Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics (Southeast European Studies) [1 ed.] 9781472443083, 9781315575544, 147244308X

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria

Through a comparison of public spheres in Bulgaria and Serbia, this book illustrates the weaknesses of current measurements of democracy. Dawson’s ethnographic approach allows him to demonstrate the counterintuitive conclusion that Serbia has a more solid foundation for liberal democracy than EU member Bulgaria. Of tremendous interest for anyone interested in democratic transitions, democracy promotion, and liberal theory more generally. Chip Gagnon, Ithaca College, USA There is a troubling gap in the literature on democratic transformations: the cultural dimension of these processes is insufficiently explored and poorly understood. This book fills this gap in the most persuasive manner. Based on an ingeniously conceived ethnography of public spaces, carefully calibrated comparative design, and masterfully collected evidence, the author shows that the ranking of political systems based on the formalist criteria, employed for example by Freedom House, is not as conclusive as it is often assumed. A different picture – arguably more accurate – emerges when the political cultures revealed through the detailed analysis of public debates are compared. Jan Kubik, Rutgers University, USA Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria is a timely and much needed text. It is an important contribution to the studies of the public sphere, as it raises important questions about the nature of democracy, democratic participation and ways of measuring it. The book raises crucial questions about formalised measurements of democracy, and explores the public spheres as sites of contention and complication. Moreover, Cultures of Democracy provides new and fascinating empirical material on Serbian and Bulgarian public spheres, making it a welcome addition to the study of South Eastern Europe. Jelena Obradovic-Wochnik, Aston University, UK

Southeast European Studies Series Editor: Florian Bieber, Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz, Austria The Balkans are a region of Europe widely associated over the past decades with violence and war. Beyond this violence, the region has experienced rapid change in recent times, including democratization and economic and social transformation. New scholarship is emerging which seeks to move away from the focus on violence alone to an understanding of the region in a broader context drawing on new empirical research. The Southeast European Studies Series seeks to provide a forum for this new scholarship. Publishing cutting-edge, original research and contributing to a more profound understanding of Southeastern Europe while focusing on contemporary perspectives the series aims to explain the past and seeks to examine how it shapes the present. Focusing on original empirical research and innovative theoretical perspectives on the region, the series includes original monographs and edited collections. It is interdisciplinary in scope, publishing high-level research in political science, history, anthropology, sociology, law and economics and accessible to readers interested in Southeast Europe and beyond. Forthcoming titles in the series After Ethnic Conflict Policy-making in Post-conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia Cvete Koneska A Discourse Analysis of Corruption Instituting Neoliberalism Against Corruption in Albania, 1998–2005 Blendi Kajsiu State Building and Democratization in Bosnia and Herzegovina Edited by Soeren Keil and Valery Perry Austerity and The Third Sector in Greece Civil Society at the European Frontline Edited by Jennifer Clarke, Asteris Huliaris and Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos Citizenship in Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro Effects of Statehood and Identity Challenges Jelena Dzankic

Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria How Ideas Shape Publics

James Dawson University College London, UK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2014 James Dawson James Dawson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Dawson, James, 1979Cultures of democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria : how ideas shape publics / by James Dawson. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-4308-3 (hardback) 1. Democracy--SBulgaria. 3. Political participation--Sulgaria. 5. Civil society-Sulgaria. I. Title. JN9656.D39 2014 306.2094971--dc23 2014027943

ISBN 9781472443083 (hbk) ISBN 9781315575544 (ebk)

Contents Preface and Acknowledgements   Guide to Abbreviations of Political Parties   1

The Neglect of Citizens in the Measurement of Liberal Democracy: An Agenda for the Application of Public Sphere Theory to Central and Eastern Europe  

vii xi

1

2

Liberal Institutions, Illiberal Democracy? The Public Spheres of Serbia and Bulgaria Compared  

31

3

Political Pluralism in the Mathematical or the Philosophical Sense? Comparing the Range of Discourse in Recent Serbian and Bulgarian Political History   

61

4

Publics and Counterpublics in Serbia: Public Sphere Pluralism in Niš  

97

5

Disenchantment without Coherence in Bulgaria: The Absence of Public Sphere Pluralism in Plovdiv  



Conclusion: Evaluating Democracy through the Public Sphere    175



Postscript: On the Bulgarian Protests of 2013 and the Spectre of Authoritarian Populism in Serbia  

Bibliography    Index  

133

185 193 207

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Preface and Acknowledgements The countries of Southeastern Europe have given me so many fond memories that I cannot adopt the dispassionate role of the analyst without difficulty. As a Bachelor’s student in 1999 I spent the summer carrying furniture for a removals company in Essex to finance my first trip to the region, to attend an international work-camp in the mountains near Sliven in Bulgaria. That strange and exhilarating trip was to be the prelude to a much longer engagement, one that has continued in various forms to this day. After applying to teach in Bulgaria through the European Union’s Commenius Programme in 2002, I was allocated to a secondary school in the town of Stara Zagora and immediately set to learning the language and embracing a lifestyle in which my friends and colleagues, though woefully underpaid, seemed to have so much more time for each other than anyone did back home. It suited me so well that I found teaching jobs to keep me in Bulgaria for three full years after the expiry of my year of EU funding. It was during that period that I began travelling, usually with friends from the US Peace Corps, to the countries of the former Yugoslavia. When I was subsequently awarded funding to do a Master of Research at University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, I took the opportunity to do internships in Sarajevo and Belgrade that introduced me to the world of international NGOs, politicians and investigative journalists. If I were to write a memoir of the time I spent in any of these places, it would naturally be laced with nostalgia for old friendships and impromptu ‘weekend’ trips that sometimes stretched to several weeks. Alas, as a scholar of politics, that is not my task here. The main aim of this project has been to compare the progress of Serbia and Bulgaria in creating political cultures oriented towards the liberal democratic system. Based on analyses of political discourse and public discussion observed from 2011–2012 in the large provincial cities of Niš and Plovdiv, I found that the Serbian public sphere was clearly more contested, pluralist and (at the margins) liberal relative to Bulgaria. As this finding is a rather controversial one, being that it contradicts the accession judgements of the EU (Bulgaria is in, Serbia still out), I will use this space to describe in very plain terms the kinds of data I encountered in the field that convinced me that this was the case. I will then briefly consider these findings in the light of the massive popular mobilizations that have taken place in Bulgaria since 2013. Before describing the contrasts, I will state that in Serbia as in Bulgaria, the ‘centre ground’ of politics and public sphere debate more generally has been and probably remains characterized by the uneasy overlap of avowed aspirations for a‘European’, ‘democratic’ future and the persistence of nationalist and socially

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conservative narratives that consistently undermine these aspirations. In my experience, the sharpest contrasts between these societies were to be found in the ideas of those politicians, intellectuals and highly-educated citizens who might reasonably be considered ‘committed democrats’. In Serbia, it was impossible to miss the political presence and, crucially, the popular resonance of ideas that were unambiguously supportive of the project to implement liberal democratic principles – including ‘inconvenient’ ones like ‘civic tolerance’ – across society. For example, a sizeable minority of my informants in Niš were not only oriented towards a ‘European’ and ‘democratic’ future, but were actively seeking to challenge mainstream nationalist, socially conservative assumptions and even – despite their own relative poverty - to advocate for the rights of marginal ethnic and social groups to which they mostly did not belong. In Bulgaria, such orientations are not unknown, as may be attested by the ideas of some of my Bulgarian academic colleagues that are quoted in this book. However, such ‘hard liberal’ identifications were conspicuously absent from the national political sphere during my fieldwork in Bulgaria. Perhaps more significantly, they were sociologically invisible. The longer I remained in Plovdiv, the more confident I became of the realization that such ideas were not just atypical in the city but actually antithetical to the way that even most highly-educated, EU-oriented Plovdivchani tended to identify in relation to the world. The committed Bulgarian democrats I found – and there were many – tended to be simultaneously committed to distinctly illiberal normative visions of what life in a ‘normal’ European democracy should look like. Obviously, in isolation from the theoretical framework to be laid out in Chapter 1, these anecdotal references to fieldwork experiences carry little weight on their own. Nevertheless, they are congruent with the overall findings of the book. I concede with no relish whatsoever that the liberal democratic credentials of Bulgarian society – at both the levels of everyday discussion and elite political discourse – undeniably come off worse from this comparison with Serbia. Since I acknowledge that watchers of Bulgarian politics will approach my analyses with the successive waves of mass anti-government protest since 2013 in mind, I will take this opportunity to offer some brief thoughts on these recent events with respect to the findings described above. Basically, I am optimistic that these waves of protest are likely to improve the quality of Bulgarian democracy in the long-run. The mass outpourings of anger at the cosy relationships between governments (of right and left) with the economic elites they are tasked with regulating will probably result in a reduction in the degree of impunity to be enjoyed by political elites in future. With respect to the analyses that follow, I will happily concede that my appraisal of the Bulgarian public sphere would have been at least slightly, perhaps significantly, more optimistic if my fieldwork and analysis had been carried out during 2013–14 rather than 2011–12. However, it is also clear that not everything has changed. As most social scientists are well aware, extraordinary events like the Bulgarian anti-government protests can be transformative but international press coverage of them generally does a poor job of detailing the existing parameters of political discourse and competition

Preface and Acknowledgements

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that may or may not be challenged by such mobilizations. Having spent several years mapping out these ‘normal’ parameters, I find significance in the kinds of challenges that have been omitted from the protests as well as those that have been central to them. For example, the fact that the protesters have not dared to challenge the ethnically and socially exclusive bases of political competition in the country means that any attempt to argue that liberalism has won the day would be premature. First and foremost then, the protests are testament to aspirations for the accountability of elites, but they are also testament to the reluctance of Bulgarian civil society to actively challenge the ethnic nationalist assumptions that coexist with aspirations for ‘normal’ European democracy. These arguments are outlined at greater length in a brief post-script to this book that also considers recent developments in Serbian politics. Having cautioned the reader that there will be no place for ‘nostalgia’ in my analyses, I hope I will be forgiven for taking a few paragraphs to recognize the very significant help I have received in bringing this project to fruition. The largest debt I incurred in completing this project is owed to Sherrill Stroschein, who has been incredibly generous in sharing both her time and her thoughts since this project was in its infancy back in 2009. The encouragement she gave me to scale up the ambition of this project and to engage directly with debates in the field of democratization went a long way to shaping this book as it now stands. In addition, Eric Gordy has consistently made himself available to help me sharpen my ideas and to give me the benefit of his expertise in Serbian politics and social theory. I thank the School of Public Policy at University College London for giving me the wonderful opportunity to work as a lecturer and also to the students, in particular those on the MSc Democracy and Comparative Politics, whose intelligence and enthusiasm regularly reminds me why I became an academic. The research project described in this book was facilitated primarily by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC grant number: ES/I904166/1). As this project has been many years in the making, I also wish to acknowledge past financial support I have received from the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) without which it would not have been possible for me to pursue this career. Since this project involved two long periods of ethnographic fieldwork, it would be impossible to thank everyone to whom I am grateful for making my stays in Serbia and Bulgaria so interesting, productive and enjoyable. In Niš, Serbia, I am particularly indebted to Milena Marković both for providing very professional transcriptions of the group discussions and for being a closet sociologist. I would like to thank Dragoljub ‘Brka’ Djordjević, Miloš Tasić and Vladan Petrović at the University of Niš for being part of ‘the best katedra (department) in the world’ and Dragana Rodić in the careers service, whose enthusiasm for her work, and life in general, inspired me. Radovan ‘Doda’ Dodić is thanked for always putting his technological talents at my service and for helping to assemble some focus groups. My fellow researchers Charlotte Johnson and Giorgos Monogioudis deserve a mention for the very warm hospitality they extended to me in Belgrade.

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I thank my Serbo-Croatian teachers Jelena Ćalić and Svetlana Rakočević and the administrators at UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies for allowing me to attend their classes ahead of my entry to the field. Bojan Aleksov was generous with his time and contacts before I left London for Serbia and thanks are similarly due to Predrag Cvetičanin who shared his ideas with me after I arrived in Niš. In Plovdiv, Bulgaria, I would like to thank all of the colleagues at the Ethnology department of Plovdiv University ‘Paisii Hilendarski’ and Stoyan Antonov in particular for helping me to settle in to the office. I would also like to thank Neli Arabadzhieva, Ivaylo Klisurov, Elena Kmetova and Jeff Warner for their friendship and assistance. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the hard work of Halide Bekirefendieva in providing the Bulgarian group discussion transcriptions. Last but certainly not least, I will extend my gratitude to around one hundred citizens of Serbia and Bulgaria who participated in group discussions whose opinions appear, pseudonymously, throughout this book. I will add at this stage that all of the analyses in this book are my own, from which it follows that I accept responsibility for any views or factual errors that appear in the text. I will continue by extending my gratitude to those who gave me the benefit of their expertise in the various stages of writing up this project. I would like to acknowledge the thorough reviews and thoughtful criticisms provided by Richard Mole, Jon Fox and one anonymous reviewer which resulted in significant revisions to the text. Several present or former colleagues at UCL including Cathy Elliott, Niheer Dasandi, Dario Brentin, Mark Griffiths, Oliwia Berdak, Anna Rebmann, Licia Cianetti and Ana Omaljev of the University of Reading either commented on chapters or helped me to refine my ideas through discussion. At Ashgate, I would like to thank the series editor Florian Bieber for accepting my manuscript and Rob Sorsby for being so helpful and efficient in getting this book into print. Finally, I also wish to thank Matt White, without whose unusual skill set, combining a keen eye for spelling inconsistencies with an impressive knowledge of Balkan politics and societies, this book would read much less clearly. On a more personal level, I would like to thank my wife, Huimin Jia, for putting up with my late nights and always-looming deadlines with good humour and sympathy. While I am on this theme, I would also like to extend my gratitude to Xiao Qin and Yuan Jun for their evident pride in the scholarly career of their son-in-law. My parents Paul and Christine have consistently provided emotional support, lifts to airports, Sunday dinners and emergency plumbing services to insulate me from ‘normal life’ to the extent that I could concentrate on the writing up. Staying in the family, Granddad Peter, Nana Joyce, Joe, Ann-Marie, Rosie and Beth all deserve mentions only because I could not possibly complete this list, or imagine life, without them. JD, London, July 2014

Guide to Abbreviations of Political Parties Congruent with most international scholarship on Serbia, unabbreviated party names are rendered in their in English-language translations but abbreviated forms are given in Serbian (DS, SNS, and so on). Since international scholarship tends to use English-language abbreviations for some Bulgarian parties (UDF, MRF) and Bulgarian language abbreviations (GERB, NDSV) for others, I have simply followed what I perceive to be the most established form. Serbia DS DSS G17+ LDP SNS SPS SRS

Demokratska stranka (Democratic Party) Demokratska stranka Srbije (Democratic Party of Serbia) no long form Liberalno-demokratska partija (Liberal Democratic Party) Srpska napredna stranka (Serbian Progressive Party) Socijalistička partija Srbije (Socialist Party of Serbia) Srpska radikalna stranka (Serbian Radical Party)

Bulgaria Ataka Атака (Not abbreviated in the text. Translates as ‘The Attack’) BSP Българска социалистическа партия (Bulgarian Socialist Party) GERB Граждани за европейско развитие на България (Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria – generally referred to simply as GERB in the literature) MRF Движение за права и свободи (Movement for Rights and Freedoms) NDSV Национално движение Симеон Втори (National Movement Simeon II) UDF Съюзът на демократичните сили (Union of Democratic Forces) VMRO-BND Вътрешна македонска революционна организация – Българско национално движение (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization [Always shortened to VMRO] – Bulgarian National Movement)

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Вяра Морал Родолюбие Отговорност – Национален Идеал за Единство (Faith, Moral, Patriotism, Responsibility [Always shortened to VMRO] – National Ideal of Unity)

Other Abbreviations BNT BTV CEE EBRD EC EU FH ICTY IMF LGBT NATO NGO OSCE PM RTS SFRY

Българската национална телевизия (Bulgarian National Television) Би Ти Ви (BTV [no long-form]) Central and Eastern Europe European Bank for Reconstruction and Development European Commission European Union Freedom House International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia International Monetary Fund Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender North Atlantic Treaty Organization Non-governmental organization Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Prime Minister Radio-televizija Srbije (Radio-Television Serbia) Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Chapter 1

The Neglect of Citizens in the Measurement of Liberal Democracy: An Agenda for the Application of Public Sphere Theory to Central and Eastern Europe The institutions prescribed by the Western-led project of democratization – competitive elections, the rule of law, the separation of powers and so on – are themselves the realization of liberal principles such as individual liberty, equality, civic tolerance and representation. The apparatus of formal democracy measurement, represented in this chapter by Freedom House, tends to treat the implementation of these liberal institutional forms as equivalent to liberal democracy itself. In this way formalist approaches to democratization neglect the fact that, besides formal institutions, ‘democracy also needs to be reflected in the ideas that people hold and value’ (Blokker 2009: 1). As I will demonstrate in this book, existing theories of the democratic public sphere1 can be harnessed to evaluate such ‘cultural’ dimensions of democratization. This is achieved by focussing directly on the discursive practices2 – including the everyday discussions of citizens as well as the public discourse of political figures – through which persons are constituted as democratic citizens. This approach allows the scholar to distinguish between more liberal, pluralist public spheres characterized by open and vigorous contestation over matters of common concern and more illiberal and restricted public spheres in which challenges to conservative orthodoxies are rare and lacking in public support. Since citizens only attain the capacity to uphold liberal democratic institutions when they both understand and identify with the principles enshrined in them, I claim that the comparative analysis of public 1 The public sphere is explained at length further on in this chapter. At base, the public sphere may be understood as the aggregation of numerous sites in which citizens meet to discuss matters of public concern, allowing individuals to constitute themselves as democratic citizens through civic participation. 2 Practices are ‘repeated actions or deeds that are repeated over time; they are learned, repeated and subject to [change] through interaction’ (Wedeen 2008: 15). In the sense that practices embed agents within structures of meaning – discourses – then they may be called ‘discursive practices’. These same discourses – ‘liberal democracy’, ‘Serb nationalism’, and so on – are observable only through the practices of agents. From this, it follows that when practices change, so too do the discourses that structure them.

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sphere discourse could usefully complement existing formal modes of democracy measurement. The emphasis that public sphere theories place on the constitution of citizens through everyday practices of deliberation could be particularly useful to those hoping to understand recent political developments in several newer members of the European Union, where successful ‘democratic consolidation’ in the formal, institutional sense has not necessarily entailed the formation of liberal democratic publics. From Poland to Hungary to Romania and beyond, voting publics have shown themselves to be ready to follow political elites into the increasingly illiberal political landscape of the present (Tismaneanu 2009). In this vein, the Bulgarian portions of this study serve to illustrate the sociological shallowness of the successful elite-led push to adopt liberal democratic institutional norms towards the goals of EU and NATO membership. The frustrated Bulgarian public that emerges from the data of this project is one in which even young and highlyeducated people, ill-served by a chaotic media sphere that is hostage to deal-making between economic elites and their political allies, tend to fall back on illiberal ideals of ethnic nationalism and social conservatism that are antithetical to liberal democratic principles. Perhaps surprisingly in the light of the fact that Serbia has only recently achieved candidate status for EU membership and continues to lag behind Bulgaria in terms of Freedom House’s Democracy Scores,3 the picture emerging from the Serbian data of this project reveals a public sphere wherein nationalist, pro-authoritarian and socially conservative discourses are consistently opposed by liberal-progressive discourses promoting solidarity on the basis of cosmopolitanism, minority rights and a concern for equality under the law. From the perspective of the liberal democratic project, Serbia may be viewed as a society in which illiberal and authoritarian defects of the political establishment comparable to those in Bulgaria are, crucially, acknowledged and opposed by a significant minority of the citizenry who are committed to upholding values congruent with liberal democracy. The fact that this distinct liberal ‘counterpublic’4 is evident in Serbia means that, unlike in Bulgaria, an illiberal consensus cannot form around nationalist and socially conservative discourses. These references to the empirical findings of this book are, however, a preview of the chapters that follow: the imminent task is to clarify my theoretical approach 3 The ‘Democracy Scores’ system of measurement is discussed at length further on in this chapter, while the relative scores of different states in CEE are described in the early part of Chapter 2. 4 To facilitate understanding of this term, it is necessary to bear in mind that I have taken on board criticisms of Jürgen Habermas’s original conception of a singular, inclusive public sphere of discussion in order to accept that national contexts will generally consist of multiple publics and counterpublics. As I describe in greater detail further on, following Michael Warner’s definition, a counterpublic is a kind of public brought into being through an oppositional discourse containing the reflexive awareness of its own subordinate status in relation to a dominant public (Warner 2002).

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with reference to existing comparative scholarship on democratization in the region. The argument of this chapter must necessarily proceed in stages. First, I consider why formalist measures of democratization are so influential in the context of a democratization movement that consists of policy-makers as well as academics. In the interests of representing a prominent and rather comprehensive example of formal measurement, I describe the Freedom House system of ‘Democracy Scores’ in some detail. While I endorse the basic utility of the system, I claim that the methodological tendency to consider the non-repression of liberal ‘virtues’ (such as media independence and civil society) as analogous to their actual practice represents a significant flaw that compromises the reliability of the scores. Next, with reference to one highly-cited paper arising from a high-level mid-2000s conference on democratization (Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova 2007), I show that some scholars arrive at conclusions on the basis of Freedom House scores, while at the same time they recognize the importance of several aspects of democratic practice that are not considered by formal measures. In response to the authors’ call for the development of methodologies appropriate to the task of facilitating understanding of ‘cultural’ aspects of democratization, I argue that the existing literature on the public sphere provides a wide array of conceptual tools that may promote such understandings. In the remainder of the chapter, I describe the specific conceptual tools that I apply in this study. In addition, I argue that, contrary to the normative convictions of some fellow scholars of cultural dimensions of democracy, it is justifiable to evaluate democratizing states against a specifically liberal standard of democracy. In conclusion, I advocate the benefits that attention to the messy and contextual business of discursive practices can bring to the democratization field. Analyses of the discursive content of public sphere discussion can distinguish liberal discourses from illiberal, nationalist and authoritarian ones. Rather than studying institutions as ‘liberal democracy’, these analyses can reveal to what degree life in the societies regulated by these institutions may be experienced as liberal and democratic. Measuring the Measure: Freedom House as an Indicator of Liberal Democratic Practice Before considering Freedom House, it is worth recognizing that not all attempts to measure democracy involve a serious attempt to identify liberal societies. For example, scholars taking inspiration from Joseph Schumpeter’s procedural notion of democracy typically require nothing more than the holding of elections in which more than one party has a chance of winning. An exemplary ‘minimalist’ definition of democracy of this kind is that employed by Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi in Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World, 1950–1990 (Przeworski et al. 2000). Przeworski and his collaborators define democracy simply as ‘a regime in which those who govern are selected through contested elections’ (2000: 15).

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In their study then, the formal procedure of the (competitive) election is held to be synonymous with ‘democracy’, leading to a binary classification system that codes all states as either ‘democratic’ or ‘authoritarian’. With ‘democracy’ thus defined, the authors were able to test the relationship between ‘economic wellbeing’ (measured in GDP Per Capita) and ‘democracy’ statistically, identifying a positive relationship between democracy and prosperity. This approach to the classification of democracy has been praised by those hoping to perform statistical tests on data classified according to independently-verifiable criteria (Munck & Verkuilen 2002). Furthermore, even scholars who are generally sceptical of the preference for statistical modelling in the human sciences have been moved to applaud the apparent robustness of their findings (Shapiro 2002). However, their approach has earned a sustained theoretical critique from Lisa Wedeen on the grounds that the authors’ definition seeks to displace more historical and philosophical understandings of the term, completely ignoring questions of popular participation among many other concerns of democratic theorists (Wedeen 2008: 105–111). In spite of these concerns, such studies continue to be influential far beyond academia, providing easy-to-use databases ‘in a situation in which the labelling of a country as “democratic” or “authoritarian” can have far reaching and sometimes devastating consequences for international funding or the relations among states’ (Wedeen 2008: 106). Nevertheless, these databases focus attention on those states where the occurrence of competitive elections is debatable, thereby rendering most of Central and Eastern Europe as belonging to the part of the world in which the battle for democracy is ‘already won’. Accordingly, scholars of democratization working on CEE tend to pay attention to measurements of democracy that consider practices beyond the ballot box. Among formalist measures, Freedom House lies at the other end of the complexity spectrum, measuring ‘democracy’ through a wide range of criteria along a continuous scale that allows for marginal differentiation between states that are classed as democracies. Freedom House therefore stands as a suitable example of an attempt to represent liberal democratic progress in a comprehensive and multifaceted way. By including consideration of dimensions such as civil society and the media, it could be argued that Freedom House attempts to address some of the analytical concerns of public sphere theorists, albeit from a different angle. In this section, I have elected to rely on the ‘Democracy Scores’ system used in the regionally-specific Nations in Transit report that Freedom House publishes annually on the post-socialist states of CEE and Eurasia, rather than the Political and Civil Rights scores used in the annual Freedom in the World report.5 5 A fuller rationale for this decision will be supplied in Chapter 2. The main reason is that, unlike the Democracy Scores system described above, the Freedom in the World system does not provide gradings that are nuanced enough to distinguish between the countries of the study, as scores are rounded to whole numbers. For example, both Serbia and Bulgaria score 2 for both political and civil liberties as of the new 2013 report and are thereby simply classified as ‘Free’.

