants, and visitors from the southern republics.  More than 57 percent of Muscovites are of the opinion that the migrants are negatively affecting the labor market, and more than 70 percent claim that the migrants are to a large extent responsible for the shortage of affordable apartments.  More than 77 percent are sure that most of the migrants are involved in criminal activities (L'vov, 1997: 155).  None of these groups - new rich, new poor, the underclass, and the migrants - associate or intermingle with each other- each lives their own lives and spatially become more segregated than in The Soviet period.

Moscow also boasts the highest degree of political activity in Russia.  Democrats, liberals and Westernizers, populists, Slavophiles and monarchists, communists, and neo-fascists - all of them have their own vision of Russia's past, present, and future; and each is trying to implant their vision on
Moscow's landscape.

National iconography and symbolism (flags, emblems, anthems), ceremonies and festivals, public squares and representative buildings, shrines, monuments, sculptures (along with their design and location), state patronized and supported arts as an aesthetic force for binding the nation together, even postage stamps represent a political lexicon that may reflect a continuity with the past and serve as a bridge between a past and a future.  They may also accentuate a break with a past.  However, there is not one past, but many, and the same symbols may have quite a different meaning to different social and ethnic groupings.  There are no "natural" symbols at all.  The symbols of state and nation are just as arbitrary and arguable as any other symbols.  Which past and whose symbols are selected, and how they are selected and interpreted, may be a matter of consent or contestation.  At present, Russia's self-identification is ambiguous and uncertain.  It is still a matter of the ongoing political and ideological debate that involves cultural presentation as well.

In Russia, the future always begins with rewriting and restructuring the past.  Thus, Moscow has become the battlefield on which the different political forces and social groups are producing, modifying, and appropriating competing national representations.  In this contest, historical facts, myths, and symbols are invented or reinterpreted, and monuments and public spaces are destroyed, erected, and reconstructed in an attempt to shape the country's collective memory and to demarcate new sites of power.  So far, post communist Moscow has failed to come to any symbolic, cultural, or stylistic unity, and, to a large extent, has ignored the social aspects of urban development.

Nowadays, Moscow is a city of imitation, fakes, and bad-taste eclecticism which often borders on sheer kitsch.  At the street level, this is apparent in the numerous two-sided posters which show a picture of an Orthodox church accompanied by the words "the heart of Russia" on one side, and an advertisement for Marlboro cigarettes or imported hard liquor on the other.  At a higher level, this is evident in the old-new state symbol, the double-headed imperial eagle, which, after more than sixty years, is once again brazenly displayed on the roof of the State Historical Museum - located at the entrance to Red Square - while Lenin's mummy still rests in his mausoleum and the red stars still crown the steeples of the Kremlin towers.  The double-headed eagle was borrowed from Byzantium in the 15th century and symbolically implied the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome.⁶  Nevertheless, it is actively exploited today by Yeltsin's leadership and, ironically, is bitterly opposed by the same communists who are longing for the restoration of the Russian Empire.  The imitative character of post-communist Moscow is also evident the fervor to rebuild churches destroyed in the Soviet period, which is sometimes accompanied by the destroying of existing historical and cultural monuments.  However, the hastily rebuilt churches are inserted into the semiotic context of the urban landscape that had been developed during the Soviet era.  Thus, their semantics are quite different from the original.

The political opposition is fairing no better.  The ideological collapse of communism in Russia simultaneously resulted in the end of totalitarian symbolism.  In fact, the latter did not disappear completely, but became discrete.  The secret places and memorials of the Bolshevik Revolution and the monuments to the communist rulers and heroes have lost a significant part of their charisma.  In the Soviet period, they served as shrines of compulsory national adulation; nowadays they retain a positive symbolic meaning only to the communists and their supporters.  To satisfy the need for additional symbols, the opposition, instead of attempting to create new ones, is trying to appropriate the symbols that it totally negated in the recent past.  This is most apparent in their meetings and demonstrations, during which portraits of Stalin, who almost destroyed the Orthodox Church, peacefully coexist with icons.  Likewise, protesters carry red banners of the Soviet Union alongside the yellow-black-white tricolors of the Romanov dynasty, without showing any hint of the paradox that surrounds this contradictory and oxymoronic display.

No wonder contemporary Moscow has several different faces.  One of them is best expressed in the slogan: enrichessez-vous.  This is the motley Moscow of conspicuous consumption and fancy shops.  The number of such shops far exceeds the real demand, because they often duplicate each other, and no more than 5 or 6 percent of Muscovites can afford purchases there in any case (Lokotova, 1998: 58).  This is the Moscow of prestigious foreign cars, with chauffeurs and bodyguards.  The number of such expensive automobiles in Moscow exceeds the total in many Western capitals.  This is the Moscow of renovated and newly constructed office buildings and expensive condos.  Numerous new magazines (Profil', Den’gi, Domovoi, Mir i Dom, and others) are filled with advertisements for apartments in the so-called "elite houses" where one square meter of dwelling space costs more than two thousand dollars.  They also advertise the services of designing and remodeling firms that promise to remodel and furnish apartments in any style: from German to Japanese.  Since anti-Americanism has again become fashionable in Russia, these firms are especially recommending the "evroremont" (remodeling in the European style), which together with furnishings may cost up to 120 thousand dollars for even a one room apartment (70 square meters) in an elite house (Roshek, 1998-.55). This is also the Moscow of nascent suburbanization, a completely new phenomenon for the city.  In the Soviet period, mainly the working class and the underprivileged lived permanently in the suburbs.  Those who could do so preferred to settle in the city.  Middle and upper class Muscovites, especially those with young children, liked to move to the suburbs, where they owned or rented dachi (wooden summer houses), only for the summer months.  Now, one is witnessing the birth of another suburban Moscow, where single family brick and stone houses and mansions cost from several hundred thousand to several million dollars.  Twenty to thirty thousand such houses have already been built in the most scenic locations (Moskovskie novosti, December 14-21, 1997 -. 8).  Not infrequently, their construction is in blatant violation of Russian legislation which forbids construction of villas in the vicinity of reservoirs that supply the capital with drinking water (Moskovskie novosti, October 26-November 2, 1997- 12).

Another face of Moscow is shaded in gray hues.  It represents the grim communist past and the hardships of the transition period.  This is the Moscow of wholesale markets where the numerous poor, who cannot afford to shop at retail stores, find the majority of their foodstuffs and consumer goods.  This is the Moscow of elderly women trying desperately to supplement their meager income by petty trade on the streets, all the while intimidated by police who extort bribes from them, at the same time closing their eyes to the activities of real criminals.  This is the Moscow of crowded communal flats occupied by several individual families; the Moscow of four- to ten- or more story apartment buildings built from prefabricated cement slabs, depressing in their monotony.  One fifth of Moscow's apartment houses still consist of khruvhcheby, five story houses of very low quality construction, whose building was initiated under Khrushchev  (they are ironically called khrushchehy by Muscovites because this word sounds similar to the Russian word truvhcheby, or slums).

In principle, families with modest means are entitled to rent-free dwellings provided either by the state or the city-, "modest" meaning those who currently occupy tiny flats or rooms with no more than 5 square meters of floor space per family member.  Still, by 1996, 346.6 thousand families in Moscow were waiting for rent-free apartments; 14 percent of them bad been waiting for ten years or more (L'vov, 1997-.96- Nezavisimaia gazeta - Politekonomiia, N 2, January 1998 -2).  However, the construction of living quarters for the poor strata of the population has all but come to a stop.  In the past, up to 67 percent of the city's budget was allocated for this purpose, while today this is only 3 percent (L'vov, 1997:99-100).  Only state and city officials and bureaucrats are provided with rent-free apartments - and those are of the highest quality.  For the rest of the population, the municipal government has built too many apartment buildings in the outlying districts of the capital, where Muscovites were supposed to be able to purchase apartments at favorable rates.  Upon closer investigation, however, the advantages of these apartment buildings are revealed to be fictitious.  The supposedly low cost of municipal lodgings was fixed at 630 dollars per square meter, but similar apartments on the open market were fetching 500 to 550 dollars for the same space.  As a consequence of this situation, there are now 40 thousand unsold and empty apartments; only one tenth of those built have been purchased (Kamensky, 1997: 48-49).  To solve the problem, the Moscow government now wants to provide subsidies and develop a system of mortgages, ideas which in their Western understandings are virtually nonexistent in Russia (banks are providing only short term mortgages, at very high interest).  However, some experts doubt that many Muscovites would be capable of purchasing apartments with even these favorable conditions (L'vov, 1997: 1 00).

One more face of contemporary Moscow is determined by the interests and the tastes of the political class, which, in its attempt to create and promote a new national identity, tends to propagate a mighty statehood and Russian nationalism with Orthodox accretion.  Remarkably, the boundaries between the public and private realms have not yet changed significantly in post-communist Moscow.

Having embraced a market economy, Moscow has collided with the problems that follow the absence of commercial and office space.  Construction and real estate have appeared to be an extremely lucrative business.  However, if the construction boom had been precipitated by market demands, it is the municipal authorities that are profiting more from it than anyone else.  The Moscow municipal government remains the principal owner of city land, as well as the main customer and primary builder in the city.  Likewise, every step in construction, beginning with architectural projects, is under its tight control.  In fact, monopolism, clannishness, and dependence on bureaucracy are very strong in Moscow's architectural establishment.  In order to receive a project from the city, one should be sufficiently servile, obedient, and on good terms with its authorities.  In these respects, capitalism liri Moscow, at least in most cases, has turned out to be bureaucratic capitalism.

This state of affairs, together with an enormous concentration of capital in the city, has allowed Yuri Luzhkov, the authoritarian mayor of Moscow and one of the most influential politicians in Russia, to play the populist-nationalist card and use the construction boom to carry out, in short order, the large-scale reconstruction of the city, especially its historical center.  A priority has been given to highly publicized grand projects, each costing hundreds of millions of dollars, which have irreversibly changed the face of downtown Moscow.  The political aspects of this Luzhkov-style reconstruction, which is being carried out with the full consent of Yeltsin's leadership, is entirely obvious.

On the one hand, every Muscovite must know and feel that construction is being carried out by those in political power, and that only those in power can make the city comfortable for each person.  This is why the reconstruction of the city and the erection of new buildings is so provocatively noticeable and, in its very essence, antidemocratic.  It seems that the municipal and state authorities are simply screaming for everyone to hear: "we are the power." The Moscow mayor and his cronies peremptorily decide which architectural style befits the capital and which does not.  It is well known that Luzhkov dislikes architecture of glass, concrete, and metal.  Thus, to please him the architectural establishment have already come out against the "mechanistic implementation of Western architectural style (Segodnia, March 2, 1996: 8)," and now demands an adherence to the so-called "traditional Moscow style," even though no one has ever defined this style in any convincing or professional way.  Moscow is not a very layered city.  Its characteristic feature is not the perpetuation of tradition, but rather its frequent interruptions.  Nevertheless, it is the adherence to Moscow traditions that above all other characteristics is taken into account by the city bureaucrats when they decide, often arbitrarily, whether to approve or reject architectural projects (Rezin, 1997- 52).

In practice, the contemporary "Moscow style" Is an eclectic mix of post-modernist vernacular with elements of the neo-Russian architecture of the second half of the 19th century, which aspires to the alleged Russian symbolism (gables decorated with arches, tent-like and helmet-like exterior ornamental features set over roofs, merlons and pointed towers on roofs, kokoshniki: a series of corbelled-out, round, or pointed arches arranged in receding tiers as a purely decorative feature, et cetera).  This is hardly accidental.  The neo-Russian style (incidentally, in the past it was usually called the pseudo-Russian style), which found its inspiration in the Russian architecture of the 17 century (Barton, 1990: 175 ff), was not noted for its artistic merits.  No wonder that contemporaries ironically labeled as "chests with kokoshniki" such specimens of this style as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the Imperial Historical Museum.  However, in the neo-Russian style the ideological side always prevailed over the artistic one, and this is just what makes it so attractive to the Moscow authorities preaching the ideas of traditionalism and derzhavnost' (mighty statehood).

Any traditionalism, even the most imitative and tasteless, works much better for an assertion of the ideology of derzhavnost' than avant-garde.  Members of the Russian avant-garde in the early post-revolutionary period, even those who had been devoted to the communist cause, earned the hard way that it was impossible in the Soviet Union to be avant-garde while simultaneously reflecting in their art the official ideology.  I am afraid that this is also impossible in post-totalitarian Russia.  In fact, the official concern with forms of local cultural identity is not new in Moscow.  It was quite conspicuous during the reign of Czar Alexander 111, and even more so in the Stalin era (Tarkhanov and Kavtaradze, 1992; Papernyl, 1996: 51 ff.).  Still, contemporary Moscow architecture contains some new and almost beguiling characteristics, which prove that Russia is still in transition, and that nothing there is certain as of yet.  In addition to the "local tradition," contemporary Moscow architecture attempts to adopt post-modernism to support traditionalist, nationalist, and statist ideologies.  Post-modernism is, however, ill suited for any official rhetoric.  The two different aesthetic principles are combined without comprehension of the fact that they are opposites.  Thus, a contradiction has emerged- the image of the mighty state is asserted by means of its deconstruction.

In the early years of perestroika, exhibitions were mounted at the Moscow Manezh Gallery of major city projects.  Muscovites used to record their opinions in ledgers placed at the gallery.  The authorities would peruse these ledgers, but then go ahead with their own projects, studiously ignoring everything they had read.  But at least a modicum of democratic decorum was maintained, and the projects were open to public scrutiny.  Nowadays, the city government is not permitting even that.  Authoritarian decisions have replaced independent experts, public opinion, and open bidding competition.

Russia is a more verbal country than a visual one.  From the 19th century Russian culture has acquired a clearly literature-centered character.  Now they are trying to change this in Moscow.  All principles of the current Moscow style are mendacious.  Instead of history, one gets its negation.  Incorrect replicas of destroyed monuments are rebuilt from the bottom up, such as the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and a growing number of other buildings, next to which even original monuments lose their authenticity.  A replica may appropriate the style of a lost original, but its message is different.  In a way, the replica becomes more real than the original, because it is contemporary.  Instead of declared respect for the city's architectural ban-nony and landscape, one witnesses their disruption (e.g., the Trade Center at Manezh Square).  The disfigurement of Moscow's historical face, which began under Lenin, reached its climax under Stalin, and continued under Khrushchev and Brezhnev, has been resumed in the post-communist period-, this time by the authorities who claim to be democratic.  Instead of contemporary architecture, Moscow gets its imitation.

It is well known that monuments say more about the agenda and artistic preferences of those who ordered their construction than about the persons or events they are intended to commemorate (Wohl, 1996- 1).  While the characteristic feature of the contemporary Western cultural tradition connected with society's democratic and egalitarian principles Is the decline of public monuments and statues, they are mushrooming in Moscow and have become a vehicle for statist and nationalist visual propaganda.  Another contemporary tendency, that of miniaturization of sculptural monuments to make their scale more humane, is also alien to post-communist Moscow.  Its iconography is certainly acquiring illiberal and authoritarian traits, and tends to celebrate things that are removed from the everyday concerns of ordinary people- imperial rule, military victories, the pomp and circumstance of the Church, the omnipotence of the state, et cetera.  Perhaps nothing symbolizes this better than the Victory in World War II Monument on Poklonnaia Hill, a pompous and ugly reserve of the Soviet spirit, or the nearly 90 meter high monster monument to Peter the Great on Krymskaia Embankment, which Muscovites have nicknamed "the Terminator." The latter was built despite vehement public protests, and is widely perceived not only as characteristic of dubious, but officially cherished artistic values, but also as a symbol of Russia's new statehood.

Thus, culture again becomes ideology, and ideology becomes politics.  The old imperial double-headed eagle and Saint George defeating the dragon (the pre-Revolutionary emblem of Moscow) have functionally replaced the hammer and sickle and red stars of the Soviet era; but in some places they even share the same reverence and respect.

Statism was always an important ideological factor in Russia.  Its current merger with nationalism seems almost natural.  While a declared goal of the Russian leadership is to build a multiethnic civic nation in the country, its actual policy suggests something quite different (Khazanov, 1997- 138-139).  The triumph of the new power and its search for self-expression through the control of public space, monumental propaganda, and pageants reached its apogee in September 1997 during the festivities for the artificial 850-year Jubilee of Moscow.  This event, with its pompousness, ostentation, and inevitable haste, was a repetition of the Soviet-era syndrome for mass celebrations (Grueva, 1997: 56-59).  In the best tradition of Potemkin villages, building facades were quickly repaired and beautified anew, but only in downtown and only of the edifices that faced the street.  In addition, this repair and beautification was done in such a way that the paint will certainly chip and peel by the end of the first winter.

In aesthetic terms, the jubilee, with its large pageants, mass processions with thousand of participants, choreographed rites, military symbols, and abundant fireworks, was an attempt to resurrect the Soviet-era "Grand Style." However, only the political and financial elite and their families were invited to and attended the most prestigious events.  The ordinary taxpayers were entertained with cheap performances.  All of this also recalls the Soviet era.  The tribute to capitalism consisted of a new style in advertising.  Slogans like "Moscow is Russia's true value" -were placed on advertisements for Italian plumbing equipment and Belgian toilets.  Likewise, at the close of the festivities, church bells began ringing all over the city at the same time that billboards for Menatep Bank and Sainsung Electronics lit up the night sky.

More interesting were the ideological aspects of the festival.  I very much doubt that its organizers knew Ernest Renan’s celebrated saying that to be a nation its members have to forget many things, but they followed his dictum in practice.  In the performances organized on the occasion of Moscow's pseudo-jubilee, Russian history unexpectedly appeared as an endless, unbroken sequence of golden centuries.  It turned out that all was well and good during the reign of the grand princes, the czars, the emperors, the communists, and the post-communist leadership.  The message was clear- the murky waters of the past should be apotheosized, not enlightened and debated anymore, in order to assert historical continuity and to fabricate a new political reality.  It was as if the long-buried concept of the Third Rome had never been forgotten.  In a song specifically commissioned for the 850-year jubilee, Moscow was called the "prophet" and "messiah." The official narrative was a clear démarche against national retrospection and the still numerous liberal-minded people in Moscow who adhere to Western values.  In an interview given in regards to the jubilee, Luzhkov exalted Moscow as having preserved the "spiritual conservatism," In Luzhkov's view, Moscow in this sense was advantageously distinct from Russia's seaside cities (obviously, St. Petersburg is the first that springs to mind), in which a constant foreign influence has resulted in an intensive erosion of the national mentality and common statist values. (Trud, September 5-11, 1997).

But that is not all.  Once again, we are witnessing the widespread use of Russian mythopoeia: pre-Revolutionary Russian symbols and reinvented episodes from Russian history are used and manipulated to provide the authorities with an aura of legitimacy.  The festivities and television, which broadcast the Jubilee ceremonies to all of Russia, must have shown to all who watched that a consumer society has already arrived in Russia, and will soon make its appearance throughout the rest of the country, if only other regions follow Moscow's example.  But this "new" society should be a specifically Russian, great power, nationalist and Orthodox consumer society.

Construction of the memorial at Poklonnaia Hill came to no less than 200 million dollars.  The cost of the monument to Peter the Great is, at minimum, 15 to 20 million dollars.  The reconstruction costs for Manezh Square and its commercial center are kept from public scrutiny, as if they were a state secret, but are estimated by experts to be 350 million dollars minimum. The renovation of the capital, in anticipation of the jubilee, cost about 60 million dollars, with a further 50 million dollars spent on organization (Izvestiia, September 9, 1997).  In market economies, expenditures usually correspond to income.  In post-communist Moscow, however, things are done a bit differently.  The construction of churches and monuments, reconstruction of downtown, and the celebration of the artificial jubilee were carried out with a sweep that goes beyond all reasonable limits.  In Moscow today political populism is accompanied by aesthetic populism.  Moscow's mayor, with a clear conscience, ravages the municipal coffers for the glorification of his own political ambitions, and for the satisfaction of his own extremely low cultural standards.

Only one face is conspicuously absent in present day Moscow -- that of the middle class liberals. These people played an active role in the defeat of communism in Russia and the downfall of the August 1991 putsch, a role which at that time led a well-known publicist to name Moscow "the city of decent people." Today, their impact on Moscow's landscape is minimal.  Under these circumstances, city authorities, without hindrance, accomplished the reconstruction of the Manezh Square, the very square which in the era of perestroika became the gathering place for democratic rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people who had just awakened to political activism.  This "closing down" of the public space for democratically minded Russian citizens is taking on an almost symbolic meaning.  Marked by impeccably bad taste, the new constructions are becoming a memorial to their time.
 

Textnotes

1. Russian statistics are still not very reliable, and those on Moscow are no exception.  Whenever possible I prefer to use data published by the Department of Press and Information of the Moscow Municipal Government in such editions as Pul's and Simptom.  These publications, although not classified, are published only in 680 copies each to provide information for the deputies of the City and State Dumas, as well as for the Russian government, for Moscow's high officials, and for the editors of some newspapers.  I am most grateful to the people in Moscow who assisted me in obtaining these editions.

2. Moscow mayor Luzbkov boasts that Moscow contributes an even 43 percent to the state budget (Obshchaia gazeta, October 16-22, 1997), but this is apparently an exaggeration.

3. Actually this figure should be somewhat higher because of the widespread practice of tax evasion and employment in the "shadow economy."

4. The number of those employed in small businesses (no more than 7 or 8 employees) in Moscow has reached 1.3 million people.  In addition, a significant number of people are employed in these businesses without registration, in order to avoid paying taxes (Pul's, N 36 (120), 1996:24-1 Simptom, N 11 (59), 1997- 12).

5. In 1996, Professor Alexel Komech, Director of the Institute of Arts Studies and one of the most respected art historians and critics, told me that his salary was 1200 rubles ($200) a month; while his daughter, a minor clerk in one of Moscow's hotels, earned 1300 rubles a month.

6. Actually, this may be another myth.  Some scholars are of the opinion that this emblem was borrowed by the Moscow Great Prince Ivan III from the Habsburgs.
 

References

Bernstein, Erlen
    1997  "The Moscow Miracle." New Times, July- 27-29.

Berton, Kathleen
    1990  Moscow: An Architectural History.  New York: St. Martin's Press.

Grueva, Elena
    1997  "Prazdnik Zemll." Itogi, September 16-.56-59.

Kamensky, Alexel
    1997  "Vozdushnye zamki dlia tekh, komy tesno." Itogi, April 1: 48-49.

Khazanov, Anatoly
    1997  "Ethnic Nationalism in the Russian Federation." Daedalus, 126, (3)- 121-142.

Lokotova, Zhana
    1998  "Tseny podzemel’ia." Itogi, February 24: 56-58.

L'vov, G. N. (ed.).
    1997  Moskva 1996: Obshchesvennoe mnenie.  Moscow: Meriia.

Papemyl, Vladimir
    1996  Kul'tura Dva.  Moscow- Novoe literatumoe obozrenie.

Revzln, Grigory
    1997  "Stil'." Itogi, September 2: 48-53.

Roshek, luila
    1998  "Dizainervkie uvlugi." Profil', No.3: 49-54.

Tarkhanov, Alexel and Kavtaradze, Sergel.
    1992  Architecture of the Stalin Era.  New York: Rizzoll
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Varoli, John D.
    1966  "There are More 'New Poor' and 'New Russians'." Transaction, N 4, October-. 6-11.

Wohl, Helmut
    1996  "Monuments, Real and Imagined." In: Claudio Véliz (ed.). Monuments in an Age Without Heroes.
              Boston- Boston University Press: I- 1 5.
 
 

RE-IMAGINING RUSSIAN NUCLEAR WEAPONS SCIENTISTS
Hugh Gusterson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

 Three factors shaped global society in the period after 1945 -- capitalism, colonialism, and cold war.  Of these three, anthropologists have almost entirely ignored the cold war in the recent wave of theorizing about global processes.  And now we are in the process of ignoring the reformulation of the international security order in the decade after the end of the cold war. If I can be permitted to play with Arjun Appadurai's language about global flows and structures, I would like to suggest that, in addition to "ethnoscapes," "mediascapes," and "financescapes," global society is patterned by "securityscapes." Far from producing deterritorialization in the new global order, these "securityscapes" regulate the flow of people and resources between countries, distribute nation-states into hierarchies and alliances, and produce complex discourses of identity and enmity.  Especially for those working in the security apparatuses of the superpowers, the cold war provided lived realities, structures of feeling, and cultural imaginaries articulating the innermost recesses of the self to the nation-state.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cold war "securityscape" has buckled and twisted into a strange new shape.  In the new world order that is now congealing, Russia is no longer an enemy but is not quite a friend, is no longer communist hut not exactly capitalist, and is no longer a superpower but, with its 12,000 nuclear weapons ready to destroy us (Norris and Arkin 1997), is hardly a country like any other.  It is the rapid dislocation and ambiguity of Russia's position in this "securityscape", and the ambivalence Russian and American security personnel feel towards one another as new discourses are superimposed across old ones, that I want to explore in this paper.  The paper is based on fieldwork conducted at both of America's nuclear weapons laboratories -- Los Alamos and Livermore -- and among Russian nuclear weapons scientists at a variety of sites.

Let's begin with a little Orientalist sensationalism.  In their best-selling book, One-Point Safe, the journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn describe the New Russia thus:

The country was bleeding to death stripped and robbed of its assets by their former guardians, like the Gypsy children roaming the streets... The vast arsenal once built up regardless of cost... was waiting to be hauled away and sold in lots to black market customers ... Russia ... was about to turn into the greatest thieves' kitchen in history.  The high command of the Russian military, custodian for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, was in the front rank of the looters.(Cockburn & Cockburn 1997:34).

This is the emergent image of "the Russian threat", recently popularized in the Hollywood film Peacemaker, featuring a corrupt and drunken Russian military officer who steals an ICBM warhead and sells it to Yugoslav terrorists who want to destroy New York.

Western and Soviet discourses on security in the 1980s had represented Russia quite differently.  Those discourses divided the world into two tiers: the first tier was occupied by the superpowers and their European allies.  In this tier the superpowers, despite their enmity, were represented as sharing a common heritage of technical rationality that made them mature enough to discipline their rivalry into nuclear deterrence.  In the second tier were so-called "developing" nations who, in the Orientalist imaginary of a national security elite, were seen as too irrational and too internally chaotic to be entrusted with nuclear weapons.  In the 1990s the Russians, while retaining their nuclear arsenal, have slipped from the first to the second tier in Western security discourse.  The Russian threat is no longer seen to be a well disciplined "evil empire" but a poverty stricken, chaotic state that cannot defend its old sphere of influence and which threatens to spew nuclear materials among the second tier nations, and to sub-national terrorists, as it struggles to reorient itself.

In this new securityscape egalitarian rivalry has given way to hierarchical cohabitation.  The U.S., as the sole superpower, is expanding NATO into the old Soviet sphere of influence, has forced Yeltsin to accede to a START II Treaty the terms of which are skewed against the Russians, is unilaterally reinterpreting the Antiballistic Missile Treaty in America's favor, and sending its oil companies to secure the reserves of the Caspian.  Meanwhile the U.S. has spent $265 million buying Russian weapons so that they can be studied (Rothstein 1995), and has started to sub-contract scientific research to former Russian nuclear weapons scientists, who now constitute a high-tech version of the reserve labor armies throughout the third world whose existence enables American employers to function more efficiently.  For example, shortly after cutting the Los Alamos Laboratory's budget for magnetic fusion research by two thirds, the U.S. government gave $90,000 to Russian scientists to do the same research (Hickox 1992).  They also gave $3 million to former Russian weapons scientists to work on new technologies for nuclear waste disposal (Easthouse 1994).  Russian science is becoming a yard sale in which the American state can rummage for bargains.  Describing this new situation, one manager at the Livermore Laboratory told me, "the Russians worked on everything ... You gotta sift through all of that ... so we start out at the Russian Academy of Sciences and work our way through the system, see who's good, who isn't good... and then we target those people ... and see if there's something there this country's interested in."

Most of the American money has been spent, however, on securing Russian nuclear warheads and fissile material from theft or purchase.  The U.S. government has spent several billions of dollars buying Russian uranium to keep it off the market (Bukharin 1993; Cockburn and Cockburn 1997), providing equipment to help dismantle Russian nuclear weapons, making sensors and video technology to protect Russian nuclear material in storage, and developing special containers and railcars for transporting the material (Associate Press 1995; Lockwood 1993, 1994, 1995).  Many hundreds of millions of dollars have also been spent on the new science center at Dubna, where former weapons scientists are subsidized by Western governments hoping to keep them out of trouble.

These assistance programs, often called the "lab-to-lab programs," have generated increasingly frequent and extensive contacts, and even joint experiments, between the Russian and American nuclear weapons scientists who were, throughout the cold war, only able to communicate by seismographic semaphore, as each side listened for the muffled sounds of the other's underground explosions far across the world.  As Russian and American weapons scientists struggle to make sense of each other and of their own histories in the light of a new geopolitical order, there are four themes I want to pick out in their discourse.  They are Russian backwardness, Russian pride, doubleness, and what I want to call militarist utopianism.

First, Russian backwardness.  The encounters between Russian and American scientists have been structured and enabled by the fact that Russia lost the cold war and its economy and society are in disarray.  On the Russian side these encounters have also been inflected by a national discourse about Russian backwardness reaching back at least to Peter the Great.  American scientists told me, with some amusement, that the Russian technology they saw reminded them of American technology a quarter century earlier.  Russian weapons scientists, at one point three months behind on their salaries and growing their own vegetables to get by, told me of the disappointment they felt at having their life's work frozen by a state that had simply run out of resources, complaining, for example, that the Livermore Laboratory is building a $1.2 billion laser to simulate thermonuclear explosions, while Minatom cannot afford such a facility.  One Russian scientist visiting the Livermore Laboratory said, "In Moscow, most of us live in small flats.  I marvel at how spacious and modern your houses are ... And the vast size of your lab, the sophistication of your equipment ... is simply wonderful" (Independent 1989).

Akhil Gupta argues that discourses of underdevelopment constructed in the West are internalized in other countries, where identity incorporates what he calls a "pervasive sense of being underdeveloped" (Gupta 1998:x).  As Russia slides down the ladder of nations, its scientists are developing just such a sense.  But Gupta remarks that national identities are structured by "contradictory logics and incommensurable discourses" (p.6), and that this sense of underdevelopment may coexist in dialectical tension with a sense of nationalist pride.  We find the coexistence of these contradictory logics not only in Russian scientists' own discourse, but mirrored as well, interestingly enough, in the discourse of American scientists who believe, in an almost mystical way, in the theoretical acuity of the Russian physicist's mind.  One American weapons scientist, focusing on the Russians' intellectual ability rather than their technological prowess, said, "we're good at the theoretical stuff too, but they're really good at it. maybe it's because they don't have the machines we do ... but they really know how to write elegant equations" (Easthouse 1991).  Another American, saying that the first Soviet H-bomb design was better than the first American design, told the story of John Wheeler, an American physicist, finally meeting Zel'dovich, one of the designers of the Soviet H-bomb, and presenting him with a male-shaped salt-shaker and a female-shaped pepper shaker.  Alluding to the superiority of the Soviet H-bomb, he said that the "male" was Zel'dovitch and the "female" was Teller, the inventor of the American hydrogen bomb.  In a context where Russian scientists lack the resources to do cutting edge physics today, nationalist nostalgia for such glorious achievements in the past is increasingly important.  Thus Yuli Khariton himself, the Russian Oppenheimer, now in his 90s, has taken it upon himself to write his own account of the Soviet A and H bomb programs, emphasizing that the Soviets had no assistance from spies at Los Alamos in their hydrogen bomb program.  Insisting on Soviet priority, he concludes, "American colleagues have clearly underestimated the significance of the Soviet test in August 1953, which must be considered the first test in the world of a hydrogen bomb" (Khariton and Smirnov 1993:30).  Thus has the arms race which has been stifled in the present been projected back into the past.

The third theme I want to foreground is "doubleness" -- the awareness on the part of both Russian and American weapons scientists that they have formerly secret doubles in another country -- "the guys on the other team" as one Livermore scientist called them (Cockburn and Cockburn 1997:27).  One Los Alamos scientist, when I asked what it was like to meet his counterparts for the first time, banged the table and exclaimed, "they're just like us!" He added, "even their directors are like ours.  The director of Chelyabinsk is shy and retiring, like John Nuckolls [of Livermore], and the director of Arzamas is amiable and easygoing like Sig [Hecker of Los Alamos]." One Livermore scientist, who I will call Henry Mullins, said, "I went over there and met the Henry Mullins counterpart, who had worked nuclear bombs, reactor lasers, electron lasers, gas lasers, solid state lasers ... It's a tremendous camaraderie.  I found it to be like working with my brother ... Similar excitement about working together.  Similar excitement about the science.  Similar work ethic ... You get into equations right away.  You know it was like a door opened to these people."

