Serbian Politics

While the recent IR “narrative turn” has greatly improved our understanding of how narratives influence state policy choices, we need to deepen our understanding of how narratives explain policy change. If state “autobiographies” provide such powerful explanations of why states do what they do, how can they change their policies and practices? To understand the relationship between policy change and state narrative continuity, I build on existing scholarship on narrative analysis and ontological security to examine ways in which state autobiographical narratives are used by political actors to confront state insecurities. My principal argument is that at times of great crises and threats to multiple state securities (physical, social, and ontological), narratives are selectively activated to provide a cognitive bridge between policy change that resolves the physical security challenge, while also preserving state ontological security through offering autobiographical continuity, a sense of routine, familiarity, and calm. I illustrate the argument with an analysis of Serbia’s changing foreign policy behavior regarding the disputed
status of Kosovo.

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

China’s increased economic engagement with post-communist countries in the Western Balkans in the last decade has added to the complexity of democratic consolidation in the region, with possible negative impacts on the established process of European integration of these countries, foremost Serbia and Albania. This article addresses the impacts of the increased economic and to some extent political presence of China in the Western Balkan states over the past decade which has been exerted through both economic investment and trade incentives as well as a more sophisticated use of China’s soft power. The latter is exemplified in the greater number of cultural, educational and scientific exchanges between these states and China within the 16 + 1 (17 + 1 after 2018) cooperation framework and bilaterally. The article discusses China’s engagement with the Western Balkan countries on a case-by-case basis. The cases of Croatia, as an EU member, and of Albania, North Macedonia and Serbia, as official candidates for EU membership, are examined to show the impact of the relationship with China on these states’ adherence to the European integration process.

The paper argues that while the Serbian society and political elite are known for treating their country's accession to the EU in terms of pragmatic utility maximisation, they generally conceive of Serbian relations with Russia, contrariwise, as an identity-laden issue. To prove it, the author analyses Serbia's behaviour toward Russia along the features of emotion-driven cooperation, found in the literature on identity and emotions in foreign policy. In particular, the paper focuses on Serbians' especially strong friendliness vis-à-vis Russia, the parallel existence of the Other (the West) in their identity and the particularly strong intensity of their attraction to Russia during Serbia-West conflicts, the reinforcement of their affection to Russia by national traumas, the endurance of the affection's strength despite conflicting rational interests and negative experiences in bilateral interaction, the frequent occurrence of references to Russia in Serbia's domestic discourse and decisional justifications and a large use of historical analogies concerning Russia. Finally, the author ponders over the implications of the existent configuration of emotional and pragmatic forces in Serbian politics for the country's current and future conduct toward Russia and the EU

Why do presidents in semi-presidential regimes sometimes call early elections? Is the behavior of incumbent presidents different from the behavior of presidential contenders when the former do not need to run for office but face the loss of parliamentary majority in a semi-presidential system? Prospect theory claims that agents make risky choices when facing a loss. Consequently, if incumbent presidents face a loss of majority in the parliament, they will call for early election to try to shore up or salvage the majority. To provide empirical evidence supporting this claim, prospect theory has been applied to the two presidential elections in Yugoslavia and Serbia in which two incumbent presidents, Slobodan Milošević (2000) and Boris Tadić (2012), had lost early presidential elections. The expected contribution of the paper is to deepen our understanding of how semi-presidential regimes resolve the problem of temporal rigidity and offer novel empirical data in support of the application of prospect theory in political science.

Ever since the end of the wars of the nineties, as well as the declaration of independence of Kosovo, Serbia has fallen of the radar, both within the international political community, as well as within the academia. Yet, in the meantime, the societal and political situation within the country has changed drastically, with the former warmonger of the nineties, Aleksandar Vučić, having taken hold of seemingly unlimited power. Serbia has, during his reign, become entrenched in corruption, the multitude of affairs being produced on a regular level serving as proof. Drawing on existing theories of political corruption, we shall tackle Serbia’s political corruption via the examination of the most prominent affairs, coming to the conclusion that Alatas’ designation of “tidal corruption” fits contemporary Serbia best, as well as classifying most prominent instances of corruption.

This article traces how Kosovo came to agree to the Rambouillet accords, with the aim of exploring the nexus between diplomatic representation and international agency. It demonstrates that, in the world of diplomacy, entities like 'Kosovo' can act only when they are carefully staged. Thus far, however, the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) has largely failed to acknowledge the role of diplomacy in the constitution of agency. To clarify what is at stake in the theoretical debate, therefore, I begin with a systematic discussion of how IR has conceived of diplomatic representation. Taking a cue from Bruno Latour's and Lisa Disch's writings on political representation, I then suggest an alternative understanding of diplomacy that takes its performative character seriously. Equipped with this conceptual toolkit, I subsequently turn to the story of Kosovo’s representation at the Rambouillet conference held in 1999. Tracing how the Kosovo Albanians and their international supporters staged Kosovo’s diplomatic performance, and how the Yugoslav/Serbian delegation tried to undermine it, I demonstrate that diplomatic representation can indeed generate agency. I also identify three factors that influence whether a diplomatic performance succeeds in making those who are represented act: recognition by other international actors, practical competence, and the alignment of the represented.