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In particular, I will focus my critical attention on the ways in which FH recognizes democracy and the process of evaluation that leads to the allocation of the quantified ‘democracy scores’. Quantified scores are important because they enable facile ‘at-a-glance’ comparison between states, increasing the accessibility of social scientific research to non-academic audiences. As with the data of Przeworski et al., these audiences include national and international policy-makers who almost certainly take such data into account when decisions are made domestically about the direction of political reforms and internationally about the allocation of international funding – and possibly even about admission into international political-economic blocs such as the European Union.6 FH probably remains the best known measure of democratization in the world today and, as I will discuss further on, the data the organization provides acts as a common reference point for many scholars and policy-makers in the context of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe. Finally, I will take for granted the idea that the Freedom House system, in that it prescribes liberal principles such as the separation of powers and freedom of speech through measurements of ‘judicial framework and independence’ and ‘media independence’, is a transparently liberal measure of democracy. I will therefore be judging the FH system on its own terms: to what extent does it succeed in credibly measuring liberal democracy? Like Przeworski et al., FH gives prominence to elections. However, as of 2012, Electoral Procedures (EP) is just one of seven categories, the scores of which are averaged out to provide an overall ‘Democracy Score’ (DS). The other six are Civil Society (CS), Independent Media (IM), National Democratic Governance (NDG), Local Democratic Governance (LDG), Judicial Framework and Independence (JFI) and Corruption (CO). In each of these categories, states are graded between 1 (‘lowest level of democratic progress’) and 7 (‘highest level of democratic progress’) according to a methodology that relies on expert-based testimony rather than independently-verifiable criteria. Specifically, the grades arise from an interaction of the evaluations of the authors of country reports (often academics or political journalists from the states in question), the input of groups of ‘regional expert reviewers’ and ‘Freedom House’s academic advisory board’, so that the organization itself ultimately exercises ‘editorial authority’. It is expressed in the methodology section of a recent FH report as follows: 1. Authors of individual country reports suggest preliminary ratings in all seven categories covered by the study, ensuring that substantial evidence is provided where a score change is proposed.

6 Further to my claim that FH is more widely used than minimalist measurements in the CEE context, it is also cited by many scholars and analysts (Tilly 2007, O’Donnell 2008) who recognize sociological aspects of democracy that are simply neglected by minimalist approaches.

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2. Each draft report is then sent to several regional expert reviewers, who provide comment on both the score change and the quality of its justification in the report’s text. 3. Over the course of a two-day meeting, Freedom House’s academic advisory board discusses and evaluates all ratings. 4. Report authors are given the opportunity to dispute any revised rating that differs from the original by more than 0.50 points. (Freedom House 2012b: 24) The unavoidably subjective dimension of ‘expert’ opinion leads some statisticallyoriented researchers to express their concerns about a lack of data transparency (Munck & Verkuilen 2002), but is a less of a concern for those scholars of democracy who recognize that categories such as ‘civil society’ or ‘media independence’ cannot merely be enumerated according to any objective or universal criteria. From this second perspective, the subjective and corporate character of the grading procedure may arguably be understood positively, as introducing the elements of discretion and moderation necessary to interpret complex and sometimes contradictory bodies of data. Ultimately, the grading procedure of FH is a case of ‘describing with numbers’ to promote easy access and facile comparability between data that is fundamentally qualitative and descriptive. At least in theory, the element of ‘expert’ discretion raises the possibility that the authors may take dimensions of practice and meaning into account. Certainly, the inclusion of categories such as ‘Independent Media’ and ‘Civil Society’ reveals an underlying concern with the spread of ideas and the participation of citizens in political life beyond the ballot box. However, the ethos behind the evaluations is one that prioritizes institutional form and legal accommodation over intelligibility of meaning and actual practice. This ethos may be accessed by reading the qualitative justifications for the scores, and it is illustrated effectively with reference to the summarizing paragraph on Civil Society in Bulgaria in 2012: Civil Society. The civic sector in Bulgaria is well regulated, generally free to develop its activities, and well established as a partner both to the state and to the media. However, the ability of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to raise funds domestically remains limited, impeding the emergence of rich feedback links between NGOs and local communities. The absence of specific regulations for lobbying activities also creates a space for dubious practices and hinders the ability of civil actors to effectively express and pursue the interests of various segments of society. Therefore, Bulgaria’s civil society rating remains unchanged at 2.50. (Freedom House 2012c)

The authors7 applaud the regulation of the ‘civic sector’, which is ‘generally free to develop its activities’, although they concede that nongovernmental organizations 7 The credited authors of this report are Georgy Ganev, Daniel Smilov and Antoinette Primatarova, all of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a prestigious think-tank in Sofia.

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have funding problems in practice. In the following sentence, the reader is told that a lack of funding means that the development of ‘feedback loops between NGOs and local communities’ is impeded. Presumably, it can be deduced from this that civic participation in public life is not very widespread beyond the employees of NGOs. In fact, in most of the qualitative justifications for Civil Society scores the key opinion expressed in the topic sentence tends to be congruent with the authors’ judgement on the NGO sector, with the degree of public participation being a secondary consideration. As an example of this, consider the identical formulations in the Bulgaria reports for 2007 and 2008 wherein civil society is claimed to be ‘vibrant’ in spite of the subsequent admissions that NGOs do not enjoy ‘public support’ (Freedom House 2007, Freedom House 2008). In fairness to Freedom House, it is necessary to state that the longer description of civil society presented later in the 2012 report does provide the reader with some sense of the kinds of identities and interests that are represented in Bulgarian civil society. A nongovernmental web portal for NGOs, launched in 2010, contained 5,302 entries in 2011, compared to 5,094 entries in 2010. Among these web-registered NGOs, 267 defined their basic activity as related to environmental issues, 191 as related to human rights, 137 as related to ethnic issues, and 77 as related to women and gender issues. The two registers indicate that Bulgarian NGOs cover various social spheres (health, education, social services), rights issues (human, minority, gender, religious), public policy and advocacy (with an increasing interest for environmental issues), business and development, and sports. Most of the organizations […] in the nongovernmental online register, appear to be active. (Freedom House 2012c)

From this description of the nongovernmental sector, the reader is likely to understand that the Bulgarian civil society sector supports a very wide range of interests, many of which identify themselves in terms of a liberal discourse of social advocacy and human rights. Furthermore, the reader is assured that the majority of these hundreds of organizations, defined as environmental, human rights, ‘ethnic’ and gender-based ‘appear to be active’. However, it is impossible to infer from this whether or not such groups have actually contributed to a spread of liberal ideas because we are not even informed of the character of any specific campaigns8 by these NGOs, let alone whether or not they resonate with broader However, it should be noted that certain features of the layout are standardized (‘Therefore [the score] remains unchanged at …’), and the allotted grade, according to the methodology quoted in the previous paragraph, is officially that of FH rather than the authors. 8 For example, even assuming that all of these groups are based on sincere grounds of public-spirited advocacy, a ‘gender’ group could easily promote conservative ideals antithetical to liberal ideals such as human equality just as any of them could conceivably articulate their claims in nationally or ethnically exclusivist terms.

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sections of the public. In the absence of any more meaningful data, it is reasonable to conclude that the sole purpose of noting the existence of these groups is to support the central claim that the civic sector ‘is free to carry out their activities’. According to this evidence, the FH methodology would appear to conceptualize the formal, legal freedom to fulfil some liberal ‘virtue’ as analytically equivalent to the actual (anthropological) practice of it. From an empirical perspective however, it is quite obvious that the notional ‘freedom’ to participate in civil society and the realization of the practice implied by it are not the same. With respect to the cited example of ‘civil society’ in Bulgaria, any scholar working from the assumption that the content of political discourse counts would surely wish to cross-examine the authors further before accepting their conclusions. Do subordinate groups such as the ‘ethnic’ or genderbased groups dare to challenge national majoritarian or patriarchal norms? Does what Habermas called the ‘force of the better argument’ take precedence over other kinds of authority? (Habermas 1989). Are ‘civil society’ actors actually ‘political’ in the Mouffian sense that they dare to challenge political and economic hegemonies? (Laclau & Mouffe 1998, Howarth & Glynos 2007). Informed by such concerns, I wonder whether knowing about the legal possibilities provided by ‘civil society’ legislation helps the reader to know whether people not working for NGOs actually participate to any degree in non-institutional politics at all. Furthermore, similar questions can be asked in relation to the other dimensions of ‘democracy’ measured by the index. Concerning media independence, for example, does a country score better or worse when more of its journalists undertake risky investigative assignments that result in efforts by lawmakers to constrain media activity and/or threats to their personal safety? Concerning ‘electoral procedures’, can a state achieve top marks even when its citizens are presented with what the Bulgarian sociologist Ivan Krastev has referred to as ‘elections without choices’ in the sense that meaningful policy differences are not apparent? (Krastev 2002). Freedom House supplies no clear answers to these questions. In spite of what I perceive to be the laudable aim of recognizing that democracy is enacted in numerous sites across society, the reliability of the data is surely hampered by the methodological bias towards a negative conception of liberal democratic practice – ‘the prevention of unfreedom’ (Blokker 2009: 4) – that fails to adequately distinguish between possibility and realization. This surely compromises the reliability of Freedom House’s claim to measure liberal democratic practice. In this sense, it could certainly be argued that databases like Freedom House’s would be more credible if they dropped pretensions to measure democracy as a whole in favour of claiming to cover only specific aspects of it.9 However, seen from the perspective of the democratization movement as necessarily composed of both scholars and policy-makers, the problem does not necessarily lead to catastrophes of misunderstanding. In the next section, I hope to show that key actors within 9 Wedeen has made a similar point with reference to Przeworski’s approach (Wedeen 2008: 111).

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policy-making circles are well aware of the limitations of such databases, using them in a similar, sceptical way to that I would confess to doing myself. While the Freedom House methodology, for example, seems quite blind to the question of whether citizens actually debate politics at all, it does not follow that all those who consult this data fail to grasp the import of such questions. Formalism Meets the Liberal Citizen: The Hybrid Formal-Cultural Approach of Advocates of Democratization in Central and Eastern Europe The ‘rapid democratization’ of most of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe until the mid-2000s was largely measured, assessed, recognized and applauded on the basis of formalist understandings of democratization. This is true both of the conditionality imposed by the EU as it judged the performance of candidate states against the highly-formalist criteria of the acquis communautaire and, as I will describe below, of the scholarship that applauded these achievements. However, for all that Western policy-makers and many scholars of democratization seem wedded to the formal measurement of democracy, this evidently does not preclude the notion that many of these same actors also focus on socio-cultural aspects of democracy that are neglected by these same databases. Since at least the mid1990s, for example, Western-backed projects in CEE have been implemented that treat democracy as existing far beyond the formal institutions and procedures of the state (Greenberg 2010). In addition, policy-oriented scholarship studying the intersection of democratization and economic transition with citizens’ everyday lives has been repeatedly commissioned and funded by influential Western sponsors of democratization (Brown 2006). In this section, I will focus on one particular article in order to show how a declared adherence to formalist measurement has long co-existed with broader, more philosophically-aware understandings of democracy as embodied in context-sensitive practices that are poorly addressed in the existing formal apparatus of democracy measurement. The paper I have chosen to focus on is ‘Democracy in the Post-Communist World: An Unending Quest?’, co-authored by the senior political scientists Grzegorz Ekiert, Jan Kubik and Milada Anna Vachudova (2007). It is written on behalf of the influential democracy promotion think tank Club de Madrid, which is comprised of many former heads of state, ‘leading academic experts’ and other dignitaries who met in Prague in late 2005 at a time when many states of the region had recently acceded, or were just about to accede to full membership of the European Union. It may thus be read as a corporate policy discussion paper of a significant democratization establishment as well as the authors’ attempt to guide that movement. The paper starts with a promise to ‘diagnose and explain the state of democracy in post-communist Europe’. The diagnosis is swiftly delivered as the authors claim on the basis of Freedom House scores that the post-communist states exhibited both ‘the best and the worst record of transition from authoritarianism

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to democracy’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 9). In the first group, the citizens of Baltic and Central European states which entered the EU in 2004 evidently enjoyed a ‘quality of democratic institutions similar to that enjoyed by citizens of established Western democracies’ and were ‘closely followed’ by prospective future members Bulgaria, Romania and Croatia. The second group, comprised of the states of the former Soviet Union (excluding the Baltics) and ‘other Balkan countries’ were either ‘semi-democratic’ or ‘consolidated autocracies’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 8). This disparity between the evidently very successful democratic transitions of countries in the first group and the lack of success seen in the second was explained by the authors as being due to the fact that only the first group benefited from the ‘real prospect of EU membership as a reward for comprehensive political and economic reforms’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 12). This strong correlation between successful candidacies for EU accession and an upward trajectory on the Freedom House measures of democracy (and to a lesser extent economic freedom as measured by the EBRD and Heritage Foundation databases) informs the main conclusion of the article, specifically the affirmation of the ‘European Union’s democratization power’: The European Union may be presiding over the most successful democracy promotion program ever implemented by an international actor. The track record so far is excellent: every democratizing state that has become a credible future member of the European Union (except perhaps Serbia) has made steady progress toward liberal democracy. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 22)

It is a triumphal message that would likely have echoed the sentiments of many among the pro-Western policy-makers and scholars of the democratization field at that time. Considering the subsequent reversal of many of these democratic gains, as evidenced both according to the formalism of Freedom House and according to more qualitative accounts of politics in the region (Krastev 2007, Tismaneanu 2009, Bánkuti, Halmai & Scheppele 2012, Ganev 2013), it would be possible to criticize the authors’ conclusion as being symptomatic of some wider tendency to give far too much credence to formalist measures of democratization. However, viewed as a whole, their paper is far from triumphalist and communicates an uneasy awareness that the institutional progress that had seen the Freedom House scores of most CEE countries shoot up and propel them into the EU was unmatched by several dimensions of democratic practice that are not addressed by such measurements. In fact, the remainder of the article is largely given over to the authors’ descriptions of alleged problems in the politics of the region, most of which call for an analytical attention to discursive content rather than institutional frameworks. For example, in calling for ‘ideological and philosophical clarity’ on the part of political actors, the authors raise an issue that speaks directly to the concerns of a number of theorists of political discourse who have argued that the articulation of distinct political platforms is a precondition for citizens to

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identify with political competition (Laclau & Mouffe 1985, Torfing 1998, Mouffe 1999). In a similar vein, the importance of ‘leaders’ commitment to democracy’ (pp. 16–17) is stressed, with references to the benefits of having ‘well-known and committed democratic leaders like Lech Wałęsa and Václav Havel’. Even where the authors discuss issues that can be measured formally, such as economic reform, their conclusions are centred on citizens’ perceptions rather than political-legal frameworks: ‘Citizens need to believe that reforms are legitimate … [and] fair …’ (p. 21). Further policy recommendations call for measures to address ‘the feelings of isolation’ felt by those in the Western Balkans subject to travel restrictions, something which allegedly ‘hands votes to nationalist and anti-democratic parties’ (p. 28) and to address the problem of students in those same countries who grow up ‘suffocated by ethnocentric and antidemocratic propaganda’ (p. 27). What links all of these recommendations is that they are based on reasoning other than that used by Freedom House and other formalistic measurements that the authors used to laud the success of democratization in CEE. Most of all, the authors seem to be concerned by the idea that the institutional progress they laud at the beginning of the article is unmatched by any progress in the imaginative cultural project of creating democratic citizens. The most emphatic statement of this normative agenda is quoted below: Democracy needs informed citizens and a culture of moderation. Thus, a “proper democratic” culture needs to be developed. Some cultural syndromes, such as various forms of religious and nationalistic fundamentalism, are antidemocratic, but culture is not immutable; it can be changed – albeit slowly – with considerable resources and patience. No effort should be spared to instil prodemocratic culture through education and through building free and responsible media. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 17)

This vision is preceded in the text by a friendly mention of ‘liberalism’ and holds out little room for compromise with non-liberal conceptions of democratic culture. In short, Ekiert et al. argue for an extensive project of identity-construction analogous to that undertaken by ‘national awakeners’ across much of the same territory in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, much as Eric Hobsbawm recognized that the need for ‘awakeners’ demonstrates that national identity was largely absent before these intellectuals promoted their ideas (Hobsbawm 1983), Ekiert et al. perceive ‘liberal democracy’ in the same category: a set of ideas that will be observable in the thoughts and practices of citizens only to the extent that these ideas are actively promoted from above and resonate with the people below. Scholars who believe that democracy ought to be promoted rather less prescriptively sometimes critique such interventionist policy approaches that aim to ‘discipline’ people in democratizing states in order to produce ‘good’, democratic, liberal citizens. Bearing in mind the sheer ideological zeal evident above, it is unsurprising that the article in question has received such treatment (Greenberg 2010). In recognition of this critique, I defend the normative bias in

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favour of liberal conceptions of democracy further on. At this stage, however, my intention is to highlight the theoretical gulf between Freedom House’s negative conception of liberal democracy as the ‘prevention of unfreedom’ and the authors’ assumption that a liberal democratic culture needs to be actively promoted, through education, the media, political ‘reformers’ and an active opposition to ‘nationalistic fundamentalism’. Indeed, when liberalism is seen in the context of the history of political ideas, it is surprising that so many scholars evidently believe that liberal democracy can be promoted in some kind of ‘neutral’ manner that remains agnostic with respect to the question of whether political leaders campaign on the basis of ‘tolerance and equality’ or ‘nation and fatherland’ so long as they commit to abide by the results of elections. It is this tension between the political-legal conception of liberal democracy as a set of rules on the one hand and as a set of ‘cultural’ practices on the other that leads to the kind of doublespeak that permeates the article wherein democracy in CEE is simultaneously presented as mission accomplished on the basis of formalistic measurement and as a nascent cultural project that has made little progress in the direction of creating liberal democratic citizens. Unsurprisingly, Ekiert et al. call for more research into these ‘cultural’ dimensions of democracy (p. 13). Recognizing Liberal Democracy in the Practices of Citizens In the remainder of this chapter, I will describe an alternative set of criteria for the identification of liberal democratic practices that departs from the formalism of Freedom House. I derive an inexhaustive set of criteria for recognizing ‘cultural’ aspects of democracy through reference to normative and empirical research into what is generally referred to as ‘the public sphere’ – an aggregation of sites in society through which individuals meet and discuss public matters, constituting themselves as democratic citizens in the process (Habermas 1989). In political theory, the emphasis on ‘civic participation’ that public sphere theories imply is often promoted as an alternative to liberalism (Sandel 1982, Taylor 1985). However, this line of critique assumes a rights-based negative conception of liberalism of the kind promoted by John Rawls (Rawls 1971); indeed, the target of these critiques is a liberalism not too far removed from the conceptual approach of Freedom House. When liberalism is instead understood as a form of identity that requires the kind of active promotion that Ekiert et al. advocate, it becomes possible to argue that there is no contradiction between liberalism and civic participation. On the contrary, I claim that it is through participation in public spheres of discussion where liberal ideas are present that liberal democratic citizens are made. Chantal Mouffe provides an eloquent definition of liberal democratic citizenship that may suffice for the purpose of guiding my endeavour: What we share and what makes us fellow citizens in a liberal democratic regime is not a substantive idea of the good but a set of political principles specific to

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such a tradition: the principles of freedom and equality for all. Those principles constitute what we can call, following Wittgenstein, a “grammar” of political conduct. To be a citizen is to recognize the authority of those principles and the rules in which they are embodied – to have them informing our political judgment and our actions. To be associated in terms of the recognition of the liberal democratic principles, this is the meaning of citizenship that I want to put forward. It implies seeing citizenship not as a legal status but as a form of identification, a type of political identity: something to be constructed, not empirically given. Since there will always be competing interpretations of the democratic principles of equality and liberty there will therefore be competing interpretations of democratic citizenship. (Mouffe 1992: 75)

In this view, liberal democracy itself becomes recognizable through reference to the embodiment of liberal principles, specifically freedom and equality, in the practices of agents. I will elaborate upon this definition of liberalism further on, but this will suffice for now. This definition of liberal democratic citizenship as a form of identification rather than a legal status provides a point of reference that is at once flexible enough and yet intelligible enough to facilitate reasoned consideration of whether what Ekiert et al. describe as ‘a proper democratic culture’ is evident through practices of discussion in given contexts. In this project, I seek at once to ascertain the existence of liberal democratic discourse in the public rhetoric of political actors at the elite level and in the everyday practices of citizens. My assumptions with respect to the dynamic relationship between elite discourse and everyday practice are informed by nationalism theory, specifically by Eric Hobsbawm’s oft-cited statement on the matter: Nationalism and nationhood are dual phenomena that while constructed essentially from above, cannot be understood unless also analysed from below, that is in terms of the assumptions, hopes, needs, longings and interests of ordinary people, which are not necessarily national and still less nationalist. (Hobsbawm 1993: 10)

If the terms ‘nationalism’ and ‘nationhood’ are substituted by ‘liberal democracy’ and ‘liberal democratic citizenship’ then the logic of Hobsbawm’s statement can be used to justify examination of both the elite study of liberal democratic discourse and the resonance of those discourses in the everyday practices of citizens. This recognition of the mutual constitution of ‘above’ and ‘below’ dimensions of discursively constructed identities has informed the theoretical convictions of many nationalism scholars (Fox 2004, Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox & Grancea 2006) and even of some scholars of democracy who opt to forgo analyses of everyday practices. For example, Laclau and Mouffe analytically privilege the ‘political moment’ rather than direct observation of everyday discussion but

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nevertheless recognize that ‘political identities are constituted and re-constituted through public sphere debate’ (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: xvii). In the following theoretical discussion, I attempt to outline evaluative criteria designed to recognize liberal democratic practice with reference to discourse accessed through everyday discussion alongside analyses of elite political rhetoric in recognition of the fact that neither dimension of ‘liberal democracy’ can properly be understood in isolation from the other. This dual analytical focus may similarly be justified with reference to nationalism theory. Outlining what they call the ‘everyday nationhood’ approach, Jon Fox and Cynthia Miller Idriss argue against deducing the ‘quotidian meaning and salience of nationalism from its political and cultural privileging’ on the basis that while ordinary people may ‘engage and enact’ nationalist discourses, they may also ‘ignore and deflect’ them (Fox & Miller Idriss 2008). Their framework does not aspire to the normative and evaluative purpose that I embrace in this project, but their recognition that the cultural privileging of political discourses of nationalism does not directly correspond to the frequency with which it informs everyday practice is an idea that I can adapt to the study of liberal democracy. The logic of not taking political discourse as evidence of popular resonance could be argued to be particularly apt in the context of post-socialist states where many political leaders, including Slobodan Milošević, have discursively advocated ideas such as tolerance and democracy (Gagnon 2004) while being widely perceived to inspire support on the basis of parallel appeals (clientelism, nationalism, and so on). Thus while I concede that liberal democratic citizens are unlikely to manifest themselves in the everyday public sphere unless politicians or civil actors have advocated liberal principles publicly (and I will provide analyses of elite political discourse to ascertain this point), evidence of elite articulation does not guarantee popular resonance. It is for this reason that I subtly favour evidence gathered ‘from below’ by recognizing liberal democratic citizens primarily through reference to everyday public sphere discussion rather than seeking to infer their existence from political discourse. To these ends, I will make ample use of existing empirical and theoretical work on the public sphere in order to assemble a suitable theoretical toolkit. What follows may be taken as an inexhaustive set of theoretical principles that may be used to distinguish more democratic practices from less democratic ones. My aim is to provide convincing comparative analyses guided by a dynamic set of principles derived from the literature rather than to benchmark societies against rigid criteria. Public Spheres and the Making of Democratic Citizens The concept of the public sphere is generally associated with the work of Jürgen Habermas, who popularized the term (1989 [1962]). In rough terms, Habermas conceptualized the public sphere as the aggregation of numerous sites in which citizens gather to discuss the public matters of the day. The existence of a vibrant public sphere of discussion is vital for democracy for two key reasons. Firstly, access

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to public sphere debate is a condition of possibility for feelings of community, for the transformation of atomized subjects into democratic publics of citizens who understand and care about more than just their private lives. Secondly, it is only through participation in public sphere discussion that civic power is generated, which is to say that citizens articulate their identities and interests together in ways that can lead to collective action. The sites that constitute the public sphere (sometimes referred to as ‘institutions’ which contains an unhelpful implication of formality) are neither ‘private’ social contexts such as the family home nor hierarchical institutional settings such as workplaces (or most political parties) but a ‘third setting’ for conversation with three main characteristics: ‘participation is optional, potentially open to all and potentially egalitarian’10 (Eliasoph 1998: 11). I will begin by discussing where the public sphere may be encountered and will then consider in greater detail how it may be recognized by reference to the two key democratic functions mentioned above. Habermas idealized the communities of debate that emerged from the coffee houses of eighteenth-century England, while Wedeen has spoken up for the democratic qualities of the qat11 chews in Yemen wherein inclusive male audiences articulate their political concerns in common (Wedeen 2008). Some of the institutional activities understood by the phrase ‘civil society’ may qualify as public sphere discussion to the extent that political debate is actually encouraged within NGOs or leisure groups, while other civil society groups are no more conducive to open debate than workplaces. For example, Eliasoph gives the example of American and British government initiatives to replace public services lost in cutbacks with volunteers who were expected to refrain from any broader political discussion of the kind that might possibly result in activism or ‘civic power’ (Eliasoph 1998: 13). In the East European context, it might be added that socialist-era states organized numerous contexts for citizens to indulge in collective pursuits – pioneer clubs, student brigades, veterans’ organizations and so on – that were not generally conducive to the generation of civic power; in fact, some social scientists argue that socialist states were, in view of their conspicuous failure to organize economies or ensure their own continuance, surprisingly successful at forestalling any possibility for civic power (Dvornik 2010).12 On the 10 These conditions originate in the work of Habermas, who stipulates that inequalities among the social status of participants must be subordinated to a temporary equality (‘ideal speech condition’) based on a shared adherence to the principle of ‘rationalcritical discourse’ which dictates that the force of the better argument ought to prevail. 11 Qat is a leafy stimulant chewed on social occasions in parts of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. 12 It is perhaps curious that this idea has emerged from a study centring on the former Yugoslavia (Srdjan Dvornik’s 2010 Actors Without Society thesis) wherein an unusually diverse array of civic organizations, some of them political, were allowed to exist (see Chapter 3 of this book). However, it is important to remember that even Yugoslavia was an authoritarian state that tolerated dissent only up to a point (Cohen 2001, Jou 2009). This idea may be taken to hold more generally across the former Eastern Bloc countries, in

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other hand, there are a potentially unlimited number of sites that are not usually subsumed under the rubric of ‘civil society’ in the democratization literature where the public sphere may be encountered: in bars, coffee shops, sports clubs, street corners, residents’ associations and so on. Ultimately, what designate such sites as belonging to the public sphere are the functions that they perform in making democratic citizenship possible, a point upon which I will presently expand. No society can be considered properly democratic unless it consists of democratic citizens who are produced through the discursive act of articulating worlds in common. Furthermore, everyday talk can only really be understood as the deliberation of citizens when face-to-face conversation is directed at a wider circle of concern than the individual lives of participants and their acquaintances. It is through the reflexive awareness of participants that other, similar conversations are taking place across the shared territory of concern that citizens come to understand themselves as belonging to a public of deliberative strangers (Habermas 1989 [1962]). This reflexive awareness may be exhibited quite simply, as may be illustrated with reference to a hypothetical example. When two women in a school playground talk about a drop in family allowance entitlements with respect to the consequences for their children, they exhibit no explicit awareness of their interconnectedness within society.13 However, if they talk in any way that acknowledges that welfare reforms affect a far broader community than themselves and their families, and especially if they express opinions about whether the changes are desirable or not for society (regardless of whether they refer to or take a stance on the actions of political decision-makers), then they exhibit a reflexive awareness that they are bound with others similarly affected over a distinct territory. As Wedeen has argued, even the act of discussing reports in national newspapers that refer to events remote from the local context of the speaker identifies such activity as contributing to the constitution of a public that is recognizably national in scope (Wedeen 2008). Thus, being a ‘citizen’ and belonging to a ‘public’ are each defined by modes of thought and practice that link subjects through shared areas of human concern that are acknowledged to affect the lives of many. Once this condition of shared community is recognized, it becomes possible to imagine the role of public sphere discussion in constructing civic power. This is the result of the articulation of identities and interests through discursive speech, what Arendt calls ‘priming for action’ (Arendt 1958). At an everyday level, civic power can be observed any time that speakers discuss matters with reference to relation to which scholars of democracy do not consider it necessary to qualify references to ‘inherited atomization’ (Tismaneanu 2009: 360). 13 Eliasoph calls this tendency, prevalent among women in her sample, to express any claim in terms of the interests of their children as ‘Mandatory Public Momism’. More broadly, she contends that Americans at the time she wrote learned to suppress explicitly ‘political’, public-spirited modes of conversation in public settings, effectively confining the public sphere to more intimate, ‘backstage’ settings (Eliasoph 1998).