This experience of doubleness has recently moved Los Alamos and Arzamas-16 to become sister cities, in a move eerily recapitulating, yet displacing, anti-nuclear strategies of the 1980s, which tried to use U.S.-Soviet exchange programs to undermine the arms race.  The two cities have exchanged delegations and gifts, developed a pen-pal program for their children, and Los Alamos has raised $10,000 in medical aid for Arzamas-16.  Arzamas-16 presented the Los Alamos City Council with a ceremonial brass bell.  When a delegation from Arzamas-16 visited in 1995, a Los Alamos councilor read this proclamation: our "two communities ... share unique histories [sic], similar national security missions, similar educational, family and patriotic values, and similar beliefs in the benefit of science to all mankind" (Schaller 1995).  It is this sense that the American and Russian weapons scientists together constitute a single transnational community applying science to the betterment of humankind that I call militarist utopianism.  I heard it in the words of the Livermore scientist who said, "you have the people who do things for the love of science and your country... Our bond first was science and then we're trying to bond the two countries ... We feel that what we were doing in retrospect was the right thing.  Building nuclear weapons for deterrence stopped World War III." And I heard a similar utopian vision in the words of a senior scientist from Arzamas-16.  He was describing a joint experiment between Los Alamos and Arzamas-16.  "After the experiment the scientists were unscrewing the shields that protected the diagnostic equipment.  You couldn't tell who was Russian and who was American.  They were all just scientists working together on a task.  At first it looked as if the data were lost.  But then the data appeared on the screen, and a collective cheer went up."

To conclude: during the cold war, when the United States and the Soviet Union were equals, American and Russian weapons scientists shared a discourse of mutual antipathy, grounded in the rivalry of the arms race, which obscured the ironic commonality of their projects.  As we move beyond the cold war world and Russia is partially absorbed into a clientilistic relationship with the U.S., Russian and American weapons scientists are at last allowed, albeit in carefully restricted and monitored situations, to meet and even to collaborate on occasion.  As old discourses morph into new shapes, the rivalries of the cold war melt and reappear in the register of nostalgia.  Meanwhile an old, submerged sense that Russian and American scientists, despite the antipathy of their governments, were engaged in a single project has now burst forth in a startling discourse of commonality and cooperation.  In this context, paradoxically, a utopian image of a divided international community restored to wholeness works to further the projects of the national security state in the world after the cold war -- a world in which Russian and American weapons scientists re-imagine their cold war rivalries as a collaborative project and cautiously join together to ensure the endurance of their dark art.
 

REFERENCES CITED

Associated Press
    1995  "Los Alamos Helps Russia Track Plutonium." Los Alamos Monitor, September 22.

Bukharin, Oleg
    1993  "Soft Landing for Bomb Uranium" Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists September, pp.44-49.

Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn
    1997  One-Point Safe.  NY: Doubleday.

Easthouse, Keith
    1991  "LANL, Soviet Scientist May Share Data." New Mexican November 18.
    1994  "Lab Scientists to Help Russians with Project. New Mexican July 26.

Gupta, Akhil
    1998  Postcolonial Developments. Duke University Press.

Hickox, Katie
    1992  "DOE Ripped for Hiring Russian Scientists." New Mexican, March 10.

Independent
    1989  "Lab Scientist Hosts Russian Visitors." Independent, December 27.

Khariton, Yuli and Yuri Smirnov
    1993  "The Khariton Version." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May pp.20-31.

Lockwood,  Dunbar
    1993  "Dribbling Aid to Russia." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists July/August, pp.39-42.
    1994  "Purchasing Power." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April, pp.9-12.
    1995  "Getting Down to Business." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.  January/February, pp.12-13.

Norr
    1997  "Estimated Russian Stockpile, End of 1996." Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 53(3):
              May-June pp.62-4.

Rothstein, Linda
    1995  "Secrets" off the Rack." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists March/April, pp.6-7.

Schaller, Charmian
    1995  "Los Alamos Welcomes Russians." Los Alamos Monitor October 17, p.l.
 
 

COLONIZATION OR LIBERATION: THE PARADOX OF NGOS IN POSTSOCIALIST STATES
Julie Hemment
Cornell University

 The stimulation of civil society has been central to the efforts to democratize post-socialist states and has been regarded as a crucial dimension of transition.  However, recently criticisms have been made from both East and West.  Some of those who were once most in favor of the notion of civil society and its promotion in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have become disaffected with the emergent structures, while others question why concepts and terms are exported with such enthusiasm at a time when their salience is challenged in Western countries (Carothers 1996). Even George Soros, the high priest of the "open society" has distanced himself from some of the processes that are underway in Eastern Europe today (Soros 1997).

In order to ground this discussion I shall consider a central plank of the democratization process, the non-governmental sphere.  Non-governmental organizations (NGOs)¹  are a striking feature of the post-Communist landscape.  Their role in transition is crucial as they serve as conduits for the distribution of material, technical and intellectual resources  - international agencies such as the World Bank and donor governments frequently send funds directly to internationally recognized NGOs rather than to governments.  Equally important is their symbolic function. Perceived by their advocates to be a vital component of civil society, the existence of NGOs has been encouraged and stimulated by international agencies and western governments accordingly.

Discourse about NGOs is strikingly polarized.  I have been struck by an apparent paradox, that while they are seen to be tied to democratic and emancipatory movements and concerns, NGOs are also perceived as part of the attempt by Western states, external to these societies, to control, civilize and discipline post-socialist states.   In this paper I will present both positive and negative evaluations of NGOs and explore some of the contention about this new sphere.  I shall then provide an historical analysis of the concept of civil society as it has been used in the context of Eastern Europe and the USSR, from the late 80’s and early 90s when it was much in vogue,²  to the more recent backlash against it. I shall then consider how the contemporary non-governmental sphere has apparently failed to meet these expectations and reconsider the binary colonization/emancipation. Why does civil society continue to be viewed in such polarized terms and what does this tell us about the processes of transition?

NGOs as Salvation

Some positive views of NGOs are as follows:  First, let’s take the self representation of an international NGO, taken from an announcement of an internship position advertised on the internet:

ISAR is a non-profit organization that supports the growth of the non-governmental sector in the countries of the former Soviet Union….our mission is to empower grassroots activists to address local social, political, and environmental challenges by providing them with grants, training and other forms of technical assistance.

This rhetoric suggests a progressive form of democracy-building at its most grass-roots and people friendly.

A second, similar type of language is found among scholars who celebrate NGOs as progressive forces in the context of transnationalism and see them as key players in an emergent "global civil society".  In a recent article, anthropologist Terry Turner (n.d.) provides a positive reading of the new networks of NGOs, environmental and rights activists and sectors of the media and public opinion,  "An emergent transnational community of movements and groups has begun to coalesce as a new, global extension of civil society, in complementary opposition to the longer-established sector of global civil society comprised of private transnational corporations." This type of rhetoric is also pronounced among feminist activists and scholars, particularly in the aftermath of the Fourth World Conference on Women.³

Finally, a third constituency that celebrates the emancipatory potential of NGOs is found at what is traditionally considered to be the opposite end of the political spectrum, among pro-market liberal democrats.  Until his recent turn around, George Soros, international financier-turned-philanthropist and promoter of civil society in the former Communist states has epitomized this trend.  With western governments, Soros’ Open Society foundation has promoted NGO development as part of the agenda to stimulate the development of an independent pluralistic "civil society" in post-Communist states and has set up independent media organs, think tanks and academic institutions accordingly.

In these positive evaluations, NGOs are progressive bandits that work to protect people against the incursions of evil states and/or international forces.  The symbolic order around NGOs is predicated on a series of binary oppositions, most fundamentally between state/society.  In all cases, the "non-governmental" sphere is seen to lie outside the state/society dichotomy, and NGOs are seen to represent a third realm that is apparently free from particularistic interests.  They transcend politics, particularly the politics of the Cold War, they are non-aligned and stand for universal values, mere facilitators of local empowerment.  In the first example, the ISAR announcement is inflected with Christian notions of voluntarism and charity and contains a set of oppositions based on the pair sacred/profane (not-for-profit/for profit, charity/business) at the same time as it draws on an international development discourse of entitlements and rights. In the second case, the "global civil society" discourses replicate the same binaries - state/society (or "community"), profit/not-for-profit - at a global level.  In the third example, the Soros-type discourses rest on the same binary state/society, but are expressed slightly differently, as "open society"  vs. the totalitarian state, or "dictatorship."  It is important to note, however, that this is a (good)state/(bad)state binary, as the designation "open society" is modeled on the liberal democratic state.  Far from transcending politics, this last position smacks of liberal triumphalism at the "victory" of liberal democracy over Communism.  In this discourse, "NGO" becomes a metaphor for "civility," "freedom," a concrete referent for "civil society" which is the desired end of "transition."

The Denouncers

As I have noted, there is a new trend toward critiquing the non-governmental sphere and its role in the "democratization" process.  Here NGOs are perceived to be an arm of a generalized western colonizing project.  These arguments (which are directed at various types of  NGO, but broadly at the whole NGO-ization process) rest on the same binaries we have already seen expressed in the other arguments (state/society) but here NGOs are perceived to have a distinctly "political" function and to be aligned with the "west".

Soros Foundation initiatives have been met with rage and distrust by some actors in post-socialist states.  Soros is frequently represented as acting in some "western" identified plot, either of his own or of U.S. devising.  President Tudjman of Croatia recently denounced him as the "linchpin of a global plot" and the Soros Foundation was recently forced to close down in Belarusia following the seizure of its bank account.  Although both these cases are at the extreme end of the hostility spectrum, they can be situated as part of a general anti-Soros trend.  Whether labeled "Hungarian", "Jew" or "CIA agent", Soros is cast as the consummate "outsider" by hostile publics in Russia and Eastern Europe (Traynor 1997).

Charges of "imperialism" have been leveled at NGO activity from several quarters.  A recent article in Replika, a Hungarian social science journal, denounced "western intrusion in to Eastern Europe on the field of social science research" as "colonization" (Csepeli et al 1996). Though explicitly leveled at academic collaboration, this critique takes aim at the entire NGO-ization project:

The ideological aim behind these efforts can be summarized as ‘Project Democracy’, conceived as something to be implemented from above, following and copying western models (Csepeli et al 1996: 114).

Here, the authors do not oppose the processes of privatization and decentralization of East European institutions that they describe; their main criticism is that the terms of "East-West" engagement are asymmetrical and unfair.  East-West boundaries are patrolled and reinforced by agencies that constitute citizens of "western" nations as "experts" or "primary investigator" and those of "eastern" nations as recipients or junior collaborators.

NGOs are thus perceived to perform a kind of missionary function on behalf of the "West".  Far from  transcending politics, NGOs are perceived to be part of a strategy to further cement inequality and difference.  The "reconstruction of Eastern Europe" is read as a reinforcement of the East/West binary, where projects which ostensibly prevent seepage, escape, the "drain" of best resources from the area in order to protect East European economies and permit them to gain strength, actually work to keep East Europeans "out" in the interests of West European security.  In many cases, they are perceived to actually drain the wealth of the East.⁴  Once again, NGOs are "outsiders", but this carries different inflections.  They are not considered outside or above politics, but to be the agents of outsider political interests.

Not surprisingly, those who see NGOs as liberatory are "western" (or western identified, as in the case of elite corps who work within NGOs and who have access to the frameworks and resources they offer), while those who view it as colonizing are "eastern" or eastern-identified (as in western scholars who have in some way "gone native", or who are drawn to the position of the underdog).  It is easy to write transition this way, particularly when resources are so clearly stacked on one side.  In order to avoid replicating these polarities, I will side step to illuminate the issue from another perspective and question some of the concepts that are commonly taken for granted in these debates.

NGOs and the "Civil Society" Debates

It is important to situate the emergence of the concept of "NGO" in the post-state socialist context.  As I have shown, today many scholars and actors in the non-governmental sphere view NGOs as an index of "civil society" (which is regarded as a key signifier of "democracy").  However, this is according to a very different conception of "civil society" than was envisaged when the term first entered discourse in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the mid-1980s.  This shift is significant in so far as it suggests that much of the bitterness expressed toward NGOs is a result of disappointment in  "transition" (among western scholars as much as post-socialist subjects).  In order to trace these themes, it is necessary to historicize the concept of "civil society" as it has been used in the context of  the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  There has been a huge amount of discussion among political scientists and my aim here is not to provide a summary, but to trace some of the themes and metaphors running through the discussions, and to consider how they relate to politico-economic events.

As I have noted, the term "civil society" experienced something of a renaissance in the 1980s, stimulated by events in Eastern Europe and the USSR.  It appeared to represent a means of breaking out of the polarities of the détente period (Capitalism/Communism, East/West), and was used by western intellectuals of the left as a means of articulating internal opposition to state socialist regimes whilst still critiquing capitalism (Arato 1981; Garton-Ash 1983; Habermas 1989; Ost 1990). The term was used similarly by some East European dissidents as a means of articulating a "third path" between the two systems.⁵  If this was the original meaning, usage soon became more sloganistic, and the subtleties became less important than its performative and symbolic function.  "Civil society" became a rallying cry and was the gloss on any kind of resistance to the regimes to the degree that "it" was broadly considered to have been efficacious in bringing down the regimes.  As one political scientist put it, "it was highly effective in bringing about the demise of Communism" (Schopflin 1993: 262). The term is now comfortably used to justify the turn to capitalism and the west, and is deployed descriptively to describe the processes of "transition" and "democratization" with "NGO" as its concrete referent.

The first "non-governmental organizations" that appeared in the Soviet Union (though they were not thus named) were loose groups of  friends and colleagues who united around specific issues, for example to campaign for broadly defined religious or political freedoms, or for the state to acknowledge past crimes.⁶ Groups perceived themselves and were perceived to be oppositional to the state; accordingly the Soviet state attempted to suppress them, while western states lauded them as evidence of "society’s" natural resistance to the totalitarian state.

These groups began to understand themselves and to be read by those outside in terms of "civil society."  The concept was used in the Soviet/East European context to describe a movement from bottom up.  It was frequently presented as a natural life force, as one prominent civil society theorist put it, "civil society tends to swell rapidly from below" (Keane 1988: 5), as suppressed social interests gathered together to form alliances.  "Natural" society here is pitted against the "unnatural" impositions of the state.  The metaphor of naturalness is pervasive - according to Pelczynski, Solidarity, the quintessential "NGO" of this period, had an "evolutionist strategy," it did not strive toward any "political" goals (it neither intended to establish capitalism or to destroy the state) but sought the establishment of a plurality of self-governing civil associations (ibid.). "Civil society" then is seen as a universal stage of development.  Habermas captures this well in his characterization of the East European revolutions as "rectifying revolutions," which are distinctive due to their lack of ideas that are innovative or oriented toward the future (Habermas 1990). Here, there is something artless about the emergence of groups and organizations, which appear as a natural corrective, the result of civil society’s inevitable resurgence.

Why did this notion have such currency and appeal among scholars and members of these groups, what did it resonate with?  It seems to me that the yearning for "civil society" represented a desire to bring "public" and "private" together and can be attributed to a desire for "completeness" and "normalcy" that the socialist state denied its citizens.  The state socialist system rested on a rigid division between public and private, where people were required to submit to the state in their public lives but perceived their private lives to be free.   The home then became the repository of all that was deemed most authentic and valued.⁷  Todorov (1991) has characterized this configuration as constitutive of "social schizophrenia"), and the system was certainly perceived thus by many state socialist subjects.  "Civil society" seemed to offer a way out, a means of mending this apparent fracture - it was a repository of dreams, "a Utopia, the solution to all the problems accumulated by "real socialism" (Kumar 1993) and appeared to represent the chance to be "civil," "civilized," "normal," in so far as it signified honesty and authenticity in public life.

This yearning for completeness is also a desire for an egalitarian kind of togetherness, which expresses itself through the east/west binary.  "Civil society" suggests horizontal connections, rather than the vertical integration between society and state and is thus apparently egalitarian, fraternal, and unconstrained by borders and boundaries.  It appeared large, expansive, unbounded (as evident in talk of a "global civil society"), but at the same time conveyed a specifically European flavor.  The yearning seems to be all about a reunion between East and West, a means of reasserting a common European-ness, a shared culture and intellectual heritage that Eastern Europe perceived it had lost touch with and was outside of.

These discourses have much in common with the emancipatory discourses around NGOs that I have examined - both point toward a post-ideological world, and a transcendent "public" space.  Given these similarities, why was there so much disappointment with what transpired?  Why can’t NGOs serve as the vehicle for these dreams?  What are the similarities and differences between the intellectual project of revolution and the contemporary NGO order?

The Contemporary NGO Order

I shall now return to the contemporary non-governmental sphere to see how it matches up to these expectations.  I shall argue that firstly, it is a far more formalized space than what was desired and secondly that, far from diminishing the boundaries between East and West in an equal, fraternal forum, it is perceived to be the preserve of a western or "westernized" elite.

At a glance, the "non-governmental" space of the "transition" is a far cry from what was desired.  Despite the similarities in rhetoric, it is a less "political" seeming space, its participants are less often dissidents and politicos, the intellectual architects of the anti-Communist revolutions, but young people intent on developing their careers. Involvement in the civil society of NGOs can be seen to represent a form of entrepreneurial activity and for some it is very lucrative.  The land of projects, funding applications and trainings is a world of task-oriented, bureaucratically orchestrated activity rather than utopian strivings.  Ironically (in so far as they appeared to be diametrically opposed to all that "civil society" stood for), some of those who thrived under the old regimes have also proven to be equally adept at mastering the symbolic order of NGOs and projects (Sampson 1996). This has given rise to a great deal of cynicism among some people who regard the NGO sector as just another corrupt mafia, evidence of business as usual.

NGOs are a far cry from the  spontaneous and loose groupings of the late ‘80s.  In order to be perceived as authentic by international agencies, an NGO has to be "autonomous, voluntary, legally registered and non-profit" (Sampson 1996: 129).  No church or nationalist groups are recognized, nor are political parties.  What’s more, to be credible (that is, fundable) NGOs have to meet very strict criteria, they have to name a "target group," must have a "mission statement" and provide indices for "evaluation" and "sustainability" (ibid.).  While the early groups were based on principles of "openness," "solidarity" and "living in the truth" (Keane 1988: 4), "transparency" is a recurrent metaphor of project-speak (Sampson 1996: 129), which illustrates metaphorical continuity across these changes in civil society.  However, in the project-speak usage "transparency" now suggests clarity of affairs, bureaucratic precision, economy and rational planning rather than an expansive dream of a post-ideological world with no walls or boundaries.

Crucially, the non-stateness of this space is illusory.  Note that the designation "non-governmental" is an official categorization, that is, it is dependent on governmental recognition.  While historically NGOs identified themselves and were identified as oppositional to states, they are now used by governments as conduits to distribute material and intellectual resources both nationally and internationally. Organizations have to be officially recognized by governments in order to win tax exemptions and in order to practice legally, and by international bodies in order to win grants and have access to international networks.

A second major cause of frustration with the non-governmental sphere is that NGOs are also perceived to be "western" and hence inaccessible to most post-socialist subjects.  It pays to spend a little time here to consider the significance of the designation "western" in this context.

In the context of "transition," "west" signifies a set of political and economic values and standards, a stage of development rather than a geo-political location.⁸  "Transition" is always posited as a process whereby the "east"  becomes more like the "west," by way of a series of prescribed economic and political steps.  In theory, if it follows these schema, it too can joint the western clubs (EU, NATO, as well as commercial "joint ventures" and NGOs).   The west is the donor, the modernizer, the site of "know-how" while the east is cast as beneficiary, recipient in a relationship of structural inequality, an "outsider" who wants "in."

Actors in the "east" have accepted the designation "lesser" to some degree, because this acceptance backed up their victimhood - as citizens of states annexed (in the case of East European subjects), or as individuals oppressed (in the case of  Soviet subjects) by the Soviet regime.  This discourse becomes part of a strategy for resistance.  Habermas points to this in his description of the "rectifying revolution."  The East European revolution of the late ‘80s "presents itself as a revolution that is to some degree flowing backwards, one that clears the ground in order to catch up with developments previously missed out on" (Habermas 1990). This has the effect of primitivizing the "East" and serves to legitimate western-identified development projects as a means to an end.

It is important to note that, although it posits "east" as lesser, the East/West binary as it expresses itself in the context of "transition" is premised on the assumption of a kind of filial relationship.  "East" is coded as explicitly less than "west," but in so far as it took a wrong turning along a path that they shared.  As a result of that wrong turn, "east" is constituted as arrested in some way, but this difference is not irremediable.  The Oriental "other" is irredeemably other, and denied voice and subjecthood by orientalising discourses (Said 1979),  but as David Kideckel has put it, "the devaluation of eastern (European) life is not because ‘they’ are totally different, but rather because ‘they’ have fallen into difference over time" (Kideckel 1996: 30).  The logic of the binary (which Kideckel calls "categorical orientalism" to distinguish it from Said’s "orientalism") "holds out the possibility of redemption for the fallen through capitalism, democracy, civil society, privatization and the like" (ibid.).

It is this relationship that causes "the east" to expect to eventually gain admittance to the western club, however, this expectation is consistently thwarted.  Once they had embarked on the western prescribed path of economic and political development, many "eastern" actors called for the dissolution of the East/West binary and argued for a return to the designation "Central Europe."  Timothy Garton-Ash, citing prominent East European intellectuals Havel, Michnik, Konrad, laid out the qualities of the desired Central (as opposed to Eastern) Europe, "skeptical, sober, anti-utopian minds and rational, humanistic, democratic and tolerant societies" (ibid.), terms that are associated with "west" rather than "east."  However, the designation "Central Europe" has proven slow to catch on and the perception of many actors (we can include the authors of the Replika article here) is that they are still stranded as "outsiders."  "West" also signifies universal standards of civility (rights, values) to which eastern subjects appeal and which are ostensibly available to all.  Disappointment comes when the "east" is made to feel its own specificity, and learns that these values are not universally applicable, but are jealously guarded.

Thus far I have traced the expectations that preceded the development of civil society and shown how they contrast with perceptions of the actually existing non-governmental sphere.  NGOs are highly formalized structures that operate under constraints imposed by governments and international agencies, and are linked to a development project which is perceived to originate "outside".  Where does that leave us?  Is transition all about colonization?  We can disrupt this view by questioning the fixity of the terms "East" and "West," "inside" and "outside" and by returning to "transition" to recharacterize it.

We need to get away from seeing the East and West as hermetically sealed, fixed locations.  It is important to see that the East/West binary is constitutive of identity on both sides (here I draw on the work of scholars like Said, etc.).  The inside/outside polemic helps to conceal the mutual dependency within the relationship, that is, that the "West" needs an "East" as other, both in order to be and to know itself and vice versa.   In this sense, it is impossible for the east to ever really "westernize" (in the sense of joining the west), in so far as the sides of the binary pair need each other to keep on rolling.⁹ This points to a different reading of the end of the Cold War.  As many scholars have noted, the collapse of the state socialist regimes, though hailed as a victory of the West and liberal democracy, actually resulted in an identity crisis for "western" nations as much as for the teetering socialist states.  As Turner (n.d.: 19) puts it "the removal of the threat of war between these two power blocs removed the major non-economic political and ideological basis for the hegemony of nation-state as the organizing frame of global politics."

"Transition" in post-socialist countries then is just as much about the west as about the east and is not reducible to a relation of domination/subordination.  Scholars such as Carothers have pointed to the irony in the fact that the notion of civil society continues to be enthusiastically exported at the very time when these institutions are most under threat in western states.  I suggest that it is precisely when it fails in the West that its export becomes most important.  It is in the context of this identity crisis - wherein western "civil society" itself begins to break down - that proclamations about the necessity of civil society to post-socialist states grew louder (Hann 1996). As Diana Fuss (1991) puts it,  "the greater the lack on the inside, the greater the need for an outside to contain and defuse it, for without that outside, the lack on the inside would become all too visible." The post-socialist "other" was re-constituted as disadvantaged and in need of "development" and assistance, thus legitimating all kinds of interventions - and maintaining the identity of the "west."  It is in this light that we can read the new sets of oppositions that emerged (donor/recipient, expert/trainee). This explains why projects that ostensibly diminish the difference between East and West are perceived to cement the division still further.

Let us then return to characterize the NGO order. "Transition" in the former socialist states is conventionally understood to be part of a unidirectional process, a stage of politico-economic development, part of a movement from state socialism (or "communism") to a market-oriented democratic-type economy.  However, I see "transition" as a complex discursive field of ongoing transactions, explicitly, the re-drawing of boundaries between spheres (state/society, public/private, East/West).  There are multiple different perspectives on this redrawing and interpretations of the emergent configurations, depending on the social, cultural and economic capital actors bring to it.

"Transition" is not something that only happens in "East European" countries, "it is also a strategy being implemented by international development agencies, western financial institutions, foreign aid programs and humanitarian or other non-governmental organizations (NGOs)" (Sampson 1996: 121).  It is a flow of resources that is not unidirectional and which (despite the rhetoric) does not signify a particular pattern of development.  Its participants are international and there is no homogenized "western" or "eastern" participant - participants are representatives of the World Bank, the IMF, the Soros Foundation, government ministers, varieties of "experts" (human rights activists, feminists, evaluators, scholars) of different nationalities as well as teams of staff, interpreters, translators and "target populations."  It is important not to over-emphasize the role of NGOs.  After all, they are but one of the new channels that opened up in the post-socialist landscape and have spawned much less public contention in Russia than "business" and "mafia," for example.  It is also important to note that it is not just the "east" that gets recast and that the "west" is also transformed- "transition" stimulates a diversification of both "east" and "west" rather than simply reinforcing eastern lesser-ness.   To reduce the relationship to one of "emancipation" or "colonization" is to vastly simplify the relationship.

How then to employ the effects of NGOs in post-socialist society?  Their presence brings about shifts in discourse, they introduce new structures and a new symbolic order to the Russian scene, and bring new technologies and types of human service provision, which gives rise to the perception of new needs.  However, in this they are not unique; "transition" brings a whole new set of powerful operators to Russia - powerful in the sense that they have material and intellectual resources that will impact the "socio-cultural means of interpretation and communication" (Fraser 1990).  It makes no sense to see this development in terms of the imposition of a "foreign" order, or to interpret the NGO order as the depoliticization of the non-governmental sphere; instead, NGOs signify a new kind of politics with which we need to come to grips.  Different interest groups are created through the projects that characterize "transition," and compete with one another over resources. The concepts and agendas that NGOs bring are not stable or constant, but are subject to redrawing; "as they pass across boundaries of states, political economies and gender regimes they are decontextualized and recontextualized, fitted into other discourses which may change the meaning of arguments" (Gal 1996).  Hence, regardless of the intentions of actors engaged in the process, the outcomes will be uncertain, and there is no replicating the models upon which they were based, no matter how intense the desire to do so.  The more interesting questions to pose are, what are the interests behind the use of designations such as East/West, inside/outside, state/society?  What are the effects?

Denunciations of NGOs as "western" or "outsider" are often made by those who are baffled by the symbolic order of "transition," or who are left behind resource-wise.  Contemporary Russian society is increasingly polarized, and the ability to learn these new codes (what Sampson calls the "magic" of the transition) is an important component of survival.  Those who are in a position to master and manipulate these codes flourish, while those who do not see it as a form of black magic that originates "outside."  However, these denunciations can also be made as part of a political strategy, in the context of a savvy bid for resources.  It is in this light that we can re-consider the Replika article.

Csepeli et al represent the East/West relationship as one of domination/subordination.  However, at the same time, the article and the authors’ collaboration itself contradicts the rigidity that this model suggests.  Entitled "Colonization or Partnership?  Eastern Europe and Western Social Science," it is published in a special English language edition of a journal funded partly by the Soros Foundation.  As they write of the insurmountable differences facing "eastern" scholars, the authors betray their own familiarity with "western paradigms" and literature, and with the mores of both "sides."  In addition, it is co-authored by a "western" scholar.  This polemic represents a move by a savvy young generation of scholars who are at home in both worlds.  It certainly sells copy, especially to western scholars, some of whom (including this writer) are frequently only too ready to breast-beat themselves for having too much power, cultural capital, and to constitute themselves as colonizers.  It appeals to the desire for a "moralizing narrative," as opposed to the liberal democratic "heroic narrative" that celebrates the western role in the creation of a post-socialist non-governmental sphere (Todorov 1997). This amounts to a fetishization of the "outside," which is deemed to be a more radical space - in Diana Fuss’ (1991: 4) terms, it is "in" to be "out," there is an "avant-garde affinity for the liminal space of the marginal" amongst those whose location is secure, or central.
 

Textnotes

1. The term encompasses a wide range of organizations, including media organs, think tanks, human service organizations and pressure groups (environmental, women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, professional).

2. While at the end of the socialist regimes and in the early days of transition, East European intellectuals and scholars of Eastern Europe coincided in their enthusiasm for the idea of civil society, today however, many regard it with suspicion.

3. As noted by Aihwa Ong.

4. This kind of perception has been encouraged by a series of scandals that have broken around development projects, revealing that a large proportion of funds earmarked for development go to pay the salaries of western specialists (see for example Janine Wedel's editorial, Moscow Times, June 3 1997).

5. See for example Adam Michnik. Letters from Prison. (Berkeley, 1985)

6. In Russia, they emerged out of the dissident "kruzhki" (circles) of the 1960s-70s

7. Here I am arguing against those who have argued that there was no separation between public and private in
"totalitarian" regimes.

8. Sampson has noted that the actors involved in "transition" are of various nationalities and that development programs in Albania are as likely to be funded by Islamic agencies as by "western" ones, "The social life of projects", p.125.

9. Reinhard Kosselleck asserts that "the linguistic usage of politics, like that of everyday life, is permanently based on the fundamental figure of asymmetric opposition". In this case, "west" cannot be maintained without its counterceoncept in, "The Historical-Political Semantics of Asymmetric Counterconcepts," in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, MA, 1985).
 

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"SWORN VIRGINS": CASES OF SOCIALLY ACCEPTED GENDER CHANGE
Antonia Young
Colgate University and Bradford University, UK

 Abstract:  Well documented in the past, the phenomenon known as "sworn virgins" was thought to have been eradicated under the Communist regime.²  They are not always recognizable, for once their parents, or they themselves usually as children or adolescents, make the vow to become male they dress and behave accordingly, and as such are totally accepted and even revered within their communities.  The reasons for this female-to-male cross-gender role are various.   Early records refer predominantly to this as the only acceptable alternative to not marrying the man to whom a woman was betrothed (thereby saving the honor of all involved).  Until the l920s, up to 30% of the male population died violent deaths, putting a specially high value on male descendants.  Not infrequently the shortage of boys was redressed by designating a daughter henceforth to become a son.  This tradition has remained alive in the Northern Albanian Alps, where bloodfeuds are being revived.

The following paper results from both archival and empirical research over a period of several years.

I first became interested in the subject through my own travel and study in the area since the late l950s.   There is an extensive literature, much written by early foreign travelers to the area in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and up to the Second World War.³  Amongst these visitors were such well-known figures as Lord Byron and Edward Lear.   Almost all these writers referred to the Kanun, and many to "Albanian virgins".  In this century Albanian anthropologists and ethnographers have also written of the phenomenon.   I should particularly mention the English woman traveler and self-trained anthropologist, Mary Edith Durham who spent much of the first quarter of this century in all parts of the Balkans and even influenced British foreign policy in the area.   Durham switched allegiance from her early support of Serbia, to a lifelong concern with Albania.   She met several "sworn virgins", some of whom are featured in her book High Albania.⁴  On a visit to Albania in the mid-l930s, it was several days before the travel writer, Bernard Newman discovered that his guide was a woman.⁵  More recently, the well-known Canadian novelist, Alice Munro has informed the world of the traditional phenomen through her short story "The Albanian Virgin".⁶

Although records from the past l50 years have proved the existence of "sworn virgins" in areas of Montenegro and Kosova adjoining Northern Albania, the present study has concentrated primarily in Northern Albania.

Placing the phenomenon historically

It is in this northern mountainous area that people still live by the Kanun or Laws of Lek Dukagjin.   These oral laws were first written down early this century (and translated into Italian in l94l, into English in l989 and into Russian in l994).   They contain l263 articles concerned with rural life, including the church, the family, property, land, work, honor and marriage.   The Kanun also gives a detailed description of the rigidly gendered division of labor:

Traditionally men's work includes: all heavy manual work (chopping wood, sything, mowing, harvesting, protecting animals and property);  talking to visitors, drinking and smoking with visitors, avenging family honor.

Women's tasks include:  bearing and rearing children;  cooking and cleaning house;  serving men and guests (including washing their feet);  carrying water and firewood;  seeing to dairy production and taking it to market;  storing and processing food;  processing and weaving wool;  washing and mending clothes;  manufacturing garments for the family, for trousseaux and for sale;  embroidering garments and linen.   Additionally they must do men's work at times of feuds or particular harvests, and they may also be seen spinning or knitting at the same time as performing several of the above tasks.

Traditional rural society in Northern Albania

Anthropolgically this is a strictly patriarchal, patrilocal, patrilineal society where the social pressure of the fis (tribe) asserts a major influence.   Tradition determines the need for household heads (=men, formerly who carried guns).  The importance of "honor" is also a determinant of this need for men.