How did war affect political and economic reform efforts across the post-communist world? War is hypothesized to have a negative political impact through three main mechanisms: distraction from any peacetime political and economic reform agenda; military defeat and disruption, and associated weakening or militarization of state authority; and postwar economic isolation. After controlling for cultural, economic, and institutional factors, statistical analysis confirms the negative effects of war on political and economic reform. The negative effect of war is robust across a range of model specifications and time periods, but is estimated to be stronger or the subgroup of initially democratic countries. The cultural variable of 'frustrated national ideals' is the most important control variable. There follow brief case studies of the eight post-communist countries torn by protracted, large-scale military conflict - Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The case studies focus on how initial conditions - particularly he cultural variable of frustrated national ideals - interact with longer-term effects of war to influence postwar revival of reform efforts. Among the subgroup of initially democratic countries, the dominant pattern is not one of democracy unleashing diversionary war, as it did in Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia. Rather, reform nationalist governments typically wanted to avoid war. But their political constituencies and ideological commitments typically prevented them from making concessions that might have avoided war, or at least stopped it more quickly. This entangled their countries in longer-term conflicts, with correspondingly greater adverse impacts on political and economic reform.

This paper aims to accomplish two goals. First, to present recent empirical evidence to the claim that Serbia is on the path towards embracing a more radical version of electoral authoritarianism. This is accomplished by examining most recent illiberal politics aimed at controlling electoral processes and the media sphere, and extracting public funds for partisan purposes. I claim that the incomplete design of democratic institutions in Serbia set up between 2001 and 2012 is primarily responsible for the democratic decline. The second goal is more general and aims to emphasise the importance of extracting public funds for hybrid regimes. Extractive institutions matter because they directly impact other critical segments of electoral authoritarianism (notably, elections and media freedom), but also because they explain the type of leadership they promote in politics. If public resources remain without proper institutional oversight and are simply 'up for grabs,' this will attract leaders more willing to dismantle democratic institutions and violate democratic procedures. Serbia serves as a good and current example of this linkage.

This article seeks to contribute to the anthropological analysis of neoliberalism as a hegemonic project of capitalist social transformation through a close examination of the ideological legitimation of austerity-driven public-sector retrenchment in Serbia. It shows how long-term continuities of political economy and public discourse create opportunities for market populist elites to sell neoliberalism as a moral project. Persistent structural conditions, especially scarcity of jobs, and an established popular discourse about the excessive and corrupt public sector provide a fertile soil for a moral ideology that justifies neoliberal policies as a redress to an immoral redistribution of societal resources.

This article analyses the discourse surrounding, implementation of, and struggles over the new disability policy in Serbia to show how its founding principles of human rights became partially co-opted by neoliberal welfare restructuring. As a result, it sought to make disabled people not only equal but also economically ‘independent’ in the sense of relying on wage labour instead of welfare. Owing to its inadequate assumptions and instruments, the policy has largely failed to deliver on these objectives. Disabled people mobilized against neoliberalization by defending material welfare entitlements inherited from Yugoslav socialism. At the same time, they appropriated the register of human rights to demand a substantive political and civic equality. This points to the possibility of rights-based projects that fuse rather than oppose the politics of recognition and redistribution.

The paper examines the quality of democracy in Serbia via the quantitative analysis of media discourse. It reveals a robust competition, participation and accountability in the first decade after regime change and major recent decline, and thus shows that expert assessments from influential indices of democracy underrated democratic quality in the former period and overrated it later. It also shows advantages of complementing expert assessments with that based on media discourse. The content analysis examined 1921 coded items from print and electronic media coverage of major political conflicts at strategic points in the country's democratisation.

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the relationship between political memory and foreign policy by analyzing how physical sites of traumatic memory serve as locations of foreign policy construction. Specifically, I explore how physical sites (such as concentration camps, killing sites, or memorials) serve to construct foreign policy through the enduring meaning they have as material reminders of collective trauma. I illustrate the argument with a case study of Jasenovac, the commemorative site of the largest concentration camp administered by the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. The Jasenovac site is a particularly useful case for my argument because it is a site of contested memory and conflicting national narratives. Most significantly, it is the site of production of three distinct foreign policies – of Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia’s Republika Srpska– which all use the Jasenovac site to pursue different and mutually exclusive foreign policy claims.

