The Origins of Contemporary Serb Nationalism: Yet Another Case of "trahison des clercs?"

Abstract

SEER,Vol. 82, No. I,Januay 2004 Review Article The Originsof ContemporarySerbNationalism: YetAnotherCaseof trahison desclercs? ALEKSANDAR PAVKOVIC Dragovic-Soso,Jasna. 'Saviours ofthe Nation'.' Serbia's Intellectual Opposition andtheRevival ofNfationalism. C. Hurst&Company, London, 2002. ix + 293 pp. Notes. Bibliography.Index. f35.00; CI6 50? THEphrase 'savioursof the nation' refers to those Serb intellectuals who, in the mid-I98os, publicly espoused the cause of the Serb nation which was, in their view, in danger from its traditionalenemies.' For Jasna Dragovic-Soso, they were neitherthe savioursof the Serb nation nor the villains of the later wars againstthe alleged Serb enemies. Yet, in the course of their debates over the recent history and political fortunes of the Serbs they helped to construct a nationalist political platform which the Communist leader Slobodan Milosevic then successfullyused to mobilize large segments of the Serb population in supportof his regime and itspolicies. Dragovic-Soso's is the firstbook-length studyof the recent revivalof Serb nationalism. Her story of the revival startsin the late I960s with the rejection, by a few Serb dissident intellectuals, of the Communist partypolicy to devolve sovereign state powers from the federalorgans to the six republicsand two provincesof the Yugoslavfederation.They argued that this policy, finally codified in the I974 Yugoslavconstitution , divided the Serb nation among four semi-sovereign states federal republics in which they lived, and thus denied them a homeland that other nations enjoyed in socialistYugoslavia.But, like intellectual dissidents elsewhere in Eastern Europe, in Belgrade they failed to offer any alternative to the Communist constitutional blueprint :their primaryaim, as dissidents,was to undermine the regime's claim to legitimacy and not to propose alternativesto it. As theirmain tool of tradewas the writtenword, theirprimaryconcern, as elsewhere in EasternEurope, was freedom of expressionor, rather,the lackof it. Following the death of the paramount Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz-Tito in I980, dissident intellectuals in Belgrade and Aleksandar Pavkovic is Associate Professor in Politics at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Principal Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne, Australia. i Their intellectual and political opponents in Belgrade referred to the more prominent among them, ironically, as 'the fathers of the nation'. 80 THE ORIGINS OF CONTEMPORARY SERB NATIONALISM Ljubljana established committees for the defence of the freedom of thought and expressionand set upjournals independent of the regime. However, in I985, the concern of many Belgradedissidentintellectuals shiftedto the defence of Serbnational rights,which they believed to be under systematicattackfromthe YugoslavCommunistpartyand from Albanian nationalists in the province of Kosovo and Metohija. In Dragovic-Soso's view, this marked a momentous shift from the universal and liberal to the narrow nationalist agenda and from the rhetoricofuniversalpoliticallibertiesto a rhetoricof Serbvictimization by othernationalgroups. Her book attempts to explain how this shift occurred and how it affectedSerbianpoliticsin the late I98os. Forthispurposesheoffersan analysis of nationalist discourse and the debates among leading nationally-mindedSerb intellectualswhich, in its scope and thoroughness , is unrivalled in scholarly literatureto date. Several anglophone scholars notablyNicholas Miller,AndrewWachtel,AudreyBudding and myself- have analysed various aspects of Serb nationalist discourse.2A few scholarsfrom Serbia notably Olivera Mojsilovic and Ivan Colovic3 have offeredboth analysesand incisive critiques of thatdiscourse,and in herunpublisheddoctoraldissertation,4Audrey Budding sought to find a common nationalist platform which, she believed, Serb intellectuals presented as an 'ultimatum' to other nationalgroupsin formerYugoslavia.But unlikemost of herpredecessors in this field, Dragovic-Soso argues in a systematic and highly persuasivemanner, that the origins of Serb nationalistdiscourseneed to be sought in the context of the intellectual debates within which it was deployed and constructed as well as in the context of dissident responsesto the Communistpoliticalframeworkof the time. Dragovic-Soso's 'structural-contextual'approach assumes that any ideological discourse, as a form of political discourse, consists of attemptsto conceptualizeand to respondto salientaspects('structures') 2 N. Miller,'The Non-conformists: DobricaCosic and Mica Popovic',Slavic Review, 58, 1999, 3, PP. I 68-87; A. B. Wachtel,Making aNation, Breaking aNation.Literature andCultural Politics inYugoslavia, Stanford,CA, andLondon, I998; A. F. Budding,'SystemicCrisisand NationalistMobilization:The CaseoftheMemorandumof theSerbianAcademy',Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 22 (specialvolume,'CulturesandNationsof CentralandEasternEurope: Essays in Honor of Roman Szporluk'), I998, pp. 49-69; A. Pavkovic, 'From Yugoslavism to Serbism: The Serb National Idea, I986- I996', Nations and Nationalism, 4, 1998, pp. 5I3 -28...