Bloodfeuds are highly ritualized in accordance with the Kanun, so that single killings are not seen as murder, but as the avenger's greatest dignity in saving the honor of his family - even when he knows it will result shortly in his own or his close kin's death.

Reasons for the shortage of men

Violent deaths resulting from the return of bloodfeuds after the fall of Communism (l99l), along with the migration of young males in search of work elsewhere have combined to cause the recurrence of a shortage of men.

The need for responsible men

The role of household head is a position of greater prestigeeven than that of an ordinary man.   He is needed to inherit property (although women do now have this right according the state laws, few would dare to demand that right in opposition to the Kanun);⁷   to represent their household at village meetings;  to control the family;  to manage, maintain and protect the property and any sales or purchases;  to make decisions for the whole of their household (which traditionally had 60-l00 members;  a few such families still exist although l5-20 now is more usual), especially concerning family honor, marriages, education and/or occupation.

Man's prestige - woman's loss of identity

Article XXIX of the Kanun states:
a woman is known as a sack made to endure as long as she lives in her husband's house.   Her parents do not interfere in her affairs, but they bear the responsibility for her and must answer for anything dishonorable that she does.

The ritual sobbing of a bride at leaving her parents' home signifies her own loss of identity.   Traditionally the bride's parents supply a bullet to the new bridegroom, giving him the encouragement to shoot his new wife should she betray him in one of two ways.⁸

As a nuse (new bride), (the name by which she will now be known until another son marries) she will become the most subordinate (beautifyl/dutiful) person in her husband's family's home and be expected to be up first in the morning and to serve all their needs continuously all day long.⁹  She should not be seen communicating in any way with her husband;  if it is essential to speak to him, she should do so in whispers.¹⁰  She has become an acquisition of the family.  Only by producing a son, will a nuse gain status, however, although her son is considered to belong to the family, she remains an outsider.  Guiseppe Valentini¹¹  spoke to a man who believed there was no way to be allowed into Heaven without a son, essential for life after death.

Rapid social change

Now in some areas where there is not even running water, there is a proliferation of TV - (thanks to Enver Hoxha's many 5-year plans bringing electricity to those remote areas).   However, there is much less impact on Northern Albania than other parts of the country, due to very poor infrastructure, leaving remote areas still very little affected (MTV looks like fairy tales from another planet).  But changes are certainly taking place.

The confusion over land distribution has not been uniformly resolved. Varying criteria have been applied.  Co-operatives were looted and vandalized.  Governent decree granted everyone a portion of land, but was unable to arrange the apportionment.  Some demanded the land they had worked for 50 years, some demanded the land which had been taken from their family during the 50 years.   Many have been left landless and forced to migrate.   With these difficulties over land distribution and irrigation rights, disputes are erupting and bloodfeuds are re-emerging, said to be involving about 60,000 people in about 2,000 feuds,¹² 5,000 killings in the last five years.¹³

Sworn virgins

There are many different terms used to refer to these women who fill the place for which there is no man, although none of the (approximately fifteen), I have met, seemed aware of any special term, preferring to think of themselves simply as men.

Terms

Vaze e betuar (most common in present-day) where the decision is made in childhood or even at birth by parents lacking sons.
Mashkull  (present-day, around Shkodra)

Later decision: Virgjineshe (committed to virginity), Virgjereshe (Shyrock, l988), verginesa (Gremaux, l989 - he also uses "Balkan virgin"), virgjin (Gjergi, l979), verghinesha (Cozzi, l9l2), "Albanian virgin" (Durham, l909), "sworn virgin", "avowed virgin" (US/UK anthropologists), muskobani, muskobanj, ostajnica (Serbian: man-woman, manlike, she who stays), tombelija, basa, harambasa (Montenegrin), tobelija (Bosnian: bound by a vow), zavjetovana djevojka (Croatian), sadik (Stahl, Turkish moslem: honest, just)

Rene Gremaux has identified a variant: semi-religious women who wore black, behaved as nuns, but lived in parental homes (l9l5-l9l2) and were known as murgesha or morga.

The anthropologist, Mildred Dickemann, has noted that they are: "transgendered individuals who have become social men leading masculine lives".¹⁴  Rene Gremaux comments that:

In Balkan virgins we see an inherent ambiguity and ambivalence substantially reduced by their classifactions as "social men", as well as by prescriptions and restrictions concerning their sexual behaviour.¹⁵

Once the decision is made, often accompanied by a vow of chastity, social pressures ensure that the change is not reversed.  The advantages of "sworn virgin" status are that most remain heads of their own family/kin.   It is usually a role they have taken from birth or early childhood.   A woman's alternative as a "sworn virgin" allows her to carry on the name and inheritance "to prevent the house, the hearth and the candle from being extinguished" (it may then go to nephews in the next generation).  "Sworn virgins" adapt their own speech and mannerisms such that many would not tell their true sexual identity.  Others relate to them as men,  usually using male pronouns either in addressing them or in speaking of them.

The anthropologiest Andrew Shryock tells us: the essential character of the "Albanian virgin" was her asexuality, her unwillingness to marry ... she was culturally "male".¹⁶

The film director, Srdjan Karanavic, who made the film Virdzina¹⁷  says "a sworn virgin is not a man in terms of sexuality, but in terms of social power".  What is of concern is the importance of carrying on the name and inheritance.

Case histories

Of the "sworn virgins" whom I have interviewed, I discuss three below.

Pashke

Orphaned at a year old, Pashke now lives with her invalid uncle in a remote mountain village where she was brought up by her grandmother and this uncle.  Shortly after her grnadmother's death when Pashke was eighteen, her uncle was taken to hospital in Shkoder, 50 miles away.   The petite Pashke made the journey twice each month for seven months to visit her uncle in hospital, walking most of the mountainous way.

Although Pashke had never met a "sworn virgin", she knew of her traditional right according to the Kanun laws under whose influence her people have lived for centuries.   In order to make the long journeys, Paskhe made the decision to forsake life as a woman: "a girl alone could not undertake such journeys" she said simply, and "to dress as a man earns the respect due to a man".

Pashke had been a Commune worker under Communism.   on his return from hospital, her uncle could only respond with gratitude to his niece who now works on their tiny smallholding.   Her uncle appreciates her as a son; her neighbors relate to her as a man.   She admits to being lonely at times.   Social outings are few in the village, but Pashke smokes and drinks with the men at weddings, funerals and occasional village meetings.

Lule

Lule showed me photographs of herself as a young man: driving tractors and trucks - her occupation since the age of fourteen - and attending weddings in smart masculine attire.   It was particularly her firm, assertive stance that stood out for me, as an observer well accustomed to seeing women in trousers.   This trait seemed especially exaggerated alongside the feminine attire and comparatively reticent behavior of the village women - to all around, Lule is certainly seen as a man.

Lule was the tenth child in a family of eleven.  After seven daughters, her mother gave birth to twin boys, one of whom died shortly after.  Pjeter, the surviving twin, was thoroughly spoiled and would not accept his responsibilities as the only son in a family with nine daughters.   Lule had always behaved as a boy as long as she can remember.  Her older sister, Drane, who never married due to ill health, says "we tried to dress Lule in skirts, but she always refused.  And we made such a fuss of Pjeter when he was little he became incapable of doing anything for himself".  Lule always knew she didn't want to marry:  "I used to run away when I was a child if I heard that anyone was coming to try to arrange my marriage".  It became increasingly obvious that Pjeter was incompetent to become the head of the household and representative at village meetings "and in any case he had always accepted me as an older brother", said Lule.  On the death of their parents only a year after Pjeter married, Lule naturally took the household leadership.  Now she runs a small business with her own welding machine.  She never regretted her choice:  "I wouldn't have it otherwise ... here I am in control, I have a large family.   We have enough land for us all to live from when it is properly managed, I enjoy taking charge of going to market and trading our produce for household necessities.  Work is the most importannt thing in m life, though i do miss the company of my workmates from the days when I was a tractor driver".  Pjeter's wife confirmed the need for Lule as head of a household of ten:  "I did find the situation odd when I was first married" she admitted "but I soon got used to it, and now Lule is like a brother to me".  Pjeter does little to help in the family, who all look to Lule for both outside income and family decision-making.  Lule does all the chopping, planting and mowing to produce the animal feed they sell.  There are now six children in the household - some of them have asked why they call Lule "aunt" when she's a man.

Dilor

In another small village, outside Bajram Curri, the 84-7ear-old Dilor presided over the Bujari household.  When I met her in l994, her nephew Gjoke told me "He still commands extraordinary respect from all around, though no longer able to take the active role he fulfilled during most of his life".

At the age of six, while walking in the woods, Dile met a herbal doctor from whom she learnt the properties of the local plants.  She applied herbal remedies ever after, and doctors from the local hospital came to seek her advice.  By the age of eight, with two sisters and no brothers, Dile added the neuter ending to her name (forming Dilor) and made the decision to become a boy, never to marry, but to gain the advantages of a man's life.  She called a meeting of all her relatives, and despite their lack of enthusiasm concerning her choice, Dilor stood by it and soon earned respect both of her family and of all their neighbors.  On the death of her mother, Dilor's father remarried and had a son, Nikoll, but this did not affect Dilor's decision.  Later when their parents died, Dilor and Nikoll built their own house.  Nikoll married, his son also married, and although the household now consisted of seven, Dilor was still the representative at village meetings.  During the Communist era this family was one of the last to relinquish their land, which was eventually taken by force.  Dilor, a devout Catholic, often received police visits on this account, but held her own in these potential confrontations:  "I knew how to talk to these men, sometimes I bribed them;  I made sure my family gave them traditional hospitality but in the end ti was officials from further afield who implemented confiscation of our land".   Nikoll recalls:  "they didn't dare arrest Dilor, he was held in such high regard by the whole village".

She was frequently asked to represent the village as "headman" in the dasmor (traditional custom of fetching a bride to her wedding), for which Dilor would wear a xhamadan (embroadered ceremonial marriage waistcoat worn by men on
these occasions).

Gjoke's wife found it strange when she first married into the household, but acquiesced:  "it's my responsibility to work for Dilor, even if she is at times whimsical".  Many comment on her use of strong swear words, deemed appropriate only for men.  Dilor (whose male attire was always of traditional style, including "skull cap") frequently walked considerable
distances to visit people in surrounding areas.

Dilor told a story of a man who once challenged what might be uncovered below her belt:  "I pointed my gun at him and threatened to kill him;  he finished up pleading for his life!"  She used to enjoy amusing her friends by making advances towards outsider girls who didn't know her true sex but revealed the truth as they became uneasy at her advances.  Her greatest regret is that:  "the Communists took away my horse and my gun".

Clarification should be made that the "sworn virgin" phenomenon is not to be confused with homosexuality.   I never met a "sworn virgin" who took any partner (either male or female).   However, in Serbia, Rene Gremaux found reports of very occasional cases.

It was only in l995 that the law was repealed which formerly punished even those with a homosexual tendency with a prison sentence of up to ten years (for men only - it has not been imagined that women could have such a tendency).   Lesbianism is barely discussed or understood even in Albania's capital.  On pursuing the topic I found incomprehension and a reminder that the laws of the kanun are strictly monitored.

A "sworn virgin" has sworn herself to celibacy and is under extreme pressure to conform.  This is consistent with the traditional laws (the Kanun).  Whataker writes of the northern Albanians that they:
seem to be highly restrained in the overt expression of sexual emotion ... indeed chastity provides one of the key concepts in the chain of rights which made up the ideal of family honor, on which the bloodfeud rested.¹⁸

As a very rough estimation of present numbers of "sworn virgins", based purely on subjective observation, I would make a guess of up to one hundred in existence - I have not yet met any child who is being brought up to be the next generation's "sworn virgin".  The youngest I met was 22 when I first met her and seemed quite disoriented, living in a small town; however, on meeting her a year later she had fully accepted her role (the youngest of 3 daughters, training to follow in her father's footsteps, she had already spent a year living in the men's police dormitory in Tirana).

My prediction is that due to rapid social changes, this traditional gender role change will probably die out within a generation or two.
 

Textnotes

Paper delivered to the XVIII Seminar on Albanian language, literature and culture, Tirana, Albania 19 August -1st September, 1996 under the title "The phenomenon of Sworn Virgins".

2. Even Albania's eminent anthropologist, Andromaqi Gjergji, writing in 1963 about "virgjina", described the phenomenon as a tradition no longer in existence: "Gjurme te matriarkatit ne disa doke te dikurshme te jetes familjare", Buletini i Universiteti Shteteror te Tiranes (Shkencat Shoqerore), no. 2, 1963, pp. 284-92.

3. See Shpetim Mema: Albanica I, Albanica II, Tirana: Biblioteka Kombetare, Sektori i Albanologjise, 1987; J. Allcock and A. Young (eds.): Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: women travellers in the Balkans, Bradford University Press, 1991; Valentina Duka: "Albania as viewed by English travellers of the nineteenth century" in Bradford Studies on South Eastern Europe, Occasional paper no. 2, University of Bradford, Bradford.

4. First published by Edward Arnold, London, 1900; republished by Virago Press, London, 1985; Bacon Press, Boston, 1987.

5. Albanian Back-door, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1936.

6. First published in the New Yorker, 27 June-4 July, 1994; also in her book of short stories, Open Secrets, Chatto, 1994.

7. Article XX:  "The Albanian woman does not inherit anything from her parents-neither possessions nor house; the Kanun considers a woman as a superfluity in the household"; and Article XXXVI.88:  "The Kanun recognizes the son as an heir, but not the daughter".

8. Article XXI of the Kanun:  "the parents of his...wife...give him (the groom) a cartridge" as protection for "two acts (for which) a woman may be shot in the back...a) for adultery; b) for betrayal of hospitality" (to any guest).

9. Rose Wilder Lane: "When the bride arrives at her husband's house she takes a humble place in the corner, standing, her hands folded on her breast, her eyes downcast, and for three days and nights she is required to remain in that position, without lifting her eyes, without moving, and without eating or drinking. On the second day...she goes about the household, obeying the commands of the elders, always standing until they tell her to it, and for six months, not speaking unless they address her", Peaks of Shala, Harper, New York, 1993, p. 25.
    Berit Backer: "The new bride does not move freely among the other women in the new village, until years later. As a young bride (nnuse), a stage that lasts for some three to five years, she is on constant trial. She cannot take many liberties and has to be subservient and constantly at the beck and call of the rest of the household. She is permanently performing in order to win the approval of her new family, "Behiind stone walls", Ph.D dissertation, Oslo, 1979, p. 147.

10. Francois-Charles-Hugues-Laurent Pouqueville, Travels through the Morea, Albania and several other parts of the Ottoman Empire, London, Richard Philips, 1806.

11. Quoted by Paul H. Stahl in Household, village and village confederation in southeastern Europe, New York: East European Monographs, 1986, p. 107.

12. Cited in the Albanian parliament (1995).

13. Branko Jolis, "Honour killing makes a comeback", Buardian, 14 Aug. 1996, translated from Delo, a Slovenian weekly.

14. Chapter in Bullough Ver, Bullough and Bonnue, 1997.

15. "Woman becomes a man in the Balkans", in Gilbert Herdt, ed. Third Sex, Third Gender, New York, Zone Books, 1994.

16. Autonomy, Entanglement, and the feud: prestige structures and gender values in highland Albania", Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 1, January 1988.

17. 1991. This was the last official Yugosllav film to be made as a co-production between Croatian, Servian and French companies. The Story was based on one which the Director read in a newspaper concerning a woman in 1944. Karanovic believed this to be the last existing case.

18. Ian Whitaker, "A sack for carrying things: the traditional role of women in northern Albanian society" in Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 54, 1981.
 

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Zaimi, Nexhmie
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PROSPECTS FOR TRANSNATIONAL CIVIL SOCIETY FOLLOWING THE ARRIVAL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION IN A CONTESTED BORDERLAND
Robert Gary Minnich
University of Bergen

 In her original proposal for this session Jill Dubisch asks whether "the Europe of the future [will] be one of greater emphasis on regionalism and upon local cultures as a form of resistance to the hegemonic and homogenizing forces of the European Union." While it seems that regional movements will significantly mark Europe's future I do not see them essentially as a form of resistance. To the contrary, I view regionalism as the consequence of positive political strategies which in terms of locally based configurations of common interest both support and exploit institutions promoting European unification.

In the wake of fundamentally new constellations of political and economic power regional movements dismantle the authority and hegemony of European nation-states. And actors positioned at both the center and periphery of these new power structures are instrumental in this process where the nation-state is no longer a gate keeper controlling access to the international arena. The European Union and European Parliament are but two prominent manifestations of this new order, the complexity of which is exemplified by the aspiration of virtually all of Europe's new nation-states to membership in regional, pan-European and global institutions which are seen as sources of economic, political and military stability and security (e.g., CEFTA, EU, OSSE, NATO, IMF, OECD, WTO, UN, etc.). At the time of their recognition, earlier this decade, it was suggested that many of these diminutive states were not viable. But their absolute size is not really an issue since from the very beginning their existence has been contingent upon membership in institutions guaranteeing participation in global economic and political systems. These new states thereby relinquished, along with their established European counterparts, the right to exclusively define the terms of citizenship for their subjects, a situation which underlines potential for the formation of transnational civil society.

In this paper I wander between the macro-perspectives of the state and inter-state relations and the arena of "local level politics" (Swartz 1969). I discuss citizens and politicians, marginalized by the institutions and structures of existing nation-states, who are helping establish across state borders the terms of a new European political order. From the vantage point of these marginal actors the imagined threats of hegemony and homogenization at the hands of Brussels Eurocrats or Strasbourg parliamentarians find little credibility.

The following discussion of the integration, partition and reintegration of a European region is conceived in terms of civil society. In its most fundamental sense the Western idea of civil society is a discourse about social order (Tester 1992). The modern content and current revival of the term have arisen at historical junctures when political thinkers and actors have been exercised by disruptions in the established social order (cf. Hann 1996, Seligman 1992). Social movements promoting new forms of association in the face of jointly perceived inequities can be seen according to Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato (1994: 16ff) "as a new terrain of democratization" inherent to civil society. I suggest that regionalism, as it is presented below, is representative of such movements; it is a context for institutionalizing new forms of association which mediate local life worlds with the political and economic institutions upon which they are contingent (ibid.).

My interest in this paper is to identify with reference to life worlds anchored in a specific locality new patterns of association and mobilization in a changing European social order. I ask if these new patterns represent an evolving form of civil society which transcends the nation-state in the quest to establish a democratic social order. In other words, I consider European regionalism as a movement toward new terms of citizenship where the nation-state is no longer the pre-eminent source of authority and guarantees. Indeed, it may be more appropriate to frame this transformation of citizenship in terms of human rights increasingly contested and enforced in a global system rather than in the confines of the nation-state (Turner 1993).

The understanding of regionalism advanced here is contingent upon the setting in which I have studied it, namely, a contested borderland in the southeastern Alps which encompasses the intersection of the Austrian, Italian and Slovene state frontiers. In the short course of eight decades this former multi-ethnic western periphery of the Dual Monarchy was partitioned by modern nation-states, has been subjected to state sponsored ethnic nationalism and cleansing and was divided by the Iron Curtain. But in the wake of Slovenia's 1991 secession from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Three Border Region (hereafter: TBR) faces the prospect of re-integration on terms which invite one to reconsider conditions generated for civil society during the waning decades of Habsburg rule. Not infrequently these days local public gatherings and political initiatives within the TBR are colored by an explicit nostalgia for the multi-ethnic social order of late Habsburg society regardless of whether these events take place on Austrian, Italian or Slovene territory or acknowledge the fundamentally new constellation of power in today's Europe.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. I begin with an account of the institutionalization of modern civil society in the increasingly democratic order of late Habsburg society. I describe the early formation of local voluntary organizations and political institutions in light of an expanding and increasingly standardized "public sphere" (Offentlichkeit)  orchestrated by the state (Habermas 1989). The fate of these local civil institutions under totalitarian rule during the intervening period of inter-state partition is then outlined. This provides background necessary for evaluating the latent potential of persisting local political cultures as a basis for re-establishing during the present decade what for this region must be acknowledged as a transnational (i.e., inter-state and inter-ethnic) form of civil society. I conclude by considering ways in which contemporary civil society institutions in the TBR form the basis for a common political culture and call forth new perspectives within political sociology for theorizing on citizenship and human rights.

Institutionalizing civil society in the periphery of a multi-ethnic empire

The modern idea of civil society presupposes a tension within Western society between the private and public domains, between realization of individual self-interest and attainment of the collective good (cf. Keane 1988). By citing above Cohen and Arato's belief in the democratic potential of civil society to resolve these tensions I adopted a normative understanding of the term as an "ethical ideal of the social order" (Seligman 1992: x). My objective below is more purely analytical; it focuses upon the institutionalization of modern civil society in the Dual Monarchy, a process which became pervasive and irreversible upon the abolition of feudal bondage in 1848. During the remaining decades of Habsburg rule the Kaiser's subjects were incrementally empowered as legal persons. Under the auspices of an increasingly effective constitutional authority in Vienna it became possible to participate as an autonomous moral agent in a public domain secured by the state, a tenet of the modern liberal variant of civil society (Keane 1988). Former personal subjects of local nobility became citizens through extension and standardization of the civil rights to hold property, enter into contracts, establish voluntary organizations and the political rights to vote for public officials and stand for public office (cf. T.H. Marschall 1964). TBR residents became participants in a public sphere facilitated by the "Empire of Bureaucrats" (Johnston 1983).

Pre-modern forms of civil society are commonly associated with the burgher class and its incorporation through civil code as free citizens of towns and trade centers. Such pockets of nascent civil society were established in the TBR. But the majority of its population was incorporated in villages which are representative of what Robert K. Burns (1963) has called "The Circum-Alpine Culture Area". Here one can also document the early formation of representational forms of political association (self-governing village based corporations) developed in relative isolation from more direct forms of feudal subjugation confined to the region's very few manorial estates. Within the TBR we thus detect a historical approximation in village society of what Burns terms "self-governing republics-in-miniature" (ibid., p. 148) which have managed common lands, regulated inheritance, promoted local welfare and otherwise organized the public sphere of village society. Thus, the post 1848 intervention of central government in local polities accommodated established traditions of democratic association, it standardized existing political cultures within pervasive structures of an imperial state.

Following extension of the right of association in 1867 the pre-existing civil institutions in TBR villages were supplemented by a plethora of voluntary organizations which organized commercial affairs (e.g., savings associations and agricultural cooperatives), promoted social welfare (e.g., poor houses, voluntary fire-brigades), and furthered public enlightenment (e.g., schools, school boards, newspapers, weeklies, libraries, reading circles) (Moritsch and Baumgartner 1992). A pre-existing infrastructure for participation in the civil affairs of local communities was expanded and standardized throughout the TBR.

These locally based institutions readily became vehicles for consolidating political factions seeking position in a nascent parliamentary system at all levels of government (ibid.). Ideological opposition between liberalism and conservatism propagated by burgeoning secular and clerical elites throughout the Habsburg lands (Kann 1974: 346ff) increasingly pervaded the public domain of local communities. (The essentially agrarian economy of the TBR confined the advance of Socialism during this formative stage of Austrian parliamentarianism to the region’s few industrial and mining centers with a nominal proletariat.) The Catholic Church competed with liberal elites in the promotion of village level welfare and cultural institutions as a base to build support for their respective political factions. By the turn of the century when the franchise was extended to the Monarchy’s adult male population village polities became the setting for party politics and factional strife.

In the Slovene and German speaking villages and towns of the TBR this extension of the public domain to a state-wide political arena was accompanied by the politicization of ethnic difference based upon linguistic identity. A simplified model of a complex local political landscape suggests that the Catholic Church in its quest to conserve the Old Order elicited support from the region's newly enfranchised Slovene speaking rural population, while the liberal agenda was promoted by a largely German speaking bourgeoisie. The aspiration of increasingly influential ethnic elites to promote the self-determination of their respective peoples readily became an important factor in mobilization around the ideological positions outlined above (Pleterski 1996). Within the three provinces of which the TBR was a part (Carinthia, Carniola and the Coastal Province) liberal and clerical conservative factions enlisted ethnic support in their quest to dominate these provincial governments.

The co-optation of  civil society by totalitarian regimes and the disruption of a local social order

Through the state's institutionalization and standardization of the public sphere in the TBR the stage was set for effectively implementing ethnically defined terms of citizenship under the regimes which succeeded the Habsburg Vielvölkerstaat  (multi-ethnic state). The TBR was partitioned by Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia following the most devastating war in the region's history. TBR residents became the citizens of three nation-states which proceeded to fortify their common borders and propagate images of "hostile neighbors" building upon collective memories of the Great War conducted between the Austrian and Italian monarchies along the SoËa Front.

With the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s the southern and western segments of the TBR with a predominantly Slovene speaking population (i.e., the western third of Carniola and the Coastal Province) were subjected to state policy which systematically administered citizenship rights on the basis of ethnic ascription. Local traditions of self-government and participation in civic institutions were severely disrupted by the deportation, exile and imprisonment of local elites. Leadership and control of local civic and political institutions were co-opted by a largely monolingual cadre of Italian officials and immigrants recruited to the region by various economic incentives.

Following Anschluss with the Third Reich in 1938 the northern segment of the TCR (Carinthia) was subjected to a similar form of administration for which a German nationalist elite could be recruited locally. Slovene leaders and intellectuals suffered fates similar to their compatriots in Fascist Italy. And in an effort to ethnically homogenize their respective dominions, Hitler and Mussolini contracted with one another the infamous Option  of 1939 which coerced German speakers of Val Canale and Alto Adige to opt for repatriation in the German Reich. The democratic social order of plurilingual ("multi-ethnic") communities founded upon local traditions of self-government was destroyed through the imposition of ethnic loyalty as a qualification for participation as an equal in the public sphere. A situation was created in advance of an eminent war which is reminiscent of conditions in Bosnia following the war of this decade and imposition of the Dayton Accords.

In Bosnia the immediate and pervasive experience of war conducted in the name of ethnic difference has transformed local life worlds and traumatized individual lives such that reconstitution of the original multi-ethnic social order of Bosnia's villages and towns on the basis of ethnically neutral civil institutions seems unlikely. To what extent was this also the case in the TBR following World War II ?

Re-forming TBR civil society in the wake of war

Much of the territory of the TBR was liberated by a Communist led partisan army which was recruited locally from the ranks of a resistance movement dedicated to the overthrow of totalitarian regimes noted above. The TBR experienced pervasive demographic changes, reminiscent of contemporary Bosnia, as a result of Fascist and Nazi campaigns to promote ethnic homogeneity in their respective segments of the TBR. The German minority of Val Canale (which was to remain within Italy) was greatly reduced through the aforementioned Option while the Slovene minority remained in place but subordinated to a monolingual Italian speaking majority. And multitudes of Italians fled the Julian Province of Imperial Italy as it was reclaimed by Yugoslavia through the advance of the Partisan Army at the conclusion of the war. Autochthonous Slovene speaking communities have thus persisted in Carinthia (Austria) and Val Canale (Italy) under the numerically and politically dominant presence of the respective German and Italian majorities while the Italian population of Yugoslav part of the region was very nearly depleted following the war.

The War of Liberation set the stage for inter-state relations and redefining the terms of citizenship in the TBR following World War II. And the Cold War divide came to prevail over ethnic difference in the conduct of inter-state relations. The borderland marked by the Iron Curtain between Yugoslavia and Austria - Italy was initially supervised by the Allies, reminiscent of the situation in Bosnia today. However, the final adjustment of TBR borders (especially between Yugoslavia and Italy) and the reintegration of Austria as an independent state in the international community were contingent upon treaties which, among other things, formally secured the rights of ethnic minorities on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In contrast to the Dayton Accords these treaties have been subsequently supplemented and implemented without the direct intervention of foreign powers. And as we shall see implementation remains a pressing issue in the public sphere and fora of democratic association within each of the neighboring countries and between them.

The post-war period has been marked in the TBR by the increasing transfer of sovereignty from local states to international organizations such as the Common Market and European Parliament. In the 1960s the Iron Curtain was radically dismantled as an obstacle to intra-regional commerce and freedom of movement when Yugoslavia initiated an economic policy based upon the employment of Yugoslav workers in Western and Northern Europe. The Yugoslav state became increasingly subject to the conditions of bilateral and international agreements promoting its integration in global economic institutions. The terms of citizenship and participation in the public sphere throughout the TBR became increasingly contingent upon common membership in the same inter-state organizations and agreements.

The opening of local borders also facilitated the re-union of families dispersed by war and exile; it revitalized informal and formal contacts among village institutions and provincial governments which were significant for the eventual re-integration of the Slovene Republic in the western European sphere of political and commercial intercourse discussed below.

In comparison with the highly centralized regimes of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the progressive decentralization of government in Communist Yugoslavia facilitated the revival of local civic institutions in some areas of public life, particularly in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia. The former dominant role of the church in the public sphere of village and town life was, however, rigidly constrained and the formation of political factions was prohibited. Nonetheless, nominal local control of cultural, educational and welfare institutions was reinstated. The praxis of voluntary association and free exchange of information in the public sphere of local society was revived under the constraints outlined above.

By turning to the arena of minority politics within Austria, Italy and Yugoslavia during the Cold War it is possible to detect new patterns of political mobilization and association which exploited supra-state institutions within Europe. The formal guarantee of minority rights obtained in the treaties described above enabled minority elites in the TBR to engage democratic procedures in their quest to implement rights which local nationalist groups have consistently opposed in the borderlands of both Italy and Austria. And, as we know from the post-war period in the South Tyrol, Carinthia and Friuli-Giulia-Venezia the occurrence of ethnically inspired violence has been largely curtailed by state authority.

Minority politicians and cultural elites in Austria and Italy have been innovative in forming political alliances with other minorities throughout Europe and with institutions such as the European Parliament. As a result they have effectively countered ethnic nationalist policy tolerated within the framework of nation-states and particularly within borderland provinces which are home to exile communities in NE Italy (Ballinger 1996) and unreformed Nazis in Carinthia who comprise the vocal right wing fringe.

Already in the 1950s Socialist Slovenia's political leaders, many of whom were optimally positioned in the federal government and diplomatic corps of the Belgrade regime, began to promote contact with and improve the situation of the Slovene minorities in Austria and Italy. They were instrumental in initiating a series of laws and institutions within Communist Yugoslavia which provided a model for implementing minority rights which has been emulated elsewhere in Europe. And this "enlightened" domestic policy was systematically exploited in the quest to attain within the international arena sanctions against provincially inspired assimilatory policies directed toward indigenous Slovene speaking communities in Carinthia and Friuli-Venezia-Giulia.

These political initiatives within the domain of provincial politics have come to inform local understandings of one's overall integration within greater Europe. On the basis of my contact with Slovene speakers in Austria and Italy who are not professionally engaged in minority organizations it is apparent that the above patterns of inter-state mobilization around minority rights issues have come to shape local understandings of the potential range of democratic association far beyond the confines of the classic nation-state. And one encounters considerable individual versatility in evaluating and exploiting various subsidies and information networks maintained by the EU. In rural TBR communities local councils are increasingly aware of the potential of association with organizations and counter-part groups located outside their respective nation-state. In recent years the movement for attaining sister-cities in other countries has blossomed. Since tourism is an increasingly important source of income in the TBR local municipal councils have formulated with EU support marketing strategies which stress both the diversity and integrity of the region as a cultural region. Local and regional cultural traditions are being objectified and mobilized in pan-European marketing strategies of the region as a tourist attraction under the slogan "Eurpaeus sine finibus" (European without boundaries).

Slovenia's independence  and the arrival of the EU in the TBR

Ironically, initiatives of provincial and state leaders to promote political and economic cooperation across state-frontiers erodes the sovereignty of the state institutions which empower them. And in the TBR it is as much political initiative from elected and appointed leaders as the civil and commercial undertakings of local citizens that have generated a broader public sphere in which to establish new terms of citizenship, new patterns of association.

Slovenia's secession from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1991 can be seen as the culmination of numerous government sponsored initiatives taken in Belgrade and Ljubljana which sought increased political and economic integration with Western Europe. Following the constitutional decentralization of Yugoslavia in 1974, Slovenia's socialist leadership readily acknowledged the potential of regional movements as a vehicle to subordinate nation-states (in this case their mother state, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) to a pan-European political and economic order.