This article constitutes an attempt to put forward some suggestions towards constructing a framework of understanding the processes of social construction of sexuality and gender identity within the context of the ethnic conflict, and of nationalist/populist politics in former Yugoslavia. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which masculinist discourse is articulated to the politics of ethnicity in former Yugoslavia, by examining the definition and treatment of women as `biological reproducers of the nation’ through the discourses and policy proposals of moral majority nationalist and pro-life movements in Croatia and Slovenia, and of the nationalist movement and regime in Serbia, and the use of rape and sexual assault against women as weapons’ in the ethnic conflict in Bosnia and other republics of former Yugoslavia.

The Republic of Serbia is a state overburdened with complex issues regarding its political transformation. These problems are a consequence of the dynamic changes which have occurred over the last 30 years. It should be remembered that Serbia underwent a transformation from an authoritarian to a democratic state in a relatively short period of time. Unfortunately, these dynamic political, economic, and social modifications coincided with serious systemic changes and this had an adverse impact on Serbian democracy. The political problems which directly influence the process of democratization are becoming more and more visible over time. One such problem is undoubtedly the fact that state power is in the hands of one political party: the Serbian Progressive Party. For states going through a transformation, such a concentration of power could have negative effects on the quality of democracy. This article evaluates the non-democratic trends in Serbia which stem from the strengthening of the Serbian Progressive Party, especially on the level of state power. The article also suggests that this development might lead to Serbia being categorized as a country which has become stuck in the so-called grey zone of democratization.

This article examines how political cartoons reflected and mobilized resistance to growing authoritarianism and the personalization of power in contemporary Serbia. The focus is on the work of Dušan Petričić, the most influential political cartoonist in Serbia, which was published in daily Politika and weekly NIN between 2012 and 2017. Petričić’s cartoons offer interesting insights into a dramatic decline of press freedom and the rise of authoritarian personalist rule in terms of both their content and political impact. The authors draw on quantitative content analysis and qualitative multimodal analysis to examine the key representational and stylistic features of Petričić’s cartoons, both as a way to understand the relationship between his aesthetics and his political statements, and in order to critically assess some of the ways in which democratization conflicts may be expressed visually. Their analysis also draws on evidence from an in-depth interview with the author. In combining a systematic analysis of key visual patterns across a sample of cartoons with a comprehensive evaluation of how both visual and linguistic features work together to promote anti-authoritarian ideals and resistance, the article offers a framework to understand the political import of aesthetics in Serbia’s democratization process.

The article analyses from an anthropological perspective the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the first state-supported Parade in Serbia, as a part of the building of a democratic and European Serbian nation. In their discursive framing of the Parade and making claims on the state to take it under its auspices, the organising NGOs bound the event to the EU integration process of Serbia. This policy link helped them forge a political alliance with the state, but was also instrumentalised by the government to avoid an ideological conflict with the opponents of the Parade. Owing to the perception of the alliance as “elitist” and to the militarised and depoliticised nature of the state’s involvement, the event materially actualised and reified rather than transcended the enduring conflict of liberal and collectivist citizenship visions in Serbia. The article argues that the overall discourse of the government on Europeanisation is informed by the same top-down and instrumental logic. However, members of civil society develop political subjectivities which demand active citizen participation and critically engage with the discourse to restore its democratising potential. Similarly, the emerging “populist” politics of LGBT rights, illustrated by the pop singer Jelena Karleuša's participation in the domestic debate, are better placed to face the legacies of socialist and ethnonationalist nation-building than the human rights and Europeanisation approaches

If nations are non-preordained configurations of socio-political collectivities then they cement – or fragment – as a consequence of two core sets of on-the-ground interactions: those taking place within a national movement among contending intra-national constituents; and those taking place between competing national movements, typically over territory. A third set of on-the-ground socio-political interactions has received less attention in the study of the phenomenon of nationalism: I term it ‘dynamics across nationalisms’. If such dynamics are explored in conjunction with the more prevalent study of interactions within and between nationalisms, they can shed brighter explanatory light on the phenomenon of national consolidation/disintegration.

Development of ‘16 + 1’ framework substantially depends on how Central and Eastern European countries understand their fast-evolving relationship with China. This article investigates and analyses related perceptions and discusses their implications for ‘16 + 1’. Focusing on the Sino-Serbian relationship, the study reveals that the understanding of China and its growing involvement in the region oscillates between the extremes, yet that both positive and negative evaluations are not supported by the available empirical evidence and informed by a proper understanding of the context within which the relationship takes place. This is likely to result in a sense of disillusionment, as well as heightened concerns about the relationship with China, casting shadow over the prospects of the China-CEE relations.