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normative principles, or imply identities and interests in relation to matters of public concern. If one speaker in a group argues that it is important that public officials are appointed on the basis of having appropriate experience and qualifications and the others in the group endorse his opinion, then it becomes, for example, rather more likely that these people will be dissuaded from voting for a party that is observed to appoint well-connected insiders over more competent outsiders. If these kinds of views are widely and regularly expressed within the public sphere of discussion, it may even happen that more direct forms of civic power may be observed in the form of, say, street protests or online petitions. More often however, in a society that really merits the appellation ‘democratic’, the aggregation of such views at the everyday level will attain some degree of congruence with the acts of political decision-makers (who in turn seek to influence public discussion through their interventions). By this account, public sphere debate ‘performs the function of “legitimating state authority” … transforming the voluntas of executive power into the ratio of law buttressed by public opinion’14 (Habermas 1989 cited in Wedeen 2008: 119). In this way, the civic power of the public sphere may be observed in an institutional politics that is responsive to the discursive practices of citizens, just as it may be observed in extra-institutional acts through which citizens seek to affect political change. While I am addressing these themes, it is also appropriate to note that the public sphere is very commonly misrecognized in scholarship and its discursive content misappropriated. Public sphere discourse may not be identified by reference to public opinion polling, which is an attempt to infer a public without reference to the discourse through which it is called into being. Furthermore, the fact that ‘public opinion’ polling results are dependent upon the subjective question choices of the researcher is another reason why this kind of data cannot pass for a reliable indicator of the dynamic and context-dependent contours of public discussion (Bourdieu cited in Warner 2002: 54). Much the same arguments can be applied to studies into ‘values’, such as the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, which are based on questionnaires devised remotely from the discursive contexts they appropriate. This is not to argue that survey results are not indicative of anything; so long as they are interpreted in terms of the context in which they are found, they may reveal trends in social attitudes that escape the gaze of other kinds of research. However, they cannot stand in for analysis of public discussion which, by definition, is self-organized and discursive. It is also worth adding at this stage that voting patterns similarly cannot be used to infer the quality and content of public discussion. Congruent with Habermas’s own reservations15 and 14 These are legal (and obviously Latin) terms, with voluntas referring to the will or power behind decision-making and ratio connoting the reasoning behind it. 15 Habermas endorses ‘deliberative democracy’, a modern form of participatory democracy, on the basis that polling ‘[produces] something that passes for public opinion when in fact it results from a form that has none of the openendedness, reflexive framing, or accessibility of public discourse’ (paraphrased in Warner 2002: 54).

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contemporary thinking in anthropology, election results do not provide a reliable source of data concerning identities because election results show only what happens when publics are compelled to choose from a limited field of options at a specific time (Borneman 2007). Even if one considers that the actor can sometimes reveal herself through her vote, it is nonetheless clear that votes may also be cast without any degree of identification with political platforms or even personalities. Even when clientelistic dynamics are not in play, political power may just as well change hands as a result of shifts in the allegiance of economic elites or media barons in a way that may have little to do with the discursive triumph of a new idea in the public sphere. As with all of the research problems discussed in this section, public sphere discussion can most reliably be accessed by reference to that same public sphere of discussion, which entails a patient empirical approach employing some combination of ethnographic and discourse analytic methods. Publics and Counterpublics As Chantal Mouffe argues, understandings of democratic citizenship rooted in civic participation on the one hand and discursive content on the other are not mutually exclusive (Mouffe 1992). While the concept of the public sphere is invoked principally by scholars stressing civic participation (Habermas 1989, Eliasoph 1998, Wedeen 2008), the impetus towards a deeper consideration of discursive content in the public sphere literature arises from critiques of Habermas’s conceptualization of the public sphere in the singular as a discursive arena in which all members of society would discuss public (rather than purely private) matters (Habermas 1989). In the most famous of these critiques, the feminist scholar Nancy Fraser argued that some groups would inevitably be excluded from the ‘universal’ public sphere. This would occur both because inequalities in society would inevitably permit more access to the public sphere to some than to others and also because those controlling the discourse as a result of these same power asymmetries would tend to disqualify as ‘private’ the consideration of many dimensions of experience related to the wellbeing of ‘members of subordinated groups – women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians’ (Fraser 1992: 122). In response to these actual inequalities of access, Fraser argues that discrete ‘subaltern counterpublics’ have repeatedly constituted ‘parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser 1992: 123). The means by which such dominant publics and subaltern counterpublics could be identified is through reference to discourse, a point that I will presently elaborate upon. Michael Warner further develops the concepts of public and counterpublic in ways that provide very usable definitions. Concerning the former, he states:

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A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. […] it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed. (Warner 2002: 50)

Thus, it is only through reference to discourse that the existence of publics may be postulated; hence being a member of a public is not analogous to being a member of a community or group on the basis of ascriptive criteria. So, while discourse may be observed either through reference to cultural artifacts (‘shows’, ‘books’) or ethnographically (‘opinions produced’), it may not be observed by reference to ‘objectivist’ criteria such as census categories or, as I argued in the previous section, to voting patterns. With respect to counterpublics, Warner generally agrees with Fraser’s idea that any democratic society should consist of discrete publics rather than a universal one, but added the element of reflexive awareness of subordinate status to his definition of the counterpublic: A counterpublic maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status. The cultural horizon against which it marks itself is not just a general public or a wider public, but a dominant one. (Warner 2002: 84)

This feature is not common to dominant discourses wherein speakers ‘can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognizing the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy’ (Warner 2002: 88). As an example of this tendency, we may consider the tendency of many straight people to refer to themselves as ‘normal’ in relation to gays, or the tendency of many nationalists in different contexts to speak as ‘the people’. In such cases, the specificity of one’s own identity or cause is hidden or denied in a manner that it is not available to those whose concerns are excluded from ‘mainstream’ discourse. Warner provides the example of a proto-feminist counterpublic in eighteenth-century London which existed in relation to a discourse of subverting societal (patriarchal) expectations of female decorum (Warner 2002: 78–81). Of course, the construction of this discourse in opposition to the general or mainstream public negates the possibility of this (counter) public’s members mistaking their own practices for ‘normalcy’. Thus it is possible to distinguish dominant publics from counterpublics on account of the reflexive awareness of subordinate or oppositional status on the part of the latter. Finally, Warner cautions that it is only a small sub-set of discourses that ‘acquire agency in relation to the state’, which is achieved when discourses ‘adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse’ (Warner 2002: 89). In this sense, it is probable that the proto-feminist discourse Warner describes was preoccupied with social life in a way that had little bearing on the political lives of its members (many of whom called themselves ‘She-Romps’). However, though I am in agreement with the idea that not all discourses imply an aspiration to political agency, I take issue with Warner’s Habermasian assumption that rational-

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critical discourse is the default register of political discourse. Rather, I would adapt this statement to make clear that discourses acquire political salience when they adapt themselves to the performatives of mainstream/dominant (rather than necessarily rational-critical) political discourse. As Peter Stamatov has noted, the assumption that ‘rational-critical’ discourse represents a shared standard across the varied contours of historically-constituted political world is a shaky one: … human reasoning and argumentation – the ideals on which our modern idea of public sphere is based … are never perfectly rational and universalist. (Stamatov 2000: 565)

If this logic is followed through to its logical extreme, then it is possible to imagine that ‘human reasoning and argumentation’ can be grounded in almost any form of discourse. For example, in states where the public sphere has arisen in the general absence of liberal ideas –as in deeply religious societies for example – then appeals to ‘rational-critical discourse’ could mark a daring act of subversion or even blasphemy. Like Fraser and Warner, I interpret the existence of a plurality of discursivelyconstructed publics as a necessary condition of pluralistic and inclusive debate. Chantal Mouffe has developed this argument further, claiming that it is only possible to identify oneself in terms of political competition when ‘meaningfully differentiated positions’ are represented (Mouffe 1999, 2000). This rejection of Habermas’s avowed aim of consensus forms part of the theoretical basis for my analysis of elite political discourse in Chapter 3. However, in spite of this, I nevertheless take the liberty of referring to the ‘Bulgarian public sphere’ or the ‘Serbian public sphere’ in a manner that should be understood to refer to purely aggregative categories. The use of these phrases serves the analytical purpose of allowing for comparisons of the relative degrees of civic participation in public discussion, and of discursive/philosophical differentiation, between national contexts. Of course, it emphatically does not communicate any claim of discursive uniformity within these contexts. On the other hand, congruent with the discursive theories above, references to ‘publics’ and ‘counterpublics’ should be understood as referring to self-organized ‘spaces of discourse’ that are identifiable with reference to shared discourse and are usually explicitly identified with that discourse in the text (for example ‘the liberal counterpublic’). It is through reference to discourses and the publics they imply that the national ‘public spheres’ may be considered as ‘meaningfully plural’ to a greater or lesser degree. In addition, it is also with reference to discourse that it is possible to identify performances of recognizably liberal forms of citizenship as I will now describe.

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Liberal Democratic Citizenship In this section, I follow Ekiert et al. and Chantal Mouffe (1992) in arguing that liberal democracy requires the creation of liberal citizens in much the same way that nationalist projects require the creation of national citizens (Fox & Miller Idriss 2008: 536). While this is not an entirely new idea, it is necessary to justify this approach both from an empirical perspective and, because implicit normative judgements lie behind all evaluative work on democracy, an ethical one too. From the empirical perspective, the first thing to note is that the specific institutional configurations that are prescribed by the western-led project of democracy promotion are themselves the institutional embodiment of liberal ideals such as individual liberty, equality, civic tolerance and representation. When these ideals are enacted and embodied in the everyday practices of citizens – including elites – liberal democracy is strengthened because, besides formal institutions, ‘democracy also needs to be reflected in the ideas that people hold and value’ (Blokker 2012: 1). It is not difficult to imagine how exalted liberal institutions like competitive elections, the rule of law or the separation of powers could be undermined if the philosophical ideals underpinning them were misunderstood or maligned. I will limit my list of illustrative examples to just two kinds of blatant abuse of liberal institutions observed during the fieldwork period. Unqualified judges could be appointed by politicians on the apparent understanding that they would owe their loyalty to their political masters, thus violating the principle of the separation of powers;16 similarly, electoral codes could be altered to oblige television stations to withhold TV access to candidates unable to pay above a legally-mandated threshold, restricting access to political representation according to financial means.17 As the literature on political abuse of the liberal democratic system attests (Bánkuti, Halmai & Scheppele 2012, Ganev 2013), there is no limit to the inventiveness of political actors in seeking to actively undermine the spirit of the liberal institutions they inhabit. Furthermore, it is intuitively correct that the capacity of ordinary citizens to hold these elite actors to account is proportional to the degree to which they themselves understand liberal ideas on the one hand and positively identify with them on the other. From an empirical perspective, then, so long as one endorses the normative task of evaluating liberal democracy (which I attempt to justify below) through reference to public sphere discussion, one cannot logically remain ‘agnostic’ with respect to the question of whether liberal ideas, understandings and identifications are evident. Liberalism is inscribed into the institutional forms of the state which can be (and are) grossly undermined when these same ideas are not upheld by office-holders and citizens. 16 In early 2011, a spokesperson from EC Commissioner Caroline Ashton’s office warned the Serbian government for appointing unqualified persons to the judiciary, prompting some comment from my informants (discussed in Chapter 4). 17 I refer to the issue of the changes made to the Bulgarian electoral codes January 2011 in chapters 2 and 5.

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Before progressing to the question of ethics, it is worth pausing to describe in somewhat greater detail what I mean by liberal – a task seldom embraced in a broad democratization literature in which promoting liberal democracy is the point of the exercise.18 Liberal ideas are not, according to the approach endorsed in these pages, a kind of universal standard as Habermas (1989) and some others hold, but a specific set of ideas, the development of which can be dated to the past two and a half centuries in Western Europe and North America. Since at least the French Revolution, ‘liberal’ thought has advanced a dual concern with both freedom and equality, concepts that were understood to be in tension with one another from the very beginning. Thus political liberalism necessarily connotes some attempt to reconcile this tension (Rawls 1971,19 Mouffe 1992). According to John Stuart Mill’s influential mid-nineteenth-century polemic, the freedom of the individual should be limited only in those cases where harm to others could result. By way of clarification, Mill is quite clear that the imposition of one’s own values on those who do not share the same convictions (‘the Tyranny of the Majority’) is against the principles of the liberal creed (Mill 1859). This idea finds its material realization in many anti-majoritarian features of the accepted template for institutional design in democratizing countries, from diplomatic pressure to sign up to Minority Rights conventions, the promotion of proportional representation systems (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998) and the more recent push for the adoption of ombudsman institutions (Monogioudis 2013). With respect to contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the dominance of socially conservative and nationalist discourses in most political contexts will usually mean that liberal identifications will be recognizable as a distinct ‘civic’ alternative. In a recent edited volume on Serbian political culture, Sabrina Ramet uses the terms ‘civic’ and ‘liberal’ interchangeably, probably going just a little too far in presenting nationalist and liberal ‘values’ as diametric opposites:

18 Besides the formal approaches to democracy measurement addressed in this section, this contention could equally be levelled at the more epistemologically open ‘quality of democracy’ literature, in which authors routinely refer only to ‘democracy’ but attribute decidedly liberal characteristics to it (Blokker 2009: 6). For example, Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino present the key domains of investigation that collectively constitute the study of democratic quality in decidedly ‘liberal’ terms: ‘The rule of law’, ‘participation’, ‘competition’, ‘vertical plus horizontal accountability’, ‘respect for civil and political freedoms’, ‘the progressive implementation of greater political (and underlying it, social and economic) equality’ and ‘responsiveness’ (Diamond & Morlino 2004: 23). Thus, the promotion of ‘democracy’ as liberal democracy, whether in the narrow sense of material institutions or in the broader sociological sense of the checklist above, is very much the rule rather than the exception in the literature. 19 I have in mind Rawls’s second principle of justice, which stipulates that inequalities may only be justified to the extent that they benefit the most disadvantaged members of society (Rawls 1971).

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Civic values are understood to be values supportive of ethnic tolerance, interconfessional harmony, human equality, tolerance of sexual minorities, and the rule of law. Those subscribing to civic values emphasize common citizenship as the basis for the community – in this case, all Serbians, regardless of whether they are ethnically Serb or Hungarian or Albanian or Turk. Uncivic values are understood to be values corrosive of these civic (liberal) principles. Those subscribing to nationalist (uncivic) values look to common ethnicity as the basis for the community – in this case all Serbs, regardless of whether they live in Serbia or in Bosnia-Herzegovina or Croatia or elsewhere. (Ramet 2011: 3)

To clarify, I do not follow Ramet in perceiving all expressions of nationalism as necessarily uncivic/illiberal, because I accept the argument that some underlying form of solidarity is necessary for democratic competition itself (Calhoun 2002). As I argue in Chapter 3, nationalism can, when discursively articulated in rather atypically inclusive forms, fulfil this constructive purpose. However, I claim Ramet is right to highlight the tension between these distinct, regionally-salient discursive constructions. For the sake of providing an empirical rule of thumb, it is sufficient to state that, in order for a discourse to be regarded as liberal, then liberal principles – tolerance, equality of difference and so on – must take precedence where a clash with nationalist or socially conservative principles is observed.20 It is necessary to note that, rather curiously from my perspective, the term ‘liberal’ is frequently also used to refer to a specific set of economic policy orientations that are also associated with the terms ‘economic liberalism’ and ‘neoliberalism’. Though these ideas are only very tenuously linked to the philosophical rationale underpinning the familiar set of liberal democratic institutions prescribed in democratization efforts, the dominance of these economic doctrines in the foreign policies of most of the contemporary capitalist societies that are also involved in promoting liberal democracy leads many to view the projects of economic liberalization and democratization as two sides of the same coin (Krastev 2007, Tismaneanu 2009, see discussion in Chapter 5 of this book). However, as Philippe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl argued more than two decades ago, in the context of evaluations of democratization, the conflation of these ideas is unhelpful. While preferences for such neoliberal policies as low corporation tax and minimal state regulation may be represented as compatible with democracy, it is not justifiable to understand such policy orientations as necessary criteria of liberal democracy. I would add that the same principle applies to the currently fashionable mantra of ‘fiscal discipline’. From this, it logically follows that strong political advocacy of social welfare need not necessarily be understood as some kind of ‘populism’ that is antithetical to democracy: indeed, vigorous political conflict over the role 20 For some points of empirical reference, the delicate formulation of ‘nationalism and patriotism’ of the late Serbian PM Djindjić (see Chapter 3) qualifies in the sense that he clearly took pains to avoid contradicting liberal principles. However, claims to be ‘tolerant’ on the basis that ‘we’ put up with ‘the Gypsies’ (see Chapter 2) do not qualify.

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of the state in the economy has been a recurring feature of many well-functioning democracies (Schmitter & Karl 1991: 86). From the perspective of the citizencentred approach to democracy advocated in these pages, Mouffe’s argument that competing interpretations of liberty and equality will lead to different interpretations of liberal democratic citizenship (Mouffe 1992: 75) justifies an open-minded approach to competing economic outlooks. It is thus reasonable to apply a methodological ‘agnosticism’ with respect to the question of economic policy preferences. Finally, due to the fact that my valorization of distinctly liberal forms of citizenship distinguishes my approach as a normatively-committed one, it is reasonable to justify it in ethico-normative terms. To this effect, it is worth considering the fact that several critical scholars, some of them ethnographers and discourse analysts who share much of my theoretical vocabulary, take the position that applying a prescriptive liberal framework to democracy promotion fails to allow room for more local, culturally-rooted forms of democratic practice to develop (Blokker 2009, Greenberg 2010). Paul Blokker argues that the prescriptive approach to democratization is against the very principles that underpinned the historical impetus for liberal democracy in Western contexts, where it was seen as an open-ended, creative and emancipatory response to the closed discourses of power of the old regimes that preceded it. In particular, he is concerned that when democracy is promoted together with a liberal political culture, it may affect a ‘closure of meaning’ that defeats the original historical purpose of liberalism: [T]he reduction of the democratic imagination to a predefined liberal understanding ignores the very nature of democracy as a continuous process of political meaning-giving. As Claude Lefort has argued, democracy has emerged as an emancipatory project against both the regimes of absolute monarchy and totalitarianism, and in this has substituted openness for closure. Democracy embodies exactly the attempt to avoid the closure of meaning that was the result of the legitimation of political power by extra-societal markers (as was arguably the case in pre-modern and early modern societies in the form of references to nature or God, or in totalitarian societies by reference to historical materialism) … Not much creation and imagination seem to be going on if democratization is merely about the appropriation and reproduction of a liberal political culture. This is obviously even more so if such a political culture is to be transposed from ‘advanced’ democratic societies to democratizing ones. (Blokker 2009: 3)

By this account then, liberal ideas were not emancipatory in and of themselves, but because they were perceived as a useful means of preventing rulers from legitimizing their acts with reference to ‘extra-societal markers’ like God and global workers’ revolution. When liberal ideas are imposed in a prescriptive and specific form, on the say-so of more powerful foreign powers, they evidently affect the kind of ‘closure of meaning’ that they were once articulated against.

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It is, however, possible to question the assumptions upon which Blokker bases his argument. Most importantly, Blokker’s account rests on the idea that the power asymmetry in the Post-Socialist societies that he focuses on is biased in favour of ‘advanced’ democratic countries responsible for transposing their ‘liberal political culture’ to the new context. When the political arena is viewed in terms of discrete national representatives sitting around tables in international fora, this is indeed the case. Certainly, EU conditionality has been predicated on the adoption of characteristically Western liberal institutional forms and the fact that this has been effected across the region speaks for the power of democracy promotion in the narrow, institutional sense. However, as Blokker himself argues, democracy is not just about institutions but must also be ‘reflected in the ideas that people hold and value’ (Blokker 2009: 1). Evaluated in these broader terms, it is far from clear that liberal political cultures have even become dominant in many countries of the region, let alone hegemonic to the extent that they bring about the ‘closure of meaning’ that concerns Blokker. Indeed, as many scholars working on the countries of CEE agree, it is the relative absence of liberalism, not its ubiquity, that threatens to define political discourse. In this vein, we may consider the consistent promotion of national chauvinism by Bulgarian parties of right and left (Rechel 2007)21 or the following appraisal of Serbia’s democratic future supplied by Ramet: As Timothy Edmunds has noted, “(in) Serbia since 2000, electoral politics has become solidly established. Liberalism has not. Reformist elements have had to work within – and often struggle against – a political space shaped by the illiberal practices of the past”. Whether Serbia can succeed in building a truly liberal democracy will depend on how successful it is in fostering civic values, and that, in turn, will depend on the future behaviour of the press, the future contents of school textbooks, and the future pronouncements of clergy, politicians, and other persons with influence – or, in a word, on the firm and stable commitment of the ruling establishment to building a civic culture and promoting the rule of law in Serbia. (Ramet 2011: 406)

Far from having presided over a complete linear progression from one master narrative to the next, liberals in Belgrade and Sofia have to make their case in the context of a political climate in which appeals made in the names of dead fourteenth-century princes and nineteenth-century revolutionaries cannot be contradicted without risk. If one privileges the power asymmetry at the domestic rather than the international level then it is reasonable to argue that it is not liberal democracy but the hegemony of illiberal and especially nationalist discourses that threaten to bring about the ‘closure of meaning’. 21 See also Albena Hranova, ‘Rodno: Dyasno I Lyavo’, Liberalen Pregled, 21 November 2008. Available at https://librev.com/index.php/component/content/article/413. Accessed 20 August 2013.

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Indeed, the fact that liberalism has been adopted as the politics of choice by very disparate groups of intellectuals in many CEE countries appears to mark it out as a discourse of dissent rather than coercive power. In Serbia for example, liberal discourse is routinely employed by committed social democrats, anti-nationalists, minority advocates, LGBT activists and even some radical feminists.22 The rationale for this convergence probably has less to do with the idea that all of them have been similarly converted to Millean (still less Fukuyamian) visions of the good life, but that they share the perception that liberalism holds out the possibility of avoiding the monopolization of public discourse on the part of entrenched political and economic elites who have generally adopted some combination of national, religious and social conservatism as their politics of choice. Newspaper editorial policies are a good indicator of power relations between liberal and illiberal voices, with the latter usually enjoying a considerable advantage in most national contexts, in the Balkans at least.23 From the perspective of the ordinary citizen striving to make sense of politics, liberalism emphatically does not represent the only show in town. From the perspective of local journalists, activists and even those rare cases of politicians who seek to disrupt dominant, exclusivist aspects of the social order through the invocation of liberal principles, the threat of extrademocratic harassment is intermittently present in a way that does not apply to the opponents of liberalism.24 Thus, my normative position is based on a political judgement that liberalism will never conclusively make the political weather in the contingent political terrain of CEE, but that it will continue to form a useful means of dissent for those scattered citizens who envisage a more open and egalitarian future. From this perspective, the case for perceiving the promotion of a liberal political culture as a threat to the open-endedness of the democratic adventure is not a strong one.