In 1978 the elected leaders of the Austrian Bundesländer of Carinthia and Styria, the Socialist Republic of Slovenia and the Italian Region of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia established a Working Group dedicated to promoting the idea of the Alpe-Adria Region, a replication of the southwest corner of the former Dual Monarchy. The TBR is the axis around which the Alpe-Adria Region is formed. It is both the historical zone of language contact at the heart of the region and integrates it as an important hub of communication. The Alpe-Adria idea immediately attracted the attention of adjacent regional polities (provincial governments) which are clearly peripheral to their own nation-states. As a result, the Alpe-Adria movement was joined by Bavaria in the north, Istria in the South, the South Tyrol in the West and western parts of Hungary (Gyor) in the East. Various cultural and commercial activities conceived with reference to the region have since taken place. The Alpe Adria Working Group has been attractive not only for European Union initiatives promoting regional integration. It has helped define new terms for political association and mobilization. (cf. Moritsch 1996, KlemenËiË 1994)

In the 1980s the mayors of local towns (Arnoldstein, Kranjska gora and Tarvisio) jointly proposed the TBR as the host for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games. More recently support for this candidacy has been revived on a higher rung of the regional political ladder. In June 1996 the heads of the provincial governments of Friuli-Venezia-Giulia, Carinthia and the prime minister of Slovenia discussed a renewed joint application for the 2006 Olympic Winter Games. In recent years initiatives such as the foregoing have successfully elicited financial support from EU programs created to promote regional integration and self-determination within the European Union — an explicit strategy for diminishing the prominence of the nation-state as the primary actor in the movement for European unification.

Austria’s membership in the EU in 1995 and Slovenia's 1996 association with the same as a candidate for full membership trail intra-regional political initiatives. The arrival of the EU in the TBR was not startling news but rather the fulfillment of local expectations and political agendas.

The above politically guided intra-regional agenda has been facilitated during the past decade by increased contact initiated directly between locally based voluntary organizations such as parish churches, local choral societies, sport clubs, alpine tourist associations, volunteer fire brigades, etc. Ironically, many of the same organizations which during the waning decades of Habsburg society were instruments for inculcating ethnic-nationalist confrontation are today transcending ethnic parochialism by initiating cooperation conceived to promote mutual commercial, cultural and welfare interests of the "borderland region." They are re-establishing a common "trans-ethnic" civil society.

Slovenia's adoption of parliamentary democracy and a constitution written to conform with democratic standards established in the European Parliament has been significant for the revitalization of common civil and political institutions in the villages and towns of the TBR. The classic array of political factions established in late Habsburg society — liberal, conservative, social democratic — have re-entered local level politics throughout the region. A common political / ideological landscape has been re-established which embellishes and legitimates a political culture which is now largely uniform throughout the TBR.

While superficially this suggests no more than re-integration of a former Alpine cross-roads, a closer look at the patterns of association and types of social movements which today are manifest in the local polities of the TBR indicate that what is now manifestly a "trans-ethnic" civil society is also becoming a "trans-state" civil society.

Prospects for transnational civil society - the case of the Three Border Region

Re-integration of the TBR has opened for new forms of political association based on the universalization of citizenship rights. But along with Bryan Turner (1993) I question whether this qualification of citizenship is appropriate, since citizenship is so strongly identified with the nation-state. As he notes: "In Europe, citizens increasingly appeal to supranational entities (the European Court of the European Parliament) to satisfy or achieve their (national) citizenship" (ibid.: 178). If sociology is, as Turner notes, the study of the transformation of social order then it should be possible to conceptualize "human rights solidarity as a historical stage beyond citizenship solidarity." (ibid.) I suggest that the pursuit of minority rights within the TBR under the umbrella of "European standards" evokes the greater domain of moral solidarity alluded to here. But I am aware that in other contexts where the Western idea of citizenship is less well founded in local political practice the "human rights movement" can be viewed as an instrument of exploitation. On the other hand we have noted in the TBR that pursuit of the "human rights" of ethnic minorities has inhibited state violence in post totalitarian society. And concurrent processes of economic integration and legal standardization of the life situation of Western Europeans has pulled the multi-lingual population of the TBR together in a common quest for prosperity and security. Meanwhile the region’s population remains acutely aware, through now distant personal experience and knowledge of the current conflict to its immediate south, of the devastation wrought through the hopeless experiment in ethnic state making where civility is so utterly threatened. Finally, the introduction into the public sphere of the TBR of supranational social movements promoting, for example, environmental concerns has involved local citizens in global issues. In this way the globalization of the public sphere intervenes in local life worlds affirming the presence of trans-national civil society.
 

References

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HISTORICAL MYTH AND THE INVENTION OF  POLITICAL FOLKLORE IN CONTEMPORARY SERBIA
Karl Kaser  University of Graz, Graz   Joel M. HalpernUniversity of Massachusetts

 In one of the years after 1389 the Serbian medieval Serbian despot² Stefan Lazarevic ordered the construction of a marble column on the Kosovo polje (Kosovo field) with this inscription to memorialize his father, who died there in battle:

"Oh man, stranger or hailing from this soil, when you enter these Serbian lands, whoever you may be ... when you come to this field called Kosovo, you will see all over it many bones of the dead, and with them myself in stone nature, standing upright in the middle of the field, representing both cross and flag. So as not to pass by and overlook me as something unworthy and hollow, approach me, I beg you, oh my dear, and study the words I bring to your attention, which will make you understand why I am standing here ... At this place there once was a great autocrat, a world wonder and Serbian ruler by the name of Lazar, an unwavering tower of piety, a sea of reason and depth of wisdom ... who loved everything that Christ wanted ... He accepted the sacrificial wreath of struggle and heavenly glory ... The daring fighter was captured and the wrath of martyrdom he himself accepted ... the great Prince Lazar ... Everything said here took place in 1389 ... the fifteenth day of June³, Tuesday, at the sixth or seventh hour, I do not know exactly, God knows."⁴

More than half a millenium late in 1989, it was possible for the first time for the contemporary political version of the ancestral Serbian medieval state to have a centenary celebration of these events on the original site known as  the "Field of Blackbirds." A century earlier, in 1889, the Kosovo field was then still part of the Ottoman Empire. It had been an Ottoman army that had won the battle there against a Serbian coalition force on June 23, 1389. It was at the beginning of the 20th century, in 1912, that the region was finally reconquered and integrated into what was then the Kingdom of Serbia. The memory of this defeat has been an integral part of the Serbian cultural heritage. This defeat was memorialized as a national holiday in pre-World War II Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The year of 1989 was a significant marker in Serbian contemporary history. The early summer of that year was a time of dramatic political transition in the then Socialist Federated Republic of Yugoslavia reflecting trends throughout Eastern Europe as a result of the disappearance of the USSR as a political entity. The constituent Serbian Republic under the leadership of its communist president, Slobodan Miloševic, and his communist Party associates wanted at this time of transition to consolidate their grip on power. They saw their way to do this by asserting Serbian nationalism at a time of the disintegration of the existing communist state. The symbolism inherent in this 600th anniversary celebration became a useful political tool. This was in consonance with trends throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In this part of Europe individual nationalisms, drawing their strengths from the past, replaced discredited and failed communist ideologies of universalism and future oriented achievements.

The first strong signs of the dissolution of Socialist Yugoslavia, with its emphasis on regional political autonomies, went hand in hand with the coordinated unification of the then autonomous but Serbian controlled regions of Vojvodina and Kosovo. This structure became the basis for the new Republic of Serbia, as the central part of the now truncated state of Yugoslavia. What had once been six federated republics split into new national states -- Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and a contested Bosnia. Only ethnically similar Montenegro remained with Serbia. But Vojvodina and Kosovo, unlike the core area of Serbia were not homogeneously Serb in ethnic character. Vojvodina had large Hungarian, as well as Romanian, Croat affiliated and other national groups. In Kosovo, despite its being the heartland of the medieval Serbian state, its population was approximately 90 percent Albanian.⁵ Kosovo with its historical legacy, reflected in its many Serbian churches dating from that period, was an area overburdened with its history and symbols. In that fateful year of 1989 it became the stage for a spectacular political-historical celebration.

Thus the significance of what happened on June 28, 1989 on this field of Kosovo cannot be understood from the inscription alone. It needs to be seen as a celebration of a resurrection and embellishment of the origin myth of the Serbian State. This manifestation was probably one of the most, if not the most, significant political ritual in modern Serbian history. The public dissatisfaction with the political situation at this time provided the Serbian state, and specifically Miloševic, with the opportunity to revive the Kosovo Myth as the principle national myth. It liminalized "the nation" as an eternal, divine category of community, of shared Srpstvo ("Serbianess").

Preparations for the celebration were difficult because a state of emergency had been declared for the province. This had followed large-scale rioting and political protests by the Albanian majority which had been  recurring since the early eighties. The Albanian population therefore did not participate in the officially proclaimed celebration which had been declared a national holiday. It is probable, however, that Albanian draftees served in the Serbian military forces. Policemen and military units from all parts of Serbia were concentrated in Kosovo in order to provide security for the festival.

This festival needs to be described in superlatives. Some million and a half Serbs came from the Diaspora, among them migrants to Australia, Canada and USA, to gather on this historic battlefield. About a thousand journalists were accredited. Some six thousand buses and about forty thousand private cars brought participants to this southern province. There were vendors with pictures of historic battle scenes and portraits of medieval Serbian rulers as well as of Milo?evi? who was then president of the still existing Yugoslavia. Other politicians present included the former Yugoslav president and contemporary Slovenian Prime Minister, Janez Drnovšek, and the Yugoslav Prime Minister, Ante Markovic, a Croat.⁶

For weeks the Serbian mass media had bombarded the population with programming about the historical and contemporary importance of the event. During the first half of 1989 a specific kind of political folklore was invented. It was one that was congruent with the well-established idea of the Serbs as a unique and martyred people, most notably as manifested in their defeat at Kosovo. While propagated from above this idea found resonance among the general population. This view was also congruent with the general political climate which favored keeping the dispersed Serbian populations in one state as had been the case in Socialist Yugoslavia.

Fears associated with the then imminent dissolution of Yugoslavia inspired ordinary citizens to focus on this historical event.⁷ Both academics and popular writers contributed to the nationalistic rhetoric and related historical mythology. One of the most prominent Serbian historians of the second half of the 20th century and long-time president of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Radovan Samardzic, explained the significance of the forthcoming event: "The Battle of Kosovo may be regarded as one of the most important events in world history... Ever since the fifteenth century, the writings of learned humanists have classified it as one of the turning points in world history."⁸ One cannot but wonder how many such "turning points" might exist from his perspective.

The day of celebration began early. At 7 AM there was a liturgy in the monastery of Gracanica. This monastery is located near the provincial capital of Priština. Then the celebration moved to the site of the historic battlefield.  The Serbian public seemed moved by feelings approaching a mass hysteria. The events of 1389 were commemorated and political and ecclesiastical leaders draw conclusions for the future of contemporary Serbia. In his speech Milosevic left little doubt that he saws himself as a kind of secular Messiah who will preserve the holy Serbian land for its people in that year and in that place. The land was lost 600 years before because of discord and betrayal. He remarked that Serbia's socialist leaders had betrayed their people. He suggested that the concessions which had been made by Serbia would not have been accepted by "any other people in the world." He contrasted this discord and betrayal with the heroism justly celebrated in Serbian poetry and national history. Miloševic suggested that the heroism displayed on the battlefield of Kosovo had already inspired six centuries of creativity. The brave army had remained honorable even in defeat."⁹

The idea of a Messiah or a historical hero who will return back to earth  to liberate an enslaved people is both widespread in human history and not new to Serbian literary tradition. Thus the Serbs under Ottoman domination expected by the end of the 16th century the messianic return of their first medieval archbishop and mythic hero, the Holy Sava (1219-1233). After several uprisings the remains of Sava were burned by the Ottomans. But this act did not lessen the widespread belief in his Messianic return. The Serbian people have also expected the return of other mythical figures of Serbian history.

One of the most prominent of these "sleeping" heroes is the historical figure of "Kraljevic Marko", the king's son Marko, whose real name was Marko Mrnjacevic and who lived in the 14th century. Historically he was not important  and he died as a vassal of the Ottoman emperor in a military campaign against the principality of Valachia. Nevertheless he is the hero in many Serbian epic songs. He even placed in the historical context of the battle of Kosovo. The legend was spread that the hero had only temporarily left his earthly existence.  He was said to be slumbering in a cave or on an island awaiting the appropriate opportunity to lead the Serbian people to freedom.

At the beginning of the 20th century the popular Serbian poet Radoje M. Domanovic contributed his narrative "Kraljevic Marko, The Second Time Among the Serbs." This was a popularized picture of the return of the Messiah. Kosovo plays an important role in the narrative. But at the same time he left intellectual space for a critical reflection on the myth of the Messiah, recognizing a strong tension between the myth and the social reality. But it is not quite clear whether the author is critiquing the social role of myths or the "weakness" of contemporary Serbs as compared to their heroic predecessors.¹⁰

Aside from this picture of the sleeping hero who will act at the proper historical moment, the question remains as to why a record of so-called discord and betrayal in the medieval past of more than half a millenium ago remains so real in the present.

Briefly stated, a self-confident army was defeated under seemingly honorably circumstances some 600 years ago. Yet the shared memory of this event apparently can develop sufficient power to explain the fact that one and a half million people undertook a pilgrimage to this historic battlefield. But this observation alone cannot explain the full role of this historical myth and the related function of invented political folklore in Balkan politics at the end of the 20th century.

In this paper we plan to analyze four aspects of this phenomenon. First, what actually happened in 1389? Second, how is it possible that a battle without significant historic impact reappeared as a reinvigorated national myth in the last decades of the 20th century? Third, the historic battle was enriched by dramatic epic events e.g., the military leaders on both sides, the Serbian prince Lazar and the Ottoman sultan Mehmet were killed. Nevertheless, the battle ended with the defeat of the Serbian army. The question arises as to how and perhaps why the Serbian collective memory is structured in order to actualize a defeat as a heroic, powerful and memorably event? Fourth, and finally -- how is political folklore created?

The Historical Context for the 1389 Battle of Kosovo

We begin by contextualizing the events surrounding the Kosovo battle in 1389. In the beginning of the 13th century a Serbian feudal state under the leadership of the Nemanjici dynasty was established in the area of Kosovo. This state extended its territory towards south and southeast at the expense of the Byzantine Empire and smaller Albanian principalities. The area of the Kosovo was a part of this expansion. At the time of one of the most successful Serbian emperors, Stefan Dušan (+ 1355), he reigned over a considerable portion of the European part of the Byzantine Empire. By the middle of the 14th century Serbia, along with the Hungarian Kingdom and the Byzantine Empire, became one of the most powerful countries in the Balkans. These Christian powers were threatened, however, by the expansion of Muslim Ottomans who, originating in Anatolia, began to expand their domain in the Balkans. Some eighteen years before the battle of Kosovo the Serbian army suffered a severe defeat. This was one of the consequences of the increasing feudalization of Serbia. After the death of  Dušan, his successors were forced to cede authority to the high-ranking nobles. Thus the power of the Serbian state was considerably weakened and the regional nobility strengthened. One of these regional potentates was Lazar Hrebljanovic who became known to later generations as Prince Lazar. He was able to establish an independent principality on the northern fringes of the state with the seat of his power located in the fortress of Kruševac. His castle was situated not far from the field of Kosovo.

In the spring of 1389 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet decided to pursue further territorial advances. The Serbian Prince Lazar responded by recruiting an opposing army. This force included both Bosnian and Albanian troops. The two armies were lead by their respective rulers, who were then both about 60 years old. The two armies met in the morning of June 28 on the field of Kosovo. We don't know details about what happened; no report of a witness of the events exists. What we do know is that the two military commanders were killed and that the Serbian army again suffered a heavy defeat. In Western Europe for the first half of the following year the opposite was believed. Wrong messages were conveyed and only after some time did the truth emerge.

The battle of Kosovo represented a defeat of the Serbian army, but only one in a series of defeats both before and after 1389. It does not appear to have been a strategically crucial battle. But there was a dramatic effect since at Kosovo both commanders were killed. A Serbian nobleman with a dagger, who was able to get close, probably killed the Ottoman sultan Murad. Lazar was captured and probably executed by one of Murad´s sons and successor. As it is very often the case with defeats, thoughts of the defeated turn to betrayal a point Milosevic referred to 600 years later. From an analytical historical perspective, the battle was not a turning point in Balkan history to say nothing of the broader perspective of world history.

The only consequence was formal recognition of Ottoman supremacy by the surviving Serbian feudal nobility who did not as yet have Ottoman troops garrisoned on their territories. A half a century later, in 1439, additional  Serbian lands were conquered and occupied. A quarter of a century later, in 1463, the last Serbian stronghold, the fortress of Smederevo on the Danube fell to the Ottomans. Between the time of the first Serbian defeat in their war with  the Ottomans in 1371 and the final one in 1463 almost a century had passed. In this setting Kosovo was only one among a series of battles. Why the battles of 1371, 1439 or 1463 did not also become the setting for national myths is not quite clear. But viewed in comparative perspective it seems clear that mythical settings and strategic significance need not coincide. Myths require the creation of a dramatic setting in which events can be concisely symbolized. Myths while sometimes open to varying interpretations cannot by their nature  deal with subtle shades of meaning or bureaucratic and administrative complexities.

The Framework for Myth Making: Myth as Historic Capital

Following up on our third point, we can view myth making as the accumulation of historic capital. Not every European society has a predisposition for the creation of and subsequent commemoration of historical myths. What is the concrete theoretical and historical framework for myth making? We think that in this concrete case an extraordinarily high proportion of historic capital was accumulated, which, at a certain level, turns into a national myth.

Thus we see myth creation as closely related to what we consider here as "historic capital." This can be seen as a variation of what, following Mauss, Bourdieu calls, "symbolic capital." accumulated within a given cultural framework.¹¹ This capital is based on the valued memories of a group in a dramatic form which can be capable of evoking strong affect. Such affect derives from their links to individual and group identity. This memory capital or historic capital can be drawn on in the future to mobilize social action and enhance political cohesion. It is important to note that this capital is held in the form of liminal memories. That is memories which exist in a timeless liminal framework outside of a sequence of events in a linear chronology i.e. as myths. Thus the memory, the myth, of Kosovo exists alone apart from a specific historic context of chronologically oriented events as in the case of the battles which preceded Kosovo and followed it. In evoking the historic capital of Kosovo that day in 1989 Milosevic was, in effect, attempting to reconstitute the national identity of the Serbian people, an identity which had been purposely supressed in the days of socialist Yugoslavia.

An illustration of the dynamics of this process can be seen among patrilineally oriented descent groups. In this case capital is accumulated in the form of ancestral honor which can be transmitted over the generations. In the Balkans this is reflected in the oral tradition of epic poetry which was still vital in the years after World War II. Oral tradition can be seen as a kind of myth making but one which is never static but constantly being reinterpreted and reshaped over the generations. This kind of historic capital can then be drawn on for purposes of social mobilization, it can also be linked to a strategy of survival during times of oppression. What is common both to the process of historical capital accumulation and the accompanying creation of myth is the shared liminal time frame. It evokes a time out of time, a notion of time suspended. Thus the oral tradition of the epic cycle connected with Kosovo battle does not deal with a series of linear, chronologically paced events but rather with a many times told tale in which glorious deeds are recounted and defeats rationalized. A myth is not based only on a single historical event but is accumulated historic capital and has to be seen as linked to the further historic fate of a people or nation. The perception of sacredness in a myth is reached when it becomes contextualized in a narrative dealing with the core ethos of a group or a nation. It is reinforced in group consciousness by its repetition, performance on specified holidays or anniversaries.

Since the celebration of the particularities of one group or nation  reinforces a dichotomy of self and others such activities are always laden with potential political meaning. Thus this historic capital can also be seen as an ideological weapon as witness the case of Miloševic speech on the Kosovo Field of Blackbirds (Bezistan) with its overt text  of reinforcing the Serbian consciousness and polity and constricting that of the Albanians. But such activities are double edged since the Albanians too are very much part of the Balkan oral tradition. Conflict then takes place simultaneously on several levels. There is that of the competing oral traditions which generate conflicting myths in liminal space. This is paralleled by political actions in a linear frame as occurred with autonomy was withdrawn from Kosovo in 1991. Finally in 1998 these political actions of exclusion have provoked a violent dissent as in the shooting of police officers by Albanian gunmen followed by Serbian police raids on villages.

National myths never exist in a neutral space. Nations are always defined with reference to others. The characteristics of these others are never neutral. Questions of moral and military  superiority and inferiority are always implicit and usually explicit in mythological world view. Such myths and their heroes achieve a formal sacralized state when they become incorporated into national religious systems as saints and their existence becomes part of a holy account and their iconographic representations appear in churches. The medieval Serbian churches in Kosovo are such repositories of national historic myths. On these church walls the story of Christ is depicted along with he lives lived in the Balkans a millenium and a half later. Myth then is a special kind of historical remembrance. Thus mythological remembrance reshapes the sometimes meager historic reality and creates a new, an elevated reality.

Above all myth serves to represent historical continuity and enforce the consciousness of the ethnic or national community. Those who are initiated into and accept this created historical heritage come to feel strongly linked to their liminalized mythic ancestors. In the case we are considering here, that of Serbia, the projected effect is that of a spiritual kinship group, sanctified by history and religion with an eternal history. The ritual of remembrance symbolizes for many Serbs the ethnic entity of Serbdom, being Serbian and the fight for survival. An essential meaning of Kosovo field is that survival does not depend on victory even a defeat can be mythologized as a the beginning of a period of the never ending struggle for survival, one's folk against all others:

"Who cries out and denies that Kosovo is not Serbian, where our churches and monasteries as witnesses to history lie"¹²

These symbolic myths were given a contemporary meaning when Miloševic as the political leader of Serbia declared at the Kosovo field, the long ago battle was now filled with a new meaning: "Our most important battle today is related to the creation of economic, political, cultural and social prosperity...".¹³

The evocation of a liminal event by a politician operating in a linear chronological frame is not simply a classical epiphany and invocation of the ancestors. There has to be a cultural readiness, a time of perceived crisis in which the existing system is not felt to be working and there is a search for alternatives. It is here that the concept of historical capital becomes pertinent. The historical capital needs to be viewed in terms of both content and form. That is the idea of a cultural readiness to use oral traditional and infuse it with a new content which establishes a link with a revered past. Thus, concretely there materializes the establishment of a connection between the Serbian president Slobodan Miloševic and the Kosovo events of 600 years ago as in:

    "Slobodan, your sharp sword,will soon the battle of Kosovo prepare We call Strahinic, brave and wise, the nine Jugovici, the old Jugovici or Boško, who carries our banner and mows the Kosovo fields with his saber. Warm blood in streams will flow,where every year peonies sprout If woe piles on woe, then just a word, With rifle bullets we will appear"¹⁴

For Western European societies the use of historical myth for political purposes is differently structured. Hitler's use of Aryan and Germanic mythological models to glorify German nationalism was not done on the basis of a still existing oral tradition. Rather the Nazis in the 1930s relied on historical sources to reshape materials for desired racist ends and, ultimately, to justify policies of extermination in the pursuit of the linked objectives of racial purity and political hegemony.  All these factors have been present in the actions of the Serbian state in the 1990s but they have been constituted in different ways. Serb objectives have, of course, been more limited reflecting both their restricted power-political base and the limited efficiency of their bureaucracy. Most important, unlike the Nazis who were the source of the conflict both the Serbian government and communist bureaucrats such as Miloševic were, of course, repositioning themselves following the collapse of the dominant communist power, the USSR.

It is also of the greatest significance that the Nazis, despite their abundant use of medieval symbols in their uniforms, flags and party insignia, were, above all, reacting to an event within living memory i.e. their defeat in World War I. Despite their talk of a thousand year Reich and Hitler's grandiose plans for an imperial capital in Berlin the Nazis led a thoroughly industrialized people rooted in a linear time. One of the unique aspects of the horror of the Holocaust was its technically planned aspects founded on an industrial model for killing and exploiting treasure. As described in UN and other international reports, the killings in Bosnia involved killing usually in a more direct and personalized fashion of individualized torture and murder. Killing with knives, or even machine guns, and artillery and mortar as in Bosnia tends to be more limited than destruction by the cattle car train load in gas chambers where attempts were made to pacify people prior to execution. This former model so widespread in Bosnia had been rejected early on by the Nazis because it was clearly inefficient viewed from the perspective of an industrialized model.

To utilize 600 year old tales and symbols requires not only a cultural readiness founded on oral tradition but a familiarity derived from frequent repetition. Here the amplification of the role of the traditional bard, the guslar accompanied by his single stringed gusle becomes significant. The overt commercialization of this medium was evident even in socialist Yugoslavia with numerous recordings and public performances on ceremonial occasions as well as an abundance of popular literature.

One can view the temporal setting in Serbia in a three dimensional time frame with the presence of linear (chronological, event oriented), cyclical and liminal components. In the Serbian case we can clearly see the cyclical tied to the liminal in that the Serbian oral tradition is inseparable from a patriarchal social setting. Here the notions of patrilineal descent and patrilocal residence underlie the patriarchal setting. The implementation of a patriarchal framework, of course, implies a cyclical view of existence with the fundamental social dynamic being that of male succession, son succeeding father. Such notion are not strange to the Western European social setting but these modes have not in historically recent times been dominant or exclusive. Even their role in the historic time of the Early Modern period has been questioned e.g. the ultimate role of the extended family as a dominant social form. While there is some question as to the extent to which the ideal of the patriarchal extended family household (the zadruga) was achieved by Serbian peasants there is no doubt about the extent to which it functioned as an ideal. Here we can rely on demographic documentation of fertility behavior. The patriarchal model as an ideal had not entirely disappeared from 1990s Serbia even though it had become a recent memory among much of the urban population.

One cannot say that early 1990s Serbia was a society in which a dominating cyclical time perception pushed the linear chronological order into the background or that Western societies were entirely reliant on a linear time frame. But we do have a conjunction of these three interacting time frames articulating in a different way in the Balkans. One might also say that the Orthodox church as an avowedly national church and keeper of the national tradition is also a key element. Its role as preserver of key historic symbols, including use of churches and graveyards for the hallowed dead past and present,   provide direct links to national identity. One might even call it the curator of liminal symbols. These then directly link up with the expectable cyclicity in family structures. On the level of belief and ceremonial structures one sees these linked in the Serbian slava, the feast day of the lineage's patron saint on which occasion the priest is called to the family household to bless the preparations. In this cyclical time of the lineage the liminal past becomes a part of cyclical life and inscribes itself into the life and psyche of succeeding generations.

"The Kosovo field is at the heart of Serbian identity ..."¹⁵  The Serbian epics often use kin terms to express ancestral connections. Ancestors of principal figures are called "great-grandfathers" and contemporaries are referred to as "brothers" and "sisters" "sons" and "daughters" as well as other variations which include "little son" or "my children". Such uses do, of course, stress the sense of community in a wide variety of settings. Serbia is the common house for all Serbs and the mother the ancestral mother:

"One stone is to another, a brother to a brother, all were given birthby their common Serb mother"¹⁶

A sense of common identity is also reinforced by a shared genealogy. This sense of shared collectivity is based on a common memory structured by the medium of an oral tradition. An oral tradition does not function through memorization but rather through the recreation of events allowing for a process of adaptation across generations. Modern historiography with its emphasis on scholarly methods tends to demystify romantic myths.¹⁷ But such historiography is never entirely free of national bias. So one can hardly oppose traditional myth to modern objectivity. Also as much of modern scholarship in the humanities and social sciences with its concern with deconstructing texts has repeatedly emphasized, the role of individual perception and creation is emphasized.

But certain of the preconditions for the accumulation of historic capital are, however, a given in the Serbian case where shared historical experience and a perception of common identity are emphasized. The way in which historic capital is initially created is exemplified in the recounting of the Kosovo battle and in the process transforming a relatively unspectacular event into an  historical myth.¹⁸

The myth of Kosovo is not based primarily upon the battle as such, but on the figure of Prince Lazar and secondarily on another feudal lord, Miloš Obilic. Lazar's purported mortal remnants still exist and provide a material symbolic link with the now distant medieval past. Until 1391 his remains were first preserved in a monastery near Priština, not far from the scene of the battle. They were then transferred to the Ravanica monastery in Southern Serbia. But prior to the conquest of this region by the Ottomans Lazar´s well-traveled remains were brought to the then safe monastery of Vrdnik in the region of Fruška Gora, northwest from Belgrade. Here they could rest for centuries. But in 1941, when Croatian Ustashi threatened this region, Lazar was transported to Belgrade, where he found his final place in front of the main altar of the Orthodox cathedral, where his remains can be visited today.

Crucial to the creation and subsequent enduring vitality of the Kosovo myth was the decision of the Serbian Orthodox Church to canonize Lazar a few years after his death. His placement in the annual religious calendar of observed holy days reinforced his liminal status by linking it with a cyclical dimension of observance. Thus every year on the day of his death services of divine liturgy were held throughout Serbia. These actions, in effect, institutionalized his deeds whether real or fictive.

Significantly, a further reinforcement of the status of the myth was provided by the fact that Lazar was not only canonized but raised to the status of a martyr. The central theme of his martyrdom was the conviction that he gave his life for both his people and their church. He was seen as sacrificing himself in order to save Serbia. This status was accentuated by the recounted epic element that on the evening before the battle he manifested his awareness that death awaited him. This further confirmed his heroic status for subsequent  generations. He was thus pictured as arming himself for battle aware of his impending certain death. Lazar was thus portrayed as following the pattern set by his emperor-forefathers, fatefully putting his life in god's hands. This action made the defeat of the Serbian army into a dramatic event. Defeat was turned into martyrdom and became a symbol of Christian resistance to Moslem Turkish oppression and the salvation of a people. This defeat then became the symbol of the national salvation of a Christian people. The historic capital was thus maximized as the oral tradition carried cyclically the liminal elements of the myth. Its precise linear chronological setting became irrelevant.

After the final occupation of the remaining Serbian lands culminating in the fall of Smederevo on the Danube in (1463) the autochthonous Serbian Orthodox Church organization was dissolved in the 1530s and integrated into the archbishopric of Ohrid. As a consequence the Greek clergy obtained a predominant position in the hierarchy of the Serbian church administration. They were not interested in promoting the worship of a Serbian prince. This did not mean the end of the ritual worship of Lazar, but its character changed. Lazar became even more popular among the ordinary people. This situation was reinforced by the fact that following the Ottoman occupation a large number of the Serbian population migrated from the plains and valleys into the then remote mountainous zones of the Balkans. At a rough estimate this movement affected about 300.000 people. Only toward the end of the 18th and into the 19th century did their descendants return to the plains. This was a dramatic watershed event in the life of the Serbian people and mythologically linked to the Battle of Kosovo. A significance part of the oral tradition was that future generations  recollected the Battle of Kosovo as the reason for the flight of their putative great-grandfathers. Kosovo thus became a critical turning point in the collective consciousness. It marked the transition from liberty to slavery, from life in their homeland to movement to foreign regions.

Serbian society was transformed from a viable medieval state with a history of partial dominance in the Balkans with an existing nobility and church hierarchy based in the lowlands to an essentially peasant society. This was accompanied by an ecological shift emphasizing pastoralism compatible with their predominant shift into the uplands. It was, however, a society with an acute sense of identity tied to an elaborate oral tradition. At the center of this tradition was the Kosovo epic and its hero Prince Lazar with its associated epics it became known as the Kosovo epic cycle. These became the core of the  Serbian national myth conveyed by the guslari bards. The compositions are patterned, one line consisting of ten syllables, the deseterac, one section consisting of 14 to 16 lines. The first written collection of these songs was published at the beginning of the 18th century. These songs from Montenegro and the Bay of Kotor, entitled "Stories about the battle of Kosovo", became very popular.¹⁹

The most important collection of Kosovo poetry was prepared by the famous philologist and folklorist, Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic, in the first half of the 19th century. He transformed oral tradition into written poetry: "The emperor and the empress Milica," "The fall of the Serbian empire" or "The Kosovo girl." In this way the Kosovo myth became known beyond the confines of Serbian society. This tradition inspired the famous Montenegrin prince-bishop, poet and politician, Petar Petrovic Njegoš, who lived in the first half of the 19th century. His "Gorski vjenac" (Mountain Wreath) became very popular among a growingly literate Serbian population. He was also one of the greatest interpreters of the Kosovo epic poetry. The mythological remembrance of Kosovo, however, continued to dominate.²⁰

Following an almost half century of socialist-communist dominance in which national themes were deemphasized these epic songs have achieved a new popularity in the 1990s due, in part, to their politically endorsed propogation. It is now somewhat less than a century (1912) that Kosovo has again become part of a Serbian state. The fact that the region now has an overwhelming Albanian majority (90%) has made it an arena of conflict between these two peoples. In this context the Kosovo myth remains alive. In a way it is both fascinating and tragic that a New York Times discussion group on contemporary Kosovo contains more than a few detailed and controversial discussions of medieval history.

In the late 19th and 20th centuries the myth of Kosovo was substantially embellished. This was done by an outpouring of books, articles, poems, songs, and dramas. This activity has been reinforced by the contemporary significance of the day of Lazar's death, the 28th of June. Many important events in recent Serbian and ex-Yugoslav history occurred on this day. One of the most dramatic was the assassination of the successor to the Austrian emperor's throne. This occurred in Sarajevo in 1914 and precipitated events which led directly to World War I. Austria-Hungary had assumed control over Bosnia as a result of the Conference of Berlin in 1878 when the Ottomans ceded their control over the area. The large Serbian population in Bosnia became a source of tensions between the Austrian administration and the Serbian political leaders. The assassin was a young Serbian student. The Kosovo myth with its emphasis on Serbian heroism and national identity certainly served to reinforce notions of national identity and separateness on the part of the Bosnian Serbian population. The existence of an independent Serbian state, newly emerged from Ottoman control, further accentuated the tension. Clearly World War I wasn't "caused" by the Kosovo myth but the breakdown of three multinational empires, the Ottoman, Austrian and Russian meant that Serbian national identity had to be reinterpreted.

