Searching for a Serbian Havel Nick Miller Boise State University - - BALKAN AUTHORITARIANISM ------:' Searching for a Serbian Havel
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Boise State University ScholarWorks History Faculty Publications and Presentations Department of History 7-1-1997 Searching For a Serbian Havel Nick Miller Boise State University - - BALKAN AUTHORITARIANISM -------- :' Searching for a Serbian Havel Nicholas J. Miller Serbian intellectuals must Betweenwas wrackedNovemberby demonstrations1996 and Januaryheaded1997,byBelgradeforces answer for their role in opposed to the regime of President Slobodan Milosevic, leading to bittersweet musings that the age ofliberal de• elevating nationalist hatred to mocracy may have dawned in Serbia. Early on, the West• ern press compared this movement to the 1989 Velvet the preferred language of Revolution in Czechoslovakia. Although such talk even• tually faded, the temptation was strong to attribute more cultural and political democratic potential to these demonstrations than they deserved. This was especially true in Serbia itself, where discourse in Yugoslavia. The the honest hope for a better future has combined with the rhetoric of opposition politicians to produce a false ex• Serbian people need to see pectation that this revolution not only would topple an contrition from the autocrat but would prompt the birth of a stable, demo• cratic, and tolerant Serbia. An example of this phenom• compromised before they will enon would be the announcement by the leaders of the Zajedno (Together) opposition coalition that they are embrace their role in the seeking a "Serbian Havel" who would lead the coalition in the coming Serbian republican elections. J Zajedno destruction of Yugoslavia in all meant to link itself to the peaceful, liberal democratic transition engineered in Czechoslovakia in 1989-90, of its complexity. when dissident playwright Vaclav Havel moved from prison to presidency. There is an additional parallel to be made: Like most Serbian political leaders, Havel is an intellectual who became a politician. He is invoked because he is a symbol of peaceful and effective tran• sition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy. Serbia desperately needs its own Vaclav Havel. But what would it take to be such a leader? A Serbian Havel would be an intellectual in politics, someone who brings humanistic qualities to the cynical, often violent life of the politician. Since most of Serbia's leading politicians also began their careers as intellectuals, they have po• tential competitors for this role. But, unfortunately, NICHOLAS J. MILLER is assistant professor of history at Boise State Univer• today's Serbian intellectuals with political influence can sity. He would like to thank Jill Irvine, Sabrina P. Ramet, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of this article. lay no claim to a past steeped in humanism. In fact, most Problems of Post·Communism. vol. 44, no. 4, JulyfAugust 1997, pp. 3-11, © 1997 M,E, Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 107~216/1997$9.50+0,OO, Miller Searching for a Serbian Havel 3 ·of them helped destroy Yugoslavia. And with the wars The 1986 Memorandum of the Serbian Academy over, Serbia's leading intellectual politicians have only of Arts and Sciences (excerpts) fitfully examined their own behavior over the past de• Over the past two decades, the principle of unity has become cade-and that only goes for those who have long been weakened and overshadowed by the principle of national au• of marginal influence in Serbia's political life precisely tonomy, which in practice has turned into the sovereignty of the federal units [the republics, which as a rule are not ethnically because they'are antinationalists. Serbia's Havel must homogeneous]. The flaws that from the very beginning were have come to terms with his own intellectual past. This present in this model have become increasingly evident. Not all article discusses the limits of responsibility of Serbia's the national groups were equal: The Serbian nation, for instance, was not given the right to have its own state. The large sections intellectuals for the brutal collapse of Yugoslavia and of the Serbian people who live in other republics, unlike the na• the degree to which they currently seem willing to accept tional minorities, do not have the right to use their own language that responsibility. and script; they do not have the right to set up their own political or cultural organizations or to foster the common cultural tradi• tions of their nation together with their co-nationals. (pp. 116-17) Inventing a Discourse Many of the troubles bedeviling the Serbian nation stem from of Serbian Humiliation conditions that are common to all the Yugoslav nations. How• ever, the Serbian people are being beset by yet other afflictions. There are good reasons to seek signs of introspection, if The long-term lagging behind of Serbia's economic development, unregulated legal relations with Yugoslavia and the provinces, as not remorse, from Serbian intellectuals following the wars well as the genocide in Kosovo have all appeared on the politi• in Yugoslavia. A generation of