22 I undertake a survey of the landscape of discursive political articulations in the countries of the study in Chapter 3. 23 On Serbia, see Kisić & Stanojlović 2011; for Bulgaria, see Štětka 2011. The respective media spheres are briefly characterized in chapters 4 and 5. 24 It is impossible to ignore the fact that many of those close to Milošević during the assassination campaigns shortly preceding the fall of the regime in 2000 were either in or close to political power during the fieldwork period in 2011. For example, Milošević‘s former spokesman, Ivica Dačić was Interior Minister in 2011 and became Prime Minister in 2012. Rather less well known is that many key figures occupying the Bulgarian political mainstream at the same time are known to have collaborated with the communist-era secret police (Darzhavna Sigurnost) and have subsequently been responsible for provoking nationalist intolerance in Bulgaria – such as outgoing President Georgi Parvanov and politician and historian Bozhidar Dimitrov who left the Socialists to join the right-wing GERB party which formed the government in 2009. At a more everyday level, threats against journalists and activists were common in both cities of the fieldwork study. In Plovdiv, for example, an activist of my acquaintance had to endure being denounced in libellous terms on national radio stations.

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Summary: Applying Public Sphere Analysis to Democratizing States Formal measures of democratization such as that provided by Freedom House represent a shared standard for many scholars who are committed to the task of promoting liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. The fact that Freedom House offers a global database that is carefully updated every year undoubtedly provides a useful point of reference for those scholars and policymakers who seek to hold political elites to account according to the standard of ‘democracy’. However, it has not gone unnoticed that Freedom House fails to adequately measure much of what counts with respect to the question of whether or not life in the societies concerned is experienced as democratic. As in the article featured in this chapter, the tension between the data supplied by Freedom House and scholars’ own observations of non-institutional features of political life can force a strange kind of double-speak in those who aim to promote democracy. Freedom House’s data can demand that the analyst must laud the success of the enterprise of democratization while experiential evidence suggests that something very important, sometimes referred to as ‘a democratic culture’, is missing. As I have shown through the theoretical discussion above, analysis of the public sphere provides ample grounds for distinguishing dormant, exclusivist, uncontested public spheres from vibrant, inclusive, contested ones. The vast majority of scholarship on the public sphere is not directed towards democratizing societies but long-standing democracies. This literature arose from Habermas’s considerations of the historical development of liberal democracy in eighteenth-century England (Habermas 1989), and some subsequent texts have applied his basic insights to North American (Eliasoph 1998) and Western European settings (Fraser 1992, Warner 2002). However, it is precisely the fact that this literature does not equate democracy in these ‘advanced democratic societies’ with the material institutions through which those principles are realized that make it indispensable for understanding non-institutional challenges of democratization in newly democratizing societies. As most of the authors I have cited in this section recognize, democracy is itself dependent upon the existence of public spheres through which individuals can come together and discuss matters of public concern, constituting themselves as democratic citizens in the process. Moreover, it is simply not reasonable to expect that citizens will be inclined to uphold liberal democratic institutions unless they identify with the principles underpinning these same institutional forms. The analysis of public sphere discourse can serve the purpose of differentiating liberal from illiberal discourses in a way that is simply beyond the remit of formal measurement. As I hope to demonstrate in this project, the question of whether citizens are being constituted in a way that encourages identification with exclusivist categories or with principles such as liberty and equality is certainly within the reach of public sphere analysis.

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Organization of Chapters Having so far laid out the theoretical toolkit that I will attempt to apply to the public spheres of Serbia and Bulgaria, it remains for me to relate just how I intend to access public sphere discourse in these national contexts and to facilitate comparison between them. Chapter 2 functions overall as a kind of executive summary of the central findings of the project. It focuses mainly on the ethnographic evidence gathered in the ‘below’ of public sphere discussions of citizens in order to directly address the question of the degree to which liberal democratic forms of citizenship are evident. Following a brief descriptive analysis of the Freedom House Democracy Scores of Serbia and Bulgaria over the past decade, the chapter commences with an explication of the methodological approach applied in the ethnographic fieldwork that forms the core of this project. This approach may be described as a comparative ethnography of public spheres: a rather experimental attempt to bring ethnographically-gathered discursive data into conversation with the comparative between-states approach favoured in most of the democratization literature (including formal measurement). As I claimed at the outset of this chapter, the main findings, illustrated in Chapter 2 through the presentation of selective examples of ethnographic data on the respective public spheres, suggest that there is a mismatch between formalist and ethnographically gathered data. In Chapter 3, I present a discursive-historical analysis of the development of political platforms ‘from above’ in the politics of Serbia and Bulgaria in the past two decades. I follow the theoretical insights of discourse analysts such as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to focus on the ‘political moment’ of articulation in the formation of political identities (Laclau & Mouffe 2001). While this data is gathered mainly from secondary scholarly sources supported by a limited quantity of archival data, the influence of discourse theory is present in that I try to avoid simply characterizing political movements as ‘nationalist’ or ‘liberal’ wherever it is possible to analyse political speech directly. Thus, the approach may be described as ‘discourse-lite’ in the sense that it is neither ‘just’ an historical overview nor a thorough genealogy of political discourse. If Chapter 2 was oriented towards the ‘where we are now’ of public sphere discourse in these societies, Chapter 3 attempts to give some idea of ‘how we got there’. Unsurprisingly in the light of the recent wars involving the country, the analysis reveals that the Serbian political arena has provided a number of very prominent political movements that have articulated their platforms in explicit opposition to liberalism. Bulgaria by contrast has been largely free of explicitly anti-democratic movements on any significant scale. However, considering that no major Bulgarian political movement has ever consistently highlighted the tensions between liberalism and the nationallyexclusive assumptions underlying political competition in the country, Serbian politics and civil society has also provided much stronger affirmations of liberal ideals. The upshot is that the philosophical range of political discourse has been far greater in Serbia, providing for stronger identification both for and against liberal principles than in Bulgaria.

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Chapters 4 and 5 focus on public discourse from above and below in Serbia and Bulgaria respectively, providing space for a level of empirical detail that greatly exceeds that supplied in the form of the ‘illustrative’ ethnographic data presented in Chapter 2. Besides putting my work into conversation with some recent scholarship on the political culture of these countries, the main aim is do justice to the range and variety of discourses revealed in the ethnographic and group discussion data collected over the course of this project. While in Chapter 2 the data is arranged around the central argument that I am making in this book concerning the disagreement between formal and ethnographic forms of measurement, these chapters allow space for the inclusion of some data that does not fit neatly into this narrative. Indeed, as an ethnographer, I argue that it is my analysis of the empirical detail presented and contextualized in these later chapters that justifies the knowledge claims asserted at the outset. Finally, it is worth taking a moment to justify my relative neglect of some bodies of literature that may strike some readers – particularly classically trained political scientists – as very relevant to my research. In particular, I am referring to the sizable literatures on political cultures and party systems in Central and Eastern Europe. The main reason, in both of these cases, is that since I am committed to the study of social practices in full ethnographic context, rooting my analyses in relation to these literatures would involve either buying into assumptions about the social world that I do not share, or else indulging in extended critiques of these assumptions. As I have already subjected my readers to a lengthy and critical engagement with formalist approaches to democratization in this opening chapter, neither of these options is palatable. In lieu of such theoretical spadework, I am hopeful that it may suffice to state that I do seek to address the underlying research problems anticipated by these research paradigms in the pages that follow, albeit from radically different angles. For example, much of the mainstream political culture literature, often rooted in analyses of values survey results, is implicitly or explicitly concerned with the readiness of societies to support liberal democracy (after Inglehart 1988; for CEE see Mungiu-Pipiddi 2005). I have certainly not disavowed this pursuit, yet I hold to a ‘philosophical wager’ (Jackson 2010) that yet more reliable understandings of the subject matter of ‘political culture’ may be accessed through direct ethnographic and discursive analysis of the public sphere as it emerges in everyday life.25 Similarly, the discursive-historical account of the development of political platforms offered in Chapter 3 may be seen as an 25 Taking European Values Study data into account, I recognize that it is valid for scholars to make critical inferences about, say, Serbian or Bulgarian understandings of democracy on the basis that majorities in both societies endorse democracy as ‘the best possible political system’ while simultaneously supporting the idea of a strong leader ‘who doesn’t have to bother with elections and parliament’ (EVS 2010a; EVS 2010b). Such inferences will be rooted in sample sizes (n = 1500 in the EVS) that I cannot match. Ultimately, it is the emphasis I place on context and intelligibility of meaning that explains my decision to look beyond this existing survey data.

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alternative means of addressing the research problem of the degree and quality of political competition that underpins most research on party systems (after Sartori 1976; for CEE see Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: ch. 4). My analyses are simply rooted in a different set of foundational assumptions about the way that political competition serves democracy.26 These research choices should not be interpreted as a general criticism of the quality of these mainstream political science literatures, nor does it necessarily follow that different theoretical points of departure always lead to different destinations. Indeed, I have sometimes found the analyses of scholars working within these paradigms helpful and have acknowledged this where appropriate in the text.

26 These theoretical assumptions are laid out at the beginning of Chapter 3.

Chapter 2

Liberal Institutions, Illiberal Democracy? The Public Spheres of Serbia and Bulgaria Compared Bulgaria is, according to the latest gradings provided by Freedom House, considerably more democratic than Serbia. Moreover, though few would dispute the capacity of databases like that produced by Freedom House to shape Western perceptions about the politics of democratizing states and therefore to influence policy-makers, there is an even more glaring indication of the Western endorsement of Bulgaria’s transition to democracy relative to its western neighbour. Since 2007, Bulgaria has been a member state of the European Union, while Serbia, only recently upgraded to candidate status, remains stuck in the waiting room. However, when Serbian and Bulgarian democracy is studied less from the perspective of formal procedures and legal norms and more in terms of the public sphere of discussion through which democratic citizenship is made possible, a different picture emerges from this comparison. In Serbia, the relatively prominent role of liberal discourse in political talk provides a strong counterpoint to the illiberal discourses that occupy the mainstream of political discourse. In Bulgaria by contrast, the content of discussion tends to be less philosophically diverse, leading to the persistence of an illiberal and exclusionary consensus around generally uncontested conservative orthodoxies. Furthermore, the public sphere, recognizable through practices of discussion of public matters, is also conspicuously more evident in the everyday lives of Serbian citizens relative to their Bulgarian counterparts. The evidence of the study therefore leads to the conclusion that recognizable practices of liberal democratic citizenship are rather more evident in the Serbian case. On the basis of this mismatch between formalistic and ethnographic findings, I claim that existing efforts to codify and measure liberal democracy neglect the fact that the very purpose of institutions is to ensure that life in the societies regulated by them is experienced as liberal and democratic. As I argued in the opening chapter, the blindspots of formalist measurement are increasingly evident to those writing within the mainstream of the liberal democratization literature, which is to say those working in political science rather than political theory departments. When Ekiert et al. state that ‘democracy needs democratic citizens’ and then elaborate that citizens need to be educated with respect to what democracy entails, they are making policy recommendations on the basis of their own brief ‘sketch of the “state of democracy” in post-Communist Europe’ (Ekiert et al. 2007). What I endeavour to supply in this project is the missing

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link on the basis of which scholars ought to base such policy recommendations: comparative research that systematically aims to address the empirical question of the capacity of citizens to perform the role of democratic citizens. This chapter will be structured as follows. First, I provide a summary of the relative gradings that Freedom House has allotted to each of the countries of the study over the past decade. After summarizing these formalistic measurements, I outline an alternative methodological approach geared towards identifying liberal democratic practice: a comparative ethnography of public spheres. This involves incorporating the conceptual apparatus described in the opening chapter into an explicitly comparative framework, advancing the argument that it is both possible and desirable to compare ‘national’ public spheres by reference to ethnographically-gathered data that is rooted in distinct, local contexts. The empirical section commences with an illustrative comparison of two conversation extracts from group discussions conducted in each of the countries of the study with the aim of highlighting characteristic and differential features of public sphere discussion in Serbia and Bulgaria. Since these extracts represent only a small and illustrative sample of the wider public sphere discourse in relation to each country, it is necessary to support the evidence in the conversation extracts with the findings of participant observation fieldwork in the two cities of the study. In conclusion, I return to the theoretical debate concerning the study of democracy by arguing that the progress of liberal democracy ought to be understood in a way that is at least appreciative of the analytical dimension of everyday practice. Before proceeding, it is necessary to add a caveat just in case the reader may get the impression that I am lauding the Serbian public sphere as an exemplary and inspiring example of a vibrant democratic society. It is not. This is a comparison between two societies in which transitions to democracy have largely been marred by the destructive efforts of political and economic actors to restrict the capacity of citizens to exercise civic power and form solidarities of the kind that would potentially impact upon the characteristic forms of corrupt and rent-seeking practices that are well-documented in both contexts (Ramet 2011a, Dulić 2011, Vassilev 2010, Monova 2011, Pedersen & Johannsen 2011, Ganev 2013). This has sometimes involved the efforts of these same elites to manipulate public sphere discourse in generally illiberal directions and to mobilize publics in support of national intolerance (Vujačić 1995, Živković 2006, Stamatov 2000, Roth 2010). I do not wish to make light of the difficulties facing the generally financially impoverished and information-poor citizens in either of these societies. Rather, my aim is simply to present an empirically-grounded argument stating that vibrant communities of public sphere discussion oriented towards the production of liberal forms of citizenship provide those in Serbia with forms of civic power that support the liberal democratic system rather than undermining it. Bulgarian democracy benefits less from public sphere discussion, which tends on the whole to be less liberal, less participatory, less evident.

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Democratization in Serbia and Bulgaria: The Formalist Measurement of Freedom House Both countries have satisfied Samuel Huntington’s criteria for the ‘consolidation’ of democracy, which require that power must change hands peacefully twice on the basis of election results (Huntington 1991). By this standard, Bulgaria achieved consolidation almost immediately as the political instability of the early 1990s saw power alternate between former communists and their anti-communist opponents (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011), while Serbia did so very belatedly at the 2008 elections, with the removal from office of Vojislav Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), which had held or shared power continuously since the overthrow of Milošević in 2000. However, the classification of states in such a manner is oriented more towards the construction of global databases and less towards the production of nuanced appraisals of specific states in any way that could allow for making a useful distinction between the countries of the study. Of course, the fixation on such questions of binary classification (democratic/ authoritarian, consolidated/unconsolidated) does not apply to all formalist measures of democracy, and Freedom House therefore offers a continuous measurement that suits my present purpose of comparing Serbian and Bulgarian democracy. To this end, I focus on the ‘Democracy Scores’ system used in the regionally-specific Nations in Transit report published annually by Freedom House and applied to the post-socialist states of Eurasia, rather than the Political and Civil Rights scores used in the annual Freedom in the World report.1 According to the corporate and expert-testimony-based methodology discussed in the opening chapter, Freedom House generates a Democracy Score between the values of 1 (the highest level of democratic progress) and 7 (the lowest). States scoring less than 3 are classified as ‘Consolidated Democracies’, while those between 3 and 4 are classified as ‘Semiconsolidated regimes’, with progressively less appealing designations filling the territory between 4 and 7.

1 The ‘Democracy Scores’ (DS) system of FH’s Nations in Transit is preferred here over the Freedom in the World system for two reasons, the second of which was referred to in the opening chapter. Firstly, the Freedom in the World report is not conceptualized as a measure of democracy but of ‘freedom’ (Munck & Verkuilen 2002), hence the designation of countries as ‘Free’, ‘Partly Free’ and ‘Not Free’. Secondly, unlike the DS system used above, the FitW system does not provide gradings that are nuanced enough to distinguish between the countries of the study because the scores are rounded to whole numbers. As both Serbia and Bulgaria score 2 for both political and civil liberties as of the new 2013 report, they are simply classified as ‘Free’.

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2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

Change

New EU Members Bulgaria Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Latvia Lithuania Poland Romania Slovakia Slovenia Average Median

3.38 2.33 2.00 1.96 2.25 2.13 1.75 3.63 2.08 1.79 2.33 2.10

3.25 2.33 1.92 1.96 2.17 2.13 1.75 3.58 2.08 1.75 2.29 2.11

3.18 2.29 1.96 1.96 2.14 2.21 2.00 3.39 2.00 1.68 2.28 2.07

2.93 2.25 1.96 2.00 2.07 2.21 2.14 3.39 1.96 1.75 2.27 2.11

2.89 2.25 1.96 2.14 2.07 2.29 2.36 3.29 2.14 1.82 2.32 2.20

2.86 2.14 1.93 2.14 2.07 2.25 2.39 3.36 2.29 1.86 2.33 2.20

3.04 2.18 1.93 2.29 2.18 2.29 2.25 3.36 2.46 1.93 2.39 2.27

3.04 2.21 1.96 2.39 2.18 2.25 2.32 3.46 2.68 1.93 2.44 2.29

3.07 2.18 1.93 2.61 2.14 2.25 2.21 3.43 2.54 1.93 2.43 2.23

3.14 2.18 1.93 2.86 2.11 2.29 2.14 3.43 2.50 1.89 2.45 2.24

▼

The Balkans Albania Bosnia Croatia Macedonia Yugoslavia Serbia Montenegro Kosovo Average Median

4.17 4.54 3.79 4.29 3.88 n/a n/a n/a 4.13 4.17

4.13 4.29 3.83 4.00 n/a 3.83 3.83 5.50 4.20 4.00

4.04 4.18 3.75 3.89 n/a 3.75 3.79 5.32 4.10 3.89

3.79 4.07 3.71 9.82 n/a 3.71 3.89 5.36 4.05 3.82

3.82 4.04 3.75 3.82 n/a 3.68 3.93 5.36 4.06 3.82

3.82 4.11 3.64 6.86 n/a 3.79 3.79 5.21 4.03 3.82

3.82 4.18 3.71 3.86 n/a 3.79 3.79 5.14 4.04 3.82

3.93 4.25 3.71 3.79 n/a 3.71 3.79 5.07 4.04 3.79

4.04 4.32 3.64 3.82 n/a 3.64 3.82 5.18 4.07 3.82

4.14 4.36 3.61 3.89 n/a 3.64 3.82 5.18 4.09 3.89

▼ ▼ ▲ ▼

Figure 2.1

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▲ ▲

Freedom House CEE democracy scores 2003–12

Source: Freedom House 2012b.2

Throughout the past decade, Freedom House has consistently graded Bulgaria as more democratic than Serbia, a pattern that continues as of the publication of the 20123 rankings in Nations in Transit (Freedom House 2012: see Figure 2.1). Serbia’s score has deviated only a little, climbing from 3.88 (still as ‘Yugoslavia’) in 2003 to 3.64 in 2012. Bulgaria has deviated a lot more, improving as the date for possible EU accession approached from 3.38 in 2003 to a peak of 2.86 one year after accession in 2008. Since those years where it briefly earned the classification of ‘consolidated democracy’ between 2006 and 2008, Bulgarian democracy has been ‘backsliding’, and by 2012 had regressed to 3.13. Significantly for the purposes of this paper, the trajectories of Bulgaria and Serbia have never overlapped during those 10 years of measurement, with Bulgaria always being 2 This table is taken from Freedom House’s Nations in Transit: Selected Data from Freedom House’s Annual Analysis of Democratic Development from Central Europe to Eurasia, available at http://www.freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/Release%20Booklet. pdf. Accessed 20 January 2013. 3 The decision to stick with the 2012 figures in spite of the subsequent availability of 2013 figures is justifiable because it facilitates direct comparison with the ethnographic data collected throughout 2011. Nevertheless, much the same pattern emerges even when the newer figures are taken into account: Serbia is stagnant at 3.64 while Bulgaria has continued to regress slightly to 3.18.

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ranked at least 0.5 points more democratic than Serbia. This has allowed Bulgaria to retain contact (albeit as a clear ‘laggard’) with the mostly Central European states grouped as ‘New EU Members’, which occupy a range between 1.89 and 3.43 as of 2012. Similarly, Serbia’s lower ranking allows it to appear at home among the other mostly post-Yugoslav states grouped as ‘The Balkans’, which occupy the range between 3.61 and 5.18. Thus, in spite of the fact that Freedom House’s measurements are notionally compiled according to the events of the year in question only, the gradings – and the relative gaps between clustered groups of countries – have remained remarkably stable over this period. This allows Bulgaria to be squeezed into a narrative of previously authoritarian countries that have benefited from an essentially peaceful transition and European integration (with the acknowledged problem of some recent ‘backsliding’ since the incentive of EU entry was removed) and for Serbia to be fitted into the narrative of countries that have yet to properly emerge from post-war transition (Ekiert et al. 2007: 20). However, as I emphasized in the previous chapter, while Freedom House scores are compiled on the basis of subjective expert-opinion, these opinions are evidently based upon objectivist concerns with formal procedures and legal freedoms rather than considerations of discursive aspects of political practice. As the name ‘Freedom House’ suggests, the legal ‘freedom’ to form a civil association to challenge political elites is considered to be analytically equivalent to evidence that civil actors actually use those freedoms. The challenge that I set out in the previous chapter was to harness the conceptual tools of public sphere theory to address these blindspots in such a manner that can allow for a critical appreciation of some important citizen-centred dimensions of democracy that are neglected by Freedom House. In the interests of that endeavour I will presently turn to the task of describing my methodological approach to the comparison of public sphere discussion in Serbia and Bulgaria. Methodology: A Comparative Ethnography of Public Spheres The comparative ethnographic study of public spheres is conceived of as a means of systematically addressing the question of the capacity of citizens to perform the role of democratic citizens, a concern that arises in the work of several scholars of democratization (Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova 2007, O’Donnell 2008). In this section, I describe my approach with respect to the rather complex methodological question of ethnographic comparison and also more practical concerns of ethnographic data gathering. I anchor my study of national public spheres in specific locations chosen on the basis that they embody certain traits that distinguish them as, if not representative, then at least not conspicuously unrepresentative of the national context. From this perspective, my approach draws inspiration from that of Nina Eliasoph, who presents her study as addressing the ‘American’ public sphere on the basis of ethnographic study conducted at a specific (but undisclosed) suburban location.

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For example, there is the claim that ‘most Americans live in suburbs’ followed by a description of why the particular type of suburb she studies resembles so many others across America (Eliasoph 1998: 9–10). It is implicit in this rationale that America’s public sphere cannot possibly be observed in its entirety, necessitating this more locally-based approach: ‘The settings I studied could have represented America’s public sphere, made of thousands of local citizen gatherings like the ones I studied’ (p. 11). It is on the basis of similar logic that I seek to generalize about two national public spheres with reference to specific locales. However, since neither Serbia nor Bulgaria exist on such a scale as to support Eliasoph’s claim of an almost endless and relatively homogenous suburbia – ‘These new ethnically and class-diverse dwelling places are criss-crossed by 6-, 8- and even 10-lane highways …’ (p. 10) – I recognize that it is necessary to acknowledge the specificity of the locales in small countries where such industrial-scale imaginings are not appropriate. I will therefore name the large provincial cities of Niš, Serbia (pop. 255,000) and Plovdiv, Bulgaria (pop. 338,000) that stand at the centre of my empirical work and I will seek to justify the conceit of describing ‘national’ public spheres in this contingent terrain. These cities were chosen and therefore matched according to a number of rough criteria that might be held to single them out as suitable – which is to say nationally unremarkable – places to study practices of public sphere discussion. Firstly, as cities, they represent the urban settings in which most residents of these countries now live their lives.4 Secondly, they are not capital cities, nor are they areas in which average incomes are considerably above the national average as is the case with, say, Bulgaria’s coastal cities of Varna and Burgas or Serbia’s second city of Novi Sad.5 Thirdly, they are both cities that are demographically dominated by people identifying with the majority ethnic categories, while also having substantial but politically subordinate ethnic minority populations.6 4 This is more emphatically the case with respect to Bulgaria than Serbia. According to the 2011 census, 72.5 per cent of Bulgarians live in urban areas (National Statistical Institute Republic of Bulgaria 2011) while only 56 per cent of the Serbian population lives in urban areas according to 2010 data. CIA World Factbook, ‘Serbia’, available at https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ri.html. Accessed 20 January 2013. 5 For the last quarter of 2011, the average monthly salary in Plovdiv was 308 Euros, almost identical to the then national average of 306 Euros. By comparison, the figure in the capital Sofia was 364 Euros, while the largest coastal cities of Varna and Burgas came in at 362 and 331 euros respectively. Data from the National Statistical Institute of the Republic of Bulgaria, available at http://www.nsi.bg/otrasalen.php?otr=5. Accessed 31 January 2013. In 2011, the average net wage in Niš (after stoppages) was 343 euros per month, comparable to the national average of 394 Euros, while the figures in Belgrade and Novi Sad were 485 and 464 euros respectively. Data from the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia, Available at http://pod2.stat.gov.rs/ObjavljenePublikacije/G2012/pdfE/G20121017. pdf. Accessed 31 January 2013. 6 I provide more detail about the population demographics of these cities in chapters 4 and 5. Both cities have large Roma populations which, privileging my academic colleagues’

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Though my strategy of presenting public discussion data ahead of any analysis of party politics is a very deliberate one (since I hold that the content of the former is a better indicator of the state of democracy than the fortunes of the latter), I will add at this stage that the local administrations of each of these cities was closely contested at the time of fieldwork between enthusiastically pro-European parties then holding power at the national level and their avowedly nationalist but also formally pro-European opponents.7 In light of these shared characteristics, it would be reasonable to expect that these are settings in which one might expect practices of democratic citizenship in the public sphere to be neither particularly advanced nor particularly undeveloped in relation to the respective countries at large. Beyond the rough matching of these cities by demographic and socio-economic criteria, I make no claim that either city is equivalent to the other, nor that they are ‘typical towns’ in the countries of the study – an impossibility in any case. Rather, they are culturally – and historically – specific contexts which, in the sense that all places are similarly unique, are the only kinds of contexts in which nationallycontained political institutions and media spheres are ever interpreted and experienced by citizens. As I have argued, this dimension of citizens’ experience of democracy is poorly addressed by existing approaches. Since most existing studies of democratization (including those of Freedom House) routinely use the national state as the unit of analysis, it is desirable to frame such locally-rooted studies of the public sphere in national terms in order to bring my findings into dialogue with more formal, state-based approaches. Furthermore, it is only through a comparative approach to the ways that democratic citizenship is enacted and embodied by citizens residing in different national spheres that one can approach the question of the relative extent to which ‘democracy’ actually exists at the level of lived experience. With respect to the specific data collection methods I have employed in this project, I will first address methodological principles. Since the theoretical approach to the public sphere that I described in the opening chapter conceives of democratic citizenship as a form of identification that is observable in the practices of agents (Mouffe 1992: 75, Eliasoph 1998: 11, Wedeen 2008: 114–115), estimations over the chronic under-counting in the official statistics, are roughly equivalent to one-tenth of Niš’s population (about 25,000 people) and up to one-seventh of Plovdiv’s (about 60,000 people). 7 In Niš, the local administration was controlled by the centrist Democratic Party and its partners at the time of the fieldwork, although the nationalist opposition of the Serbian Progressive Party were ultimately to gain control after the elections in May 2012. In Plovdiv, the mayoral candidate of the right-wing Pro-European GERB party Ivan Totev narrowly won the October 2011 local elections from the incumbent Slavcho Atanassov who stood under the banner of the newly-formed nationalist splinter party VMRO-NIE, really just a vehicle for the personal ambitions of Atanassov who had led the city since 2007. The recent historical development of party platforms and ideologies in the respective countries is the theme of Chapter 3 while recent election campaigns are covered in chapters 4 and 5.