After World War II instead of the marble cross to mark the spot, the new Yugoslav state constructed  a tower to mark the now mythical place of this now considered historic act. Ironically in the mid 1990s Serbian mortars and siege guns destroyed the museum erected by the post World War II Yugoslav socialist government to commemorate not the Archduke but his Serbian assassin. In Serbian historiography of the second half of the 20th century "the battle of Kosovo [became] one of the most important events of world history." ²¹ This elevation of self to center, marginality to mainstream can be seen not solely as a projection of egoism but an exclusive focus on one's own strongly perceived national identity. Manifesting itself in a Balkan context to the exclusion of others. Like most national myths the story of Kosovo does not easily lend itself to the tactics of compromise.

How to combine myth and political folklore in contemporary Serbia?

A good point of departure to discuss this question prepairs the Serbian ethnologist I. Colovic. He connects the revival of the historical myths since the end of the 1980ies to the established political folklore. The first music cassettes of the new genre were issued during the months before the anniversary by the music house "Beograd Ton". One of the title songs was "Oj Serbia, your pieces will soon become a whole". This and a series of political popular songs of the following years was inspired by the "new" politics of the Miloševic-regime. Many authors participated in the revival of the national-patriotic rhetoric and mythology in order to enact political folklore.²² One of them was Zoran Mišic, a famous poet, established once again a bridge between myth and historic capital in his own way:

"The epic of Kosovo is founded not only on the conqueror's pride, but also on the pride of those who defeat the conqueror with a spiritual weapon. Because of this, it does not endanger anybody, nor threaten anybody. The myth of Kosovo goes far beyond the limits of a national myth; by its essence it ranks with the highest creations of human spirit, collected in the imaginary museum of a unique European culture."²³

In order to understand the invented political folklore one has to take into consideration that from the beginning of the modern Serbian state in the first half of the 19th century and the political life the Serbian village, the Serbian peasant with his set of values and traditional mythology belonged to the main symbols of politics. Rural symbols, like the opaque, the gunjac or the gusla have always played a significant role in political communication.²⁴ S. Naumovic knows five reasons for this: 1) Serbia has overcome its rural status not before the second half of the 20th century, 2) it was therefore the population of the countryside which shaped the modern Serbian national state, 3) the Serbian farmer laid the foundation of economic wealth through the production and export of agrarian goods, 4) the agrarian strata of Serbian society has never been politically rewarded for their efforts and accomplishments, 5) by using
rural symbolism to demonstrate Serbia's greatness the rural strata of society could be easily pacified so that they accepted the political dominance of the urban strata.

In this political rhetoric the farmer is not only the transmitter of the Serbian myth but he represents himself his own myth. He stands for the golden age in Serbian history, for uprisings and wars of liberation; for a democratic spirit which is the result of a patriarchal and egalitarian culture; for the modest cultural hero upon which all the cultural, economic, political and military achievements of the nation rests.

Thus political folklore of the 1990ies is invented, but invention rests upon a solid and emotionalized basis, the Serbian village and the village population. The elements can be grouped into three categories: To the first group belongs the folkloric rural language and its figures. This is a powerful category since in the 19th century the language of the ordinary people was codified and not the artificial educated language of the poets. To the second category belong elements of popular culture: elements of material culture as already mentioned above, then social organizations of the peasantry like the zadruga, popular religion, the patriarchal ethos and the popular music. The third category is represented by psychical characteristics of the peasantry: the creative genius of the peasants and his high mental capabilities go hand in hand with high moral qualities.

Dobrica Cošic, poet and former president of the new Yugoslav Republic formulates the emotional occupation of the Serbian peasant as ideological symbol in a very significant way:

"Deep down in my soul it came to a big split: The truth belonged to the village and the peasants, the untruth to the town and its inhabitants... To be more precise: I became a communist because of the rural poverty and because the poverty of the peasant women ... There was no female martyr which was like a peasant woman. There was no social humiliation, which was like the humiliation of the peasant women: emotional and related to work and nature. It was because of these female martyrs that I joined the revolution, about which I thought it would have changed their lives. Thus it was not the working class and the expropriation that inflamed me for the movement."²⁵

It seems to be clear that the Serbian peasantry is the mediator in the process of the usage of the historical myth to enact political folklore in contemporary Serbian society.

Coming to a conclusion one has to ask why the mythology is still powerful in contemporary Serbia and why this historic-symbolic capital can be activated in a society which is not any longer a pre-modern but a relatively modern and developed producer and consumer society. One has to assume that in the 1980s the politics of socialistic modernization has overcome with the cyclical time perception, genealogical memory and the historical mythology. Maybe the political crisis in ex-Yugoslavia since the early eighties was responsible for a temporary domination of traditional elements, of elements that lead far back to Serbian history. Therefore we should discuss this problem within the conceptual framework of the synchronism of the asynchronic in modern Serbia and modern society in general. In any case we should be careful not to identify the potential of actualization of historical mythology with the retrogression of a whole nation into a stormy medieval heroism.
 

Textnotes

1. This article is a preliminary version, a report in progress, from a larger research project.

2. Serbian imperial title, originally the Byzantine title for a high-ranking imperial civil servant.

3. June 28 according to the new calendar.

4. Alex N. Dragnich and Slavko Todorovich: The Saga of Kosovo, Columbia University Press, New York 1984:18p.

5. For the so-called Kosovo problem see, e.g., Dragnich and Todorovich; Branko Horvat: Kosovsko pitanje, Mladost,Zagreb 1989; Arshi Pipa and Sami Repishti: Studies on Kosova, Columbia University Press, New York 1984.

6. "Vjesnik", June 28/29, 1989.

7. Ivan Colovic: Bordell der Krieger. Folklore, Politik und Krieg, Osnabrück 1994.

8. Alek Vukadinovic (Ed.): Kosovo 1389-1989. Serbian Literary Quarterly 1989. Special edition on the occasion of600 years since the Battle of Kosovo, Srboštampa, Beograd 1989:9p.

9. "Vjesnik", June 29, 1989.

10. Trian Stoianovich: Balkan Worlds. The First and Last Europe, Sharpe, Armonk 1994: 168 pp. Radoje Domanovic:Izabrane pripovjetke, Zagreb 1946.

11. Pierre Bourdieu: Le sens pratique, Paris, Les éditions de Minuit, 1980; Marcel Mauss: `Essai sur le don´, in: L´Année Sociologique, N.S. 1/1923-24:30-186.

12. Colovic:154.

13. "Vjesnik", June, 29, 1989.

14. Colovic:22.

15. Colovic:142.

16. Colovic:143.

17. Jacques Le Goff (Ed.): Histoire et mémoire, Paris, Gallimard, 1986; Jack Goody: The logic of writing and the organization of society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

18. The following is based on Emmert.

19. Emmert:82.

20. Albert Lord: `The Battle of Kosovo in Albanian and Serbocroatian Oral Epic Songs`, in: Arshi Pipa and
Sami Repishti (Ed.): Studies on Kosovo: 65-83.

21. Vukadinovic:9.

22. Colovic.

23. Zoran Mišic: ´What is The Kosovo Commitment´, in: Alek Vukadinovic (Ed.): Kosovo 1389-1989.
Serbian Literary Quarterly 1989. Special edition on the occasion of 600 years since the Battle of Kosovo, Srboštampa, Beograd 1989:168.

24. Following ideas are based on Slobodan Naumovic: `Ustaj seljo, ustaj rode: Simbolika seljaštva i politicka komunikacija u novijoj istoriji Srbije´, in: Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju, Beograd 2,1/1995, 39-63.

25. Slavoljub Cukic: Covek u svom vremenu. Razgovori sa Dobricom Cošicom, Beograd 1989:16p.
 
 

PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE ABOUT PRACTICE: RETURNING HOME TO THE CROATIAN DANUBE BASIN
Maja Povrzanovic   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

Introductory remarks: scope and context

 When Croatia gained European Union recognition in early 1992, a United Nations-brokered cease-fire was in place which left one third of the Republic not under the control of the Croatian government. At the same time, more than 15% of Croatian citizens (approximately 700,000 people) were registered as displaced persons (cf. Rebic 1995:16).

In this paper I focus on the situation in the Croatian Danube basin (encompassing Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Srijem) which is the border region to Serbia, in late 1997. It remained a United Nations Protected Area until January 15, 1998, when it was reintegrated into Croatia under the terms of the Erdut agreement (signed on November 12, 1995).

Over 80.000 people who fled in 1991 are meant to return to that area, mainly ethnic Croats but also Hungarians and Slovaks.  According to the internationally negotiated Plan for Peaceful Reintegration, they are supposed to re-start living with their Serbian neighbors whom they perceive as having supported Serbian aggression.  This is a general attitude, although the experiences varied in different places. There were Serbs who helped the Croatian neighbors to save their lifes and belongings. However, there were also many Serbs who engaged in the military acts against their Croatian neighbors.  Many Croats who lost their relatives and had to flee their homes due to Serbian aggression had problems in accepting the Amnesty Law that allows the local Serbs who took part in military actions against Croatia but are not accused of war crimes, to resettle (if they fled) or continue to live in Croatia.¹

Sociological surveys show that one half of the displaced Croats from the Croatian Danube basin agree with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration (cf. Drustvena istrazivanja 1997, esp. Sakic et al. 1997) and believe it could solve their current problems.  One third disagrees with the Plan but still want to return home or intend to return for not having an alternative option.

This paper was written in October 1997 (and presented at at the panel "'Coming Home?' Encounters Between Refugees, Immigrants and Those Who Stayed Behind", AAA 96th Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 19-23, 1997).  Therefore, the subsequent events in the Croatian Danube basin -- after January 15, 1998 when UNTAES (United Nations Transitional Administration in Eastern Slavonia) ended its mission -- are not taken into consideration.  Namely, several Croatian journals (e.g. Globus of March 13, 1998, and Nacional of March 11, 1998) report on the new asylum-seekers in Norway -- Croatian citizens from the region (mostly from Vukovar) who claim to have felt insecure since January 15, 1998, or even to have been harassed because they are Serbs.

Since this paper is not an ethnography of the complex and troublesome process of home-return of the refugees from the Croatian Danube basin, it does not offer insights about the attitudes of either the returnees or those who feel threatened or are threatened by their return.  The scope of this paper is to show how the ideology of "establishing trust" is used to overcome the inadequacy of the practice of return in the public discourse.  This ideology is established by neglecting the psychological problems framing the actual practice of return.

The clefts between the media-promoted images of the people victimized by military violence and their lived experiences in war (cf. Povrzanovic 1997) and exile (cf. Povrzanovic & Jambresic Kirin 1996) are also present in their return home.  In the following sections, some examples of public discourse on home-return to the Croatian Danube basin in 1997 are discussed: they serve as a model for areality that is yet to be established.  In the concluding section, the emotional and broader cultural aspects of the supposed coexistence of people who until only recently were mutually perceived as war enemies are brought to the fore.

The prospects of return: discourse vs. practice

Anthropological and sociological literature on refugees shows that younger and more educated  people -- especially if they get a regular job -- tend to stay in the new environment.  It is frequently reported that the children of migrants' as well as the refugees' often want to remain in the new settlement.  This is also true for Croatian displaced persons (i.e. internal refugees).  Still, the vast majority express the wish to return home.  Croatian and UN politicians repeatedly make public statements about the home-return of all the refugees from the Croatian Danube basin being their primary concern.  Indeed, home-return of the refugees in Croatia became an optimistic theme place of the refugees' narratives, and of the Croatian and international political discourse alike.

The wish to return is certainly to be differentiated from the possibility of return.  The majority of homes in the Croatian Danube basin are either heavily damaged or inhabited by the Serbs who fled some other Serb-held parts of Croatia when they were reconquered by military force in 1995, as well as due to the mines that already have killed a number of returnees.²

The wish to return is also to be differentiated from the actual intention to return (for detailed data see Jelkic 1997), especially in the context of the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration widely perceived by the displaced Croats as forced upon the Croatian government by the international community.³

According to a recent sociological investigation of attitudes regarding home-return of the Croats from the Croatian Danube basin (cf. Drustvena istrazivanja 1997), the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is also perceived as being unjust towards the Croats from the region.  It is seen by the displaced Croats as designed to protect the Serbs in the Croatian Danube basin -- not only as members of a national minority, but also by allowing the Serbs who settled there since the beginning of the war in 1991, to stay.

That the first 68 Croatian families have been given the keys to their renovated flats in two block-houses in Vukovar (on October 28, 1997) could be perceived as of somewhat lesser importance that the one ascribed to it by the European commissioner who joined the festive occasion.  He wished the Croatian representatives (and -- according to the media reports -- not the residents!) a successful and peaceful reintegration process, and hoped that it will be "the new symbol of reintegration of the communities in Croatia and an excellent example to other countries that want to overcome the remains of the past" (Vecernjilist of Oct. 29, 1997, p.7; Croatian Radio quoted him saying that it "must become a symbol...").
In the context of yet another thirteen mass graves from 1991 to be uncovered in Vukovar area, and the still not concluded procedure of identification of the 200 wounded Croatian soldiers and civilians who were dragged out of Vukovar hospital and killed after the fall of the town in November 1991 (their bodies have been excavated from a mass-grave, but due to the difficulties in identification almost half of them were legally still regarded as "missing" in late 1997) the definition of "the remains of the past" becomes controversial, proving the Nordstrom and Martin’s (1992) thesis on different coexisting field realities.⁴

In early September 1997, a Croatian daily (Vecernjilist of  Sept. 9, 1997, p.2) reported on the piece of paper that was attached to the board placed at the entrance of a school in Vukovar with the name of the school written in Cyrillic script, used by the Serbs,⁵  with "I hate Croats" added in handwriting.  It happened on the day of the visit of the Croatian minister of education.  The local Serbian representatives did not come to listen to her speech.  The Serbian teachers present (although -- as pointed out by the journalist -- accepting their salaries from the Croatian state) sat with their backs turned to her.

On the other hand, only a few days earlier in Zagreb, several hundreds of Croatian teachers met the minister of education who threatened by firing those who don't want to return to the Danube region.  The teachers (as reported by Vecernji list of Sept. 9, 1997, p.2 and Vjesnik of the same date, p.6) complained about several of their Serbian colleagues being appointed school directors, "who in the former state did not want to write a single letter in Latin script" (which is used by Croats).⁶

While international diplomacy is all about negotiating various political solutions, the returning Croats and the remaining Serbs in the Croatian Danube basin often have their respective non-negotiable goals which are not set in the frame of real political efficacy but of symbolic efficacy.  Neither of the groups refuses to compromise with political institutions, but they address forms of symbolic relation non reducible to instrumental logic (cf. Melucci 1996, 359). The less capacity for action, which means the less strength for politically autonomous decisions (among Serbs and Croats living in the region), the greater -- but also the more basic and the more predictable – is the production of, or the need for the already existing symbols.

For example, on October 14, 1997, the Croats walked out of the meeting of the Vukovar City council because the Serbian national flag was exposed together with the Croatian flag.  UNTAES confirmed that both flags should be present.  A month earlier, in Borovo Selo, the board with the Croatian coat of arms on the municipality building, although in two languages and two scripts, was damaged (Vecernjilist, Sept. 2, 1997, p.2).⁷

In September 1997, the UNTAES proposed that the Day of National Reconciliation should be celebrated in Croatia on the anniversary of  the signing of the Basic Agreement on peaceful reintergration (Vecernji list of Sept. 10, 1997, p.2). In the course of just two days, the stunned and sarcastic journalist’s comment on the idea of the Day of National Reconciliation (in Vjesnik of Sept. 3, 1997, p.4) was replaced by an approving comment in the same daily (of Sept. 4, 1997, p.5) with the Croatian representative's statement that "the Croatian government doesn't have anything against the celebration of that day, but for us it will also be a day of return" (Vecernji list of Sept. 3, 1997, p.2).

A month later (on October 28, 1997), the same representative -- who happens to be the chairperson of the National Committee for Reconciliation -- was stopped and verbally attacked by several Serbs carrying guns and shouting: "This is not Croatia! The Croats will have to leave  Vukovar!".  She was on her way to the first meeting of the Committee for
the Realization of Reconciliation in the Town of Vukovar (Vecrnji list of Oct. 29, 1997, p.2).  On the same newspaper page that report on this incident was a story entitled "The Attack on the Undetainable." It was an overly optimistic account of the very first Croats returning to Vukovar, the ones who were given the keys to the two renovated blockhouses.  A bolded title of another article on the very same page assured the readers about "An Improved Atmosphere for Reconciliation".

A humorous comment appeared in the regular cartoon at the last page of the same issue of Vecernji list (Oct. 29, 1997).  Under the title "The Day of Reconciliation", a person with characteristic cap and a beard smybols of a chetnik (Serbian irregular) was  addressing a Croat: "I am finally reconciliated with the fact that my Croatian retirement income is better than yours!" Since that Vecernji list is known for supporting the Croatian government, the fact that such a comment was published might point to the government’s ambivalent attitudes towards some decisions that have been forced upon it by the international community.⁸

In the town of Ilok, from which almost all Croatian inhabitants were expelled in 1991, a folklore pagent with Croatian and Serbian participants was held on September 20, 1997, continuing the pre-war tradition of "Ilok Vintage".  On that occasion, the Croatian county official thanked UNTAES for helping the county to organize the pagent, stating that "it is the best example of peaceful reintegration".  The Serbian representative greeted the guests -- many exiled Croats among them -- on behalf of the local Serbs, at least some of whom made the Croats flee.  The UN-high official addressed them all by saying that he is "witnessing a perfect example of what he would call the reconciliation of peoples".  The Croatian government representative stated that "the pagent has a deeper meaning" and that "it is a foundation of the building of trust between the Croats, Serbs, Slovaks and other peoples living in that region" (Vecernji list of Sept. 21, 1997, p.2).

The emerging post-war social relationships, made up of a network of tensions and oppositions, are to be (re)structured according to a politically acceptable solution. So, on the occasion of the pagent, the image of the "dancing peasants"
was taken out of the conservative, reality-detached old European ethnology, to be revived in the frames of a reality-imposed politics.

In the present situation, it is quite easy to discover the meanings of political acts by taking their symbolic representations back to the system of relationships in which, against which, or as a model for which they are produced.  The example of "Ilok Vintage" corroborates the general hypothesis on ideology used to overcome the inadequacy of practice.  In Melucci’s terms, the symbolic elaboration of action "rationalizes" social relationships according to the interests of the actor (cf. Melucci 1996, 349-350).  Croatian state officials and international diplomates expect people to accept and asses their symbols’ expressive dimensions regardless to the war-victims' capacity to emotionally identify with the new collective goals.  The cynical interpretation would have it that the diplomates -- international and local alike -- send their addressees messages about what reality must look like in the well-known "soft" wrappings of folklore manifestations which were widely used for political purposes throughout the communist Eastern Europe.  Yet today many of their addressees confront the problems totally neglected in the official statements and plans.⁹

Everyday life: tolerance or "trust"?

In spite of accepting the new political situation and not seeking revenge, many people cannot overcome grief, bitterness and fear.  Contempt is also present, because it was their former neighbors – once trusted, treated as friends, and highly ranked in the traditional value-system -- who betrayed them by becoming their enemies in war.

As shown by Sakic et al. (1997, 241), majority of the displaced Croats agree with the peaceful aspect of reintegration. One third, however, thought (in 1996) that occupied territory should be reconquered by military force (as it happened in two other Croatian regions in 1995).

Mirjana Krizmanic, a psychologist with experience in the Croatian refugees' problems and attitudes, recently warned about the reality-detached character of the political syntagm on "establishing trust" (Krizmanic 1997).  In Croatia, a tacit -- non-official and never publicly stated, but widely present -- collective guilt (guilt by ethnic affiliation) is imposed on the Serbs by the Croats who lack some kind of symbolic satisfaction for their own war-sufferings and losses.  However, people with lived war experience prove to have remarkably objective attitudes, in so far they differentiate those who attacked them from those who just passively agreed with Serbian occupation because they believed they did not have any other choice.¹⁰ Still, generally speaking, the situation in the Croatian Danube basin is a situation of the victims and the aggressors forced to live together again.

Pretending that there are no serious problems means not even trying to solve them in a way that promises peace in the future.  Krizmanic argues that the establishing of trust cannot be the first, but only the concluding stage of the process of rebuilding contacts between people until recently mutually perceived as enemies.  She lists the many psychological difficulties people are meeting when confronting the unpleasant facts they cannot change.  She also points out that the "other", Serbian side is equally responsible for the success of the establishing of trust.  She pleads for a step-by-step strategy, i.e. for defining minimal goals.  At this moment, she claims, the only realistic objective is to help people to be just tolerant towards each other, and not to expect them to forget (as the politicians would like them), or to forgive (as advised by the church). Coexistence, or rather, parallel existence without aggression, is a precondition for the possible living together of the next generations.

The importance of cultural aspects of the processes of social reintegration should not be underestimated, too.  The rebuilding of acceptable life-worlds for people in the Croatian Danube basin will be based on the elaboration of the local meanings of justice and injustice, victory and defeat, honor and shame, moral superiority and guilt, humiliation and dignity.  Their present importance is to be understood primarily in relation to the massively shared war experience that forced people to become painfully aware of the very basic physical conditions of life and of the fragility of some social bonds.  Also, most of them had a hard time living in exile for the last six years, impoverished, statistical targets of various help-strategies, often without a job, depended on aid-workers who could not really let them define their own needs.

"We are holding our heads high," was the only sentence a middle-aged woman -- one of the first returnees to Vukovar -- uttered when a TV journalist asked her how it feels to be back home (Croatian TV, Oct. 28, 1997).  The regained self-esteem emerging from finally not being a refugee any more might help the peaceful reintegration process.

However, the same spaces can be perceived as places of ultimate trauma by some people, and as territories that should be conquered in the next war by some others. Therefore, a remarkable hermeneutic subtlety is needed when analyzing how people are symbolically constituting reality in order to regain it (cf. Melucci 1996, 357).

Trying not to become part of the game of demands, expectations, and interests which tie together or put in opposition refugees, aid-workers and politicians, several Croatian anthropologists  have shown (cf. Jambresic Kirin & Povrzanovic, eds. 1996) that any particular position in the social field implies partiality and tensions. They keep juxtaposing the abstract political categories of "inter-ethnic relationships" in "post-war zones" to the lived experience of people victimized by the war regardless to the side they were trapped in.  Yet, they believe it is also the anthropologists' responsibility to point out that many of the people supposed to live together after the war have radically different war-experiences which certainly do make a difference regarding their capacity to forget, forgive, and to thinking positive and looking forward to the future.  They repeatedly make clear that "the capacity to trust needs to be underwritten by the capacity to tame chance, especially the chance of being hurt" (Daniel & Knudsen 1995, 2).

Elaborate field-insights in the complexities of exile and return should be informing the political pragmatics.  Since the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is the only realistic peaceful solution for the people of all ethnic affiliations in the Croatian Danube basin, even the small-scale traces of its success felt by the people living there would be a reason for optimism.  Anthropologists, after all, should keep believing in the coincidental creativity of everyday life as an arena of infinite improvisation of making do and making up, of constant negotiations of daily value judgements (cf. Read 1993, 35) -- perhaps also for people with radically different war experiences.  Their direct, not mediated encounters could entail a possibility of a "grassroots democracy".  It is namely in the peaceful everyday life where the situatedness and relational character of identity is easily recognized, pointing to the primary importance of personal qualities and not of ethnic affiliations.
 

Textnotes

1  The Amnesty Law and the actual realization of the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration seem to be the major political cause of dissatisfaction for a considerable number of Croats from the Croatian Danube basin.  While only 146 Croats returned to the region in early September 1997 (out of 8O.822 Croats from that region displaced in Croatia and around 25.000 abroad), UNTAES reported that 736 Serbs returned from the Croatian Danube basin to their homes in other formerly Serb-held parts of Croatia (which they fled in 1995 in the course of Croatian miltary reconquering of those regions) (Vecernji list of Sept. 6, 1997, p.2).  Still, it would not be appropriate to talk about massive political disappointment since the process of return has just begun and there might be hope for everyone who really intends to go home.  However, the Croatian official prognosis on 20.000 Croats returning to the Croatian Danube basin by the end of 1997 seems to be unrealistic -- at least because of the financial means needed and the practical obstacles to building during the winter months.

2 According to Croatian officials, all the mines in Eastern Slavonia could be removed in about ten years and two years would be needed for the very town of Vukovar -- if there was enough money (Vjesnik of Aug. 23, 1997, p.6).

3  As already noted, sociological surveys from 1996 (cf. Društvena istrazivanja 1997) show that only a half of the displaced Croats agree with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration. Almost 90% of all the displaced Croats surveyed would not return in case of Serbian local authority, and more than 63% in case of UN local authority.  However, almost 61% of the displaced encompassed by the surveys in 1996 stated that they would return in correspondence with the Plan for Peaceful Reintegration is completely implemented.  More than 90% said that they would return regardless to the Plan  on condition of complete implementation of the Croatian control in the Croatian Danube basin (cf. Rogic & Sakic 1997).

4  In October 1997, after a meeting with the angry representatives of the associations of the families of missing soldiers which was closed for the press, the vice-president of Croatian government made a short public statement: "The Program of Establishing Trust will certainly be the most difficult to realize with the associations of the families of missing soldiers, for the destiny of their relatives is still their first priority" (Vecernji list of Oct. 29, 1997, p.3).

5  In Croatia, the minority language and script is in official use together with Croatian in every municipality in which the members of the minority form more than half of the population.

6  In the meantime, it has been decided that the schools with the majority of Serbian pupils have a Serbian director and a Croatian deputy.  It will be reverse in the schools with the majority of Croatian pupils, i.e. only if the majority of displaced Croats really return to Eastern Slavonia.  (The Serbs in Vukovar already decided to establish a separate Serbian kindergarten.)  The parents could decide in which language their children will be educated.  So, at the moment, in Vukovar-Srijem county in which 16 elementary schools are situated, 4.013 pupils chose Serbian language, 216 chose Croatian, 18 Slovak, 3 Rusinian and 1 chose Hungarian as the language of education (Vecernji list of Sept. 6, 1997, p.2).  According to the 1991 census, the region of the Croatian Danube basin was inhabited by 44,5% of Croats, 34,9% of Serbs, 6,7% of Hungarians and 13,9% of other ethnic groups (Sakic et al. 1997, 237)  In 1997, 90,7% of all the persons displaced from the the Croatian Danube basin are Croats.

7  As in the pre-war months in early 1991, once again Croatian national symbols (the flag and the coat of arms) were getting focal position in the newspaper reports from the Croatian Danube basin in late 1997.  At several occasions, boards on post-offices and schools were damaged, supposedly because of being only in Latin script and not also in Cyrillic script used by the Serbs.

8  A similar ambivalence could be traced in the mushrooming of official bodies and plans in charge for home-return to the Croatian Danube basin (of Croats still displaced in other parts of the country) and from that region (of Serbs wanting to return to other parts of Croatia), esp. in their long, descriptive names, such as "The National Committee for the Establishment of National Trust", "The Committee for the Realization of Reconciliation in the Town of Vukovar", or "The Working Group for the Acceleration of Return to the Danube Region and From It" that works on the realization of "The Operative Agreement on the Return of Displaced Persons".

9  Some profound emotional obstacles are left unconsidered in political negotiations.  They are definitely not solvable by legal acts.  Here is but one example (from a personal narrative recorded for my dissertation mentioned in footnote 10).
Although he never was a Croatian soldier, a tailor from Vukovar in his late fifties was taken prisoner to a Serbian war-camp a day after the fall of the town in November 1991.  He had a Serbian irregular's gun pointed to his head twice on his way to the camp: he says that he wasn't shot by mere chance.  Together with some other people, he was exchanged for Serbian soldiers a month later -- he lost 12 kilos in that period.  Since early 1992, he lives in a hotel in Istria sharing a room with the rest of his family, having two warm meals a day and a possibility to earn some money by mending clothes for his fellow-citizens staying in the same hotel.  He was doing fine when I interviewed him in 1993 -- he even wanted to talk about his worst experiences.  Like the majority of displaced persons, he said that he wanted to return home, too.  According to his daughter, he was doing fine until Spring 1997, when it became certain that the time has come to start planing the return to Vukovar. (The internal refugees lost their refugee-status in Croatia on September 1, 1997.  They had to apply for the returnee-status if they wanted to keep the state-support.)  Since then, he is falling into pathologically long sleep, regardless to the time of the day.  After eventually waking up, he doesn't known where he is.  His daughter believes that these "blackouts" happen for his lack of energy needed for an entirely new start, as well as for the lack of emotional strength to confront his Serbian neighbors who stayed behind.  They shared the shelter with him and his family in the months of siege, but helped the Serbian militaries who conquered the town to sort out the Croat civilians by pointing their fingers at them.

10 This important psychologists’ insight is confirmed by the refugee children's autobiographical essays quoted in Prica & Povrzanovic 1996, as well as by the personal narratives (from Dubrovnik and Dubrovnik region, Vukovar, Zupanja, Vinkovci surroundings, Osijek, Zadar, Sibenik and Zagreb) I collected from 1991 to 1996 for the purpose of my dissertation entitled "Culture and Fear: War-time Everyday Life in Croatia 1991-92".
 

References

Daniel, E. Valentine and John Chr. Knudsen
    1995  Introduction. In: Mistrusting Refugees, E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen (eds) Berkeley,
              Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1-12.

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    1992  The Culture of Conflict: Field Reality and Theory. In: C. Nordstrom and J. Martin (eds):
              The Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of
              California Press: 3-17.

Povrzanovic, Maja
    1997  Identities in War. Embodiments of Violence and Places of Belonging. Ethnologia
              Europaea 27: 153-162.

Povrzanovic, Maja and Renata Jambrešic Kirin
    1996  Negotiating Identities? The Voices of Refugees between Experience and Representation.
              In: R. Jambrešic Kirin and M. Povrzanovic (eds): War, Exile, Everyday Life. Cultural Perspectives.
              Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research: 3-19.

Prica, Ines and Maja Povrzanovic
    1996  Narratives of Refugee Children as the Ethnography of Maturing. In: R. Jambrešic Kirin and
              M. Povrzanovic (eds): War, Exile, Everyday Life. Cultural Perspectives. Zagreb: Institute of
              Ethnology and Folklore Research: 83-113.

Read, Allan
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Rebic, Adalbert
    1995  Prognanici i izbjeglice u svijetu i u nas. In: Rogic, Ivan et al., Progonstvo i povratak: psihosocijalne
              i razvojne odrednice progonstva i mogucnosti povratka hrvatskih prognanika. Zagreb:
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Rogic, Ivan and Vlado Sakic
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              Vol 6, No. 2-3 (28-29): 259-280.

Sakic, Vlado, Ivan Rogic and Slavko Sakoman
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Contact Information:
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research
Kralja Zvonimira 17, P.O.B. 287, 10 000, Zagreb Croatia
E-mail: maja@maief.ief.hr
c/o Department of European Ethnology, University of Lund
Finngatan 8, 223 62 Lund, Sweden
E-mail: Maja.Povrzanovic@etn.lu.se
 
 

THE TOPSY TURVY DAYS WERE THERE AGAIN
STUDENT AND CIVIL PROTEST IN BELGRADE AND SERBIA, 1996/1997
Mirjana Prosic-Dvornic   Midland, MI

 Abstract: After a long silence, university students, and hundreds of thousands of citizens, were on the streets again, protesting against the regime in Serbia. The immediate motive for the outburst of long suppressed discontent was the regime’s insolent annulment of the victory of the opposition in November 1996 local elections. In terms of duration (from November 1996 until March 1997), spread (throughout urban Serbia) and number of participants (estimated to 350,000 to 550.000), this protest was unprecedented. However, like all previous demonstrations, it failed to initiate any real, irrevocable change. Instead, the regime succeeded to channel citizens’ discontent into "safety vents", into temporary "topsy turvy" days of "Another Serbia", thus enabling once again the continuity and stability of the regime’s particular vision of society.

Introduction

The 1992 Student Protest in Belgrade was one of the most dynamic, articulate and creative demonstrations of "civil disobedience" that took place in "Milosevic’s Serbia"  (cf. Prosic-Dvornic 1993). Despite the significance of the protest, and a desperate attempt by its participants to send a clear message that "Milosevic’s Serbia" was not the only Serbia that existed, it still failed to make big news in the world. Foreign media and its audiences were rather indifferent towards a student avant garde in Serbian civil society, that espoused the fact that there was another, different Serbia, the modern, democratic, and tolerant one in need of recognition and support.

