Between Europe and the Past—Collective Identification and Diffusion of Student Contention to and from Serbia

Astrid Reinprecht

doi:10.1080/09668136.2017.1390071

Abstract

This essay examines diffusion between student social movements against higher education reforms in the countries of the former Yugoslavia. It firstly explores how—despite a strong tradition of protest in socialist Yugoslavia and in Serbia under Milošević—activists involved in the 2006 Serbian student protests chose not to reclaim the past but rather drew on experiences from student movements in France, Germany, and Greece. Second, it uncovers how the wave of protest that started in Serbia evolved into a model for contention for the whole region of the former Yugoslavia, long before the 2011 anti-austerity protests could serve as inspiration.

Highlights

How new were these tactics, and how did these tactics come to be decided upon by the activists involved? The struggles of 2006 paved the way for what Štiks (2015) has labelled the ‘new left’ in the former Yugoslavia.1 According to Štiks’ analysis, the new left unites ‘generally progressive political and social movements’ which are characterised by their ‘experiments or advocacy of direct, participatory, and horizontal democracy [and their] critique of the neoliberal capitalist transformation of the post-Yugoslav societies’ (Štiks 2015, p. 137)
Young academics, and urban youth played a crucial role in most of these protests: students occupied the University of Belgrade in 1968; students triggered the so-called Croatian Spring of 1973; students marched the streets of Kosovo in the early 1980s; students participated in anti-war activities in the early 1990s; and students spearheaded the anti-Milošević demonstrations of 1996–1997 that precipitated his fall in autumn 2000
This essay has investigated the question of why Serbian students in 2006 looked to student movements in other European countries for inspiration, rather than to past cases of mobilisation in communist Yugoslavia or Milošević’s Serbia

Summary

20 October–10 November 2011 Occupation of Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade

Diffusion through direct means (Subversive and indirect means (booklet Borba Za Znanje, Festival, travel) and indirect means (booklet general media). In 2009, student contention erupted in Macedonia when students established the initiative Slobodni Indeks (Free Index) at the Faculty of Philosophy of the SS Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.. In 2009, student contention erupted in Macedonia when students established the initiative Slobodni Indeks (Free Index) at the Faculty of Philosophy of the SS Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje.35 This initiative ended around 2012 but provided resources in terms of people and knowledge when a law aimed at changing examination procedures at Macedonian universities was introduced when plans about a law aimed at changing examination procedures at Macedonian universities became public in late 2014. The modularisation of Serbian tactics permanently widened the historical repertoire of contention, which had been developing since communist times and stabilised under the post-communist authoritarian regimes This is not to say that students in the region of the successor states of Yugoslavia could not learn independently from other European student movements as well. Serbian tactical and framing innovations were more adopted because of the contextual similarities and the direct and indirect links between activists as described above

Conclusion

18 May 2013 19 May 2013