The chapter explores diverging implications of global democratic decline for public communication in new and old democracies. It draws on empirical evidence from a government-sponsored smear campaign against Serbia’s ombudsman between January and May 2015, including data from quantitative and qualitative analyses of print and electronic media and of Twitter content and from semi-structured interviews with key political, civil society and media actors. The analyses of the main arenas of conflict showed the prevalence of emotions and personal beliefs, as opposed to evidence, in public debates, just like in old democracies. It also revealed, however, a much broader repertoire of strategic deception and authoritarian manipulation, which resulted in sharp polarization in public discourse, systematic violations of press freedom and political competition, and a sharply declining quality of journalism.

Abstract. During the 1986–96 period, the intellectual debate on Serb national goals was characterised by a previously unparalleled diversity of views. The draft of the Serbian Academy's Memorandum, which sparked this debate in 1986, advocated an ‘integrative’ Yugoslav federation whose primary aim would be to foster Serbism, that is, to facilitate Serb political and cultural unification. After 1988, the differences between Yugoslavism and Serbism became obvious as advocates of Serb unification rejected Yugoslavia as a costly mistake. In rejecting Yugoslavism, some Serb intellectuals insisted on the regeneration of Serbia and its population, while others argued for the primacy of the unification of all Serb-populated lands into one state. The resulting diversity of views may be perhaps explicable by a persistent disagreement among the intellectuals concerning the basis of Serb national identity, as well as by their focus on an exclusivist and collectivist view of national goals; the latter, it is suggested, is a result of the continuing use of the idea of Serb unification as a part of the programme of Serb national liberation from foreign domination.

December 2015 saw the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords for Bosnia and Hercegovina. Twenty years on the six non-EU countries of the Western Balkans (Bosnia and Hercegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia, all from former Yugoslavia, plus Albania) aspire to join the Union. The article examines the geographical, linguistic, and historical currents that shaped the region and looks at themes from the last twenty five years that resonate more broadly in international crises today: confronting aggression, the impact of sanctions, “liberal imperialism,” weak institutions, the stress of war, identity confusion, and the future of Europe. The article concludes that to avoid a return to violence in the next 20 years, the region needs to be part of wider European governance. For this to be achieved, we need more than two day summits but more pro-active engagement from all sides perhaps returning to the 19th century model of a Congress.

Socialist Yugoslavia was a country suspended between traditional cultures, competing concepts of modernization, and rivaling Cold War blocs. As a result, it produced a diverse body of architecture that defies easy classification and blurs the lines between the established categories of modernism. This book explores the historical “in-betweenness” of Yugoslav modernism and the strategies architects used to mediate different—sometimes directly opposed—concepts of culture and architecture. Surveyed here is a wide range of topics: from city building and state representation, to the typologies of everyday life. Also discussed is the work of Yugoslavia’s leading architects, who transformed their in-betweenness into a new quality: Edvard Ravnikar’s seamless blending of such varied influences as Jože Plečnik, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner; Bogdan Bogdanović’s war memorials, which filtered deep-seated cultural archetypes through the lens of Surrealism; Juraj Neidhardt’s efforts at forging a modern identity for Bosnia based on the vernacular Ottoman heritage; and Vjenceslav Richter’s neo-avant-garde experiments, which provided some of the most convincing representations of Yugoslav socialism. Wolfgang Thaler photographs document these and many other stand-out achievements.

The article analyses the dimensionality of political party preferences, and the strength of the ‘ethnic voting’ on a sample of respondents from Subotica, Yugoslavia. Ethnic heterogeneity of the district of Subotica facilitated the proliferation of parties and organizations claiming to represent national minorities, primarily Hungarians, Croats and Bunejvci. Factor analysis of preferences for parties participating at local elections in 1996 showed a three‐dimensional structure. Party preferences are differentiated according to (1) civic orientation, (2) Serbian nationalist and pro‐(Milošević's)regime orientation, and (3) pro‐minority orientation. Ethnic voting dominated preferences particularly for parties high on the Serbian nationalist dimension and pro‐minority dimension. The results are discussed with reference to their implication for the quality of democratization.

Twenty years since the onset of the traumatic wars of Yugoslav secession, the countries of the Western Balkans continue to nurture narratives of the past that are mutually exclusive, contradictory, and irreconcilable. The troubling ways in which states in the region remember their pasts provide continuing obstacles in the search for acknowledgment and justice. In this essay, I develop an argument for understanding the relationship between justice and remembrance of the past. To illustrate this relationship, I explore ways in which education and memorialization projects contribute to justice efforts. I critically analyze a few ongoing education and memory projects in the region, and then present alternative ideas on mechanisms of public memory that would be more conducive to building the foundational blocs of justice based on trust, respect, and dignity.