In late 1996 and early 1997, when students, joined by citizens this time, poured into the streets of major Serbian towns once again, the situation was reversed. The protest which lasted four months, never ceased making headline news. "Another Serbia"¹  had finally become media visible throughout the world. Unequivocal approval of the events, boosted the morale of a people left voiceless for a very long time. For Serbs living abroad² this was finally welcome news coming from their homeland, after the continual stories of war, rape, destruction and ethnic cleansing that had been reported in the press for years.

My own predicament as a researcher, and a chronologist of students’ and other protests in Serbia in the 90s (Prosic-Dvornic 1991,1993,1994,1998) changed dramatically, as well. In 1992, as a professor at the University of Belgrade and a vice-dean of the School of Philosophy³, one of the most active in Protest, I was, as part of an "administrative triumvirate",  in a position to decide whether the school should or should not be involved in the protest. Leaning on the School’s long tradition of supporting "freedom fighters", a quick and unanimous decision, the only possible one, was made: let the students take over the facilities and let us, their teachers, offer them our full support. Fortunately, we also secured the full backing of the majority of staff and faculty. The School of Philosophy, together with the Schools of Philology, Natural Sciences and Mathematics, all located in the very center of the old downtown, in the Student Square became the Protest Headquarters and "home" for the entire student population.

I performed a triple role. I was in a key decision-making positions, balanced between the students and the outside world, I was a keen, always present, active participant in the protest representing my own political views, and I was an ethnographer recording the story from an  "insider’s" vantage point.

In 1996/97 during the second student protest, it was an entirely different situation.  Still formally a professor of Belgrade University on a prolonged sabbatical and living abroad, I was unable to directly participate in the protest, much less influence its course in any way. I was "outside", an observer, who, although vitally interested in the progress of the protest and its achievements, was now in a position to study "culture from a distance" through a variety of  primary and secondary sources. These covered domestic and foreign press, radio and television reports, electronic news, photographs, e-mail messages from friends and colleagues in Belgrade that often turned out to be detailed reports, insiders’ insights and interviews, and various materials generated daily by the protest, including slogans, mottoes, props and other paraphernalia. Two books on the Protest presenting analyses of the on-going events and processes, one conducted by a group of sociologists and psychologists (Babovic et al.1997), the other by ethnology/anthropology students supervised by two assistants (Gorunovic, Erdei 1997), both from the School of Philosophy in Belgrade, were also available. Being an "insider" in the "outsider’s" position, again a multiple role, with a sound "local knowledge", I could immediately recognize the shifting contexts as well as the intentions of  key participants and could "catch" all subtle nuances in meanings. I myself was experiencing a strong sensation of being in a liminal phase of a ritual while participating in the virtual reality created by various media (cf. Silverstone 1988). On the other hand, "a view from afar" provided me with a different, broader and emotionally less  biased perspective. If the former was an observation blurred by subjective interests, the latter was a more detached observation from a bird’s-eye point of view.

The Setting

The Student Protest ‘92 (June 4 - July 10, 1992 ) was conceived as an opening phase of a permanent demonstration against the injustices of the system, personified by Slobodan Milosevic’s despotic personal rule, until some real changes were introduced. Instead, it had actually marked the end of the initial period of anti-regime revolts (1990-1993),  followed by almost five long years of gloomy interregnum. When students went home for the summer in 1992, the legislatures managed to pass a new, degrading law that completely abolished the former degree of autonomy the University had enjoyed.⁴ Left with no alternative and disturbed by the worsening of the political and economic situation, disappointed by their own and their professors’ failure to preserve autonomy, the students responded appropriately one last time. Bearing the specific hallmark of their style of  action, unrestrained humor, keen satire and parody, students laid the University (1838-1992) to rest in a mock funeral ceremony  (Prosic-Dvornic, 1993:136-137).

This was not only a farewell bid to the University’s autonomy, but to civil protests in general, as well.⁵ In spite of the two important developments: the implementation of a new economic program in early 1994 that harnessed rampant inflation and introduced some financial discipline; and the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia in November 1995, living conditions continued to be miserable and degrading for the majority of the population. The regime had no intention of loosening its grip, nor of introducing any of the desired radical reforms. Its power remained intact, as did its overall cynicism and ability to turn and shamelessly exploit any situation to its own advantage. The personal rule of Slobodan Milosevic was always defined in ambiguous terms on purpose so that, at the right moment, the "right choice" could be made. Radical shifts in the political course that Milosevic took were designed to preserve his undisputed primacy.  At the time of his ascent to power (1987-1989), Milosevic was balancing between the option of preserving the socialist system in the entire former Yugoslavia under his centralized grip, and the option of introducing an alternative, nationalistic ideology and implement the concept of the Greater Serbia, 150 years long dream of the Serbian "patriotic" elites. After the outburst of the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia (1991-1995), this second option enabled the regime to represent itself as the "essence of patriotism", while those opting for peaceful resolution to differences were labeled as "traitors", "foreign hirelings" and "abstract pacifists" . After the Dayton Peace Agreement had been signed, however, this particular paradigm of metaphors distinguishing between "the good" and "the bad" Serbs, no longer applied, for it was now the President who was the greatest peacemaker of all times, (cf. Prosic-Drovec, 1994: 189-193; 1998).

Although the bellicose, blindingly chauvinistic propaganda had ceased thereafter to pollute public life, and the usual propagandistic channels which suited the regime’s needs were now used to create the illusion of normality, nothing  functioned properly. It was not only that the rule of law, an ideal of the civil society, was not established, but that even the existing laws were either conveniently  broken or strictly enforced by the regime to purge political adversaries or to enable the additional collection of "tribute". Corruption was the name of the game, and "gray" and "black" zones of economy were the only profitable ones. The new rich and powerful class was setting their rules and standards for the entire society. The majority of the population, formerly well ensconced within the middle class ranks, were rapidly nearing the poverty line. Securities provided by the previous system such as pensions, welfare and health care were gone. Pyramid schemes of all kinds were highly instrumental in "laundering" money and "transferring" private and "social" savings of the entire nation into the hands of the "chosen few". Unfortunate and sad reminders of the recent outrageous war, filled with atrocities, rape, "ethnic" and "cultural cleansing" were abundantly present: handicapped young men, armed individuals roaming about in fatigues, the flourishing of "vices" such as drug addiction and prostitution, refugees and displaced persons with nothing but memories of their former lives and no feasible future, and an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Serbian urbanites who had decided to restart their lives somewhere, far away from the "balkanized" Balkans.

Re-Awakening of "the  People"

Life was lived one day at a time, devoid of certainty and even predictability. All one’s resources went to secure nothing more than mere daily survival. Apathy was the dominant state of mind. Still, with hope on the wane, discontent and negative energy were building up to dangerous levels, waiting for an occasion to explode.

That occasion presented itself on November 17, 1996,  when the democratic coalition Zajedno (Together⁷ ) had won, in the second election round, a majority of seats in local governments in Belgrade and in 13 out of 19 other major cities in Serbia, a total of  34 municipalities. As soon as preliminary results were announced that night, citizens gathered in Belgrade in Republic/Liberty Square⁸  to celebrate their victory⁹. The same was happening it other "victorious" towns throughout Serbia.

In order to prevent the "unimaginable", the regime, as usual,  took every "precaution" to secure its victory: prearranging election laws and electoral district to favor the ruling Socialist Party; preparing the dissemination of desired positive images of the regime and negative ones of the opposition, as well as the infamous "commentaries without information", essential to totalitarian propaganda by the state-run media; elimination, by public denunciation or private threats and blackmail, of potentially dangerous candidates in the "enemy camp"¹⁰; intimidation of the electorate; tampering with ballots and "doctoring" the results before they are publicly announced (never proven but always strongly suspected -cf. Prosic-Dvornic 1991). However, despite all there "security actions" the regime was in for a big surprise.

Although the Socialist Party of Serbia won the majority of  seats in 144 other communities¹¹, it was quite shaken by the loss of the big cities. The 144 villages and small towns were not as important and they included less than 50% of the electorate. Not only did they lose the majority, they got the message loud and clear that the voters mood was changing and that a dangerous crack in the regime’s image of invincibility had been made. According to the sources of a well informed journalist, President Milosevic at first was angry and blamed  his closest collaborators’ personal disputes ("We lost Belgrade because of your quarrels, and we lost everywhere that there were quarrels" [between party members] - Djukic 1997: 270) and poor organization for this serious precedent. It appeared as though he was  willing to accept defeat, and even ready to find a silver lining in this unexpected, dark cloud: "This will only boost the party to better prepare for the next elections" (Ibid.). Later that  day, however, believing that the people were lethargic enough to care about politics, Milosevic turned to a different strategy. He instructed his party members in electoral commissions and district courts to make the necessary "arrangements" that would annul their adversary’s victory. which resulted in suddenly "discovering" numerous, alleged irregularities in the voting process at the posts wherever the opposition had won were thus suddenly "discovered"¹². The arrogance of the act, the obvious display of the obstinacy of an autocrat who would not shy away from open deceit nor abuse of any institution, who exposed the entire, allegedly independent, judicial system as being nothing more than one of the levers of power, who in order to protect his will and interests, believing that he could "get away’ with it, insulted and enraged the voters.

This was not the first time the public was faced with the arrogant attitudes and acts of the regime. As a matter of fact, there were far more serious deeds and deceits previously committed that had unobtrusively gone by. But it was this last act that went too far. A sudden and extremely powerful revolt, erupting out of a great for relief from oppression and hardship ensued. Since the joy of victory had already been experienced, and the long-dormant hope that there still could be change after all, was rejuvenated, the situation was very different. It was as if  the voters were hit by the old curse, "may you lose what you’ve already had".

Taking to the Streets Again

The initial release of anger caused by the obvious tampering with the local level election results could have become violent and unpredictable.  The masses were charged with negative energy, and all they needed was a call for the "Romanian scenario" to begin. Was this the start of a civil war in Serbia?  Unlike all previous rallies most of which were confined to Belgrade¹³,  demonstrations this time began in the provinces, in Nis, the second largest Serbian industrial city. Needless to say, the inhabitants of Belgrade were only too eager to join in, as were populations in the all other "annulled" towns. Determined not to withdraw before their demands were met: that the regime honored the original vote count, that the state-run media were freed from the deadly propaganda, and that some sound economic and political reforms were initiated, demonstrations stretched over an extended period of time. Citizens’ rallies lasted for three months, and ended only when the opposition candidates were allowed to rightfully took over local governments. Student protest which had one additional demand, for the University President to resign, continued on through March 1997. The number of protesters was also unprecedented. In Belgrade alone it was not unusual to see between 100,000 and 200,000 citizens and tens of thousands of students participating in daily marches. On special occasions, such as religious holidays, St. Nickolas Day, December 19, Christmas Eve, January 6th, St. Sava Day, January 27 (founder of the Serbian Orthodox Church, celebrated as patron of schools and education), all celebrated according to the Julian calendar still used by the Serbian Orthodox Church, New Year’s Eve, one would observe as many as half-a-million people in the streets of Belgrade.

The President of the Democratic Party, Zoran Djindjic, a philosopher educated both in Yugoslavia and in Germany, with profound theoretical knowledge on civil disobedience and other non-violent types of protests, with personal, "field" experience dating back to his own student days in the early ‘70s, found a salutary solution. Knowing that the enormous tension that was building into what could have turned unto an all-out blood bath had to be given a vent, while implementing the principle of non-violent protest, Djindjic though of a convenient way of releasing protesters’ "steam", yet causing no serious harm or damage to property. The solution was the to launch "cannonades" of eggs directed towards some of the most important "gears" of the regime. The state-run Television Network of Serbia,  Radio Serbia, "Politika" Publishing House, and editorial offices of other pro-regime newspapers, the City Hall, Court House, Assembly Building and other well known symbols of repression were all "targeted". For several days, beginning on November 25, 1996, miles long  columns of protesters marched by launching attacks with "fresh ammunition" every go round (buttermilk and red paint were also sporadically used)¹⁴. This  part of the protest became known as The Yellow Revolution. The name was derived from the egg yolk, the part  that  adhered the best to a targeted object. . One of the streets lined with several target spots was renamed Scrambled Egg Street for the duration of the protest. For days the buildings were covered with rotting eggs, "the odor outside matching the one inside". When passing by these buildings, protesters would turn their heads away and hold their noses, pretending to be protecting themselves from the smell of corruption and moral decay.

The egg, the symbol of the initial phase of the protest has been commemorated by special memorabilia sold as souvenirs such as, post-cards bearing the inscription "Greetings from Belgrade", depicting Politika Publishing House covered with a giant egg, and spectacles cut out of cardboard, the "lenses" of which were in the shape of a sunny-side up egg.

Once eggs helped channel rage and aggression, there was a lot of room left for more creative forms of expression. The group that possessed the infallible "know-how" in that area, were the students who joined the protest on November 22 when their Student Initiative Committee was organized. They were especially angry because the Rector would not even recognize the existence of the Student Protest. Instead he tried to reduce these tens of thousands of students to what he referred to as "a handful of manipulated kids" who were "obviously only trying to avoid their academic obligations". In reality, there was a general strike at the University, denied by the Rector who chose to ignore the protest and try to deceive the public by announcing that "the schools were working normally".

Representation of the Protest in the  State-Run Media

Fallacies uttered by various representatives of the regime, as a way of dealing with the "undesirable events", were not unusual in a society in which the well oiled propaganda machinery constantly recreated "better", virtual reality. Another effective tactic was to ignore the event, as if it had not occurred. This was a good way of not only preventing the real news from getting out, but also a worthy way of trying to send a message to the participants that their actions were so insignificant that they could not even "make the news". The calculated  expectation was that protesters who failed to make an impact, would become demoralized and give up. While the same technique was applied to the 96/97, it soon became impossible to overlook the large number of participants who gathered daily at various locations throughout the state. Additionally, there was independent media only too eager to disseminate information about the Protest. A primary example among these was the famous Belgrade Radio B92¹⁶, which the regime perceived as exceptionally "objectionable", despite its very limited broadcast range, barely covering the greater Belgrade area. Signals of Radio B92 were first  jammed for days. Finally the regime managed to shut down the station altogether on December 3, 1996, under the pretense of an "expired license"¹⁷. However, due to the combined pressure from both protesters and the international community (Voice of America broadcast Radio B-92 reports during the shut down), the attempt failed and the station was reopened two days later.

Other techniques were employed since the "ignoring" and "muting" ones did not work. They included  attempts to minimize the scope or significance of the event, to employ "didactic" rebuking, to discredit and disparage, to label, to dispel solidarity by dichotomizing everything pertaining to the Protest into "bad" categories, such as  "different", "foreign", "imposed". To make the attempted deceit more "believable", phrases like "a handful of manipulated kids", were additionally "supported" by cropped camera shots, focusing on small detached groups of protesters going to or from the rally and close-ups of individual participants, montaged to make it seem as though there in fact were not many demonstrators participating. Finally, aiming to produce an even stronger impact upon the viewers, the political "expertise" and opinions of so-called "honest, hard-working ordinary citizens" polled all over the country were broadcast regularly. They revealed that the only representation of the Protest "honest" citizens knew about was through information presented by the regime-run media. Their contempt was hence the result of this imposed ignorance.

Political opposition and the protesting citizens were the ones who were blamed the most. Students, however, were OUR children and it was impossible, or at least counter-productive to proclaim them "our enemies" or even different from US. That was why they were  represented in the regime-run media as a small group that had unfortunately fallen into the trap of the "violent, pro-fascist demonstrators" as the President of the Serbian Assembly phrased it.¹⁸ According to another "explanation", it was not the students were not taking part in the demonstrations. They were impersonated by "hirelings" of sorts, "from adolescents to senior citizens (!) disguised as students".

Needless to say that actions like carrying of foreign state and corporate flags, or displaying the Protest’s motto "Belgrade is the world", or passing by foreign embassies, which to the protesters symbolized partnership with the community of nations, were readily reinterpreted as undeniable signs that "the protest was mentored from abroad" as part of an "international plot against the small, proud, sovereign, and freedom-loving Serbia".  The President of Serbia himself, repeated this message in his very first address to the nation, on December 13, 1996, five weeks after the beginning of the protest. He flagrantly abused the letter from Mr. Warren Christopher, in which the former Secretary of State criticized Milosevic’s actions and advised him to honor the will of the voters. Mr. Milosevic, however, presented the letter as a "proof" that the unrest in Serbia was engineered from abroad. Hence, the treacherous opposition and its followers were nothing but a mob of "Fifth Columnists" and "terrorists".¹⁹

It is true, however, that the international community, as the situation escalated, was more and more involved with the "annulment problem". Were it not for their support of the Protest and pressure on the regime many potentially disastrous actions might not have been prevented. Without outside interference, Milosevic would not have cared much about the "election scandal". But, because of it, he was forced to request an arbitrage from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. A delegation, headed by Mr. Felipe González,  visited Belgrade in mid-December and their findings verified that the opposition had indeed won the elections in almost all of the disputed posts. Nevertheless, it took Milosevic a month to begin reversing some of the annulments. It turned out that he was actually still pushing the confrontation further, as he continued to irritate the opposition and the entire nation by instructing electoral commissions and courts to play the game of overruling each other. Alternating a proclaimed concession with a new rebuffing the pledge to honor it was nerve racking indeed. Only when all other resources were used up, did Milosevic decided to resolve the situation, in his own way, of course. Making it appear as his grace, on February 11, 1997 he proposed to the Assembly to pass Lex Specials honoring almost all of the original election results. Following the event, opposition representatives were finally inaugurated as mayors and as new municipal councils.

The Police

It was this careful monitoring by international political and humanitarian institutions, and serious warnings from foreign governments that prevented the regime from using police force to mercilessly crush the protesters, a few instances of violence notwithstanding. As is always the case in  a protest scenario, the police were present daily in or around all important institutions the demonstrators were likely to visit. However, when so ordered, they performed more than just the perfunctory role of securing the protection of people and property. From the very beginning quite a few individual arrests were made for alleged "disorderly conduct", or "interference with the police work", such as "regulating traffic"²⁰ , with the evidence that sometimes there was police brutality behind the scenes. The intent of these sporadic actions was to intimidate and remind people of what might happen if they crossed a line. In mid-December 1996 and again from mid-January 1997, however, riot police in full gear were beginning to rough up demonstrators. In particular was the time when Mr. Milosevic  was contemplating whether to concede some municipalities to the opposition, while the opposition leaders were considerably widening their marching routes which already included some of the Belgrade suburbs, hitherto strongholds of the regime. Enraged anew, the police on several occasions were ordered to forcefully chase protesters away. The scores of wounded protesters were the result of each such "close encounter".

In the last week of January, the police cordons were no longer placed around important landmarks throughout the city. Instead they were preventing protesters from marching along major streets even in the center of the city. The "forbidden city"²¹ was thus greatly expended, at the expense of the "liberated territory" which, practically overnight, was reduced to the confined area of the old city center. Students’ reaction to this sudden siege was to walk in circles, surrounded by a police cordon, with hands on their heads, as if on a prison walk. This was the introduction to an eight-day standoff between a motionless, stern police force in full riot gear, and a gay, active and friendly student "cordon", bravely withstanding both the force and freezing temperatures. Students continued with their pacifying behavior, trying to "humanize" the opposite side. They turned the space inside the cordon into a camping ground with a kitchen was set up in a tent, fire burning in barrels, a discotheque working at night. After morning work out, students helped the public city services take away piles of garbage. They never ceased trying to communicate with the police officers. Students offered them food and flowers, talked to them, attempted to draw them into their games and make them smile.  One "odd" couple, a young police officer and a female student, who met during demonstrations standing in different cordons, even got married after the Protest.

In Search of the "Good News"

In mid-December when everything seemed to be going against the ruling party,²² the regime badly needed news items that could be reinterpreted in its favor. One operation was to buy social peace by paying welfare benefits that had been in arrears. From the economic point of view this was a desperate and dangerous move for it could generate devaluation and a new wave of rampant inflation. However, from the regime’s vantage point, this did not necessarily have to be a negative development, since it had already used inflation as one of its manipulating tools. Money was also needed to back up parallel programs, such as the formation of a pro-regime phantom student organization, called the IndependentStudent Movement. The job of its well paid activists  was to attempt to counter-balance the effects of the authentic Student Protest. Declaring to represent the majority of the student population, the Independent Student Movement demanded classes and "normal" life at the universities to resume. However, as this was not the first "student organization" that was set up, the entire outrageous staging was immediately perceived as too transparent to work.
 

One final attempt to demonstrate that the Socialist Party of Serbia and its Leader still enjoyed vast popular support was to revive populists meetings that were, carefully engineered "from above", highly instrumental at the time of Milosevic’s ascent to power. The new series of meetings, For Serbia, with the expressive slogan Serbia shall not be ruled by foreigners,  was organized in various towns between December 17 and 24, 1996. "Grand finale" was to take place in the capital. None of the meetings went well and everywhere there were conflicts between the regime supporters and opponents. Staging one in Belgrade was extremely risky and it nearly turned into a clash of catastrophic proportions. The nation was brought to the brink of civil war, and it was hard to accept that the organizers were not aware of the dangers involved. Many believed that the regime counted on these conflicts to be used as an excuse for brutally crushing down the civil and student protest.

The Socialist Party of Serbia announced in advance that at least half a million of its supporters were expected to attend the Belgrade meeting. It was to take place in Terazije,  some 300 feet away from the Republic/Liberty Square, the gathering spot of the opposition.   People of all ages and from all walks of life, assembled from all over Serbia, especially from more remote places where the only news available was that of the state-run media, were bused or transported by trains to the capital in early morning. They had been susceptible to the propaganda and many confirmed that they really believed their mission was to assist the President in liberating the capital from "traitors", "foreign mercenaries", "fascists", "Chet-nics" and "hooligans". Others were motivated by less noble reasons, such as fear of repression or of losing whatever privileges they still thought they enjoyed. Some took a chance to introduce an adventure into their dreary everyday lives, and substitute a free ride to the capital, with travel expenses fully covered, for a day of work. Whatever the case, they thought that they would be welcome and that its citizens would appreciate their effort. As they started their walk into town, carrying President’s photographs and "pre-fabricated" posters with old, uninventive, sterile messages and slogans, attached to long wooden poles, all provided by the organizers, they faced a very different, unexpected reality. Their own arrogance and determination to deal with the traitorous Belgrade mob quickly and thoroughly, was met by anger and insults coming from the Belgrade crowds that could hardly be described as "a handful". Confrontations and clashes occurred throughout the day and ended with scores of casualties.  The most dramatic moment occurred immediately before the meeting. Some 40,000 thousand "supporters", less than a tenth of the expected  number of participants, were besieged by an at least five times greater  crowd of protesters. A possibly disastrous conflict of the two groups was prevented by the opposition leaders who miraculously managed to calm down the opposition protesters and lead on a march in another direction.

The organizers of the Terazije meeting, that is "groups which control[led] the means of communication and repression" (Da Matta 1977:247), made all the necessary preparations well in advance. As a contrast to the flexibility and constant improvisation the opposition resorted to in leading the Protest so that it could respond promptly to the ever-changing situation, the regime, wishing to emphasize its authority, power and stability, adopted an opposite strategy. The Terazije meeting was therefore conceived as a formal ritual celebrating the existing structure and its inherent hierarchy (ibid. 248 ff; Turner 1977), or, in Handelman’s terminology (1990: 23-50), it was designed as a public event that presented the live-in-world. It was used to impart messages that confirmed social relations, values and orientations in accordance with the regime’s world view.  To this end, a  proper, elevated stage was erected, sturdy enough to support the President of Serbia, his wife, prominent members of the left coalition, and high government officials, or, as some commentators phrased it, "the ruling couple and their suite...weighing several billion dollars" (M. Milosevic et al.,Vreme, vol. 323, Dec.28, 1996:10-12).

Iconography and scenography reminiscent of the social realism style, loudspeakers, spotlights, and, most importantly, television cameras and transmission trucks, were all set in place, waiting for the "suite" to arrive. For security reasons, but also for reasons of symbolic spatial distancing between the ruler and the ruled, the stage was conspicuously fenced off from the area reserved for the crowd. The ruler, backed by frenetic clamor of support coming from the crowd transported from afar to create the right ambiance for his speech, used their presence as a backdrop for the warnings and threats he intended for the other half of the Serbian society. He openly admitted that he was not going to tolerate the existence of the  schism; nor the barren attempts by the menacing opposition to harm him; nor the imposition of a world community that he had no intention of honoring, especially the standards of a "new world order"; nor anyone who dared challenge his authority, and so on.

One spontaneous moment that could not have been anticipated and "engineered" in advance revealed the true nature of the Leader’s relationship with the People, proving that they were to him nothing but necessary decoration. That moment came when the mass all of a sudden started chanting, using the President’s nick name: "Slobo, we love you!". Obviously annoyed for being distracting while delivering some important message, he impatiently cut the chants off with an ill-tempered:  "I love you too!" Needless to say that this little phrase immediately became the joke of the town, and that the following day the opposition protesters were all proudly sporting new badges inscribed with the President’s "declaration of love".

After the meeting was over, while quietly walking through the city towards their buses waiting to take them home, the supporters were an entirely different kind of crowd from the one that came in the morning to "cleanse" the city. Their arrogance was worn out and replaced by shock, disbelief and humiliation. One scene of retreating defeated "warriors", caught by a Deutschewelle camera crew (Dec.25, English Edition News, MEU, 5:00 P.M. EDT) quintessentially showed how farcical the latest regime "rally-idea" was: An elderly couple, at least in their late 70s,  walking rather briskly with an effort, trying to keep up with their group of  "retreating supporters", dragged a sign behind them which read: "I want my classes to resume!"

Once they were gone, students offered their silent but very expressive comment of the event. The following day they performed a "cleansing ritual" by scrubbing the spot from which the "ruling couple and their suite" instilled hatred, intolerance and isolationism. Indeed the clash that occurred in Belgrade on the Christmas Eve, was not just a conflict of political opponents. It was the clash of two cultures very distant form each other, of two different civilization spheres, one archaic, rural, patriarchal, suffering from an "authoritarian syndrome", the other representing cosmopolitan urbanites with modern/post-modern predisposition.

From the regime’s vantage point, however, the meeting produced many positive effects. The leader had demonstrated that he still had the power to impose his will. He also proved that there still existed a Serbia loyal to him and it was made visible throughout the world. Maybe the image of "his Serbia" was not very appealing to those abroad, but it was extremely useful for internal representation. Pictures, speeches, and especially The Speech,  cheers and applause ardently recorded at the meeting, were the "good news" around which new sequences of virtual reality could be built. Reinterpretation by means of electronic editing  would create exactly the desired representation of the meeting. All that would be disseminate would be the "right" kind of messages, all negative ones would be eliminated.

Those who had seen both the event and its media representation knew the difference. The citizens of Belgrade, themselves victims of a vicious propaganda, could no longer bear the perpetuation of lies and intoxication of viewers who were not there to witness the events, and who would not, therefore, be objectively informed. As a manifestation of their anger and resistance, early in January, the protesters transposed one of the specific features of the Protest, the noise, an obligatory companion to any march or gathering in the streets, to their homes. Every day, as the RTV Serbia, popularly known as TV Bastille since March 9, 1991, started its evening news broadcast, windows would open everywhere, and protesters, would begin to make deafening noise by banging pots, pans, lids and any other suitable household utensil, to outshout the stultifying propaganda. Maybe they were recalling the magical power of noise counted upon in traditional religious rituals that were used to chase the "evil forces" away. The effects achieved by this action were really impressive, especially as the noise began to spread out, from the downtown area towards the very outskirts of the city.

Participation in these evening rituals further liberated the citizens from fear instilled by the regime, as the "noise makers", operating from their own homes, without ability to mingle into the street "anonymous mob", openly revealed their identity to neighbors and watchful informers. They were finally brave enough, to speak as individuals, not only "as a mass". The same courage was required to wear some of the badges that bore various mottoes, slogans, or identifiers (e.g."I am a Walker", "I am a BU Student/Professor, "Greetings from ‘a Handful’", "Together", "There are Plenty of Eggs in Belgrade!") all the time, not only during rallies. Being "labeled" outside the "ritual context" as a  member or sympathizer of the opposition, and taking individual responsibility for one’s actions and thoughts among others who may have held different opinions, was definitely a step toward a democratic, civil society. Also it was a way of transcending individual orientations, hitherto exposed only in a private sphere, to a public arena  and reaching out to others of similar aspirations. Realizing that one was not alone, but rather a part of a large group of people with whom one could share  thoughts and actions, created a need to systematically build that group’s identity. That is why the participants did not shy away from using audio-visual symbols which confirmed and amplified their belonging to a newly defined collective.

Without a doubt, the protest was dominated by educated urbanites and it was an expression of their cultural and political preferences and values . Strong democratic orientation, non-authoritarianism, non-conformism, preference for freedom over egalitarianism, proneness to "westernization" and a western model of society, openness towards the world, patriotism but not chauvinism , were among the most cherished values of the protesters  (Cvijic 1997; Kuzmanovic 1997; Vuletic 1997; Babovic 1997b). However, this is not to say that they were a monolithic mass that shared all the same beliefs and supported all the same actions. They differed in views, but nevertheless knew how to communicate their differences and how to tolerate them. What they shared was "solidarity without consensus" (Kertzer 1988: 67), or, as J.Fernandez phrased it, the "social consensus" about appropriateness of action, but not necessarily  also a "cultural consensus" about its meanings (ibid.68).

The Topsy Turvy World of "Another Serbia"

When the Protest is deconstructed to its basic building blocks, it becomes evident that there were very few new elements not  seen or exploited in some earlier anti-regime demonstrations. The Protest ‘96/97 was rather a climax of all previous experiences. What made it different was a fresh bricolage, and adaptation of the existing elements to the new situation. One of the most significant changes, however, was augmentation in scope (spread, duration, number of participants) which was one of the Protest’s main sources of power.

The Belgrade Protest was evolving in and among traditional sites that the opposition had already "conquered" or imbued with symbolic meanings during previous rallies. Republic/Liberty and Student Square were among the "preempted" spaces that have long been established as trademark assembly spots for the opposition and students, respectively. Maintaining its assembly site the opposition counted among its few lasting victories. They were able to defy all regime’s attempts to relocate their rallying from the center of the town, recently restored as the regime’s own intended show-off place, to a park across the river Sava, in New Belgrade, a city created by zealous socialist builders.

Marches, as a peaceful form of expressing resistance, associated with the universal arsenal of civil disobedience instruments that originated from as far back as Gandhi’s marches in South Africa, were a part of the Belgrade opposition rallies from the very beginning. Thus, the very first demonstration organized in June 1990 involved a march from the Liberty Square to the Serbian Television Network Headquarters. Later, from the "Slovenian War" (June 1991) on, they were utilized by pacifist, feminist and civil movements and groups in their anti-was campaigns. Motion played an important role in some of the most memorable actions of the kind, including The March of Peace, The Black Band and The Last Chance (Prosic-Dvornic 1994: 181-184). In addition to their various symbolic meanings, these marches helped publicize the existence of groups of people holding opposing views on some crucial issues to those dissipated by the government. This was a very important function considering that the only available sources of information to the majority of the population was the controlled state media. After some successfully performed "actions in motion" by the Student Protest ‘92 and the parallel opposition gathering known as St. Vitus Assembly, marches were definitely enlisted  as a "mandatory" expression of protest. One of the novelties introduced by the Protest ‘96/97 were the inter city marches, or "walks" as they were referred to by the participants. Hundreds of students from Ni? (250 km away), Kragujevac (120km) and Novi Sad (80) marched to Belgrade in mid-December in support of their Belgrade colleagues.

Noise-making, another trademark of the Protest ‘96/97, also had its history. Bells of all sizes, alarm clocks, keys, were the most important requisites of The Last Chance manifestation. This particular gathering also inaugurated another fixed element in the "protest folklore", a prolonged jingling and clattering with keys or whatever suitable gadget, at every mention of Milosevic’s name. It is not surprising that noise had a prominent place in those political rituals. In addition to drawing attention of the onlookers, and symbolizing the "awakening", it is also an excellent boundary marker between different phases of a ritual, or between "sacred" and "profane" modes of existence. Innovative components in the Protest ‘96/97, were reflected in excessive and diversified noise-making, to an extent that a definite trend was set: "Noise is ‘in’!". Thus, every day, drummers from various rock-n-roll bands were at the head of the citizens’ procession, making deafening noise by devotedly pounding their instruments and setting the pace for the march with Latin American and African rhythms. They heralded the approach of the procession to a neighborhood so that occupants of apartments and offices along the way had time to come to their windows and balconies and prepare to greet the protesters. They were not merely spectators, but equally important participants in the Protest. They contributed to the street spectacle "from the galleries", by flashing lights, displaying slogans, dancing,  shouting, waving, "playing" small, plastic toy trumpets and rattles borrowed from the sports fans’ inventory.²⁷ Often, rock bands and dancers performed while walking with the protesters.