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria

I find that it is reasonable to apply methodological principles devised for the study of a different discursive construction of identification, namely nationalism. The empirical field of ‘everyday nationhood’ is founded upon a core theoretical distinction between the study of the ways in which persons can act as ‘national persons’ when prompted by interviewers or questionnaires and the way that they actually do act as national persons (or not) in the course of their everyday lives (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008: 537). While the social scientific repertoire is replete with ‘prompting’ methodologies such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and soon, all of which are appropriate for finding out whether or not people can perform the role of democratic citizens, the question of whether citizens actually do participate in public sphere discussion is best addressed by means of an inductive approach to participant observation. Fox and Miller Idriss refer to this as the ‘waitand-see’ approach (Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008). In this project, I have combined this kind of participant observation research with a series of lightly-moderated group discussions in order to address both of these forms of data. Although there is considerable overlap in practice, I have found participant observation to be particularly appropriate for gauging the degree of civic participation in the everyday lives of informants,8 while group discussion data is more appropriate for consideration of the discursive content of public sphere discussion. I will describe my use of each of these methods here, starting with participant observation. As with Eliasoph’s forays into all manner of voluntary associations, ranging from country-western clubs to peace activism (Eliasoph 1998), I have aimed for a maximal range of viewpoints within the chosen cities, and this principle has guided my efforts to sample informants through participant observation research (and in convening group discussions). My entry into the field was aided by contacts in university departments, through whose assistance I was able to take on a limited amount of teaching and research duties. This brought me into contact with both academic colleagues and students who were very helpful in introducing me to subsequent informants. Furthermore, in order to put myself in contact with people not necessarily linked to higher education institutions, I participated in the activities of almost any available recreational and civic associations which would accept me as a member. These included a mountaineering club, a careers office, an ‘alternative’ NGO, a sports club (Serbia), a private language school, an environmental NGO, a running club and a dance class (Bulgaria). Of course, this sample was supplemented by innumerable interactions with landlords, neighbours, youth hostel staff and obviously friends, a great many of whom provided me with the benefit of their thoughts which have found their way anonymously (or pseudonymously) into my field notes. In these ways, I came into contact with people from a range of age groups and social backgrounds. Most

8 The empirical dimension of civic participation may be addressed by considering ‘whether, and to what degree, do individuals constitute themselves as citizens through public sphere discussion’.

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of the interactions reported in this book (and all of the group discussions) took place in Serbo-Croatian or Bulgarian as appropriate.9 The format of the ‘group discussion’ is based on the work of Rogers Brubaker and his collaborators in their research into practices of everyday ethnicity in Cluj, Romania (Brubaker, Feischmidt, Fox & Grancea 2006: 382–384). In the first instance, the authors follow William Gamson in assembling groups from existing ‘peer groups’ rather than applying the more rigid sampling criteria typical of ‘focus group’ research (Gamson 1992), and they further encourage informal behaviour by conducting the discussions over food and drink. In order to gain some idea of variation between generations, they seek to organize groups according to three generational cohorts justified according to the overlap of life histories with specific periods in recent Romanian history: 18–23 year olds, 30–40 year olds and over 55s. Finally, the authors refrain from subjecting discussion participants (usually 4 or 5) to pre-set questions in favour of organizing each two-hour discussion around a small number of broad themes such as ‘politics’ and ‘getting by’. Considering that the object of investigation of their study was ‘everyday ethnicity’, it can be seen that the inclusion of topics like ‘politics’ facilitated both the use and the avoidance of ethnicized frames of understanding without explicitly introducing them. The role of the social researcher became a rather passive one – a moderator rather than an interviewer – while the vast majority of the interaction took place between the participants themselves. I have retained most features of this approach, but have deviated from this model in just a few important respects necessary to address the specific aims of my project. The features that I have retained include the practice of assembling groups from pre-existing peer groups (usually achieved by asking one of the group to assemble their friends or colleagues), the preferred group size of 4–5, the choice of a setting designed to put discussants at ease and the organization of groups according to distinct non-overlapping generational cohorts, roughly coinciding with the age

9 At the time of the fieldwork, my Bulgarian language (once very fluent) was still marginally superior to my Serbo-Croatian, despite the fact that I had only received formal tuition in the latter. This was because I had lived and worked in Bulgaria for a period of several years (2002–06) and had already undertaken social and archival research in the country (Dawson 2012) before commencing this project. My Bulgarian inevitably suffered to some degree as I learned Serbo-Croatian at University College London for some three academic terms prior to entry to the field in January 2011. Nevertheless, I was generally able to hold my own in conversations in both languages, and the fact that much of the vocabulary of these languages overlaps undoubtedly helped with comprehension. Another factor that came into play with unstructured interactions – though not group discussions which were always conducted in vernacular languages – was that when I found myself alone in the company of someone of my acquaintance who spoke English better than I spoke their native tongue, as happened fairly frequently, we ‘found the quickest route’ to communication.

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boundaries specified by Brubaker et al.10 The argument of these authors that these age groups will have experienced different periods of their respective countries’ recent histories works just as well with respect to Serbia and Bulgaria in 2011 as it evidently did in Romania at the beginning of the previous decade.11 The most important respect in which I have differed is in terms of the topics of discussion: unlike Brubaker and his collaborators who waited to see if their informants would introduce discourses of ethnicity, I informed my groups in advance that they would be talking about ‘politics’ – the central object of my investigation. As I was really interested in the discursive content of discussion on public or political matters, I tended to begin by asking informants to talk about ‘the good and the bad of life in Bulgaria/ Serbia’. This ‘national’ framing of the question encourages informants to discuss their concerns in a way that is ‘public’ and oriented to a wide circle of concern. Subsequent themes relating to ‘politics’, ‘elections’ or specific ‘protests’ were still more explicitly political. Other respects in which I deviated from the authors’ model were led by practical concerns, although these too had significant effects on the nature of discussion. For example, I halved the discussion time to one hour, mainly in order to reduce the amount of transcription, translation, coding and analysis to manageable proportions. In fact, since I convened a total of 12 group discussions in each city, all of which were conducted in vernacular languages, the first two of these tasks were of such magnitude that I could not do them alone.12 The relatively short period of discussion meant that I had to take a slightly more pro-active role as moderator in order to push the discussion into more than one domain – a considerable challenge from the perspective that emotive topics like ‘the good and the bad of Serbian life’ and ‘politics’ frequently moved participants into the territory of the 10-minute monologue. After reflecting on the transcripts of

10 As in Brubaker et al.’s study, one or two participants would sometimes arrive who were outside the age parameters. In such cases, I proceeded with the discussion regardless. 11 Older Serbs and Bulgarians (‘over 55s’) would have reached adulthood under state socialism, the middle cohort (‘30–40’) will remember the politically turbulent and economically calamitous times of the 1990s and the youngest cohort (‘18–25’) would have reached an age of political awareness during the present ‘democratic’ period in which the two societies find themselves on opposite sides of the EU’s external boundary. It is possible to add, a little mischievously, that this principle works almost equally well ‘for any time and place context’. The real benefit appears to be that the use of non-overlapping age cohorts allows for the perception of generational variation in views and outlooks. 12 I quickly discovered that the idea of doing my own transcriptions and translations was incompatible with the aim of undertaking reasonably productive participant observation fieldwork. I very gratefully paid for this work to be undertaken and have acknowledged those responsible in the Acknowledgements section. Since returning from the field, I have coded all transcripts using NVivo qualitative data analysis software. My use of this software was not particularly sophisticated: more a case of managing a huge body of conversational data, using ‘code-and-retrieve’ functions as a means of re-familiarizing myself with discussions that I had moderated myself.

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early discussions, I progressively became more active in later discussions in order to encourage more dynamic interactions among participants. Consistent with my approach to participant observation, I made an explicit effort to include as broad a range of perspectives as possible in my group discussion sample. In the first instance, I achieved this by seeking to balance my sample according to gender, age (through the three age cohorts), and educational/ professional backgrounds. However, I also sought to sample as wide a range of cultural identities as possible, and it is to this end that I consulted recent ethnographic literature and the advice of local social scientists wherever possible. These kinds of strategies, relying on a combination of local knowledge and snowball sampling where sufficient resources for applying a mathematically defensible sampling frame are not available, have been advocated by the anthropologist Edward Green under the label of ‘convenience, purposive sampling’ (Green 2001). For example, influenced by recent sociological work claiming a relationship between rural ‘cultural styles’ and nationalist political affinities in Serbia (Cvetičanin & Popescu 2009), I made sure that at least one of the groups sampled fans of folk music in Niš. In a similar vein, when considering the composition of the groups from the over 55 age group in Niš, a sociological colleague of that generation suggested that the social division between rural incomers and Staronišlije (those whose families had resided in Niš for several generations) was salient for his generation, stating that it was important to bear in mind that the population of the city had more than doubled during the socialist period. Thus I resolved to sample at least half of that age cohort from those born outside of the city. These kinds of concerns meshed with more conventional ones, so that I balanced basic socio-economic considerations of gender balance and professional/educational background with culturally- and even locally-specific considerations.13 In these ways, I used snowball sampling to start with those groups most accessible to me and progressively sought to end up with those perspectives that were lacking until I had reached a sample (totalling 12 groups in each city) that was equally balanced by gender, organized into three age cohorts, each of which consisted of four groups that were diverse in terms of social and cultural composition. 13 Regrettably, one respect in which I failed to represent these cities was in terms of their Roma minorities. I generally followed an ethnicity-blind approach to the composition of group discussions, which led to the participation of a handful of people identifying with minority ethnicities across the two cities, but no Roma. It had become obvious long before the end of the fieldwork period that the degree of social exclusion of Roma populations from the mainstream of life in both of these cities meant that I would have to be more proactive in convening Roma groups. However, I decided against this from the perspective that I could not have claimed to contextualize the perspectives of these citizens of the towns in any sensible way without conducting a separate ethnographic study. Due to the time-consuming ethnographic necessities of gaining contacts and building rapport, this was impossible given the limited time allotted to an already ambitious fieldwork agenda. Thus what follows can be understood as arising from a broad and inclusive but nonetheless incomplete ethnography of the public sphere in these cities.

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Finally, it is necessary to outline my strategy for presenting this data in a way that achieves the stated aim of bringing my approach into a dialogue with existing comparative approaches to democratization (such as that adopted by Freedom House) while remaining faithful to the ethnographic commitment to context. I try to achieve this by working at two different levels of analysis: by presenting the key findings of the project in a rather condensed form up-front in this chapter, and then supplying progressively more fine-grained forms of analysis in the chapters that follow. Indeed, I claim that the findings that I highlight in this comparative chapter must necessarily be supported by more detailed and context-sensitive forms of analysis in order to justify the appellation ‘ethnographic’. In this vein, I follow Peregrine Schwartz-Shea in recognizing that ‘thick description’ is a key criterion of comparability from the perspective that it is only when readers are provided with a sufficient degree of contextual detail that they are able to judge the degree to which the findings may be applicable to other contexts (Schwartz-Shea 2006). Since I cannot sensibly claim to provide this kind of attention to context in the space of this chapter alone, I will take up the challenge in the remaining empirical chapters. To this effect, I supply an account of the recent historical development of political discourse in the two countries of the study (Chapter 3), followed by broader ethnographic surveys of political discussion in each country separately (chapters 4 and 5). What follows in this chapter is thus a condensed presentation of ethnographic data that aims for legibility within the comparative and evaluative framework of the democracy measurement paradigm. Talking Politics in Serbia and Bulgaria At the outset of this chapter, I argued that public sphere discussion in Serbia is more philosophically plural with a more pronounced element of liberal discourse relative to Bulgaria. As should be clear from the preceding methodology section, these are findings that arise from the analysis of many hundreds of interactions gathered through 12 months of participant observation and two-dozen group discussions across the two fieldsites. Since any attempt to present a full and representative sample of these accounts in the limited space available in this chapter runs the risk of failing to communicate the vital dimension of the tone and character of public sphere discussion, I have elected to defer presentation of a fuller range of perspectives until chapters 4 and 5. However, it is possible to at least illustrate these findings through the juxtaposition of extracts from just two group discussion transcripts. Since I have argued that the mainstream of political discourse in both societies can reasonably be described as illiberal,14 my claim that the Serbian public sphere is philosophically plural rests on the idea that some significant liberal ‘counterdiscourse’ exists through which a significant minority of Serbian citizens 14 This perspective is supported by some contemporary work on both Serbian (Edmunds 2009, Ramet 2011) and Bulgarian (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011) political discourse.

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‘formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs’ (Fraser 1992: 123). My choice of extract from the Niš groups is selective in this sense: it does not show typical political talk in Niš, but rather what I represent as discourse characteristic of a distinct ‘liberal’ counterpublic.15 To give some rough idea of the prevalence of such identifications, two out of 12 group discussions quite strongly approximated to this model with related stances observable to a limited degree in several other groups.16 The existence of this oppositional, liberal counterpublic is worth applauding from the normative perspective of democracy promotion because it may be understood to represent a constituency inclined to demand accountability of elites in terms that are congruent with those assumed by the liberal democratic blueprint enshrined in the country’s institutions. The presentation of the extract from the Niš group will be followed by excerpts from a similar group discussion from Plovdiv, Bulgaria. My claim of the lesser degree of pluralism and liberalism in the Bulgarian public sphere rests on my argument that oppositional discourse is rather less prevalent there and rather less liberal where it is encountered. While I am not claiming that there is no outspoken liberal dissent against illiberal orthodoxies in Bulgarian public life, I can claim that those Bulgarian intellectuals expressing counter-majoritarian views on, say, national historiography, ethnic relations or social justice have to do so in the knowledge that they can count on very little public support. (Though it is beyond the remit of this chapter, I will add at this point that I agree with those analysts suggesting that the generally hopeful waves of protest targeting the links between oligarchic networks and political elites in Bulgaria through 2013 have so far done little to disturb the taboos constraining the parameters of public discourse [Tsoneva 2014]. These protests are discussed at some length in a post-script to this book.) On the basis of my field research, I can claim that solidarities based on consistent identifications with liberal principles are rare to the point of sociological invisibility in the country’s second city of Plovdiv. In selecting the Bulgarian extract, I could therefore have quoted from almost any one of the 12 groups I convened to stress the relatively unreflexive way in which most of those I interacted with in Plovdiv understood politics and social life 15 My usage of the term ‘liberal’ in this chapter is based on the lengthy discussion offered in the opening chapter: in short, it connotes principles such as liberty, equality, civic tolerance and representation that are inscribed in the institutional forms of liberal democracy; it is not to be confused with economic liberalism or the individualist pursuit of self-interest. As Schmitter & Karl note, economistic conceptions of liberalism are compatible with democracy but are not necessary conditions of its existence (Schmitter & Karl 1991). 16 As observed through participant observation and recorded in the author’s fieldnotes, these stances have a prominence in everyday life that is roughly proportional to the group discussion sample. As I argue in Chapter 4, its existence also creates an aspirational tendency among a larger number of less philosophically committed Serbs to identify with an intellectual cosmopolitanism that is somewhat at odds with the observed continuity of conservative social tendencies among many urban Serbs.

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through illiberal assumptions that impeded their earnest efforts to make sense of the liberal principles enshrined in the rules of the democratic political game. In order to introduce a rough element of systematization, I have elected to quote from the Plovdiv group that most closely approximates to the chosen Niš group in the sense that both groups are gender-mixed, consisting of city-born adults with higher education sampled (albeit imperfectly) according to the same age category. This first extract is taken from a group discussion in March 2011 in which a group of four friends from Niš in their late 20s and early 30s discuss Serbia’s political problems. As is the case throughout this book, names have been changed to protect the anonymity of informants. While it is clear from the nature of the discussion that the group are highly-educated and maintain a close interest in politics, it is important to note that none of them are employed in politics nor are any of them working in related professions such as law or the non-governmental sector. In fact, according to my notes, two are not in regular employment and there is only one member of the group (the English-teaching assistant lecturer) who is actually contracted to work on a full-time basis.17 Several minutes earlier, the group had been asked to discuss ‘politics in Serbia’, and the conversation is now in full swing. Several public figures are mentioned by the first speaker (‘Uroš’) and so it is necessary to provide some background information here, even though the tone of the discussion should be fairly clear from the transcript alone. The first political reference made is to the then recent sacking of the deputy PM Mlađan Dinkić (leader of the then disintegrating G17+ party) by then PM Mirko Cvetković of the Democratic Party (DS). Thus the ‘they’ who are ‘losing their grip’ in Uroš’s first comment are the DS-led government. The next mention is of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) and their leader, Tomislav ‘Toma’ Nikolić, who was then in opposition and calling for early elections. This is followed by a reference to the government’s announcement of the embezzlement trial of Svetlana ‘Ceca’ Ražnatović, the singer and widow of the late warlord Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović. Several independent public officials with briefs to protect citizens’ rights and regulate public affairs are mentioned later in the conversation with respect to the Ombudsman institution. Finally, a reference is made to Muamer Zukorlić, a Bosniak/Muslim18 leader from the Sandžak region of Serbia, who had been agitating for some degree of autonomy from the Serbian state on behalf of the religious community he claims to represent. Uroš (M, English-teaching assistant lecturer, early 30s): But they sense that they’re losing their grip once they sacked Dinkić … The Progressive Party, no matter what they’re like, they’ll always have votes because people are fed 17 ‘Darko’, a bookseller in his late 20s, does not pass comment during the exchange below. 18 The term ‘Bosniak’ stresses a national unity of Slavic Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. It is preferred by some, though not all, Muslims in Serbia and BosniaHerzegovina.

Liberal Institutions, Illiberal Democracy? up with the Democratic Party and they want to cling to anyone, even Toma [Nikolić]. They feel they’re losing their edge, losing votes, hence the Ceca case … and they won’t even arrest her, they’ll leave her for the next elections. Danica (F, Unemployed, late 20s): Their estimate was that Dinkić was the least popular person at the moment so they sacked him … and how did they sack him? They replaced him with his best friend … and now you see Dinkić everywhere, opening factories, bridges, as though he hadn’t been sacked. You can see he still has a say in all those things. Jelena (F, Freelance Teacher/Translator, early 30s): They had to blame someone, they needed a scapegoat. Danica: And they try to create the impression that they’re doing something, like: “Look at us, we’ve sacked Dinkić”. Uroš: The problem here is that the institutions aren’t independent of the ruling group. The institutions in this country are devastated. The army and the police … JD (author): The Ombudsman? Jelena: The Ombudsman is the only institution functioning in this country! The Ombudsman, and Commissioner Sabić, and Verica Barac who’s head of the Anti-Corruption Council. This is an independent state body, and she’s been warning the public for months and years about all the illegal things the tycoons have done, and yesterday there was this tycoon complaining about her, and Prime Minister Cvetković took his side saying: Right, let’s see why she’s bothering him … Uroš: What about that Marko Karadžić, the secretary to the Ministry of Human and Minority Rights … how long was he there? He talked about such things in public two or three times and they finished with him. Jelena: No, he resigned himself, saying he could not work under such conditions. He said: I don’t want to receive a salary, I’m here to do my job and that’s human rights, but the Minister is sabotaging me … they made a mess of those elections for National (minority) Councils in Sandžak and now they are trying to organize new elections, and that was what enraged Zukorlić and his people … Uroš: And this is where we are supposed to see the strength of the state. Not in the current government and people in power, but in the institutions, in the mechanisms that govern a state towards a better future and shouldn’t depend

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria on who’s in power … we don’t have that. Here the police are always loyal to whoever is in power.

Throughout this exchange, the general attitude is one of cynicism and disappointment. As is evident from Uroš’ dismissive mention of Nikolić and his SNS party and the fact that Jelena takes an unusually sympathetic position with relation to the grievances of the Muslim separatist leader Zukorlić, this group implicitly identify in opposition to conservative and nationally-exclusive visions of politics. This stance helps to explain their sense of grievance with the alleged failures of the incumbent Democratic Party, which had long touted its credentials as a liberal, ‘European’ party, and might reasonably have been expected to do a better job of providing an alternative to the corruption and nationalist excess of the country’s Milošević-era past.19 Both the sacking of Dinkić and the upcoming trial of Ceca are dismissed (by Uroš and Danica) as insincere attempts by the DS to persuade voters that the party really is attempting to do something about corruption in government and the impunity of the country’s criminal elite respectively (‘they needed a scapegoat’; ‘they try to create the impression that they’re doing something’; ‘they won’t even arrest her’). The negative tone of the conversation is temporarily reversed when Jelena responds to my question by jumping to the defence of the Ombudsman institution and the efforts of the other public officials she mentions,20 but even then she concludes that the sincere efforts of some independent public officials to fight corruption and defend civil rights are inevitably frustrated by the corruption of politicians such as PM Mirko Cvetković. Uroš agrees, adding a supporting example before he returns to his theme of the corrupted state of the country’s institutions, which are seen as lacking independence from ‘whoever is in power’. Understood on its own terms, this exchange tells a depressing story of citizens alienated by the corruption of a state apparatus on the part of politicians who are seen as putting their own interests above those of the country’s citizens. Specifically, politicians are seen as deciding when high-profile suspected criminals may be apprehended in readiness for election campaigns or when investigations can be suspended, probably to supply opportunities for graft. These assumptions were widely shared among liberal intellectuals addressing the long-serving Democratic 19 As one scholar of the region argued, it was the failure of the DS to live up to these expectations that led to the resounding defeat of the Democratic Party (and the poor showing of the Liberal Democratic Party) in the 2012 elections. Eric Gordy, ‘Serbia’s Election: More Defeat than Victory’, Open Democracy, 27 May 2012, available at http:// www.opendemocracy.net/eric-gordy/serbias-election-more-defeat-than-victory. Accessed 20 January 2013. 20 Serbia contains several agencies that are intended to act as a check on majoritarian or self-interested impulses among elected politicians, although in practice some of these post-holders take a more activist role than others. The particular work and achievements of some of these agencies are discussed by Monogioudis (2013).

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Party-led administration at that time,21 so it is highly plausible that the discussants are broadly correct in their conclusions, and that indeed is depressing. However, if I am to take the exchange as an example of public sphere discussion, then it is possible to draw another set of conclusions. Here are citizens, certainly above average in terms of educational level but severely lacking in material wealth and financial security – they are no kind of ‘elite’ – who display a very impressive normatively-informed understanding of the liberal democratic system. Uroš’s complaint that the institutions are not fulfilling their function because of political interference assumes a separation of powers that is a common feature of many well-functioning liberal democratic systems. Jelena’s defence of the actions of a number of public officials is grounded in an understanding of the roles of the independent public officials as providing a legal check on the power of elected politicians in defence of citizens’ rights. This point also reveals a will and ability to discriminate between different public officials based on their actions even when politicians are generally perceived as acting selfishly; it is not a ‘politics is bad so I don’t care’ stance. Furthermore, it is worth noting that Uroš’ implication that Ceca Ražnatović should have been arrested before (he made this explicit in an earlier statement) reveals a lack of sympathy for the section of country’s elite associated with the nationalist excess and breakdown of the rule of law in the 1990s. In a similar vein, Jelena’s assumption that the Serbian government are to blame for the separatist movement in the Sandžak (‘Zukorlić and his people’) reveals a reluctance to accept the ‘groupist’, ‘ethnicizing’ language in which advocates of Bosniak/Muslim autonomy usually appear in Serbian political discourse. In summary, from the normative perspective of a roughly Habermasian constitutional post-national liberalism,22 this is a very encouraging piece of public sphere discussion. Furthermore, because such orientations to the political system are sure to have developed in the context of a relational social space, the coherence of such liberal public sphere discourse is evidence enough to infer the availability of liberal ideas in the national public arena – whether in formal politics, civil society or the mass media.23 21 For example, the respected former politician and civil society activist Vesna Pešić tried to persuade voters to back anyone but the DS, including their nationalist opponents. Vesna Pešić, ‘Tadić uzurpirao kompletnu vlast’, e-novine 15 May 2012, available at http:// www.e-novine.com/intervju/intervju-politika/64648-Tadi-uzurpirao-kompletnu-vlast.html. Accessed 20 January 2013. 22 I am referring in particular to the influential set of essays published as Between Facts and Norms (Habermas 1996) that are often taken in the literature for the definitive statements of Habermas’ approach. The essay on the post-national vision, in which Habermas called for a ‘constitutional patriotism’ is of particular relevance here. 23 This point highlights the inter-connection between the study of discourse ‘from above’ and the study of everyday (discursive) practices ‘from below’. Since both analytical dimensions are indispensable for the present study, I address the problem of political discourse in the following chapter.