Serbian intellectuals, in• cal scene with a combined force that is making the situation tense cluding historians, philosophers, writers, poets, and if not explosive. These three painful questions, which arise from the long-term policy taken toward Serbia, are so dramatic that economists, invented the discourse of Serbian humilia• they are threatening not just the Serbian people but the stability tion: the narcissistic and novel interpretation of Serbian of the entire country. For this reason they must be given due at• history that Serbs have always been persecuted by their tention. (p. 118) neighbors. This discourse prepared Serbs for war. I do The expulsion of the Serbian people from Kosovo bears dramatic not intend to accuse the entire Serbian intellectual and testimony to their historical defeat. In the spring of 1981, open and total war was declared on the Serbian people, which had political elite of barbarism. But leading intellectuals and been carefully prepared for in advance in the various stages of cultural institutions in Serbian society, including the administrative, political, and constitutional reform. This open war Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (SANU) and the has been going on for almost five years. It is being waged with a skillful and carefully orchestrated use of a variety of methods and Association of Serbian Writers, bear much responsibil• tactics, with the active and not just tacit support of various politi• ity for lowering the standards of public debate and intro• cal centers in Yugoslavia, which they are taking no pains to con• ducing aggressive nationalism into political discourse.2 ceal and which is more ruinous than the encouragement given by our neighbors. Moreover. we are still not looking this war in Beginning as early as the 1968 Albanian demonstra• the face, nor are we calling it by its proper name. (p. 126) tions in Kosovo, this group of dissidents conceived of its The physical, political. legal, and cultural genocide of the Serbian own activity as more pure and more enlightened than population in Kosovo and Metohija is a worse defeat than any politics. They imagined themselves to be the conscience experienced in the liberation wars waged by Serbia from the First of a Serbian nation that had been betrayed by bad lead• Serbian Uprising in 1804 to the uprising of 1941. The reasons for this defeat can primarily be laid at the door of the legacy of the ers and bureaucrats. They claimed to be purveyors of Com intern, which is still alive in the Communist Party of something akin to the antipolitics of the dissident intel• Yugoslavia's national policy and the Serbian communists' adher• lectuals in the rest of Eastern Europe, yet their activity ence to this policy, but they also lie in costly ideological and political delusions, ignorance, immaturity, or the inveterate op• became political in a critical sense: They roused apa• portunism of generations of Serbian politicians since World War thetic Serbs to oppose the Tito regime, which they claimed II, who are always on the defensive and always worried more had ignored or persecuted them. The most infamous ex• about what others think of them and their timid overtures at rais• ing the issue of Serbia's status than about the objective facts ample of Serbian nationalist discourse was the 1986 affecting the future of the nation which they lead. (p. 127) Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sci• Except for the time under the Independent State of Croatia, the ences. (See box.) The memorandum was produced by a Serbs in Croatia have never before been as jeopardized as they SANU committee. Although never finished or officially are today. Solution of their national status is a question of over• riding political importance. If solutions are not found, the conse• published, it was leaked to the Yugoslav press and has quences might well be disastrous, not only for Croatia, but for the since been the single most cited example of the growth whole of Yugoslavia. (p. 132) of Serbian nationalism in Yugoslavia. Many Serbs Source: Kosta Mihailovic and Vasilije Krestic, Memorandum of (mostly from the nationalist orientation) have lately in• the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts: Answers to Criti• cisms (Belgrade: SANU, 1996). sisted that the memorandum was nothing more than a suggestion for discussion and the fact that it was unpub- 4 Problems of Post-Communism July/August 1997 lished made it irrelevant. But until the ideas contained in the memorandum are repudiated by its formulators, who Intellectuals in Serbian Politics include many leaders of the nationalist revival, its status Dobrica (osic, born in 1921, is the author of many historical as an "unpublished proposal" is meaningless. novels, including Vreme smrt (TIme of Death), which has been translated into English. He was a member of the Central Commit• Dobrica Cosic, the Serbian novelist most often ac• tee of the League of Communists of Serbia (LCS) between 1965 cused ofleading the nationalist awakening in Serbia af• and 1968, when he left it as a result of his opposition to the LCS's ter 1968, recently evaluated his own actions: "In my life policy toward Kosovo and Vojvodina.