But, it was a new "instrument" in noise-making that had soon became metonymic of the Protest. The instrument in question was a simple, inexpensive piece of plastic capable of producing loud, piercing sounds: The Whistle. It was carried everywhere, all of the time, and no protester could be ever found without one. They are still cherished to this day, as a reminder of wonderful times, as a good luck charm, and as a mandatory piece of equipment should a need arise. The huge success of the whistle stemmed from the possibility it offered to act as a neutralizer,  as a substitute for other forms of expression. Because of the political and cultural heterogeneity of  the protesters, "the whistle is strategically significant for it is not ideologically binding. We can all agree to express  protest by blowing a whistle, but it would be difficult to find slogans that everybody would be comfortable with", said one student-protester (N.Jankovic, Demokratija, Feb.10,’97 :5).

If the egg, the whistle, and the noise in general were the core symbols of the Protest ‘96/97,  humor, satire, ridicule and parody were the essence of its expression. This particular form of expressing revolt against the oppression in Serbia was introduced by the Student Protest ‘92 and it was the idiosyncratic feature of the movement. This time, however, students managed to pass it on to the entire protesting population, and helped them take part in an alternative form of existence to the gloomy, burdensome and fearful everyday life they had been forced to lead for almost a decade. Although the citizens had not been completely deprived of cathartic effects of laughter owing to the marvelous work of the devoted cartoonist, Predrag Koraksi?-Corax (cf. footnote 6)²⁸ ,  this time they could experience it first hand, as its active co-creators.

This humorous approach to reality was one of the crucial cultural traits that had helped define and bind together the citizens of "Another Serbia" at that particular time. The relaxed atmosphere, positive attitudes and good-naturedness which represented them as "reasonable", "civilized" and "likable", enhanced not only their internal communication, but also their reaching out to the outside world. Even more importantly, humor was successful in unmasking the half-truths and outrageous, thumping lies, injustices and abuses used by the regime to  instill fear and hatred into the "subjects". Exposed for what they really were, they turned their creators from dangerous into ridiculous giants on glass legs. It was also a way of looking at oneself in a critical, detached way, for humor tends to be self-derogatory as well. In either case, the  therapeutic effect of seeing life from a funny side was enormous. Although the criticism was sharp and harsh, sparing no one,  their parodies and satires in whatever form they appeared - in verbal messages (slogans, mottoes, graffiti, verses), in art (cartoons and other drawings, sculptures, badges), publications (postcards, collections of protest "folklore"), or "performing arts" (procession as a happening, enactment and games like "camping with the cordon", "traffic light", ‘traffic jam", "ritual cleansing", "prison walk", "outshouting prime-time news" -  were always refined, well balanced, within the limits of good taste, and, above all, intelligent and truly funny. The key for decoding their meanings was submerged in local political events and socio-cultural relations, but most of the references were taken from the cosmopolitan, mass culture: rock‘n’roll music and lyrics, movies, strip comics, television sitcoms and mini series. This is another component that was responsible for the Protest’s easy communicability.

Humor empowered the Protest by its double capacity, to liberate its creators and to demise those who were the target of ridicule. This was a case of putting laughter to work successfully in undermining destructive social and political institutions (cf. Jenkins 1994). A deadly dictator and his tyrannical regime, surrounded by poltroons as the only acceptable companions, and populist crowds as the only desired subjects, cannot stand laughter which "dethrones" him, destroys his "sacredness", reduces his "gigantic power" and inviolable authority into a soap bubble. On the other hand, the parodists, seeing the effect of their activity, develop a sense of accomplishment, worthiness and confidence. And "emancipated", fear-free, conscious citizens cannot make good "subjects" from an autocrat’s point of view. Civil and student protests in Serbia ‘96/97 were no exception to this rule. Humor thus successfully performed its subversive role, while the key outcome was the inversion of reality.

Inversion made possible the demise of the powerful and the empowerment of the deprived. It enabled an easy stepping from the onerous, dismal, meager existence into the world of creativity, hope and spiritual opulence where the participants felt that they were in control of events. It allowed leaving behind the society with strictly defined and hierarchically ordered roles, with rules, values, interests and obligations and shifting instead into a new egalitarian experience of anti-structure. Finally it provided a passage from passive, oppressed and depressed subjects into active, liberated and joyful citizens. All this could have only been achieved through a medium of a ritual. Upon arrival at the gathering site and with the first sounds of drums and whistles, a pivotal point at the threshold separating the two levels of existence was activated. The participants were collectively "transferred" into the liminal phase of liberated, topsy-turvy world dominated by the experience of communitas (V.Turner 1977:96 ff.). Well-known scientists, politicians, celebrities walked side by side with young couples, their children and their pets joining in an informal, familial atmosphere. They were all equal players devotedly engaged in a new game bubbling with opportunities to deconstruct and desecrate, to abstract, contrast and reintegrate anything from the scary everyday world, and give it a different meanings. The events occurring during this "legalized anarchy" that represented the lived-in-world  were "like multiple or magic mirrors that play with forms of order - that refract multiple visions of the possible, from among whose uncertainties there re-emerge probabilities" (Handelman 1990:49).

Journalists and analysts who had written about some aspect of the Protest agreed that it was enacted in the form of an unrestrained, frolicsome, carnivalesque, Dyonisian celebration (cf. Vujovic 1997; Radivojevic, V., Kovacevic, N., Nasa Borba, Dec.31 - Jan.1, 96-97:VII). This "Carnival" even had its Prince, an effigy of President Milosevic as a convict. A full size figure, created by an anonymous author, of Styrofoam, sponge and cloth, was dressed in a black-and-white striped prison uniform. His prisoner’s number was actually the date when the election results were annulled. Shackles, chains and a ball complemented the effigy’s "attire". In the beginning an opposition party member carried the "Prince-Convict" at the head of the procession, but later on, the effigy was placed to "ride" on a motor vehicle hood. As the protesters wanted to emphasize that the country was ruled by a couple, there was also a "Princess-Carnival",  represented  both by a doll and by a masked participant . The Spitting Image-like-face of the doll/mask, was topped with the First Lady’s characteristic hairdo adorned with artificial flowers. Her clothes were symbolic of her political affiliation: a red neck scarf, a sweater bearing a red star on the front and the inscription "Cool" on the back.

Epilogue

At the end of a real carnival, its Prince, a scape-goat to which all "sins" of the community are pinned, is given a "fair trail". The evidence presented in a humorous form, "proves" that he is "guilty beyond reasonable doubt". His punishment is execution, and after his Last Will and Testament are read, the Prince is either burnt down or washed down. After these purifying  rites, the community is ready to return to its "normal", everyday life. In the Protest ‘96/97 the "Prince" was spared, neither tried nor punished. Instead, the young man who dared desecrate the person whose effigy he was carrying was arrested (charged with "unauthorized regulation of traffic and lighting fire-crackers" though) and severely injured while beaten in jail (cf.V. Marcetic, NIN, vol.2398, Dec.13,’96:11-12).

Nevertheless, this case of "mistaken identities" could not take away the carnivalesque quality from the Protest. On the contrary, carnivals, as well as political rituals which take on carnival expression while containing elements of  protest and licensed behavior, are designed to provide cathartic effects. They function as safety valves in a society so that the status quo, the cause of the revolt in the first place,  may  nevertheless be successfully preserved (cf. Kertzer 1988: 131-134, 144-150. Although this was certainly not intended by the organizers and participants of the Protest in Serbia, this was once again confirmed  as a valid conclusion. The outburst of revolt had not yet reached the critical point after which there could be no return to the previous status quo. Although hundreds of thousands of people were engaged in the Protest, probably more than in all previous demonstrations taken together, it was still, confined to but one segment of society, the urban middle class. In all protest in the former Eastern and Central European Communists countries that were successful in overturning the government and initiating change, workers had played a decisive role. In Serbia, however, workers burdened by extremely unfavorable economic conditions, pressured and manipulated by the regime, and fragmented into several opposing unions, were still not ready to exhibit solidarity and proclaim a general strike.

As a consequence, the regime was able to survive, albeit some small, reluctant and certainly not irrevocable concessions. It may have lost a battle but it still possessed the will and means to continue the war.  Nevertheless, the President’s image was tarnished and a crack in his seemingly monolithic authority was made. To counter this, the grip over the politically and economically disillusioned population tightened again and manipulation and abuse continued in an even more arrogant fashion than before.

In time, positive effects of each and every concession made was dismantled. Democratic opposition parties, potent only when united in a common goal, was easily broken up by cleverly exploiting rivalry among its leaders. This time, the process of discrediting opponents was greatly helped by the very same opponents themselves.

Several months after the Protest had ended, Mr. Milosevic’s resigned from the office of the Serbian President only to take a "better job". On July 23 1997, the Federal Parliament proclaimed him for the President of  Yugoslavia. Seven years earlier:

"Yugoslavia still existed, salaries were decent, Belgrade was one of ‘the safest cities in Europe’...During those seven years the former Yugoslavia shrunk down to just two federal units, industrial production to 40% of what it used to be, export trade fell to one third, average salaries do not exceed 200 German Marks a month, Belgrade is now known , because of the Mafia clashes, as ‘Palermo on the Danube’, every tenth inhabitant is a refugee and about every tenth Belgrade dweller has left the country for good."(N.Stefanovic, Vreme, vol. 353, July 26, 1997:11)

Finally Mr. Milosevic’s dream to become "Tito instead of Tito" came true. To make that clear and to impress "his people", he immediately took over all Tito’s insignia of power, his car (Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman), his residency (the former royal palace, the White Palace), his ceremonial elite guard. But, apart from these exterior symbols which appeared as a meaningless masquerade, nothing else was the same. Political and economic downfall  was continuing and the number of loyal supporters was dangerously decreasing, especially outside of Serbia (Montenegro, Republic Srpska Krajina in Bosnia). Capricious autocrat’s  power seemed to be crumbling. What was urgently needed was to try and revival  popular support, by means of a new homogenization of the masses. The most effective short-cut in that direction was, again, through nationalism. In that respect there was, it seemed, only one card left to play: Kosovo. The circle was closing: Milosevic came to power by manipulating ethnic grievances of both Serbian minority and Albanian majority there in 1980s. Could he restore  his power by playing the same game twice? Hopes are that Serbian sentimentalism when Kosovo is concerned will help shift the attention from the catastrophic results of his rule to something belonging to a "higher moral order". Antagonizing the entire world again seems to be a small price to pay for consent at home. In the past, any "disciplinary measures" imposed on Serbia by  the international community did not hurt the elite. While seriously harming the population, the United Nation sanctions provided a welcome smoke screen for the elites to prosper. Will the effects still be the same this time? Could the "awakened" citizens be turned again into a "blind, nationalistic, mob" that is easy to manipulate? Has the positive energy of the civil society been drained out for ever, or is it temporarily latent, waiting for a new chance to emerge? Will the new topsy-turvy ritual function once
again as a safety valve for the status quo, or will it be all-pervasive and hence powerful enough to finally bring about
real change?

Or, will there be another war, the worst yet to happen? Will historic Kosovo, the Mediaeval "cradle of  the Serbian nation", cease to be a part of Serbia? If it does, it will not be because of the "past injustices". Negative historic memories are built on the fact that during World War II hundreds of thousands of Serbs were expelled from the region by the Albanian collaborators of  the Axis. In the aftermath the Serbs were forbidden to return to their land, and the province was clandestinely repopulated by large numbers of illegal immigrants from Albania. This, in addition to an extremely high birth rate among ethnic Albanians in Serbia, accounts for a large Albanian population increase over a relatively short span of time.  All this has reversed the percentages of groups that make up the ethnic structure of the province. Nevertheless, if Kosovo ceases to be a part of Serbia, it will not happen because there are 97% Albanians living there. It will happen because of the catastrophic political strategy of the anachronistic leader who wanted too much in very many wrong ways, and who had denied everyone else the rights he demanded for himself. Has anyone considered the possible future  effects of the "negative historic memories" impressed by the Serbian regime on many other ethnies, but also on large segments of its "own People"?
 

Textnotes

1. The term was coined by independent intellectuals gathered in the Belgrade Circle, an association engaged in promoting peace and civil society.

2. According to some estimates, the number of people who have left Serbia since the breakup of Yugoslavia, approximates the number of Serbian refugees from the war thorn regions in Croatia and Bosnia now living in Serbia. That number is in the range between 200,000 and 300,000.

3. Each school of the Belgrade University is administered by a dean and two vice-deans. Although these are de facto full time jobs, no special administrators are hired for these positions. Instead, as a way of preventing bureaucratization of the highest education, every two years, each school elects a new dean and vice-deans from the list of its own eligible faculty members. It is considered to be both an honor and an obligation to one's school to accepts this job, compensated by a symbolic 10% salary increase. The 1992 Law on University, however, provides for the government interference. It states that every election has to be confirmed by a School Council consisting of 50% outside members, appointed by the government. The next step towards establishing full control over school administrations would be for the government to directly appoint deans and vice-deans.

4. This was achieved by converting the University into a state-run institution, administered by the University President (Rector) and three vice-presidents, who were, together with the 50% of the Council members directly appointed by the government (The majority was secured by "winning over" few votes from the other 50% members, elected by the schools). The Law on University, passed by the Parliament in August '92 was immediately put into effect and the former University President and one vice-president, proven "disloyal" because they had supported the Protest, were dismissed and replaced by two Socialist Party members with "political clearance". The new President, a party apparatchik, and a long time dean of the School of Agriculture, was to become one of the principal targets of the Student Protest 1996/97.

5. In 1993 street "happenings" occurred only on two occasions. The first one was a quiet ceremony commemorating the victims (one on each side) of the March 9, 1991 demonstrations. The second series of protests were provoked by an incident that took place during a regular session of the Federal Parliaments in June 1993. One representative of the nationalistic Serbian Radical Party, a loyal coalition partner of the ruling Socialist Party, physically assaulted a representative of the Serbian Renewal Party. The incident was immediately followed by an opposition gathering, brutal police intervention and the arrest of the leader of the Serbian Renewal Movement, Vuk Draskovic, and his wife. In an attempt to exert public pressure on the regime to free the couple and to defend political freedoms in general, the democratic opposition, in one of the rare occasions when it had managed to overcome individual differences and and
act in unison, organized several meetings. A park facing the new St.Sava Cathedral, the largest Orthodox church on the Balkans was chosen for the site of the gathering. These demonstrations and hunger strikes in the country, and resolute international political pressure, forced the President of Serbia to issue an Act of Abolition by which the couple
was freed.

6. The "Milosevic Dynasty" and their "suit", the opposition leaders and the entire "transition period" in Serbia were privileged to have an ardent chronologist, a  cartoonist Predrag Koraksic-Corax. His work is an invaluable, condensed, "shorthand" documentation of the particular Zeitgeist and its mores. According to some analysts, he was the very first political cartoonist in Serbia after World War II to launch a truly politically unrestrained but aesthetically refined "non-Afganistanian" editorial  cartoon. The President's "transfiguration" from Warmonger to Peacemaker could not, of course, escape his keen satirical demystification. Corax published a series of cartoons that left a lasting legacy of the event. One "drawn joke" depicts Milosevic crossing over troubled water from one river bank to the other by using Radovan Karadic and General Mladic as stepping stones (Nasa Borba, Jan.25, 1996:8). After safe escape, he goes through a cleansing ritual (washes his hands) with a little help from his friends (the most prominent members of the international community). Vreme, vol.310, Sept.28, 1996:11), changes his clothes (civilian for a shining armor - Vreme, vol.245, July 3, 1995:16; or dove feathers instead of helmet and gun - Vreme, vol.198, Aug. 1994:11), gets rid of the nationalistic symbols for petty change at a flee market (Nasa Borba, June 1-2, 1996:1), and appears at the Hague Tribunal, together with Tudjman, his make-believe enemy, as a saint (Vreme, col.273, Jan.13, 1997:7).

7. The coalition partners were the Serbian Renewal Movement led by Vuk Draskovic, the Democratic Party headed by Zoran Djindjic, and the Civic Alliance Party under the leadership of Vesna Pesic.

8. The square was used by the democratic opposition from their very first gathering in June 1990, protesting against the usurped media unfair election law, and it has always stayed "their place". The "preemption" was also expressed by unoffically renamed the site into Liberty Square.

9. Eager to enact the changed reality, even if only on local level, the gathered crowd chanted slogans like "Down with the opposition", "Long live the regime", emphasizing the role reversal resulting from the election victory.

10. Total control over the state-run media empowered the regime not only to reinterpret the selected events in the way that suited it the best, but also to "demonize" all major opposition leaders at one time or another. In the 1996 elections the main target was Mr. Avramovic, an extremely popular former Governor of the National Bank (1994-1996), and economic reformer who managered to bring some order into chaotic economy. After being dismissed from his post because of overtly criticizing many irregularities in the system and ministers abusing their privileged positions for personal gain, he accepted an invitation to head the coalition Zajedno. Since his popularity could mean trouble, nothing was spared in attacking hm publicly. He was forced out of the race, right before the elections. The regime believed that the opposition was fatally harmed by his withdrawal.

11. A fortnight earlier, in the first round of the elections, the ruling Socialist Party and its coalition partners, highly influential Yugoslav United Left (YUL), lead by Mr. Milosevic's wife, professor Mira Markovic, and New Democracy, had already been victorious. They had won 64 seats in the Federal Parliament. Coalition Zajedno secured only 22 seats, while the ultra nationalistic Serbian Radical Party won 16. At the local level, in Belgrade, for example, the results were completely reversed. Coalition Zajedno won 70 seats, Left Coalition 22, Serbian Radical Party 16, and Democratic Party of Serbia 2.

12. Only one city, Kragujevac, located in central Serbia, was exempted from reversing the local election results. For some reason, the newly elected representatives there were allowed to take power unobtrusively.

13. This enabled the regime to label them as "elitist" or "cosmopolitan" outbursts that were very remote from opinions and sentiments the common folk. This corresponded well with the old, much exploited stereotypical dichotomy between indigenous folk culture vs. "polluted",  "imported" urban mores.

14. Two days after "Eggs Attacks" were launched, some participants added firecrackers and stones to their ammunication which shuttered many windows. Although the opposiiton leaders managed to prevent further escalation of destruction, these incidents nevertheless provided the other side with a welcome cover story on protesters' vandalism.

15. Naming events after characteristic objects that were used in a particular revolution become paradigmatic in the post-Titoist Serbian history. Thus, for example, when Milosevic's faction of the Communist Party in Serbia staged a "popular revolt" against the Government in the vojvodina, the former northern Autonomous Province in Serbia, as part of their plan to abolish local autonomies and establish centralized rule from a single center in Belgrade, the event was called the Buttermilk Revolution. It was so named because the protesters used small cartons filled with buttermilk as "ammunition" aiming at the province's government buildings (October 1988). This inspired another leader of the Coalition Zajedno to conclude: "They came to power with the help of buttermilk, we will chase them away with eggs". (Pan jokes were also created by manipulating the word jaje, an egg, and a derivative jajara, signifying petty thief, to describe the regime as "ballot thieves". Another unrest, was named the Log Revolution. It referred to road barricades set up in August 1990 by the Serbs in Kninska Krajina (south-western Croatia), which marked the beginning of the Serbo-Croat was in Summer 1991. The naming of an event in a syntagmatic pattern borrowed from the regime was deliberate and intended as a parody. Also, it seemed that in the meantime, the regime's taste for buttermilk has changed. Or, maybe they did not like their symbols to be "contaminated" and "detoured" by the opposition. Thus, a young man was arrested because he threw two buttermilk cartons at the Politika Publishing House. While in 1988 "buttermilk was celebrated as an expression of now denounced as an act of vandalism and destruction" (V. Marcetic, NIN, vol. 2398, Dec.13, 1996:10).

16. Because of its professional and objective informing even under the extraordinary amount of pressure and obstruction by the regime, The International Organization for the Aid to the Media proclaimed, on December 16 1996, Radio B92 the best radio station of the year.

17. Ironically, Radio B92 could also, at times, be useful to the regime. Namely, according to the account of one police officer who was daily monitoring the rallies, the police were regularly listening to the B92 live coverage of the demonstrations which enabled them to be well and timely informed about the course of the events.

18. Students responded to the Assembly President's "good intentions" by asking him how was it possible that, if so concerned, he had not protected them when their age group (between 18 and 27) was mobilized and sent to Vukovar and other front-lines to fight and perish.

19. Well informed sources claimed that this particular phrasing, and the use of the Communist terminology came from the ultra left hard-liners led by the First Lady, Dr. Markovic. Her recent evaluation of the Protest 96/97, expressed in a form of a diary, excerpts of which are regularly published in women's magazines (currently it is the bi-monthly "Bazar" from the Politika Publishing House), seems to support those claims. In the February 28, 1998 entry, she wrote: "everywhere in the world demonstrations are brutally ended by poice forces...The only demonstrations that lasted several months, that were neither brutally nor non-brutally disrupted, during which nobody was either arrested or clubbed, that the entire world could watch, and that were, according to its leaders, supported by "democratic community of the world", were the last year's demonstrations in Belgrade. They were neither social nor political in character, but a manifestation of the eight-year long quisling activity of a faction of the so-called right-wing in Serbia which was financially, politically and personally supported from abroad" (Bazar, march 6, '98; 8-9). This quotation reveals two essential components of propaganda that was practiced in Serbia since late 1980s: outright lies that totally deny any wrong doing by the regime, followed by serious accusations, with no obligation to provide ny evidence whatsoever, of anyone daring to challenge the will of the ruling clique.

20. The irony was that traffic was completely blocked during demonstrations anyway, so there was really nothing to regulate. That is why students and citizens came up with new kinds of games invented to mockingly get back at the regime, using its own "concern". Namely, students played with remote controlled toy cars and trucks rights in front of the watchful policemen accusing them now of "impeding the free flow of traffic". Citizens led by the Serbian Renewal Movement members, played at zebra crossings. When the traffic light was green they would jump into the middle of the road and joyfully skip around to celebrate the pedestrian right-of-way. As the light turned red, they would quickly jump back to the pavements and chant: "Down with the red!" and "Green, green, give us back the green!" These funny little games drove the policement crazy, to the joy of the protesters. However, if they managed to provoke the police officers to smile, they would chant "Blue is not red" (police uniforms are blue in color, and red symbolizes the Communist past of the regime). On another occasion (Jan.5, '97) thousands of citizens caused an incredible traffic jam in the center of the city, pretending that their cars - all of them - have suddenly broken down. "Mechanics" with stethoscopes were running around trying to diagnose the malfunctions.

21. The idea was taken from the Student Protest "92. The students were then allowed to march by any vital government institution, but they were prevented from entering the street where the President resided. This clearly signified what was the "sacred essence" of the regime. It was not the system as such, but the person behind it. This did not deter the students though. They turned these "protective actions" from "obstacles in their way" into helpful "guidelines" for demarcating the borders of the "Forbidden City".

22. Various professional groups and associations (university professors, members of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences, performing artists, independent media and workers unions) officially declared their support. Even worse for the regime, the support also came from outside of Serbia, that is from the opposition in Montenegro, the other federal unit of the "Third Yugoslavia", from Serbs in Bosnia and their newly elected President, Ms.Biljana Plavsic, and the leaders of the Albanian "separatist rebels" in Kosovo. The protesters, some 250,000 people gathered in the Republic Square, in return, paid their respects with a moment of siilence to an Albanian from Kosovo, a victim of police torture. The message of this event that took place on December 13 '96, was dangerously clear. Serbian civil society did not perceive Albanian people as their enemy. Rather, they believed that Serbs and Albanians in Yugoslavia had one common enemy: the Serbian regime.

23. "They wear tailored suits, gleaming patent-leather shoes, ties and dress shirts. They jangle key-rings with little plastic boxes to shut off alarm systems to new cars, and are equipped with mobile phones, beepers and business cards. Most of them say they are in their late 20's, and appear to have spent several years of pursuing their degrees". (C.Hedges, Some Students In Serbia Find It Pays to Be 'Independent'," The New York Times, Dec.12, 1997).

24. The present meaning of the word Chetnik is derived from the World War II Serbian anti-German, anti-Communist, pro-royalist and nationalists guerrillas, fighting against the Axis, Ustashi (Croats, Musliims), but also the ideological enemy, the Communist-led Partisans. In the post-Communists Serbia Chetniks have been seized and revived by the far-right chauvinist parties and they have been engaged, as volunteers, in the Yugoslav wars of succession. Although these parties did not take part in the 1996/97 civil protest, their antipode, the ultra left, found it convenient to label democratic center as Chetniks, while reserving for themselves the term Partisans. This simple sterotypical binary dichotomization, separating "the good" from "the bad", was supposed to work to the Left's own advantage.

25. According to a sociological survey conducted during the Protest, from November 1996 until January 1997, the socio-demographic characteristics of protesters reveal that: 1. they included a somewhat larger share of young and middle-aged citizens (the highest percentages were of those between 20-29, 30%, and between 40-49 years of age, 23%); 2. their education level was unusually high (more than 50% were university graduates), with correspondingly high percentage of experts in the professional structures; 3. more than 80% resided in the city center (31%) or near it (52.5%); 4. only 16% were members of opposition parties. All these indicators quality the majority of protesters as belonging to the middle class. Dwellers of suburban, satellite settlements and representatives of the working class added up to only 7.1% and 6% of demonstrators, respectively (Babovic 1997a:19-30).

26. There were attempts to discredit the entire civil movement as nationalistic. The accusations came from the very heart of the opposition minded intellectuals. Two philosophy professors, Miladin @ivotic (+1997) and Obrad Savic, the president and the vice-president of the prestigious Belgrade Circle, both deserving leaders in opposing the regime, totalitarianism, nationalism and war, hosted the visit of M.Jack Lang, former French Minister of Culture. M.Lang wanted to express his support for the Protest at one of the students meetings. However, the students, rather intolerantly and rudely, refused to welcome him because, while war was still raging in Bosnia, M.Lang supported French and Serbian intellectuals who called for the bombing of Belgrade to end bloodshed. No doubt, in this instance, students violated the rules of democratic conduct failing to communicate in a civil manner with individuals holding different opinion. Their behavior could, therefore, be labeled as nationalistic or, as oversensitive national reaction at best. It is also true that among some 50,000 students participating in the Protest there had to be individuals with nationalistic outlooks. However, although there were some "detectable nationalistic tendencies in the Protest, its core was civil and democratic" (Lj.Rajic, Nasa Borba, Dec.22, '96: VII). To extend the qualificiation, based on one incident, to include the entire civil movement, and state that it had fallen into the trap of "virulent Serbian nationalism" was itself a "totalitarian" approach. The point was deliberately missed because of some personal unsettled feuds. Thus, the professors' comment spoke more about them than about the event and the Protest in general. But, if the readers did not know the context and the background for such ship-lashing, an incorrect impression could be made. Thus, they mislead a foreign journalist, who otherwise wrote well informed and unbiassed reports and commentaries, to take their evaluation for granted (C.Hedges, The New York Times, Dec.10, '96: A1,A6).

27. The favorite "protest cry", "Come on, Let's  All Go for a Walk" ("Walk" instead of "Attack"/"Offense"), was also borrowed from fanatic soccer rooters' repertoire, because their subculture was the only one to offer "fighting" elements.

28. Students, admirers of Corax's work, honored him with The Medal of the First Order presented by the Student Protest. While accepting this honor, Corax said: "It is you who are the masters of jokes and witticism, and I am suffering form a stage fright before you" (ex-Singidunum, B92 news, Jan.12, '97:1).
 

References

Special Publications:

1996  Buka u modi: Izbor najlepsih parola itd. kreacija sa jedinstvenog do`ivljaja zvanog Studentski Protest 1996 (Noise
          is In: Selected Slogans, Graffiti, and Other Creations of the Unique Happening Called Students' Protest 1996),
          compiled by the students of the University of Belgrade: Institut za socioloska istra`ivanja Filozofskog fakulteta i
          Studentski Protest 96.

1996  Demokratski maraton I - Foto dokument (The Democratic Marathon I: Photo Documents), Vreme - Demokratija,
          Special Edition, Belgrade, Jan.2.

1997  Demokratski maraton II - Foto dokument (The Democratic Marathon II: Photo Documents), Vreme,
          Demokratija, Special Edition, Belgrade, March 7 1997.

1997  The Days of Revolt 1996/97, Demokratija, Special Edition, March 9.

Protest Paraphernalia (placards, badges, postcards).

Newspapaers and Magazines:

Vreme - Independent Weekly, Belgrade, November 17, 1996 - the present

NIN (Nedeljne informativne novine) - Weekly magazine, Belgrade, Nov.17, '96 - March 20, 1997.

Nasa Borba - Independent daily newspaper, Belgrade, Nov. 17, 1996 - the present

Demokratija - The Democratic Party Herald, Belgrade, January - March 1997.

Bazar - Woman's Bi-Weekly Magazine, Belgrade, March 6, 1998: 8-9.

The New York Times - Daily Paper, New York, Nov. 20, '96 - March 20 1997.

The Washington Post -  Washington D.C., Nov. 1996 - March 1997.

ElectronicMmedia:

ex-singidunum - Odraz B92, (Radio B92, Belgrade) - http:\\www.siicom.com.odrazb.

TV Networks News:

CNN Headline News - Atlanta, GA, Nov.20 1996 -  March 20, 1997.

Deutschewelle - Berlin, Germany (broadcast by Telecourse/Mind Extension University)

France 2 - Paris, France (Broadcast by Telecourse/Mind Extension University)

RTV Serbia, Dnevnik 2 - Prime-Time News, Belgrade, Yugoslavia (VCR Tapes of selected broadcasts)

Newspaper Articles:

Hedges, C.,
    Fierce Serb nationalism Pervades Student Protest in Belgrade, The New York Times, Dec. 10, 1996: A1, A6)

Hedges, C.,
    Some Students in Serbia Find It Pays to Be "Independent", The New York Times, Dec.12, 1996).

Jonkovic, N.,
    Surka je subverzivna delatnost u odnosu na re`im (A Party is a Subversive Action Against the Regime),
    Demokratija, Feb.10, 1997:5

Marcetice, V.,
    Treniranje dr`avnog terora: Slucaj Dejana Bulatovica (Practicing State Terror: The Case of Dejan Bulatovic),
    NIN, vol.2398, Dec.13, 1996: 10-12.

Radivojevic, V., Kovacevic, N.,
    Vreme smeha i nezaborava (The Unforgettable Time of Laughter), Nasa Borba, Dec.31 - Jan.1, 1996/97: VII

Rajic, Lj.,
    Studenti nisu nacionalisti (Students are not Nationalists), Nasa Borba, Dec.22, 1996: VII.

Stefanovic, N.,
    Predsednik je posato Predsednik - u Titiovim kolima (President has become the President: Riding In Tito's Car), Vreme, vol.353, July 26, 1997: 11.

Literature:

Babovic, M., et al. (Eds.)
    1997  `Ajmo, `ajde, svi u setnju! - Gradjanski i studentski protest 96/97 ("Come on, Let's All Go For A Walk":
              Civil and Student Protest 96/97), Belgrade: Medija centar & Institut za socioloska istra`ivanja
              Filozofskog fakulteta.

Babovic, M.
    1997a Maratonci trce (po)casni krug: Sociodemografske karakteristike i politicki profil ucesnika Protesta 96/97
               (The Honor Lap of the Marathon Race: Socio-de-mographic Chracteristics and Political Profile of
               the Participants in the 1996/97 Protest), in: M. Babovic et al. (Eds.), `Ajmo, `ajde...: 19-30.

    1997b Pistaljkom protiv otmicara (Fighting the Abductor with a Whistle), in: M Babovic et al. (Eds.),
               "`Ajmo, `ajde..., 114-25.

Cvijic, S.
    1997  Demokratija sa kolektivnim predumisljajem - Opsti Karakter Protesta 96/97 (Collectively Pre-Meditated
              Democracy: General Character of the '96/97 Protest), in: M. Babovic et al. (Eds.), `Ajmo, `ajde...:35-42.

Da Matta, R.
    1977  Constraint and License: A Preliminary Study of Two Brazilian National Rituals, in: S.F. Moore,
              B.G. Myerhoff (Eds.), Secular Ritual, Assen/Amsterdan: VanGorcum.

Djukic, S.
    1997  On, Ona i Mi (He, She and We), Belgrade: Radio B92, Series War and Peace.

Gorunovic, G. & Erdei, I. (Eds.)
    1997  O studentima i drugim demonima: Etnografija studentskog protesta 1996/97 (About Students and
              Other Demons: The Ethnography of the Student Protest 1996/97), Belgrade: Filozofski fakultet
              Univerziteta u Beogradu/Signature.

Handelman, D.
    1990  Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ilic, V.
    1997  Let It Be: Drustveno-poloticka svest ucesnika Protesta (Let it Be: Socio-Political Conscience of
              the Protest Participants), in: M. Babovic et al. (Eds.) `Ajmo, `ajde..., 104-113.

Jenkins, R.
    1994  Subversive Laughter: The Liberating Power of Comedy, The Free Press.

Kertzer, D.I.
    1988  Ritual, Politics, and Power, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.

Kuzmanovic, B.
    1997  Setnjom u slobodu: Vrednosne orijenatcije i politicki stavovi ucesnika Protesta Walking to Freedom:
              Value Orientations and Political Attitudes of the Protest Participants), in: M. Babovic et al. (eds),
              `Ajmo, `ajde..., 51-64.