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For the sake of facilitating comparison, I will now turn to an extract (in two sections) taken from a group discussion in Plovdiv, Bulgaria from November 2011. The participants in the following discussion are classmates studying English together one evening per week at a private language school; as in the previous group, all have higher education. Perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, three of the four have training in different branches of the engineering sciences although two of the group worked as the owners of businesses at the time. It is therefore of obvious relevance from a comparative point of view that this group appear to be a touch better off, rather more commercial and perhaps less academic in orientation in relation to the Niš group quoted above.24 It is also notable that Vili (once again, names have been changed) introduced herself as a member of Plovdiv’s Armenian community and, at different times during the conversation, verbally identified with both her Bulgarian citizenship and Armenian ancestry. The only reference in need of some explanation is that referring to the ‘Stolipinovo’ neighbourhood of Plovdiv, which is mentioned because it is home to most of Plovdiv’s large Roma population. This first section is taken from an early section of the discussion in which the participants are discussing the ‘good and bad’ of life in Bulgaria. Bozhidar (M, mid 30s, office worker): We are too tolerant and patient as a nation, we prefer waiting patiently, one day comes and another day passes by, but we just sit where we are and there is no progress. JD (author): If people in Bulgaria were more like the Greeks25 then, if they were protesting, would the situation be better now? Aneta (F, late 30s, Owner of cosmetics business): I do not know, only a few things bother me in Bulgaria. Mladen (M, early 40s, electronic engineer): The Serbs are the same way. There is no surprise they were bombed in the ’90s and now they live a better life than us. As a nation they are more united. We are more individualist. I do not know whether this is good or not. Vili (F, late 20s, sales engineer): Everywhere it is the same. I think it more depends on what kind of person you are. 24 All of these particularistic factors certainly impact upon political talk in ways that signal that this is not a ‘controlled comparison’. However, I argue with Brubaker and Laitin that the very idea of controlled comparison is an illusion (Brubaker & Laitin 1998: 435). Even the most closely-matched of real-world comparisons turn out to be ‘apples’ and ‘oranges’ under closer inspection, as in this case. 25 I used this analogy because it was one that I had often heard in contexts where Bulgarian speakers sought to contrast their own ‘passivity’ with the supposed militancy of their Greek neighbours.

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Aneta: What do you mean by saying it is the same everywhere? Vili: I mean, in Europe you cannot go protesting in the street like that. In Europe things just do not work that way. It just depends on you, whether you are an individualist or not. Aneta: Only the laws bother me in Bulgaria. I want my country to have strict law and order. Mladen: No one abides by the laws here. The fact is that laws exist, but no one cares about them. Aneta: In neighbourhoods like Stolipinovo there are no laws. From my point of view, that annoys me very much. Mladen: It annoys me too. Aneta: It is unbelievable. When I was young and I had a baby, my husband and I were both university graduates. One day we went to a market in Plovdiv, I do not want to say its name now, and we saw that there were new flats built for the Gypsies. And we lived in lodgings and paid rent and I wondered how to make two ends meet and we both had higher education. They get their electricity, water bills and everything paid because when the elections come along, they vote for who they have to and I vote for who I want to. Mladen: Their bills for electricity and water are still being paid by the government. Aneta: This is what happens to us – we are educated people and receive nothing. The youth of Bulgaria go abroad to study and remain to live abroad. This makes me angry, because I want my child to live here.

I have included this first section because it highlights a number of the background assumptions that are necessary to bear in mind when seeking to understand the stances adopted in the following section on politics. Specifically, I am referring to the fact that three of the four speakers (Bozhidar, Mladen and Aneta), admittedly aided to some extent by my prompt, explicitly describe the world as being divided into discrete nations each of which has its own essential characteristics. While this underlying national habitus does not necessarily connote a nationalist orientation – note that Bozhidar and Mladen conceive of their aim as criticizing the Bulgarian nation – this view of the world easily maps onto the view of politics as a competitive struggle in which some nations act and prosper while others stagnate in a kind of zero-sum game that would be familiar to scholars working in the Realist paradigm of international relations (after Waltz 1979; for a critique,

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see Wendt 1999). In fact, the popular auto-stereotype of Bulgarians as ‘passive’ or ‘tolerant’ works as a challenge, a call to assert one’s own national interest in order to meet the challenge presented by other nations (Rechel 2007). Only Vili appears to be uncomfortable with the generalizations being passed around the table, but her attempts to recast the terms of the conversation with the claim that ‘it is the same everywhere’ ultimately fails to convince. In arguing that individualist (as opposed to ‘collectivist’?) orientations depend only on the person concerned, she tries to evoke the positive example of ‘Europe’. However, her description of ‘Europe’ as a place where ‘you cannot go protesting in the street like that’ evokes a rather less liberal and more authoritarian image. In fact, the idea that the states of Western Europe prosper because they are less rather than more tolerant of dissent, that they achieve a national unity that is lacking in Bulgaria, is a pervasive one. Aneta ignores Vili’s comment and accepts the nationalist challenge implicit in the negative discourse of tolerance/passivity. She recasts the liberal discourse of the rule of law to focus on the alleged abuses of those cast as a national ‘other’. Thus, her strident insistence on the law becomes a means of airing her grievances about the Roma whom she perceives as a deviant national ‘other’ using up resources that should be preserved for more deserving Bulgarians. Overall, the discussion that emerges from the interaction is one that certainly bears the imprint of the liberal international order in which Bulgarian citizens are compelled to understand their place in the world, with particular references to the rule of law, individual autonomy and the exemplar of ‘Europe’. However, these ideas are not articulated together in any coherent manner, leaving nationalism intact as the dominant and prevailing discourse. Vili’s vision of ‘Europe’ is almost diametrically at odds with how most liberal democratic West European states like to present themselves. Mladen’s conception of Serbia as a country pushing ahead in a spirit of national unity is probably more fantastical still. Despite the subtly different issue stances of the speakers, they appear to share the assumption, unhelpful for the liberal, that progress occurs when all are compelled to pull in the same direction. In the second section, the same group discusses politics – specifically the recent local elections, with particular reference to the close race for the mayoral position in Plovdiv contested in the weeks just prior to the recording of the discussion in November 2011. Specific references are made to the illegal practices of vote buying that are widely believed to take place on a wide scale in the country,26 which always generates a considerable amount of comment at election times. Although the mayoral candidates are not mentioned by name, a reference is made to the surprise win by the ruling right-wing GERB party’s relatively unknown candidate Ivan Totev over the popular incumbent Slavcho Atanassov (of the small nationalist party VMRO-NIE) by just a few hundred votes. One controversy relating to this race was that the central (GERB) government in Sofia had withheld the payment 26 ‘OSCE observers assess Bulgarian elections positively, but raise concerns about vote-buying, media coverage’ (Press release), OSCE, 24 October 2010. Available at http:// www.osce.org/odihr/elections/84274. Accessed 31 January 2013.

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of over 20 million euros compensation to Plovdiv for the disposal of the capital’s garbage for the duration of Atanassov’s incumbency,27 and so the comments about ‘dunghills’ refer to this scandal. One suspicious reference is made to the fact that GERB candidates won by small margins in several towns across the country. Vili: Half of the votes were bought … and the other half were bought for a lot more money. Aneta: Who bought these votes? Everyone says that elections are bought. Mladen: It is impossible for it to happen everywhere, for the party which is in power now to win everywhere with the minimum required to win, by less than a third of a per cent. Aneta: The strangest thing is that we say votes were bought. Why not assume that maybe this is what the country needs? In the first place I am happy with the elections because I wanted this party to rule in Plovdiv and I was very happy that GERB won. Because I heard all kinds of things about the other candidates and so in this election I voted for the only candidate about whom I know nothing. The one and only reason for this is that I wish to have more money invested in this city. I do not think that the other candidates are so honest and respectable. They are all much of a muchness. Mladen: Why did they [GERB] divert several million away from our town a year and a half ago? Aneta: That is why I voted for the ruling party’s candidate – to get more money for Plovdiv! Mladen: And they will have it [the money] for the next few years and after that they won’t be in power. For sure, that is what will happen. Aneta: My choice was deliberate – economic. I thought about how we could have the money for the city in which I live. Plovdiv was facing the danger of becoming a huge dunghill for Sofia. Mladen: Well, it is a dunghill already.

27 This debt was subsequently settled, as the discussants anticipated, in the weeks following the installation of the GERB candidate in Plovdiv municipality. ‘Plovdiv Finally Gets Hefty Sum for Sofia’s Waste’, novinite.com, 14 December 2011. Available at http:// www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=134859. Accessed 31 January 2013.

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria [… Two comments omitted (Aneta continues to justify her vote for GERB in the same vein with Mladen arguing against)] Vili: I have friends who were candidates for municipalities, not for mayor, and they told me that all the parties sit down together with great mockery, they drink and discuss and then determine who does what and what will be robbed and acquired in the town. Mladen: I wonder how come there is still more to be stolen from this country. I still cannot figure it out.

With reference to form rather than content, the reasoned argument at the heart of this extract conducted between Aneta and Mladen demonstrates that the slightly-artificial setting of the group discussion has occasioned ‘the performance of a distinct form of personhood, one that revels in peaceful disagreement’ (Wedeen 2008: 119), which is to say that this exchange fulfils one of the minimal requirements of public sphere discussion. However, I am obviously also interested in content. While two of the discussants (Mladen and Vili) come close to the cynical and disappointed tone of the Serb discussants, the gloom is lifted by Aneta who declares herself to be very satisfied with the results of the election and with the ruling party. Clearly, Aneta takes the corruption (that she acknowledges) for granted and has ceased to be surprised or even offended by it. She explicitly accepts Mladen’s claim that the national GERB government was withholding funds from Plovdiv so long as they did not control the local authority and proudly declared that she voted for the GERB candidate ‘to get more money for Plovdiv!’. While such a cheery embrace of patronage politics is distressing for the democrat,28 it is also a minority position in my data. In this section and elsewhere, the responses of Vili and Mladen to the perceptions about electoral corruption that they refer to is more typical in that they are inclined to see all politicians as equally tainted. Vili’s closing anecdote of political actors sitting down together and planning to assetstrip their constituencies is a good illustration of this. While Mladen’s complaints in this section are broadly congruent with the kind of critique that a committed liberal might level at the political machinations that appear to have decided the electoral fate of Plovdiv, such an impression would be misplaced. Mladen elsewhere declares that he much preferred the system ‘before 10 November 1989’, never has voted and never will. Thus, it is fair to say that this group, excepting Aneta’s embrace of the system’s illiberal subversion, perceives no redemption for 28 With reference to scholarly attempts to judge the health of democracy from satisfaction surveys (Eurobarometer, World Values Survey and so on) it is worth considering the effect that citizens embracing clientelistic politics may have on the data, as enthusiastic adherents might possibly answer questions about ‘satisfaction with democracy’ positively. In addition, such votes help to keep turnout levels respectable in a way that should not necessarily be understood as an endorsement of the political system (‘liberal democracy’).

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the political system in any manner that is equivalent to the active support of the Niš group for the actions of independent agencies attempting to hold political figures to account. Moreover, while the Niš group appeared to be united by a discourse that actually provides a rationale for bringing figures to account on liberal grounds, it is unclear whether any of the Plovdiv group would be able to point to any guiding principle short of, perhaps, the nationalist call for solidarity vis-a-vis other nations. In presenting these close readings of conversational data, I have been careful to stress that these extracts are not representative of the broad samples of citizens who participated in the study. The Serbian extract in particular is selected specifically because it represents what I have characterized as a ‘counterpublic’ organized around liberal discourses of freedom, equality, representation, civic tolerance and so on. These will be the ‘normal’ registers of political discussion for a swathe of Serbia’s urban populations that might conservatively be estimated to number several hundreds of thousands nationally,29 but in a population of over seven million these ‘hard liberals’ represent no more than a sizeable minority. In this spirit, I will not hesitate to add that roughly half of the Serbian groups probably bore a closer resemblance in terms of discursive content to the featured Bulgarian group than they did to their ‘liberal-cosmopolitan’ compatriots. The economic scapegoating of marginal social groups, the assumption that national unity is a criterion of being European, and even nostalgia for authoritarian rule were all frequently encountered in Niš as well as Plovdiv. It is certainly worth reiterating that the Serbian public sphere is no exemplary case of liberal democratic practice, not least because many Serbian citizens are explicitly hostile or ambivalent with respect to democracy itself. However, while the Plovdiv conversation could probably also have taken place in Niš, the crux of my argument lies in the claim that the reverse is not also true. Put simply, the public sphere in Niš provides some of its citizens with a capacity to hold political elites to account in a way that is supportive of a specifically liberal conception of democracy, while the public sphere in Plovdiv does not. Furthermore, the presence of distinct liberal voices in the Serbian public sphere forces an awareness of challenges to illiberal and socially-conservative orthodoxies even among many of those citizens who will never take time to consider what Ombudsman institutions are for, or why institutions ought to be 29 It is obviously very hard to quantify the prevalence of political orientations. Voting figures cannot help much here since, as I aim to show in Chapter 4, such orientations are only weakly represented in the national political arena. However, it is very obvious on the ground that one is not only dealing with professional intellectuals but also sections of the population that are similarly unimpressed by the influence of mediocre nationalist authors, turbo-folk divas and bearded clerics on politics. After all, somebody besides my immediate informants must have been reading satirical websites like njuz.net and it must have been more than one graffiti artist who sneakily transformed every other daubing of ‘Srbija Srbima’ (‘Serbia for the Serbs’) graffiti into ‘Srbija svima’ (‘Serbia for Everyone’).

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‘independent of the ruling group’. Considering that some Nišlije were able to dissect institutional politics with such philosophical coherence, it should be no surprise to realize that many of their peers who did not seem to follow politics closely were at least able to distinguish liberal and inclusive political practices from illiberal and exclusivist ones. Of course, none of this negates the fact that a great many Serbs prefer to bind their political identity to the exclusivist categories of ethnic Serbdom and the Orthodox Church. Others evidently embrace the patronage politics of well-funded political parties promising less abstract rewards. Through all this, the Serbian public sphere will remain meaningfully pluralist and contested so long as at least some citizens continue to reject the illiberal discourses of the mainstream on clear, principled grounds. In Plovdiv, Bulgaria by contrast, this element of philosophical contestation is missing, ostensibly because no coherent oppositional counterdiscourse has emerged to challenge the nationalist and socially conservative assumptions in which mainstream political discourse is grounded. As in the featured extract, attempts to hold elites to account in the name of ‘Europe’ or ‘democracy’ usually fail because so few can tie these concepts to specific principles. In the absence of any other shared vocabulary, even young and highly-educated Bulgarians tend to fall back on ethnic nationalism and other discourses antithetical to liberal democratic principles. The result is that the Bulgarian public sphere is evidently experienced as a disharmonious consensus in which most seem unhappy with the political present, but find themselves understanding politics through the same exclusivist categories of understanding as the politicians they malign. The avoidance of philosophical conflict is achieved at the price of the elimination of meaningful pluralism.30 Comparing the Everyday Public Sphere in Serbia and Bulgaria While I have so far relied on just two selectively chosen group discussion extracts in order to ‘illustrate’ my argument, in this section I provide a brief summary of data gathered in the varied contexts of everyday life by means of one year of participant observation divided between the cities of Niš and Plovdiv. The analytical focus is slightly different in the sense that data gathered by means of participant observation is marginally better suited to judging questions of civic participation than discursive content. This methodological point informs the findings that I emphasize in this section: the Serbian public sphere is larger in the sense that those in Niš discussed politics far more frequently in the course of their everyday lives than did their counterparts in Plovdiv. From the perspective that democratic citizens are formed through participation in public spheres (Eliasoph 1998: 11, Arendt 1958), this would suggest that everyday life takes on a markedly

30 This formulation draws on Chantal Mouffe’s work. As Mouffe has argued, such cases of apparent consensus often mask the frustrations of diverse societies (Mouffe 1999).

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more democratic hue, providing more fertile soil for the formation of solidarities, suggesting higher levels of ‘civic power’. To make the case that politics was a recurring topic of everyday conversation in Niš is not to argue that most Nišlije ‘like’ politics. The spontaneous conversational forays into political territory that I observed were more often conducted in a spirit of distancing oneself from political machinations than in embracing them, a phenomenon that has already been described by political ethnographers working on Serbia (Greenberg 2010) and on other contexts (Eliasoph 1998, Fox 2004). To give just one of many examples of unprompted political talk from my Niš fieldnotes, a friend who worked as a teacher of physical education at one of the technical faculties of the university related the opinions of a senior sociologist on the topic of the announced embezzlement trial of Ceca Ražnatović to his assembled friends enjoying drinks in his flat. With some degree of relish, he said, ‘You know what Professor X told me about Ceca? He said that it is now we can tell that the elections are getting close’. Of course, this is really just a different way of expressing the same idea that the Niš group discussants used to understand the case, that the DS-led government was making a belated show of going after high-profile, well-connected underworld figures with the elections on the horizon (after allowing them to conduct their business with impunity during the intervening years since the last election). However, because this statement was unelicited when the speaker might conceivably have spoken about almost anything else, it is reasonable to make a few more observations. Firstly, the admiring tone suggests that the act of expressing clever-sounding opinions about politics increases the prestige of the speaker, which is to say that talk about politics is one of the socially-acceptable ways through which speakers in that context choose to construct their identities in relation to the world (on ‘making one’s appearance in the world’ through political discussion, see Arendt 1958). Secondly, the physical education teacher’s endorsement of the cynical opinion of the sociologist suggests that he too aspires to be critical about politics, to be someone who ‘gets it’ rather than a subject of manipulation. More often than not, conversations about politics were mocking and jocular, but when things became more serious, this gave way to anger. While certainly not complimentary about Serbian politics on the whole, the public sphere seemed to contain close to the amount of discussion about politics that one might hear among working class people in an English city; certainly not models of ‘informed citizens’, but not generally apolitical either. If one were required to do so, after a few months of acquaintance, it would probably be possible to characterize most of the people one encountered in terms of their political persuasions. With respect to the Bulgarian case, it is hard to describe ethnographically what I have characterized as a relative absence of public sphere discussion about politics. After six months in the field, it was generally much harder to identify one’s acquaintances in terms of their political persuasion, with the admitted exception of just a few of my university colleagues. This can be attributed to the fact that, rather than expressing views about specific events or political figures,

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many people preferred to express strong aversions to ‘politics’ in general. One suitable illustration of this tendency may be the aversion to formal politics in the country’s green movement, which – at least prior to the emergence of broad antigovernment protests in 2012–2013 – was the only progressive social movement able to mobilize Bulgarian citizens to any significant degree (Kenarov 2012). The general distaste among green activists for getting involved in politics no doubt helps to explain the electoral insignificance of the splintered green parties which exist (none of which passed the 1.5 per cent threshold for public electoral funding in 2009, not to mention the 4 per cent threshold for entering parliament). Within one organization that I volunteered for, those few members who were seeking to participate in the local elections were viewed with suspicion by the majority who did not. In part, this could be explained in terms of pragmatic considerations: politics involves making alliances that can leave one without access to public funds when the fortunes of one’s political allies falls in the bitter factional world of Bulgarian politics. However, such a pragmatic disavowal of politics could not explain the deep contempt with which many committed nature conservation workers and volunteers viewed those who ‘brought politics into the office’. Political involvement was seen by many as a means only of seeking ever greater personal power or, as one of the organization’s employees told me, ‘building an empire’. When I asked one senior member involved in the political faction why there was no enthusiasm in the green movement for forming progressive alliances of the kind popular in some Western European countries, where greens articulate their programme together with other progressive forces such as social democrats, minority rights groups, gender rights and pro-LGBT groups, he answered vaguely that the problem was that the green movement in Bulgaria contained many people who would not support it if it ‘became political’. Seeking clarification, I asked whether he was referring to the relatively large number of ‘skinheads’ who came along to green events and might withdraw their support if the greens threw their lot in with progressive parties. However, his response revealed that the barriers to progressive alliances were not imagined as rooted in popular aversions to specific causes, but to politics itself: ‘No, many people just don’t like politics. I mean lots of people, not just the skinheads’.31 Of course, the organizational structure of a green organization is a very specific context, but the dynamics observed are themselves informed by broader social norms. Like those in Serbia, when Bulgarians do discuss formal party politics, they usually prefer to identify ‘against’ rather than ‘for’. However, I argue in Chapter 4 that most Serbs may be understood as being more vehemently against some part of the political spectrum than others, in a way that quite obviously identifies them as ‘nationalists’, ‘liberals’ and so on. In Plovdiv, the abdication of identification with political competition was generally far more comprehensive – as with all of those in the group featured in this chapter, save the woman who embraced GERB on a clientelistic basis. After many months in the field I found that it was unusual that 31 Author’s fieldnotes, October 2011.

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I could characterize the political preferences of people whose social habits and cultural tastes I had come to know quite well, with the exception of some of my academic colleagues (a minority of whom identified as intellectuals of the political right – a stance discussed at length in Chapter 5). Most of the people I came to know best in Plovdiv are still more identifiable to me as Manchester United fans or as computer programmers than in terms of their political preferences, still less in terms of political philosophies of the kind implied by the ‘left’ and ‘right’ labels that are routinely attached to journalism on political competition in the country. The contrast I have presented above has important implications for how we might think about political participation. Voting is probably the dominant social scientific measure through which a ‘participatory’ political culture is identified (Dahl 1971), but it is by no means the only one. As should be clear from the theoretical discussion presented earlier, I favour those normatively engaged theories that stress the manner in which democratic citizens are constituted through the discursive activity of public sphere discussion (Arendt 1958, Habermas 1989, 1996, Fraser 1992, Warner 2002). Perhaps the most ambitious of these theories is that proposed by Hannah Arendt who, building upon the Aristotelian distinction between political and private persons, argued in The Human Condition that it is only through speech and argumentation in public contexts that human beings can reach their full potential – that of the political rather than the private person32 (Arendt 1958) . Of course, such normative ideas about how democracy ought to be performed are not judgemental about whether or not citizens are generally dismissive or effusive about the way that their societies are being governed, only about whether they participate in discussion. The Arendtian vision is still less dependent on the question of whether such agonistically organized discussion leads to the casting of votes. On the basis of these ideas, it is reasonable to make the argument, as even Habermas repeatedly does in spite of his predilection for prescribing specific legally-binding institutions, that it is public sphere discussion that is the very essence of democracy (Habermas 1989 [1962], 1996). On the basis of my fieldwork, I can simply report that the Serbian public sphere as observed in Niš, Serbia is considerably more prominent than that in Plovdiv, Bulgaria where citizens tend to be less inclined to indulge in self-organized argumentation about public matters. Consequently, independent of the kind of institutional development attested by measurements such as those provided by Freedom House, Bulgarian citizens are more atomized both from policy discourse and from each other, leading to an observed public sphere that is less contested, vibrant or evident. In the Arendtian sense, life is more political in Serbia, not marginally but obviously so. 32 The Aristotelian distinction between the private and the political also animates some of the celebrated work of Giovanni Sartori, who nevertheless concludes that a science of politics ought to be concerned primarily with the functioning of states (Sartori 1974). I find that Sartori’s view of politics as institutions, unlike Arendt’s view of politics as civic participation, contradicts the emphasis on public argumentation in the classical philosophical traditions that both scholars identify as antecedents of the modern study of politics.

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Conclusion: Liberal Institutions, Illiberal Democracy? I commenced this chapter by referring to the Democracy Scores published by Freedom House in which Serbia has consistently been graded as less democratic than Bulgaria over the past decade. These gradings are an artefact of the methodological approach used to deliver the verdicts, which is to say that they privilege institutional frameworks and practices over all else. I have not disputed the importance of formal institutions in this chapter, except to make the case that on their own they are not enough. Liberal democratic institutions can only lead to a fairer and more equitable society when they are staffed by officials and approached by citizens who both understand and identify with the principles and ideals enshrined in the system. In this sense, gradings that claim to assess democracy in different states with reference only to institutions must be seen as partial rather than comprehensive. With respect to the relative gradings of Serbia and Bulgaria offered by Freedom House, the data presented in this chapter suggests that they are misleading. Much of the distaste for including discursive elements of political culture in measurements of democracy results from the understanding that they are unmeasurable.33 This is debatable. While it may not be advisable to translate this kind of data into numbers, the discursive content and degree of participation in public sphere discussion is undoubtedly detectable, and therefore ripe for evaluation and comparison. In fact, when one takes up residence in a new society, public sphere discourse is the domain of political culture in which variation between contexts is most immediately apparent, long before institutional vagaries such as electoral systems or judicial codes can be expected to have any direct effect on one’s life. The newcomer usually starts to make preliminary judgements concerning whether people seem liberal or conservative, cosmopolitan or suspicious of the outside world within the first few days. Comparison is inevitable. Considering the comparative research project that is summarized in this chapter, I would argue that no scholar versed in the normative or empirical literature of the democratic public sphere could possibly perceive Bulgarian society as more democratic than that of Serbia. It is probably more consensual in the sense that the illiberal and exclusivist bases of mainstream political competition generates less dissent, but certainly not more democratic in any sense that Freedom House or the European Union should be applauding. These findings are as relevant for those focussing on institutions as for those who are interested in the public sphere, as the functioning of formal institutions is dependent on the public sphere. In fact, it is worth speculating that the relative 33 Consider the cautious manner in which Ekiert, Kubik and Vachudova implore their readers to recognize the importance of ‘Ostensibly arcane and impractical philosophical debates … [which] have tremendous relevance for the tone and tenor of political and social life’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 17). What can ‘impractical’ refer to here except for ‘difficult to translate into numbers’?

