Future from the Balkans

Future from the Balkans ZdEnka BadOvInaC The current refugee crisis in Europe, largely triggered by the war in Syria, brings up once again the tired question: What can art do in times of war, exodus, and genocide? I want to reflect on this question in light of the work of various contemporary artists and theorists on the current refugee crisis, as well as of artists and theorists associated with the downfall of the communist regime and the most recent war in the region of the former Yugoslavia. Given the fact that the Balkan refugee route has, until recently, run mainly through former Yugoslav countries, it seems almost unavoidable to trace parallels with the effects of the 1990s war in the region, and to reconsider the notion of collectivity. On the one hand, in the socialist era, collectivity was an official ideology that meant, among other things, that responsibility was everyone’s and no one’s; on the other hand, there was a genuine spirit of collectivism among the people. In Yugoslavia, founded as it was on communist notions and an ideology of brotherhood and unity, the collective habitus had become strongly rooted among artists, and, as I will show, it is still operative in the current environment of refugee columns and razor-wire fences. This is evi- denced, among other things, by the fact that artists in the region have paid rela- tively little attention to how contemporary crises affected the individual, focusing instead on how they challenge us to reexamine notions of community. Brotherhood and Unity Highway Choosing the Balkans as one of their major corridors into Europe, the refugees could hardly have resurrected a better metaphor to suggest the decay of collectivity and sociality. The Balkan route through the region of the former Yugoslavia generally followed the Brotherhood and Unity Highway, as it was known in the era of Tito. Obviously, most refugees would not have known the his- tory of this highway. But for many of us living in the these territories, this highway, constructed mostly by youth labor brigades after World War II in order to connect the whole of Yugoslavia, from Slovenia in the north to the Macedonian border with Greece, symbolizes important notions of collectivity and solidarity. Things have changed drastically from the time of socialist Yugoslavia, with its free health OCTOBER 159, Winter 2017, pp. 103–118. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00284 by guest on 01 October 2021 104 OCTOBER insurance, schools and kindergartens for all, and a community center in nearly every village and functioning museums in every town. now education and health care have to be paid for individually, most of the principal museums in the region have closed or are barely surviving, and unemployment is on the rise. Some of the main refugee centers on the Balkan route were set up in factories where, until recently, workers from various ex-Yugoslavian republics had come to work. Many of these factories failed or were downsized after the recent economic crisis. While the whole of Europe has been affected by ruthless austerity measures, it was Balkan countries, starting with Greece, that have suffered the worst consequences. Thus, the Balkan route has come to symbolize not only the refugees’ loss of home but also the loss of our own community, not only the loss of our former shared country but also, above all, the loss of a society of solidarity and welfare. It is true that one of the mechanisms whereby the socialist regime “protect- ed” its people was the relative isolation of the country, and in one way or another, artists took up this isolation as a subject for their work. One of the ways of tran- scending it—although it needs to be emphasized that of all socialist countries, Yugoslavia’s borders were the most open—was for artists to establish contact with like-minded colleagues both nationally and internationally. This was done via various collective artistic projects and networks of communication, such as mail art. Of course, the relative lack of freedom also meant that many artists retreated to their ivory towers. Yet the collective desire was clear: Freedom meant mobility. How, then, are we to account for the fact that of all European countries, it is precisely the ex-socialist ones—countries such as Slovenia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland—with their largely bitter past experiences of isolation, that have championed the most restrictive politics on the current refugee question? When Hungarian president viktor Orbán initiated the building of razor-wire fences along the southern Hungarian border, he quickly found emulators in other countries. not only that: Just before the EU and Turkey concluded their agreement on immigration policies, the governments in the region decided to close the Balkan route to refugees. The EU-Turkey agreement itself, which was intended to stop the