Prosic-Dvornic, M.
    1991  "Sa nama nema neizvesnosti" - politicki presizborni plakat u Srbiji 1990. ("We Do Not Keep you in
              Suspence: Political Election Posters in Serbia, 1990), Narodna umjetnost 28, Zegreb: 349-375.

    1993  "Enough" - Student Protest '92: The Youth of Belgrade in Quest of "Another Serbia", The Anthropology of
              East-Europe Review, Spec. Issue: War Among the Yugoslavs (eds.J.M.Halpern & D.A.Kideckel),
              vol.11. no.1-2: 127-137.

    1994  "Druga Srbija" - Mirovni i `esnki pokreti ("Another Serbia": Pacifist and Feminists Movements), in:
              M.Prosic-Dvornic (Ed.), Kulture u Tranziciji, Beograd: Plato: 179-199.

    1998  Serbia: the Inside Story, in: J.M. Halpern, D.A.Kideckel (Eds.), Culture and Conflict: "Inside" and
              "Outside" Perspectives on the War in Former Yugoslavia, Penn State University Press (in print) pp.56.

Silverstone, R.
    1988  Television, Myth and Culture, in: J.W. Carey (Ed.), Media, Myths and Narratives: Television and
              the Press, Sage Publications: 20-48.

Turner, V.
    1977  The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Symbol, Myth and Ritual Series, Ithaca:
              Cornell University Press.

Vujovic, S.
    1997  Pokretni praznik - Protest 96.97 kao urbani fenomen (Ceremony in Motion: Protest 96/97 as an
              Urban Phenomenon), in: M. Babovic et al. (Eds.), `Ajmo, `ajde...138-146.

Vuletic, V.
    1997  Buka u modi - Bihejvioralne karakteristike Protesta 96.97 (Noise Is In: Behavioral Features of
              the '96/97 Protest), in: M.Babovic et al.(Eds.), `Ajmo, `ajde...43-50.
 
 
 
THE YOUNG AND A SOCIETY: AN EXAMPLE FROM ZAGREB
Sanja Kalapos   Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, Zagreb

 Abstract: Locating young people in a society, whether as individuals or a social group, seems to be a constantly current issue. The paper shows what do the young people think of their role in contemporary Croatian society, why they do or do not take part in political and other forms of public life, and whether they think their contributions to society count at all. The youth in the one-party system of former Yugoslavia were politically inactive, because there was no choice offered to young people, besides being either pro or contra; on the other hand, the youth in multi-party Croatian society are politically and socially more active because they are faced with a multi-party, democratic system.

When do the young people start perceiving themselves as adults, and what factors influence their perception of themselves and of their role in a society -- these are some of the questions this paper will address on the basis of both older research conducted by Croatian and other scholars and my own research conducted from November 1996 to September 1997 in Zagreb. I shall not view subcultural division within the category of young people; instead, I shall try to treat them as the members of a single age group. Some Croatian scholars approach the youth primarily as specific social state of the young part of the population. However, they emphasize that the members of young population are divided throughout the social strata because of their current position, as well as the position of their families, which determines their belonging to a certain sociocultural class -- that is, the age group of the young is as stratified as the society they live in (Obradovic 1988: 57, 85; Rimac 1988: 89)².

Rimac (1988: 90, 97-98) speaks of the criteria for being adult in different social settings, or, to rephrase it in anthropological terms, in different cultures and/or communities -- for the agricultural population it was mainly having completed the army service and getting married. The young couples were not economically independent, because they would usually not move away but live at either bride's or groom's parents' home. The working-class young people were considered adult after they had found a full time job and thus had become economically independent from their parents. The legal and political maturity were not taken into consideration for either group. The middle and higher classes imposed the most complicated requests upon their young -- social maturity was measured on the basis of proper education (at least twelve, more commonly sixteen years of education, that is, the university degree) and social status. Of course, Rimac made a rough generalization -- there are numerous differences and nuances on regional and narrower, local levels throughout Croatia when speaking of "traditional communities", but for the general argument this generalization can be considered accurate. Besides discussing when do the young people become adult, an important question to ask is also who are actually the young people we are talking about -- in my research, I am addressing primarily the middle class and upper middle class students from the city of Zagreb, that is, people between eighteen and twenty-six years of age.

After having completed their education, young people were supposed to get included into their social and working communities and gain the social position similar to or higher than their families' position. Here the political and legal maturity also count. The urban communities tend to dismiss the traditional forms of gaining social maturity, which leads to the prolonged youth³ and the de synchronization of different maturity criteria. Jones and Wallace (1992: 4-8) argue that "young people are in a process of transition, in a changing society, so that much that may be observed about them one year (of their lives), may no longer be the case the next year of their lives, partly because they are growing up, and partly because their social context has changed (...) It was only in industrial societies (...) that young people faced an adjustment problem and could find themselves temporarily in a 'marginal world'. Basically, the problems experienced by young people were created by society, and were not intrinsic to the nature of youth itself"; older generations of anthropologists would perhaps view the whole period of youth as van Gennep's rite de passage. However, being adult in a contemporary urban setting such as, for example, Zagreb, is a complex and manifold concept that does not involve merely being eighteen years of age and thus being able to vote, but also gaining certain level of education, economic independence, emotional as well as sexual maturity and, finally, at least partial but often full social and political involvement in current issues. Jones and Wallace (1992: 18) say that "the concept of citizenship implies a package of rights and responsibilities⁴ for individuals in welfare capitalist societies which are implicitly transmitted with age. Youth can be seen as the period during which the transition to citizenship, that is, to full participation in society, occurs."   Of course, as the society is structured, the access to the rights of citizenship are equally structured -- the changes at a social level reflect changes at an individual level too, but my argument is that -- although social stratification is an important factor of gaining adulthood -- the social and political systems as such are also very significant. Let me elaborate on that -- in his research dating from 1988, that is, from the period of one-party system in former Yugoslavia, Fanuko⁵ (1988: 149, 160) showed that the Croatian youth did not perceive themselves as fully grown up, and, more important, did not participate almost at all in current political and social events and debates. In his research on the systems of values of the young people from former Yugoslavia during the 1980s, Radin (1990: 24) got matching results: the leading values were privacy, self-dependency and material position, leaving political involvement at number eight (of altogether eleven values); doing another research during the approximately the same period of time, he (1991: 43-44) showed that of all the existing values, the students from Zagreb placed their political engagement on the very last place (the first five being honesty, love, knowledge, friendship and work). As he emphasizes, this hierarchy is understood as a stable range of options for the desirable social causes. In his research within the same project, Magdalenic (1991: 67) showed that more than 10% of the Zagreb students were not willing to participate in a political engagement at all, while more than 24% have never even thought about it. The remaining number of young people ranges from the ones who would react only if they would personally be influenced by a problem, if they and their close family members, their friends, or the members of their generation were influenced, and only 25% would participate in a cause of general interest.

On the other hand, I have researched the middle and upper middle class student population from Zagreb, and their spontaneous political and social engagement in a cause of -- we can freely say -- general interest after having lived in a multi-party society for not longer than six years. The story begins back in 1983, when an independent student radio station called Radio 101 was founded. Right from the beginning, it became very popular among the young people because of the latest music hits that were played⁶, along with the fresh approach to advertising and news; at the same time, it gained an image of the opposition to the one-party socialist system of that time due to its sharp presentation of current issues and critic view on the society, and thus became popular also among the adult audience. When discussing the relations of power in the contemporary Croatian society and therefore describing the role Radio 101 used to have in the former system, Rihtman-Augu?tin (1997: 3) explains that "the program was primarily made for young people (...) With their efforts to achieve a modern music program, the Zagreb's old cosmopolitan spirit was evoked".⁷ Keeping this image all along, the 101 journalists were the only ones who were brave enough to speak about the fall of communism in Eastern Europe before it actually happened, as well as to introduce the emerging opposition parties even a year before the first democratic (that is, multi-party) elections were held in former Yugoslavia. Today's Croatian president Tudman's first public appearance was in an interview on Radio 101. Doing all that was a big risk at the time. However, the first multi-party elections were held in spring 1990; one of the newly founded parties gained the electoral victory, Tudman became Croatian president, and Radio 101 continued to broadcast its program, being sharp, current and informative as ever. Through the course of time Radio 101 became the number one radio station in the Zagreb metropolitan area, and some stations from other parts of Croatia transmitted parts of its program regularly, so that 101 became widely known and extremely popular. The major TV stations and quality papers in Croatia are state-owned, so that Radio 101,
weekly "Feral Tribune" (published in Split) and daily "Novi list" (published in Rijeka) became the only influential independent, non-governmental media in Croatia -- with the exceptions of few student and other low budget magazines with small circulation.

For the review of the events that happened in November 1996, I shall use the report by Zuber (1996: 11), published in an independent student magazine called Homo Volans: the body called the Telecommunication Council was founded. Its members were supposed to review the proposals written by several radio stations and to give the broadcasting permit only to a single one; so, they decided that Radio 101, after thirteen years of broadcasting, cannot get the permit to continue its work, and instead gave the permit to a station that was still in its founding stage. It was on November 20, 1996.  The news were broadcast on Radio 101 around the noon the same day. Immediately after, the 101's phones and fax machines got completely mad -- hundreds and hundreds of calls, faxes and e-mail messages of support from citizens of Zagreb (and other parts of Croatia, as well as from abroad) were received, all of them claiming that they support Radio 101 so much that they would do anything to keep it going. Only a couple of hours after the decision was made, Peter Galbraith, the American ambassador to Croatia, came to the 101 offices and offered support -- as he said, it was not merely a question of a single radio station; democracy and free media were at stake. Around 5 PM the State Department issued an official statement confirming Galbraith's opinion.

Together with all categories of Zagreb's citizens, another group of young people reacted in a firm and loud way -- Bad Blue Boys, the supporters of Zagreb's major football team. Introducing them, Prnjak (1997: 36, 110-112) says that although the group supporting the team called "Dinamo" before the 1990s existed as long as the team itself, it was formally founded in summer 1986 under the name Bad Blue Boys -- however, the newly elected politicians, now in charge, decided that one of the best Croatian football teams cannot bear the name identical to a Russian or a Serbian team, and decided to change it. "Dinamo" first became "Hask-Gradanski", the combination of the names of two pre-WWII teams from Zagreb, and then it was renamed simply into "Croatia". Carrying the rich symbolism from the socialist period,⁸ the name "Dinamo" was so beloved among Bad Blue Boys and the large part of the Zagreb population that they often organized protests in order for the team to regain its original name. Thus Bad Blue Boys, who are one of the strongest supporting groups in this part of the world, are at the same time the only supporting group without its team, pushed into an alternative position that cannot be compared with any other example (ibid. 108; 109-125; 259-260). The team's name stopped being an issue of the limited part of population and became an issue of free decision-making and democracy -- thus Bad Blue Boys thought they should react and support democracy every time it is endangered. They decided to organize a gathering as a support to Radio 101. Although it all happened very fast and the gathering was announced merely an hour before it was supposed to begin, five to six thousand people gathered in one of the small central squares in Zagreb. However, the whole problematic situation continued the next day, since the Telecommunication Council's decision has not been changed; a non-governmental organization called the Croatian Helsinki Committee (CHC) organized a huge support gathering in Zagreb's main square. Approximately 120,000 people, most of them young, came -- the square and the neighboring streets  simply could not place more people. Radio 101 asked people to bring candles with them, "to cast some light in this darkness", and asked people who supported them but were not able to attend the gathering to open their windows, to light the candles in them and to play their radios as loud as possible at 8 PM. The gathering started at 8 PM with a very symbolic sound -- the song that with time became sort of the Leitmotif of this station. People stood with lit candles in their hands, greeted popular journalists and DJs, together with other public figures who decided to come and give their support -- rock singers, writers, opposition politicians, etc., and held numerous signs in their hands, most of them with 101's slogan "We shall never surrender", or others, such as "I am Radio 101. Shut ME down!", "Telecommunication Council, Go Home!", etc. At the end of the gathering, the song banned from the state television and radio stations honoring the old football team's name "Dinamo" is played loudly. The majority are cheering and singing, some people are even crying. To make a long story short, the public reaction (writing letters to the government, signing petitions in the streets and via e-mail, sending faxes, etc.) lasted for another couple of days, after which time the official politics realized that it was simply not possible to abolish Radio 101 and, having no other choice, gave it a broadcasting permit; the first agreement was supposed to last until September, but the five-year contract was signed on 4th November, 1997.

On the one hand it was the first big and important test for the young Croatian democracy, but also for the young people, whom majority of youth researchers view as the carriers of a society's future; on the other hand, it showed how young people were able to change their attitude towards politics, public activities, standing up for what they think is important and believing in their role in a society in less then a decade. I have conducted eleven interviews with students from Zagreb (or students from other parts of Croatia studying in Zagreb); all of them, except a single one, supported Radio 101, went to at least one of the two gatherings, and believed that supporting 101 was the right thing to do and claimed they were ready to react again for another cause of general interest.

Boris, born in Zagreb in 1973, a music student, told me⁹:

Well, what I can say is that it is not right that they attempted to take away the broadcasting permit... or that they didn't want to give it to them (...) The citizens reacted with a lot of solidarity, which is beautiful, I don't know who wasn't there (...) I walked through the first gathering, but I intentionally went to the second. Of course, I wanted to offer my support but I was also curious.

Zorica, born in Zagreb in 1978, a humanities student, said:

I went to the both gatherings (...) Well, I went simply because... You know, I don't even listen to Radio 101 because I don't listen to any radio at all, but I thought it was stupid not to have this station, because if those people have something to say, then let them say it (...) I do think my appearance made a difference. One-hundred per cent. I find it stupid when I ask people whether they went, and they answer, "no, why should I bother, I alone can't make a difference". I think that each person that comes carries some meaning.

Stjepan, born in Dubrovnik in 1972, a humanities student:

I have always liked this Radio, since 1992, when I came to Zagreb. I don't know. I liked it very much then. Its style, very relaxed, with information. Objective information. Very objective. Open doors for everyone, also for those with whom they don't agree. Generally speaking, I respect it a lot and I believe it a great deal. I consider every little piece of information given by 101 to be more valuable than information given by any other source of information. (...) I don't think they're leftist, I think that there are lots of media that could learn from them. I can say I was shocked when they tried to ban it. And that gathering, that took place, I also attended it, it could have been very damaging for the Croatian politics, especially for foreign affairs. (...) However, I think that this gathering had to be held, however risky for our state, because it would be much worse if this station was shut down. (...) It seemed like the right thing to do, to go there (...), to give my support. I have been listening to them for six years and I haven't given them a nickel. Then, these people needed some help. And they have been giving me something for six years, so I have understood it as a sort of obligation to go there.

The majority believes that democracy in Croatia¹⁰ is not as developed as it should be, but at the same time they do not tend to be too critic, ascribing the lack of democracy to several facts: (1) the fact that democracy exists only six or seven years, which is too short a period for it to fully develop, (2) the fact that people leading the society were born, educated and lived large parts of their lives in a one-party socialist system and thus did not have a chance to learn and appreciate democracy, and (3) the fact that we had a war going on and that attention had to be paid to more existential issues -- like, surviving.

An extract from the conversation with Boris:

S.K.: Do you think we achieved democracy?

Boris: Not full democracy, that's for sure. I don't think so. I think it is still not possible to... that is, you cannot say your full opinion about someone or something, and especially not everywhere. Especially not in some public journals, in media, and so.

Iva, born in Zagreb in 1972, an economics student:

I think that democracy won't come to us for a long time. We have lived in democracy for seven or eight years, and I think that democracy has to be created and worked on during a much, much longer period of time. (...) Well, democracy is democracy. I think that it still does not function here. Democracy is when one votes for something, and when giving a person the right to vote, to respect this right. For starters. (...) Everyone should try to make a difference starting with themselves, and something will be changed throughout the years,  because if everyone gives up, it will remain like this for good. And I think that a lot of time should pass before something changes.

However, they think that now it is a high time to start paying attention to the culture of democracy -- no matter whether they are supporters of the elected or an opposition party, they all think that free speech and free media are basics of a democratic society, and they see themselves as introducers of new, democratic way of thinking. Similar results concerning youth and their political involvement were gained in another research in the southern Croatian region of Dalmatia -- Leburic and Tomic-Koludrovic (1996: 972-973) write that although the war slowed down the processes of the development of legal state, autonomous public opinion and civil society, it accelerated the processes of change of socio-cultural position of the young people, having abolished the traditional forms of the youth -- whatever the term traditional may apply to. The interesting point is the role youth ascribe to themselves -- as Jones and Wallace (1992: 22-23) write, the young people in Great Britain are introduced into the already existing social and political life and learn how to fit in it;¹¹ however, my informants consider themselves to be the ones from whom the rest of society has to learn. Although, objectively speaking, they are not in charge, they do not have either the power or the economic independence, they are very confident about their role.

Of course, besides the political systems as such (which can sometimes even be too general or too vague to grasp), there are other factors that influence the formation of the youth's attitudes, the main of which are family and school education. Let me mention some of the authors dealing with those aspects; for example, Jones and Wallace (1992: 21; 70; 93) claim that "in the case of young people, as with women, the process of economic emancipation has to be enacted first of all within the family of origin, though, emancipation within the family has only limited recognition in the outside world. (...) Informal relationships within families provide an immediate context within which transitions to adulthood are shaped. (...) The process of leaving home takes place at the junction between the public and private worlds of young people -- in leaving home they are leaving the private world of family relations and encountering the public world and formal relations of housing markets, labor markets, and other adult institutions. The changes occur at the heart of the transition from dependent child to independent adult".

Bohler (1997: 136) argues that the contemporary families with their modern education and bringing-up methods, not only tolerate but also encourage the formation of independent youth culture. It is certainly true that, with the abolishing of the patriarchal role of the pater familias, the children are given greater amounts of freedom in many instances, from making decisions concerning their schooling, profession and life-choices to their free time and other interests. It inevitably leads to the more intense participation of the young people in the issues of the wider social magnitude, as well as to the increasing awareness of their role and importance¹².

There is another fine example of influencing youth and forming desired types of personalities through family -- and more significantly -- school and social up-bringing: Schleicher and Fielhauer (1987: 71; 74; 75) write about the "red youth" in Währing, a Viennese neighborhood which was, during the studied period of time (that is, between 1918 and 1934), a traditional bourgeois part of town. This social structure affected the social relations and the political milieu in different ways. However, the working class children were educated in accordance with two prominent social theories of the time, the first being Max Adler's concept of "der Neue Mensch" (the New Man), who should be "filled with the working class spirit and serve as a weapon for the revolutionary class battle", and the second being Otto Felix Kanitz's new rules and suggestions for the socialist up-bringing and cultural movement, that included solidarity and class awareness. These theories have, through the youth organizations that were active at the time, increased the class awareness and behaviour of the youth "even in bourgeois Währing" (ibid. 82).

There have not been any organized social, educational or up-bringing methods to create a new type of the "Croatian youth" so far, except for the discussions of democracy that often take place in all types of media - TV, newspapers and radio stations, in the state-owned ones, as well as in the independent. A lot of broadcasting time and newspapers' pages have been devoted to emphasizing the fact that Croatia has become "a free and democratic country that guarantees equal rights for all of its citizens". I have therefore asked my informants whether they feel somehow discriminated because of their age when it comes to the participation in public debates and gaining citizenship as such and whether they feel they are given the same rights as the adult members of the society. Here are some of the answers:

Ivan, born in Split in 1973, a B.A.:

No, you don't have less rights, you just have to work hard to become someone.

Boris:

Well, no. I don't know what to say. Well, at least in everyday life I haven't noticed [the lack of rights based on his age, author's note]. And as far as institutionalized life is concerned, I have always the same rights, no matter whether I'm twenty or fifty.

The change of political system can, therefore, be viewed as the main contributor to the change of the young people's attitudes in the former one-party system, it was only possible to be either pro or contra -- and if someone was contra, they usually stayed inactive; in multi-party systems, there are a lot of options to choose from and all sorts of different opinions can be expressed. Radin (1990: 26-27, 57) explains the political inactivity of the young people during the 1980s the same way: he argues that politics offered young people sheer agreement with the current situation without offering anything back for their potential involvement -- including the participation in the decision-making.

Let me sum up the conclusion observations: my informants, the students living in Zagreb, have confirmed both through their active participation in a cause of general interest and through interviews that were a part of my research, that they do believe in the importance of their role in the existing form of democracy (although they mostly agree that it is not the level they would like to have), as well as in the future life of the Croatian state. While they are not completely satisfied with today's democracy, the majority of them view the survival of Radio 101 as a very positive thing and as a sign that democratic thought is not as underdeveloped as they first thought. Also, contrary to the results presented by some other scholars¹³, they do not consider themselves as underprivileged or discriminated because of their young age.

So, as we have seen, a group of football supporters presented itself as a democratic force that cannot be ignored, and the young people in general spontaneously took part in a public argument and thus proved that their attitudes and way of thinking have radically changed with the change of the political system, and that now they are a group of citizens that cannot be overlooked.
 

Textnotes

This is an expanded and re-written version of the paper "The Young and a Society: An Example from Zagreb", presented at the American Anthropological Association 96th Annual Meeting (Session "Youth, Future and the Making of the 'New Europe'", organized by Mary Nolan and Levent Soysal), held in Washington, DC, November 19-23, 1997 (also see Kalapoc 1997).

2. The non-English quotations were translated into English by the author.

3. Liesenfeld (1987) discusses the notion of remaining "forever young" in the contemporary Austrian society, employing examples such as the classic one in which the young Faust is about to sell his soul to Mephisto in order to prolong his youth, to the more recent ones: industrial production of youth, the cosmetic usage of youth for commercial purposes, banks and insurance companies encouraging people to join their youth programs, and dating agencies providing their services to young people (who are increasingly older) for free.

4. France's study (1998) of responsibilities that the youth are facing in order to gain their citizenship rights is a rare one addressing the issue.

5. Due to the lack of anthropological youth research in Croatia, I am employing data received through research conducted by Croatian sociologists. However, we must be careful when using those figures, since their main method (see Radin 1988:15) was a questionnaire with closed type of questions. Although the anonymity of the young informants was guaranteed, the research method itself, offering a limited number of possible answers that could or could not coincide with one's opinion, may have influenced the outcome.

6. It is not inexplicable that a radio station becomes so widely popular on the basis of the music it plays; describing the relationship between the young people and music, Frith (1987: 45; 46) says that "it is well known that the youth are interested in music" and claims that "the full integration of pop music and youth culture took place during the 1950s; the integration was symbolically expressed through a new form of music, rock and roll, and a new group of young people, teddy boys". We can freely say that, since the 1950s, music has been an integrative part of teenage and adolescent years of the members of the European and American cultures. Furthermore, Mursic (1995: 11; 21) emphasizes several times that rock music is the basic way of (not only musical) socialization of young people.

7. "Having traveled through West European countries, the young people from Zagreb have heard what were supposed to be the latest hits playing on similar radio stations. Meanwhile, they have heard these songs three months ago on Radio 101. In such moments, they felt like citizens of the world, and the youth from other socialist countries were somehow jealous. They found it impossible that a radio station from a socialist country can criticize the government so sharply (...) During the war, the young 101-journalists have reported from the heaviest battlefields. They have shared the destiny of their citizens in good times as well as in bad" (Rihtman-Augustin, 1997: 3-4).

8. Football supporting was one of the few possible ways of expressing one's national identity in former Yugoslavia and this activity therefore played a significant role for the young people's identity formation. Here are some extracts describing the 1960s and 1970s: "Since my informers did not emphasize only their Zagreb, but also Croatian identity, it was important for them to attend the games of any of the Croatian football teams that played against any of the teams from any of the former Yugoslav republics, especially Serbia. (...) A number of my informers emphasized that 'they had always been Croats, not only for the last five years', and that 'they had never been afraid of showing that they were Croats'. Their Croatness was mainly present at such inter republic football games, when, besides the usual supporting and insulting the other team, there were also insults based on each other's nationality. (...)  Of course, when the Croatian supporters went to other republics and insulted the hosts there (...), they would very often end up in police stations where, besides having legal problems, they would often get beaten up. Nevertheless, they considered this kind of supporting to be their contribution to the solution of current political problems and a form of liberating their suppressed national feelings" (Kalapos 1996: 4). It is therefore quite understandable that the name that was at the time (and is nowadays as well) celebrated as one of rare symbols of belonging to the Croatian nation became so important.

9. These are some extracts from the interviews that were part of my research. All the informers are protected by changed names as their anonymity had to be guaranteed. The method was an open interview with loosely determined topics dealing with the contemporary Croatian society, politics, and culture.

10. The term democracy has been (over)used by the media and the public rhetorics in general, and its meaning has therefore lost some of its original features and gained several new aspects. When talking about democracy in everyday life (and in the sense my informers understood the word), people most usually use it as a synonym for multi-party system (as opposed to the former one, in which there was only one party), freedom of speech, media and decision-making, leaving the administrative aspects, such as "government by the people or their elected representatives; a political or social unit governed ultimately by all its members; the practice or spirit of social equality or a social condition of classlessness and equality" (Collins Dictionary of the English Language 1989: 411) at the end of the line.

11. The same point is made by France (1998: 104-105): "...what is being suggested here is that participation is related to young people's conformity to society norms. To be a 'good citizen' it is necessary to accept the status quo and learn the responsibilities associated with it".

12. Although it may seem that the youth are viewed as a single organism in this paper, one must keep in mind that this category of population is as differentiated as -- or even more than -- any other. Not only the social status of their parents (as well as their own) apply, but there is a complex and sometimes even non-definable subcultural division.

13. For example, when discussing the attitude of young Russians towards nationalism, Markowitz (1997: 8-9) argues that "Their [that is, teenagers'; author's note] passive non-involvement reflects precisely the path that they believe is most appropriate for Russia's stabilization and development. Kids talk about politics all the time. But they take no action for they are vividly aware of their impotence and direct their energies elsewhere -- into music, sports, studies, into themselves. (...) In addition, they know from the messages they receive in school and from their parents that they are powerless in Russia's mass society, and rather than fight a losing battle, they turn inward to their interests and outward to internation (read: Western consumer) youth culture." However her paper's presentation of Russian political and public lives makes it clear that we can hardly compare them with the Croatian ones.
 

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BOOK REVIEW: LASZLO KURTI AND JULIET LANGMAN (EDS.): BEYOND BORDERS. REMAKING CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN THE NEW EAST AND CENTRAL EUROPE. WESTVIEW PRESS, 1997, 160 PP.
Alexandra Bitusikova  Banska Bistrica, Slovakia

 Collapse of communism in East and Central Europe,  the establishment  of new states and new borders as well as the process of globalization and europeization  have resulted in searching  for new  identities and  increasing nationalism and xenophobia in most post-communist countries. It is not easy to understand these  processes and it  is even more  difficult to analyse and to interpret them. Editors Laszlo Kurti and Juliet Langman have succeeded  in  putting  together   an interdisciplinary volume that deals with the issues of ethnic, national  and  transnational  identities  in  East and Central Europe  and problems  of minority  rights in  Poland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, Slovakia and Austria.

East and  Central Europe is the  multiethnic and multicultural region  with a complex  historical development and  many complicated  identities. Ethnic and  cultural  diversity was purposely  suppressed  and  disregarded  during communism. The post-communist  era,  the  establishment  of  new  states  and tendencies to building "national"  states have revived a ghost of   nationalism,  old  ethnic  stereotypes  and  dangerous ethnocentric  myths. Therefore,  it  is  no  doubt  about the neccessity  of this  book although  the angles  of the view of ethnicity problems may differ from one author to another.

Laszlo Kurti  and Juliet Langman  introduce the volume  in the first chapter. It is  a thought of globalism, multiculturalism and  transnationalism  on  the  one  hand,  and  localism  and nationalism  on  the  other  hand.  The  authors ' interest is focused on  national and ethnic identities  that often go hand in  hand  with  nationalism  from  its  separatist  up  to the unionist versions.

Chris M.  Hann, the author of  the following chapter, analyses the development  of the Polish ethnic  and national identities that were  influenced mostly by the  Roman Catholic Church and under  socialism  by  the  communist  tendency  towards ethnic homogenization.  Hann pays  special attention  to the minority group  of the  Lemko  -  Ukrainians who  experienced traumatic events of  "ethnic cleansing" after the  Second World War. The author examines  the development and  transformations of Lemko - Ukrainian  identity  that  has  been  affected  by  dramatic histories   and   ideologies   (classifying   the   Lemkos  as "Ukrainian"  by the  Polish communist  authorities corresponds with practices  of the Slovak  communist leaders to  designate East  Slovak Ruthenians  as "Ukrainian").  Hann thinks  of the confusions  in  Lemko-Ukrainian self-identification  and (re)construction  of  collective  identity  in  the  new civil society.

William  Crowther deals  with the  genesis of  the Republic of Moldova that is a state  of the Romanian-speaking majority and other, mostly  Russian-speaking minorities. Crowther  tries to find the  answer to a question  why have the Romanian-speaking people  adopted an  independent Moldovan  identity rather than Romanian  that  was  so  strongly  insisted  upon  during  the mobilization  against  the  Soviet  regime. Crowther describes three factors  that influence identity:  external constraints, public  opinion and  the course  of elite  politics. He  finds national context  significant for national  identification. He points out that the construction  of national identity must be studied  and understood  as a  creative process.  The Moldovan example makes  us think about  ethnic and national  identities and shows that  it is almost impossible to  generalize or make definitive explanations of these phenomena.

Bulgarian-speaking  Muslims -  the  Pomaks  are the  object of interest  in  the  case  study  by  Maria Todorova. The Pomaks identify themselves through religion rather than through their ethnicity that is forced to  be Bulgarian or Turkish. Todorova points to a significant role  of socio-economic factors in the Pomak  self-identification  (lower  socio-economic  status and marginalization of  Pomak territories). Economy  should not be omitted when  studying identities in  post-communist countries because  it  may  have  an  influence  on self-identification, especially  in  the  regions  with  an  unstable and difficult economic  situation.

Bashkim Shehu, an Albanian  dissident writer, writes about the issues of national and  political consciousness in Albania. He brings out an East  Central European understanding of national identity as a cultural-ethnic identity based on blood ties. He discusses  the relationship  and distinction  between national identity and nationalism touching the problem of Kosovo. Shehu describes  forms  of  Albanian  nationalism  and tendencies in Albanian  national  issues  from  the  promotion  of  national superiority  and  hatred  of  foreigners  in  the  past to the opposite - mythologizing  of the West as a  saviour of Albania at  present.  This  dichotomy  has  been  replaced  by  a  new dichotomy between a weak national consciousness and increasing nationalism.

Moving to Macedonia, Jonathan  Schwartz discusses the problems of  creating  and  keeping  the  identity  in  diaspora on the example of the life history of a Macedonian emigrant Pecho. He deals with the problems of  individual concepts of identity in the modern world. As in many of his previous anthropological works on this region, Schwartz,  thinks  also of the importance of symbols and icons in identity formation.

Juliet Langman focuses on  conceptions of individual and group identity among Hungarian minority  youth in the post-communist Slovakia. Her paper is a case  study from a village in Eastern Slovakia. The author has used  pseudonyms for the names of the village, cultural organization and  informants that is why her information  is  not  comparable  with  the  results  of other researches in  this (rather unspecified) region. The  table "Population by Nationality  in  1991  Census"  with  English  pseudonyms  and "Romanians" (instead of  Roma, I suppose) as a  part of Slovak population is  most confusing. Langman  discusses questions of ethnic, national  and cultural identities  that are different, but  not   conflicting  with  Slovak   "national"  or  "civic" identity. Local  and regional identities  are also significant in self-identification, particularly in the case of regionally differentiated  Slovakia. Langman  pays her  attention to  the crucial  role of  language  in  the construction  of identity. A command  of the  Slovak  language  is integral  to Hungarian identity,  but  it  may   move  toward  assimilation.  Langman analyses the new Slovak  national policy toward minorities and is right to point to politization of the problems of Hungarian minority in Slovakia.

In  the last chapter of the volume  Ruth Wodak  presents an analysis of  racist and xenophobic phenomena  in Austria after the fall of the "Iron  Curtain". She describes the change from Austria that  was helpful and tolerant  to political refugees, fleeing from  communism, into Austria that  has become hostile to new economic immigrants.  She discusses ethnic stereotypes, prejudices  and  increasing  negative  attitudes  of Austrians towards refugees  from the East  and puts it  into the context with searching for new identities  and the place of Austria in the new Europe.

The  volume  "Beyond  Borders"  provides  a  wide insight into problems  of ethnic  and national  identities in  contemporary East and Central Europe. We all  live in a complex and dynamic world and  try to find answers  to the questions "who  we are, where we are from and where  we lead to". The book contributes to better understanding of these crucial questions of life and leads to  positive and peaceful remaking  of new identities in East and Central Europe or elsewhere in the world.

The Anthropology of East Europe Review
Robert Rotenberg
rrotenbe@wppost.depaul.edu
Copyright 1998 DePaul University all rights reserved.