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institutional progress of Bulgaria up to 2008 as recorded in the Freedom House Democracy Scores was almost definitely shallower than the phrase ‘consolidated democracy’ implies. Pre-EU Accession institutional reform was worth risking on the part of power-holding elites who have subsequently intensified their corrupt practices (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011, Ganev 2013). The main reason they can get away with this is because citizens are ill-equipped to hold them to account. In 2011 cross-party parliamentary majorities were able to collude to include nonsensical stipulations in the Bulgarian electoral codes designed to guarantee unfairness in favour of the existing main players,34 but they did so on the calculation that the public were broadly unable to understand the liberal rationale behind electoral laws based on Western liberal templates. The Freedom House Democracy Score fell partly in response to this in 2012, but it happened with very little discussion or dissent because Bulgarian public discourse has never yet been characterized by liberal democratic ideals, not in 2005, 2008 or 2011. I should make clear that I have not covered all vital dimensions of public discourse in this chapter. It should be fairly obvious that the Bulgarian and Serbian citizens quoted above form their opinions and constitute their identities in very different contexts. Thus I have presented a condensed description of what public sphere discourse is like, not how it came to be like that. It is to that task – focussed on politics from above in the contemporary and recent historical context – that I will turn in the next chapter.

34 As I discuss at length in Chapter 5, the electoral codes adopted in early 2011 stipulate that ‘virtually all campaign coverage on public broadcasters must be paid for’ (OSCE 2011: 2), which resulted not only in the obviously enhanced visibility of the two best funded campaigns of the right-wing GERB and the Bulgarian Socialist Party candidates but also in a general ‘de facto absence of journalism’ (OSCE 2011: 16) in the sense that most media coverage took the form of paid advertisements that were not labelled as such.

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Chapter 3

Political Pluralism in the Mathematical or the Philosophical Sense? Comparing the Range of Discourse in Recent Serbian and Bulgarian Political History Politics, we argue, does not consist in simply registering already existing interests, but plays a crucial role in shaping political subjects. (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: xvii)

While my approach in this project privileges the prevalence of participatory democratic practices across society rather than focussing on the formal institutional settings of the state, this does not entail any less interest in the sphere of party political competition. In fact, relative to more minimalist and institutionallyfocussed attempts to measure democracy, which tend to stipulate a pluralism of ‘more than one party’ in the mathematical sense (Dahl 1971, Przeworksi et al. 2000), a discursive practices-oriented approach warrants closer attention to what political parties and their representatives actually say and do. Elite political competition and the discourse that is generated by political actors along the way have a key role in making possible distinct forms of political identification which are oriented to democratic competition. In other words, any political system is only meaningfully, philosophically plural when politicians articulate ‘meaningfully differentiated positions’ (Mouffe 2000) from each other. To the extent that a plurality of such positions is articulated by political parties, then the party system can be seen to be performing its democratic function of facilitating popular identification with the liberal democratic system. Where political parties do not fulfill this function, the role of civil society and the media in facilitating philosophical pluralism becomes vital. As I argued at length in the opening chapter, it is in the public sphere of discussion that democratic citizens are constituted (to a lesser or greater degree) through identification with the dynamic and contested set of norms of liberal democracy. In order to address such practices of citizenship directly, I compared the everyday public spheres of discussion in Chapter 2, concluding that liberal democratic forms of citizenship are enacted and embodied to a rather more observable degree in Serbia than in Bulgaria. However, my approach was deliberately ‘presentist’: a snapshot that, in common with annual formal measurements of democracy such as Freedom House, demonstrates where we are now rather than providing any attempt to explain how we got there. In order to tackle the dimension of political

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identity formation, it is necessary to address the political context in which, over time, it becomes possible to think and act in the varying ways that I describe in the ethnographic chapters of this book. The aim in this chapter is thus to consider the extent to which the range of political discourse available from recent historical Serbian and Bulgarian political competition has facilitated identification with and, by extension principled participation in, the liberal democratic system. The findings of this chapter may be summarized as follows. Through the following analysis, I demonstrate that political competition in both countries has, at least intermittently, provided coherent and at least partially liberal philosophical platforms during the past two decades. In both contexts, illiberal platforms have been prominent, although it was in Serbia that actors openly hostile to liberal democratic principles gained more power and influence. The trend revealed by recent developments in the respective spheres of party competition is in both cases towards less philosophical diversity, meaning that citizens will find it increasingly hard to identify with democratic politics on any normative, philosophical basis. This rather weak philosophical dimension of democratic political competition is conducive to the rise of alternative non-philosophical/ideological efforts to connect with voters, such as clientelistic and charismatic appeals, which are certainly present in both countries, but rather more predominant in Bulgaria. The Serbian political arena remains marginally more philosophically diverse, which I attempt to explain with reference to the deeper roots of progressive identity formation in the pre-1989 past. Drawing on these progressive roots, liberal civil society actors in Serbia have taken up the challenge of opposing the dominance of illiberal discourse on consistent, principled bases in a way that has not occurred in Bulgaria. It is probable that this disparity goes some way to explaining the ‘how we got there’ part with respect to the ethnographic evidence of the previous chapter which points to the existence of a recognizably liberal ‘counterpublic’ in Niš that had no observable counterpart in Plovdiv. This chapter is structured as follows. First, I will provide a discussion of the theoretical grounds upon which the following comparison will be based. The empirics of this chapter consist of an historical analysis, based largely on secondary scholarly sources, that aims at characterizing the development of political platforms in each society with particular reference to the philosophical ideas (or lack thereof) that are employed in order to connect with citizens. I conclude with a discussion of the findings in comparative perspective. The Role of Political Discourse in Making Democratic Citizenship Possible As we have seen, participatory theorists of democracy tend to agree on the role of public discussion in making democratic forms of citizenship possible (Arendt 1958, Pitkin 1967, Habermas 1989 [1962], 1996, Sandel 1982, Mouffe 2000, Warner 2002, Wedeen 2008). Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe share this basic assumption, stating that ‘political identities are constituted and re-constituted

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through public sphere debate’ (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: xvii), but analytically they privilege the ‘political moment’ rather than direct observation of everyday discussion. Their analytical approach arises from their efforts to account for the proliferation of progressive political identities (often referred to as the ‘new social movements’) that in the decades after World War II posed a challenge to the essentialist conception of class in the work of Marx. For these authors,1 persons come to identify with the democratic system when the philosophical discourse within it enables them to understand themselves in terms of such democratic competition. This idea is premised on what fellow discourse analysts Jason Glynos and David Howarth have referred to as ‘an ontology of lack’ (Glynos & Howarth 2007). According to this perspective, which is inspired at least in part by Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, the self is viewed as being constantly engaged in the act of constituting itself in relation to the world through a series of alternating identifications (Mouffe 2000: 147–148). This process of identification can never lead to the kind of ‘already achieved’ identities presupposed, for example, by rationalist talk of ethno-national group ‘interests’ (Fearon 1994, Hardin 1995).2 In other words, nobody ever is ‘American’, ‘white’, ‘working-class’ or a ‘Democrat’, although they may identify with any or all of these categories at various times.3 With respect to how this ontological framework plays out in the formation of political identities/solidarities, it follows that it is only possible to identify as ‘working-class’ so long as this ‘identity’ (or ‘nodal point’, to use the psychoanalytical vocabulary favoured by Laclau and Mouffe) has been discursively constructed in the political sphere. According to the assumptions underlying this theoretical paradigm, the discursive acts of public actors (speeches, policy statements, television interviews and so on) in constructing relatively stable philosophical platforms are a condition of possibility for the identification of persons with political movements. 1 I am aware of the argument that Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have come to represent subtly different approaches in spite of their celebrated co-publications (Wenman 2002). In this sense, my approach in this chapter derives more from the theoretical concepts that Mouffe has advanced in her sole publications, with particular respect to her valorization of the concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’ (Mouffe 1999, 2000), as will be discussed. Correspondingly, the normative emphasis of Laclau’s recent work on the desirability of ‘populist’ hegemonic articulations (Laclau 2003, 2005) has less direct influence on my stance. Nevertheless, it is necessary to acknowledge Laclau’s contribution to some of the ideas referenced. 2 While Laclau and Mouffe employ a psychoanalytic vocabulary to describe their theoretical approach to the formation of political identities, these theories are largely compatible with recent sociological theorizing on identification as an ongoing process that ‘never reaches an end-point’ (Brubaker & Cooper 2000). 3 Richard Mole provides an account of how social agents identifying with numerous categorical forms of identity might be expected to alter their actions according to context; for a ‘gay working-class Welshman’, these different identities will vary in importance depending on whether this individual is on a day-trip to London, at an Eisteddfod, at a gay bar and so on (Mole 2007).

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Considering that discourse analysts consider the articulation of political platforms (‘Workers of the World Unite!’) to precede social identities (worker, working-class) rather than to derive from the latter (Torfing 1998), the discourse analytic framework stands in direct opposition to the structural-historical framework of political cleavage formation that has been influential in political sociology since the classic work of Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (Lipset & Rokkan 1967). In their work on the formation of political cleavages in Western Europe, the authors stressed the explanatory primacy of historicallyformed social segmentation as the basis of the party systems. The continuing influence of these modes of understanding is observable with reference to some of the more widely-cited works on party systems in contemporary Postcommunist Eastern Europe. For example, Elster, Offe and Preuss premise their study of political cleavages in four post-communist societies upon the structuralhistorical assumption that the predominant cleavages to emerge would be based on ‘something other than economic class’, owing to the equalizing role of state socialism over the preceding 40 years (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 247–254). According to such accounts, it is the underlying structural composition of society that precedes and causes the formation of political cleavages. As has been argued from a number of perspectives, if the idea of the social construction of identities in historical time is accepted (and it is very rarely denied), then it makes no sense to ‘bracket’ this idea in order to conduct one’s analysis with reference to the interaction of supposedly pre-existing social groups (Jackson 2006). An unhelpful by-product of claiming the structural determination of political cleavages is that the rationale for considering the ongoing work of discourse in constituting and reconstituting political cleavages, through observable acts of speech and deed, is foreclosed. Discourse analytical approaches to political identity therefore rest upon a rejection of structural-historical assumptions about society and an assertion of the constitutive power of discourse. Having described the fundamental ontological propositions relating to Laclau and Mouffe’s ideas concerning political identification, it is necessary to expand on the normative position that Mouffe has articulated with relation to the democratic system. Whilst basically agreeing with Jürgen Habermas’ argument that democratic publics are formed through practices of critical debate, Mouffe takes issue with his idea that participants engaged in political debate ought to ‘transcend differences’ with the aim of reaching a consensus (Habermas 1996). Rather than viewing political conflict as a problem to be overcome, Mouffe argues that ongoing adversarial conflict deriving from a pluralism of ‘meaningfully differentiated positions’ that cannot be ‘negotiated away’ is the defining characteristic of democratic pluralism. She terms her preferred system ‘agonistic pluralism’, where agonism connotes the practice of principled argumentation between opponents viewing each other as ‘adversaries to be argued with’ rather than antagonistic conflict in which one’s opponents are seen as enemies to be destroyed. Thus, a system that is both pluralist and democratic should consist of a plurality of distinct platforms each one of which recognizes the others’ right to participate in politics. Far from viewing consensus

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as the mark of social harmony, she argues that one should view ‘apparent’ political consensus as the eradication of meaningful pluralism through hegemonic and exclusionary social relations, masking the frustration of those voices excluded from debate4 (Mouffe 2000: 755–757). To return to the scenario I sketched earlier, the articulation of a political platform/ identity in the public arena (for example. Socialism) is a condition of possibility for the identification of the self (for example working-class) in the terms implied by the articulatory discourse (for example ‘Workers of the World Unite!’). What the system of ‘agonistic pluralism’ entails is that several distinct philosophical positions will be represented in the liberal political sphere, leading to adversarial political contestation. This enables the self to identify not only with a specific political identity, but also with the system through which the goals implied by this political identity are pursued – in other words with democratic politics based on peaceful disagreement. When the democratic political sphere fails to provide sufficient differentiation of positions in order to generate the adversarial conflict that sustains it, as when all parties stand for similar positions or vitally important conflicts are excluded from the discourse, it becomes progressively less likely that citizens will be able to identify with it. Thus, when privileging the identification needs of the citizen, it is vital to know not only that a political system consists of several independent parties (mathematical pluralism) but also that it consists of several distinct philosophical platforms. The research problem of the distinctness of political platforms can be accessed through reference to political discourse, and this rationale stands behind the approach of this chapter. It is worth considering how applicable Mouffe’s model of agonistic pluralism is to contexts such as post-1989 Central and Eastern Europe where political identities oriented to democratic competition had to develop from a very shallow base owing to the recent authoritarian past. For example, it is clear that many of Mouffe’s statements with respect to the influence of ultra-nationalist movements are premised upon existing agonistic conflict that implies the referent of longstanding Western democratic systems with their established left-right political axes in which non-liberal political actors enter the fray as unwelcome guests: When the agonistic dynamic of the pluralist system is hindered because of a lack of democratic identities that one could identify, there is a risk that this will multiply confrontations over essentialist identities and non-negotiable moral values. (Mouffe 1999: 756)

In this sense, Mouffe fails to consider the nature of the more typical challenge to democratizing states wherein ‘essentialist’ political articulations usually constitute the political mainstream. ‘Democratic identities’ only enter political discourse 4 In this sense, Mouffe joins feminist and post-colonialist scholars in arguing that the idea of a single public sphere is sure to exclude the concerns of subaltern groups, confining them to the private sphere (Fraser 1992, Edward Said cited in Kapoor 2002).

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to the extent that they are articulated in the discursive contexts administered by ‘nationalizing states’ (Brubaker 1995) founded to further the cultural and political rights of a titular nation (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 255). However, notwithstanding the Western empirical focus of Mouffe’s concerns, it is hard to argue with the basic philosophical premise that she implies: political identities constructed in essentialist ways that identify enemies to be excluded from politics are not conducive to democratic pluralism. Notwithstanding the probable necessity of absorbing nationalist constructions of identity into democratic competition in the post-communist context, this does not entail that we need regard them as ‘democratic identities’ (even when their leaders abide by democratic norms in the minimalist sense of honouring election results) unless those ‘nationalist’ principles are somehow subordinated to liberal and inclusive principles at the level of discourse. This indeed is an exacting standard against which to measure new democracies: that a number of philosophically distinct democratic identities (excluding ‘undemocratic’ ones) ought to be provided through the discursive articulations of political movements. Nevertheless, it follows from Mouffe’s theory that identification with democratic politics is only rendered possible when such conditions are met, and I contend that this is more and not less true of political contexts where democratic citizenship cannot rely on established institutional modes of adversarial contestation.5 If the analytical vocabulary used by Laclau and Mouffe seems remote from most of the political science literature on democratization, it is worth considering that similar ideas have also been used periodically in the more mainstream works in the literature. A prominent example that comes to mind is Giovanni Sartori’s statement that electoral systems are only effective when a majority of citizens identify with ‘abstract party images’ (Sartori 1994 cited in Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 129). This underlying normative bias towards party systems based on programmatic cleavages (i.e. based on philosophically-consistent policy programmes) remains a stable feature of comparative politics work on political cleavages and party systems, with clientelistic or charismatic linkages continuing to be seen as pathologies (Mainwaring 1998; for a dissenting approach, see Kitschelt 2000). This normative concern for the role of distinct ideas in politics also applies to much of the work on the progress of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe, including the influential article by Ekiert, Kubik and Vachudova featured in the previous chapters. After calling for ‘ideological/ philosophical clarity’, the authors state that the politicians of the region ‘need 5 It could be argued that the processes of EU integration that have committed states to economic liberalization mean that many substantive policy issues are ‘already made’ at a supra-national level, limiting the ability of domestic politicians to offer policy alternatives which differ meaningfully from each other. However, the very perceptible variation between specific post-socialist contexts reveals that the task was taken up with a greater degree of sincerity and political imagination in some places than others, as I will attempt to show in this chapter.

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to decide whether to prioritize individual choice and responsibility or alternative values such as social solidarity and reducing inequality’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 18). While the political pluralism they envisage clearly resembles the left-right divide characteristic of West European societies, when they describe the merits of the ‘articulation … of explicit and publicly acceptable moral and philosophical principles’, the language employed finds some common ground with theorists of public discourse.6 Furthermore, it is clear from the preceding passage on the need to oppose ‘undemocratic … cultural syndromes such as various forms of religious and nationalist fundamentalisms’ that the authors are basically in agreement with Mouffe’s strong normative emphasis on the liberal quality of philosophical pluralism. While the statements of democratization advocates like Ekiert et al. may lack the philosophical sophistication of discourse analysts, their vision is a logical one: so long as the democracy we are concerned with is liberal democracy, then only policy programmes congruent with liberal principles can realistically strengthen it. Finally, it is worth sounding two notes of caution with respect to the limits of what it is possible to reveal through the analysis to be conducted in this chapter. In the first instance, I would like to add a disclaimer before proceeding lest my reliance on the concept of ‘discourse’ in this theoretical section should lead the reader to expect a characteristic discourse analytic approach, say a genealogy of political rationalities. In fact, what I attempt is something rather more general and thus unavoidably shallower in its depth of coverage. My approach is to build on existing scholarship to try to make sense of several political movements in order to succinctly illustrate the philosophical character of each, supported by the analysis of a limited quantity of actual discourse. While I present little original archival research in this chapter, the influence of discourse theory is present through my attempts to interpret actual discursive practices such as political speeches and policy acts (where described and cited in the literature), rather than relying only on broad characterizations of political movements as ‘nationalist’ or ‘left-wing’ of the kind found in many empirical overviews. The aim is to piece together what evidence I can find with respect to the range of philosophical stances present in national political contexts rather than demonstrating the provenance and subtleties of any one specific movement. This discursive-historical analysis should permit a rough evaluation of the degree to which political competition in these states has facilitated citizens’ identification with the liberal democratic system. Secondly, as a political ethnographer, my epistemological approach (laid out in the second half of Chapter 1) contends that the top down analytical focus on government rationalities that has been favoured by discourse analysts since 6 ‘Articulation’ here can be understood as referring to discursive acts by political actors that are engaged in making political platforms known to the public. This, together with the second idea of ‘linking political demands together in a chain of equivalence’ is what Laclau refers to by ‘articulation’ in his theorizing on political identity formation (On Populist Reason, published in 2005, shortly prior to the time at which the authors wrote).

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Foucault7 can only possibly reveal an incomplete picture of political identification. I contend that the discursive existence of distinct philosophical platforms shows that citizens could possibly identify with political contestation, not that they actually do.8 This analytical distinction is particularly appropriate to political contexts where practices of popular identification with governance and decisionmaking are less thoroughly ingrained in social life. A rather extreme example of this disconnect is provided by the ethnographic work of Lisa Wedeen on Syria. Based on fieldwork in the 1990s, she argued that the cult of personality promoted by President Assad’s propaganda machine did not actually promote charismatic identification with the national leader, who was portrayed as a God-like genius in state posters and propaganda. Rather, argued Wedeen, citizens recognized the obvious falsehood in such depictions, but their ubiquity and blatant manipulation of the discourse served to remind people of the power of the regime and in this indirect manner helped to produce the submissiveness that was demanded (Wedeen 1999). While I do not mean to suggest that either society in this study resembles Syria in the 1990s, the lesson that discourse need not be assumed to be indicative of sincere efforts to facilitate identification with the messages conveyed by political actors is generally applicable. In fact, Hannah Arendt has theorized this point in general philosophical terms. While Arendt generally emphasized the socially constructive, ‘world-making’ capacity of political speech, she conceded that speech can be regarded as ‘mere talk’ when ‘the actor does not reveal himself’ through it (Arendt 1958: 70–71). In other words, while political actors performing in the public sphere have the capacity to create solidarities that impact upon the identities of those who participate in the discourse created, this does not apply when the actor conceives of their identity/interests as one thing, and seeks support on this basis, but describes another. As it is impossible to accurately measure the intentions or sincerity of political actors, I take the position that the best way to gauge the effect of such speech is to listen for its resonance in the speech and practices of its intended targets (as in fact, Wedeen did). For this reason, it is 7 In justifying his own analytical focus on discursive rationalities, Foucault described actual practices as ‘a witches’ brew’ (Foucault 1991: 81), which I take to imply two distinct ideas. Firstly, as ethnographers like myself would tend to agree, actual practices will never have perfect congruence with the discursive rationalities in relation to which they are constructed. Secondly, and on this point Foucault’s intentions are less explicitly laid out and perhaps less palatable to the ethnographer, everyday practice is rather less amenable to reliable scholarly explication. For a good explication of the tension between discourse analysis and ethnography from a Foucauldian perspective, see the discussion in Michelle Brady’s article (Brady 2011). 8 This analytical distinction, between elite discourse and everyday practice, is an idea that is often credited to the historian Hobsbawm’s thinking on nationalism (1993: 10) and has led to the development of largely ethnographic approaches to the studies of ethnicity and nationalism seeking to uncover the domain of everyday practice (Brubaker, Fox, Feischmidt & Grancea 2006, Fox & Miller Idriss 2008). I contend that it applies equally well to other kinds of political discourse, including liberal democracy itself.

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important to bear in mind when reading the following empirical sections that the crucial question of the empirical resonance of these discourses with their targets does not automatically follow and is analysed elsewhere in the ethnographic chapters of this book. Keeping Political Discourse Contested: The Persistence of Liberal Opposition in the Illiberal Political Culture of Milošević and Post-Milošević-Era Serbia Serbia’s turbulent modern history is both very well-documented in the academic literature and familiar to a wider international audience through memories of periods in the 1990s when reports of the wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo were featured almost nightly on news bulletins. Not surprisingly, the country’s involvement in those wars during the Milošević-era has led to a persistent image of the country in the West as synonymous with nationalist excess. For example, at the time of the fieldwork, the events deemed worthy of reports in the British Guardian newspaper seemed to be sampled according to their relevance to the ‘backstory’ of nationalist contention and war.9 This serves to cement the image of Serbia as a country that is going through a protracted post-war transition in which nationalist and moderate forces are engaged in an ongoing struggle for control of the country’s future. Of course, this narrative is at least partly true. However, it is misleading in at least one respect that has very significant consequences for understanding the landscape of political contestation in the country both in recent historical and contemporary terms. Specifically, the emphasis on the main political blocs that have at least historically been distinguishable from each other primarily with respect to the degree of flexibility concerning their nationalist demands underplays the continuing influence of marginal but persistently visible intellectual and cosmopolitan discourses that do not fit the nationalist-moderate axis. From the normative liberal perspective that is explicit in my schema (but no less vital to most attempts to measure the quality of democracy), it is very important indeed that citizens are able to identify with progressive philosophical articulations that serve to make liberal democratic citizenship possible even when the mainstream political field remains restricted in a way that favours illiberal orthodoxies. In Serbia, I contend that the distinct forms of personhood implied by 9 Around the time of the fieldwork, Guardian readers could have read about the openly nationalist Serbian football hooligans who succeeded in getting an international fixture in Italy postponed in late 2010, negotiations between political elites from Belgrade and Priština a few months later, a flood of articles triggered by the arrest in Serbia of the Bosnian Serb war fugitive Ratko Mladić on 26 May 2011 and then some coverage of the border clashes around the Serbian-controlled enclave in Northern Kosovo from July 2011 onwards. During this time period, only the occasional coverage of Serbia’s bid to join the European Union was not obviously linked to readers’ memories of nationalism and war.

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liberal democratic citizenship have been enabled primarily through the persistent efforts of liberal civil society actors to maintain a presence in public consciousness. From the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Serbia in the 1990s A wide range of progressive philosophical ideas had already attained cultural prominence by the late socialist period. The influence of ideas not sanctioned by the regime at that time in Serbia, as a constituent republic of non-aligned Yugoslavia, can be verified by reference to the existence of a large number of dissenting intellectual groups in the 1980s. By the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, such groups had long been spreading social democratic, feminist and (equally unhelpfully from the perspective of the Yugoslav regime) nationalist ideas.10 At the same time, it should be acknowledged that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was an authoritarian state (Cohen 2001) that permitted dissent only in so far as it was not considered to impinge upon the political pre-eminence of the communists. Nevertheless, the fact that the open exchange of ideas was generally permitted outside of the formal political arena had allowed a vibrant cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural scene to develop in Serbia’s major cities. This meant that many more educated Serbs were able to express themselves without being co-opted by the Communist Party, leaving the political and intellectual organizations of the state with a ‘primarily mediocre membership’ (Gordy 1999). When Slobodan Milošević gained control of the League of Communists, he looked for support among those generally older, more rural and less educated sections of the population who had never been active in the pluralist and cosmopolitan life of the urban centres (Gordy 1999), utilizing rhetoric that was primarily anti-elitist and only secondarily nationalist (Vujačić 1995, Vladisavljević 2008). Thus, distinct political platforms had already been articulated in the country before the beginning of campaigning for the first multiparty elections in 1990 in which Milošević was to succeed in cementing his power. The relatively rich cultural life of Serbia’s urban centres in the 1970s and 80s had bequeathed the nascent democratic state with a significant proportion of the population who identified with progressive ideas and were never likely to be satisfied with life under Milošević’s nationalist-authoritarian former communists. According to V.P. Gagnon, for Milošević’s regime, it was the threat presented to the power-holding conservatives by mass mobilization on the part of those in favour of pro-democratic reforms, rather than any positive mobilization behind nationalist ideology, that provided the strategic rationale for Serbia’s involvement in the wars of Yugoslav succession in the 1990s. By this account, each time the scale of anti-regime mobilization became intolerable for the regime, those 10 Dević (1997) and Fridman (2011) provide brief overviews of the progressive philosophical landscape in late Yugoslavia, while Jasna Dragović-Soso has discussed the role of the nationalist intelligentsia in aiding the rise of Milošević (Dragović-Soso 2002).