uncontrolled mass influx of refugees to Europe, was assessed by a number of critical observers to effectively constitute a bribe in which responsibility for hun- dreds of thousands of people was shifted from the EU to Turkey. European lead- ers not only promised Turkey an additional €3 billion in financial assistance and to abolish the visa requirement for Turkish citizens, they adopted a model of exchange of refugees that breached international law: For each Syrian refugee returned from Greece to Turkey, one Syrian refugee was to be resettled from Turkey to the EU, at the expense of the latter. The fate of refugees of other nationalities was left unresolved. Thus, in order to solve “its” refugee crisis, the EU concluded a questionable agreement with the autocratic regime of Turkey, which, according to amnesty International, has not even ratified the Geneva Convention relating to the status of refugees and has, since 1968, granted refugee status to European seekers only. In practice, this means that international law does not real- ly oblige Turkey to treat refugees as refugees. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00284 by guest on 01 October 2021 Future from the Balkans 105 The closing of the Balkan route precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe in Greece and the forced return of refugees to Turkey. Far from being a safe country, Turkey is where these people are exposed to further human-rights violations and even sent back to Syria, against the terms of the deal. The agreement between the EU and Turkey was supposed to establish order; what it brought about was a viola- tion of international law and, as a result, an indirect refusal of any political-civil identity to the refugees and migrants. Noncitizens a similar issue of depoliticization was raised by Tomaž Mastnak in 1996, speaking at the symposium “Living with Genocide: The War in Bosnia, Political Theory and art,” organized by the Ljubljana Museum of Modern art.1 Mastnak’s key thesis was that contemporary political theory failed to grasp the war in Bosnia. Unable to understand the war in the context of wider changes in the world, it also neglected the question of the Bosnian state and that of the sovereignty of its citizens. The consequence, according to Mastnak, was that in public discussions, the citizens of Bosnia morphed into “Muslims” and their state into a “Muslim state.” The question of the state thus found itself transformed into a question of ethnici- ty, facilitating the justification of the thesis that the war in Bosnia was about local ethnic conflicts rather than any wider political interests. The resulting impossibili- ty of analysis, of positing a political interpretation of the war in Bosnia, played into the hands of those who refused to take a clear political stand in the war, let alone help the Bosnian state to mount an armed resistance against the Serbian aggres- sor. Highlighting the problem of the depoliticization of war, Mastnak noted that “by addressing Bosnians as simply humans and not citizens of a state that fell vic- tim to military aggression, humanitarianism denies their civic existence. In the world today, it is only as citizens that people can hope to have a say in what hap- pens to their lives.”2 Slavoj Žižek was another thinker who pointed out how the collapse or malfunc- tion of the state leaves its inhabitants at the mercy of transnational interests. In an essay published in the catalogue of the nSk State pavilion3 at the 1993 venice 1. “Living with Genocide: The War in Bosnia, Political Theory and art,” international symposium, Museum of Modern art Ljubljana, May 23–26, 1996, consisted of two parts: “art and the War in Bosnia” (conceived by Zdenka Badovinac, IRWIn, and Igor Zabel) and “Political Theory and the War in Bosnia” (conceived by Tomaž Mastnak). Participants in the section “art and the War in Bosnia” includ- ed Marina abramović, dunja Blažević, david Elliott, Jürgen Harten, IRWIn, alexandre Melo, viktor Misiano, Edin numankadić, Peter Weibel, Igor Zabel, and denys Zacharopoulos. This part of the symposium was documented in M’Ars, Magazine of the Museum of Modern Art 11, no. 1–2 (1999). 2. Ibid., p. 11. 3. In 1984, three groups—the multimedia group Laibach, the visual-arts group IRWIn, and the theater group Scipion nasice Sisters Theatre (SnST)—founded an art collective called neue Slowenische kunst (nSk). nSk then established further subdivisions: the design group new Collectivism, the department of Pure and applied Philosophy, Retrovision, Film, and Builders. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00284 by guest on 01 October 2021 106 OCTOBER Biennale, he wrote of the collapse of Bosnia and Herzegovina as predicting the future of Europe: “Europe is coming closer and closer to a state of non-statehood where state mechanisms are losing their binding character.

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