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in charge followed a ‘strategy of demobilization’ that involved embroiling the country in wars, enabling the regime to appeal for – and sometimes enforce – a degree of ‘national unity’ (Gagnon 2004).11 Zoran Djindjić and the Democratic Party The broad alliances of parties that emerged in opposition to Milošević and the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) during the 1990s were only really united by a desire to remove Milošević and his allies from office (Bieber 2003). However, the most important of these opposition parties, the Democratic Party (DS), certainly gained much of its initial appeal from continuity with cosmopolitan avant gardes who aimed to work within the liberal democratic system to promote a progressive, emancipatory politics that was more than just ‘anti-communism’. Some of the party’s initial elite, including its first leader Dragoljub Mićunović, were intellectuals drawn from the famous Yugoslav Praxis group of social democratic thought. However, the most important figure to take account of is undoubtedly Zoran Djindjić, a committed political reformer who replaced Mićunović at the helm and would remain a major figure in Serbian politics, serving as PM after the overthrow of Milošević in 2000 until his assassination in 2003. Djindjić was widely credited with transforming the DS into a modern political organization capable of challenging Milošević’s SPS, and the DS together with its partners in the Zajedno (Together) coalition did indeed win control of most of Serbia’s large cities in the 1996 elections in spite of the fact that the media and state apparatus was heavily biased towards the incumbents (Gagnon 2004). When the 2000 elections came round, Djindjić’s DS was easily the best-supported opposition party, despite the need to work with less progressive parties to defeat the Milošević regime.12 As PM in 2001, Djindjić was instrumental in delivering Milošević to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) despite considerable domestic political opposition and the hostility of the bulk of the press. Against this image of the liberal reformer, it is sometimes argued that Djindjić reluctantly embraced nationalism for purposes of political expediency (Jou 2009). However, it should be remembered that an explicit rejection of nationalism would have been politically counter-productive for the cause of Serbia’s best known liberal, who was already routinely taunted as a traitor for having left Serbia at the time of the NATO campaign (when the ailing Milošević regime was targeting its opponents for assassination), and this smear campaign only intensified after 11 While Gagnon’s thesis conflicts with the accounts of some scholars who place rather more emphasis on nationalism as a cause of war (Hayden 2002, 2007, S. Kaufmann 2001), it is undeniable that Milošević faced massive civil opposition throughout the 1990s. 12 The nationalist Koštunica, head of the politically insignificant DSS party, was nominated as presidential candidate in opposition to Milošević in order to aid the cohesion of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition that included nationalists as well as democrats.

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Djindjić assumed the office of PM and could be represented as doing the bidding of an ‘anti-Serbian’ international community (Kisić and Stanojlović 2011: 168– 171). Rather, as can be seen from the text of a speech he delivered on the subject of ‘Nationalism and Patriotism’ to students at the University of Banja Luka shortly before his assassination, Djindjić never stood for any kind of nationalism that would have been recognizable to his political opponents: If you look at France, England, Germany, Austria, you'll see a greater degree of “nationalism” than us. But there it is not recognized as nationalism. It is patriotism. That's what the Americans did in Vietnam, it wasn’t nationalism, it was patriotism based on mistaken assumptions, but at the final account, it was possible to say: that was a mistake. I mean, part of our problem is that we express our own national interests in the wrong way … we link it to ethnic origin first and foremost, to ethnic difference and a static position that would lead to certain failure because it is an approach that is not appropriate for modern societies. That does not mean that we should abandon the national interest and say: the alternative is internationalism, let the world do what they want and we will have to follow. No. We need a way to redefine the expression (redifinšemo ispoljavavanja [sic]) of our collective identity in the same way that the nations that have been successful in defending their national interests have done.13

In this speech, Djindjić exhibits a will to depart quite boldly from the heavily mythologized, and ethnically exclusive official history that intellectuals allied to the Serbian state under Milošević (such as the writer Dobrica Ćosić) promoted. In fact, the normative vision of ‘nationalism/patriotism’ he promotes to the students (recommended to the audience as representing what those evidently successful Westerners do) is a form of solidarity at the national level, but one that stresses the need for flexibility/ negotiability, ethnic inclusivity and the possibility of learning from the mistakes of one’s compatriots – a bold message to relate in the Serb Republic in Bosnia. Despite the label of ‘nationalism’, it is a distinctly liberal conception of collective identity that finds more of an echo in liberal theories acknowledging the need for solidarity underpinning democratic community14 than 13 Speech delivered to students at the University of Banja Luka on 20 February 2003. Cached at the Virtual Museum of Dr Zoran Djindjić [online] at http://www.zorandjindjic. org/govori. Accessed 20 January 2013. 14 Such an imagined reading list might include Craig Calhoun’s then contemporary work in this direction (Calhoun 2002) or even Habermas’ call for ‘constitutional patriotism’ (Habermas 1996). My point is not to argue that Djindjić had read and taken inspiration from such theories but that his thinking was closer to progressive re-workings of the national question than just about any other politician deploying the term. It is probably not coincidental that Jürgen Habermas, the leading political philosopher behind these ideas, had been in contact with Djindjić at the time of his doctoral studies in Germany during the late 1980s.

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in the rhetoric of his political opponents. The fact that Djindjić had to operate in Serbia at a time when the dominance of illiberal voices in the political and media spheres meant that any outright condemnation of nationalism tout court by the country’s PM was out of the question should not therefore cloud his credentials as a politician who strived to bring real progressive, philosophically-consistent ideas to the public arena. Vojislav Koštunica and the Nationalist Opposition My emphasis on the importance of the work of Djindjić ought not to lead to the argument that the overall character of the political opposition to Milošević was founded on anti-nationalist or anti-war positions. In fact, much of it was not. The various alliances opposing the regime in the 1990s invariably included some political actors who defined their political programme primarily in terms of nationalist goals. Vojislav Koštunica, who was chosen as the Presidential candidate of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia coalition for the 2000 elections which led to Milošević’s ouster, is a case in point. Koštunica had engineered the breakaway of a nationalist faction from the Democratic Party to form the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) some years earlier and made no secret of his vision of a democratic and ‘normalized’ Serbia that was nonetheless premised on a political community identifying with the Serb nation, including support for the Serb government in Bosnia and the guardianship of Kosovo as the ‘heart of Serbia’. Ahead of the 2000 elections, Koštunica explicitly criticized his more liberal coalition partners in the Democratic Party in his characteristically uncharismatic style: In Serbia … the national question will have a significant impact because of the situation Serbia is in because of the bombing, because of the propaganda of Milošević. One cannot put it aside. We must have an answer to that. A large part of the Serbian opposition is not aware of this fact. So it is underestimating the importance of the national issue. We have to try to find, and this is the position of the DSS, to find the possibility to compromise between the importance of the national issue and the importance of Serbia being a normal member of international organizations, the EU, etc. I think that part of the opposition underestimated this national issue of Kosovo. (Cited in Bieber 2003: 78)

In this speech delivered prior to Milošević’s ouster, the candidate stresses the need to tread a middle course between nationalist goals and Western acceptance. However, after Milošević was deposed and the strains of coalition became increasingly evident over the course of two terms in power, Koštunica gradually became less inclined to maintain diplomatic cooperation with liberals in the DS as he focussed his efforts on remoulding Serbia in a more conservative and antiWestern direction based partly on alliances with ethically-compromised sections of the national press. Koštunica repeated several obviously fabricated stories

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to sections of the nationalist press that were already aiming to present Djindjić as a crime ‘godfather’ in the year before the PM’s assassination at the hands of actual underworld figures (Kisić and Stanojlović 2011: 170). Over the course of the past decade, Koštunica has continued his journey to the ultranationalist edge of the political spectrum, articulating his platform around a Russophile anti-EU position and a social conservatism based on an alliance with the ultranationalists who dominate the Serbian Orthodox church.15 Furthermore, Koštunica was certainly not the only nationalist figure to emerge from the political opposition to the Milošević regime. Earlier iterations of anti-Milošević coalitions until 1997 had tended to include the nationalist-royalist Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), led by the writer Vuk Drašković, which would later briefly serve as the junior coalition partner of Milošević’s SPS in 1999.16 Indeed some, such as Vojislav Šešelj’s Radicals, claimed opposition through much of the 1990s (while enjoying considerable exposure through regime-controlled media) on the basis of a stance that was not just more explicitly nationalist than the regime but also more openly militaristic (Pribićević 1999).17 In short, there were many figures whose motivations for involvement in the opposition to Milošević cannot be attributed to any principled opposition to Milošević’s stated aim to ‘see all Serbs in one state’. From Political Polarization to Blurred Distinctions Considering that not only Milošević and his allies but also many of his political opponents stood on illiberal platforms, it is worth questioning the degree to which the dichotomous and antagonistic socio-political divisions created by the confrontation of Milošević’s anti-intellectual nationalists with liberalcosmopolitans have survived to present times. Eric Gordy, himself the author of a monograph that emphasized these divisions (Gordy 1999) has since suggested that the salience of these antagonisms may have dissipated to some degree since the 1990s (Gordy 2005). However, other scholars maintain the position that Serbian 15 Before losing power in 2008, Koštunica signalled his willingness to steer Serbia closer to the Russian sphere of influence (and further from the West) by forcing through the cut-price sale of Serbian energy concerns to the Russian state-owned Gazprom. By the time of the fieldwork in 2011, Koštunica’s DSS had travelled further to the ultra-nationalist side of the political spectrum (Ramet 2011: 6). For example, he supported the controversial cleric Amfilohija who had encouraged nationalist thugs to violently attack participants in the Gay Pride Parade in Belgrade in late 2010. 16 This co-habitation was not ultimately a cordial one. In the latter days of the Milošević regime, when Drašković’s loyalty to the regime had come under suspicion, Drašković was the subject of two unsuccessful assassination attempts in September 1999 and June 2000 (Bieber 2003). 17 Like Drašković’s Serbian Renewal Movement, Šešelj’s Radicals were also co-opted to serve as coalition partners of Milošević’s SPS around the time of the NATO bombardment in 1999.

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political culture remains as polarized as ever, most notably Sabrina Ramet in the introduction to a recent edited volume on post-Milošević Serbia, Civic and Uncivic Values. Her characterization of Serbia as polarized is justified by reference to the almost even split in votes between camps she has characterized as ‘liberals’ and ‘ultranationalists’ in the 2008 elections: … it is nonetheless clear that Serbia today is as highly polarized as it has been for at least two decades; indeed, the political divisions are probably deeper today than they were prior to October 2000. This polarization was also seen in the snap parliamentary elections held in May 2008, when Boris Tadić’s pro-EU coalition won 38.8% of the vote against 40.5% of the vote garnered by the ultranationalist coalition of Tomislav Nikolić’s SRS and Vojislav Koštunica’s DSS. (Ramet 2011: 7)

Her claim that the political divisions of the present are sharper than those of the 1990s is a contentious one that relies principally upon her equation of the coalition blocs as representing distinct social blocs.18 It is this equation of voting patterns with the political orientation of social constituencies that ultimately fails to stand up to scrutiny. While Ramet’s description of Tomislav Nikolić’s Radicals, still then officially committed to the goal of a Greater Serbia under the nominal leadership of Hagueindictee Vojislav Šešelj, as ‘ultranationalists’ seems reasonable at least from the policy perspective, the depiction of the pro-European bloc as the expression of a full half of Serbia yearning for a democratic pro-European future is more problematic. Firstly, and most dubiously, the author’s claim accepts Milošević’s former party, the Socialist Party of Serbia under Milošević’s former spokesman Ivica Dačić, as ‘soft liberals/flexible realists’ citing only their pro-EU position as justification (Ramet 2011: 7). This is dubious not only because Dačić has never been shy to campaign publicly on the basis of continuity with the politics of Milošević,19 but also because the SPS is widely seen as a party in league with criminal elites who became rich during their rule in the 1990s. Secondly, several analysts note that while the Democratic Party kept up the rhetoric of openness towards the outside world in the years after Boris Tadić took up the party’s leadership in 2003, the pace of political reform within the country slowed down. 18 Ramet also supports this assertion in footnotes referring to various opinion polls showing that the Serbian public is divided over issues as diverse as the legality of homosexuality and the transfer of war crimes suspects to The Hague, but the key evidence she provides refers the 2008 election results that I cite in this section. 19 In 2006, Dačić famously declared that Milošević had been murdered in The Hague, where, the SPS leader claimed, he had continued to represent Serbian national interests. During the fieldwork period, Dačić, then serving as Interior Minister, was quoted as saying that whenever he faces a difficult political decision, he thinks ‘What would Milošević have done?’ (attributed to Blic newspaper, author’s fieldnotes, February 2011).

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria Since [Djindjić’s assassination], Serbia has produced a series of failures in democratization, liberalization of the economy and international integration, and yet all of these have not produced lessons learned let alone a change of the political regime. (Dulić 2011: 39)

While President Tadić did make a series of limited apologies designed to atone for Serbia’s role in the wars leading to the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Democratic Party also became more expressedly nationalist during the period it spent in power post-Djindjić. For example, by the time that citizens voted in 2008, they would have noticed Tadić’s increasingly cosy relationship with the nationalist PM of the Serb Republic in Bosnia, Milorad Dodik, and would also have been familiar with the efforts of the Serbian Foreign Minister Vuk Jeremić since 2007, who interpreted his mission as one of jetting around the world persuading foreign governments not to recognize Kosovar independence. It is therefore not really appropriate to present the almost even split between the voting blocs in 2008 as evidence of political polarization around pro-European liberal values and antiEuropean nationalist values. Rather, it merely shows than when forced to choose between an increasingly corrupt and nationalist Democratic Party in partnership with Milošević’s barely reformed successors and the ultranationalists under Nikolić and Koštunica, the voting patterns were polarized. The fact that they voted for that coalition does not provide us with any clear-cut evidence that a full half of Serbia really remain the bearers of liberal, civic values as Ramet contends.20 In the years since the 2008 election, philosophical clarity in the Serbian political arena has receded still further. Firstly, despite what Ramet interpreted as the vested interest of the ultranationalist parties ‘in remaining dogmatic and inflexible’ (Ramet 2011: 6), the acting leader of the Serbian Radical Party Tomislav Nikolić left the party soon after those elections, along with many of his colleagues, to form the new Serbian Progressive Party (SNS), founded on the idea of embracing the previously disavowed goal of entering the European Union. Vitally, repeated opinion polls appeared to show that Nikolić had succeeded in taking most of the Radicals’ supposedly ‘ultranationalist’ supporters with him.21 Secondly, the Democratic Party under Tadić continued more or less along the path that it had already embarked upon – that of maintaining the rhetoric of European integration and cooperation with the war crimes tribunal while courting nationalist voters through an uncompromising stand over Kosovo. As the political scientist Branislav Radeljić put it, the DS-led coalition spent much of its time after 2008 trying to ‘bluff the Serbs that keeping Kosovo within Serbian borders and Serbia’s 20 Scholarly debate around the notion of a ‘Divided Serbia’ is discussed at length in the following chapter. 21 At the beginning of the fieldwork for this project in February 2011, the SNS was polling at 34 per cent, ahead of Tadić’s Democratic Party on 29 per cent. Poll attributed to X Plus agency from a sample of 15,000, carried in Blic newspaper. Author’s fieldnotes, 28 February 2011.

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EU membership could go hand in hand’.22 What all this signified for the wider political culture in Serbia was that the contradictions between the policies and the images of both of the most supported parties left all talk of ultranationalist and liberal blocs looking strangely anachronistic as the country’s politicians prepared for the elections which were eventually called for May 2012 (the political platforms and public sphere discussion during that election campaign are covered in the following chapter). During the years since 2007, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has attempted to fulfill the need of some voters to identify with a ‘harder liberal’ position, combining policies such as the recognition of Kosovo under ethnic Albanian rule, and enthusiastic advocacy of national minority and LGBT rights.23 However, while the LDP has, as of 2012, thrice achieved enough votes to enter parliament (beating the 5 per cent threshold, usually polling around the 6 per cent mark), the party and its leader Čedomir Jovanović are equally notable for having drawn criticism from liberal intellectuals. One the one hand, the LDP’s advocacy of ‘rapid privatization’ policies has drawn ideological criticism from those identifying with the country’s left-wing intellectual traditions (Marković 2012). On the other hand, Jovanović’s supposedly unilateral leadership style and considerable personal wealth have led many to reject his claim to represent a real alternative to the main parties.24 In spite of all of the principled criticism that the party attracts, it remains the case that the LDP provides some much needed philosophical differentiation in the increasingly homogenous discursive landscape of Serbian politics. The Vital Role of Civic Activism In stressing the generally weak liberal credentials of the Serbian ‘democratic bloc’ since Djindjić’s assassination, as well as the limited success of the LDP, I am not arguing that liberal-cosmopolitan identifications have become insignificant in modern Serbia. Rather, it seems that the actions of civil society groups operating more or less independently of the influence of political deal-making, however marginalized they are from mainstream media and political power, have been intermittently able to provide philosophically-consistent critiques of regime 22 Maia Lazar, 2012, ‘Has the Wolf Changed His Coat?’, New Eastern Europe: A Quarterly Journal of Central and Eastern European Affairs, 21 May 2012. Available at http://www.neweasterneurope.eu/node/325. Accessed 20 January 2013. 23 For example, the Belgrade political scientist Zoran Stojilković noted that practically every party contested the 2012 election campaign on socio-economic issues, with only the LDP providing a ‘harder liberal position’. ‘Serbians don’t trust politicians, Analysts say’, B92, 11 April 2012. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politicsarticle.php?yyyy=2012&mm=04&dd=11&nav_id=79718. Accessed 20 January 2013. 24 Trajan Zec (pseudonym), ‘Čedomir vs LDP’, Peščanik.net, 16 May 2012. Available at http://pescanik.net/2012/05/cedomir-vs-ldp-2/. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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politics in the 1990s and since. Even in the work of those bemoaning the scattering of the intellectuals from the ranks of late-Yugoslav avant gardes, it is possible to discern that such figures never completely receded from public life as they reluctantly aligned themselves with the task of establishing liberal democracy in the post-Yugoslav states. As Ana Dević writes: The anti-war protest that grew out of the fledgling anti-nationalist and civil rights forums of the late 1980s was a reaction to the fading of a cultural space that a generation of Yugoslavs had taken for granted and even had considered being of their own making. The disappearance of anti-war protests after 1992 and their withdrawal into the niches of humanitarian aid agencies and the centers for human and civil rights monitoring could be interpreted as a symptom of the fading nostalgia for an all-Yugoslav cultural space and the emerging postYugoslav civic enclaves. (Dević 1997: 151)

While Dević’s article stresses the sense of loss experienced by liberalcosmopolitans in the wake of Yugoslavia’s collapse, it is possible to read this against the grain in the context of democratization in CEE. Serbia, in common with some other post-Yugoslav states but unlike most other post-socialist countries that were subsequently subject to Western democratization efforts and, later, EU accession conditionality, did actually have a home-grown progressive intellectual tradition that was ready to fill the need for advocates of civil and political rights in the nascent democratic state. Furthermore, these intellectuals were not simply ‘anti-communist’ in the sense of viewing liberal democracy primarily as a means of sweeping aside the communist political-economic order to implement market capitalism. Rather, they viewed liberal democracy as a suitable vehicle for continuing their long-standing commitments to progressive, emancipatory politics in direct opposition to dominant ethnic nationalist and socially conservative discourses in Serbia. While the fact that the absorption of some of these (often proudly Yugoslav) intellectuals into the efforts to build democratization in Serbia did represent an acknowledgement that the Yugoslavia they identified with had been destroyed, it did not mean that the liberal-cosmopolitan ideas represented by such intellectuals could ever be fully erased from public consciousness. A few prominent public figures fit the mould that Dević describes, having emerged from Yugoslav cosmopolitan circles to carry the torch of liberal rights and political reform in modern Serbia. Vesna Pešić, the head of the Centre for Anti-War Action in the early 1990s, would remain a prominent political figure throughout the numerous efforts to unseat Milošević during that decade, and indeed has remained prominent since. She was the leader of the small Civic Alliance party in the ‘Zajedno’ (Together) coalition against Milošević from 1993–1997, and regularly kept up media appearances stressing an anti-nationalist position during that time. After accepting the invitation of Djindjić’s administration to serve as Serbian Ambassador to Mexico, she returned to Serbia to spend four years in Čedomir Jovanović’s Liberal Democratic Party before very publicly walking out on the

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party in 2011 as a result of her increasingly public differences with Jovanović. By the time of fieldwork, Pešić remained an influential voice demanding that democrats and nationalists alike should respect the checks and balances of the liberal democratic system. For example, during the 2012 election campaign, she even called on voters to vote for the nationalists of the SNS against the Democratic Party of then President Boris Tadić on the grounds that Tadić and the DS were clamping down on the media, stifling internal party dissent and generally aiming to concentrate authoritarian powers in his own hands.25 Another politically outspoken cosmopolitan intellectual active throughout this period is the anthropologist Ivan Čolović, who together with his co-authors coined the phrase Druga Srbija (or ‘The Other Serbia’) the original aim of which was to articulate a link between groups opposing Milošević in the early 1990s (Čolović & Mimica 1992) but which has continued to be a salient point of reference for antinationalists up to the present. Čolović remains an influential political commentator in the present. In a fascinating interview with a Croatian newspaper following the recent 2012 elections, Čolović responded to a question about whether Serbia needs ‘a new patriotism’ by declaring that: ‘If we want to affirm the values of justice, solidarity, fraternity, tolerance, responsibility and civic virtue in general, we do not need patriotism’.26 Linking this idea to the present sphere of political competition, Čolović went on to endorse the old truism that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’ by referring to the fact that after the new SNS Minister of Culture Bratislav Petković stated that the arts programme in Serbia must be ‘patriotic’ it was discovered that the minster owed the Serbian state 80,000 euros in back taxes. Among academics, Čolović is certainly not alone in sharing these kinds of strident anti-nationalist convictions; in fact, the cosmopolitan perspective is advanced by scores of politically-engaged Serbian social scientists working both within the country and, like Dević, affiliated to foreign institutions. Of course, these intellectuals do not represent one distinct position. Rather, debate between philosophical stances rather than critical consensus is the norm. As of the time of writing, there is apparently no let-up in the supply of Serbian academic voices that unambiguously oppose nationalist politics, social conservatisms (including homophobia, the influence of the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate on political life) and widening economic inequalities from a range of philosophically consistent positions. Most represent more radically progressive positions than the phrase ‘liberal’ suggests, but they collectively perform the role of educating those Serbs 25 Vesna Pešić, ‘Tadić uzurpirao kompletnu vlast’, e-novine, 15 May 2012. Available at http://www.e-novine.com/intervju/intervju-politika/64648-Tadi-uzurpirao-kompletnu-vl ast.html. Accessed 20 January 2013. 26 The interview was originally published in the Croatian newspaper Slobodna Dalmacija, but was accessed online at the site of the magazine Buka. ‘Ivan Čolović: Balkan pati od viška govora o kulturi’, Buka, 8 September 2012. Available at http://www.6yka.com/ novost/28129/ivan-colovic-balkan-pati-od-viska-govora-o-kulturi. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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inclined to listen about the tension between the politics of ‘non-negotiable moral values’ (Mouffe 1999) and pluralist liberal democracy. In order to provide an illustration of the degree of intellectual coherence and social visibility of progressive currents in Serbia, I will describe the activities of the Belgrade-based Women in Black group as detailed in recently-published scholarship (Fridman 2011, Bilić 2012). The group began life in the early 1990s as a more radical and explicitly feminist alternative to the existing Centre for Anti-War Action from which its founding members broke away due to the alleged conformity of the latter with patriarchal society. Their objective was to increase the visibility of women as political actors as well as to strengthen the solidarity among the women in all former Yugoslav republics and the world arguing that the “active solidarity between women is the force and the tenderness by which we can overcome isolation, loneliness, traumas and other consequences of hatred”. (Issued in 1992, published in Women in Black 1993: 50) (Bilić 2012: 611)

The group has come to be particularly known for staging silent political vigils in Belgrade while clad entirely in black, during which members have been insulted, arrested and sometimes physically assaulted by those hostile to the group’s message of female solidarity beyond the borders of the Serb nation. This harassment has included numerous death threats over the years, including the very public statements of Vojislav Šešelj, the Serbian Radical Party leader (and now defendant at the ICTY in The Hague) who notoriously called for the shooting of a woman in black for every plane that NATO would send to bomb Serbia in 1999 (Fridman 2011) as well as bureaucratic harassment on the part of state bodies eager to disrupt the group’s activities (Bilić 2012). The group has been able to count on a limited degree of support from the Democratic Party during certain periods of the post-2000 era, although that support has often manifested itself in the form of a heavy police presence at their performances that has caused unease among some participants (Bilić 2012). This unwelcoming climate has not, however, led to any softening of their line on anti-nationalist issues. For example, the group insists upon the recognition that Serbia bears the key responsibility for the wars of the 1990s. They have continued to reject the formulations of Serbian politicians condemning atrocities ‘done on all sides’ on these grounds (Bilić 2012: 615). As Bilić argues, it is the philosophical consistency of the group’s stance (and the embodiment of this position through the charismatic leadership of Stanislava Zajović) that has allowed for the formation and maintenance of such a strong collective identity in the unpromising circumstances occasioned by recent Serbian history.

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Summary In this section, it has been my intention to argue that, despite the generally illiberal nationalist character of mainstream political discourse in Serbia since 1990, the visibility of progressive ideas oriented to pluralist debate has been maintained intermittently by political actors but more consistently by civil society actors during that period. As a result, it surely is still possible to identify strongly as a liberal in Serbia today. While the relative marginalization of those civil society actors maintaining liberal or anti-nationalist stances has made nationalist ideas much more visible in the media, oppositional ideas based on clearly articulated philosophically-consistent stances (of the kind imagined by Ekiert et al. 2007: 20) have never fully faded from the public sphere. At the time of fieldwork in 2011, these kinds of viewpoints were visible not only in cyberspace – especially through the online newspaper Peščanik and satirical websites such as njuz.net – but also through the continued exposure of investigative reporting on the TV station B92 and the outspoken activism of intellectuals and civil society groups. In short, politics has only come part of the way towards fulfilling Mouffe’s criterion of ‘meaningfully differentiated positions’ (Mouffe 2000), but civil society has offered alternatives for those citizens willing to take the effort to look beyond the dominant illiberal narratives of the mainstream. It is in this discursive context, clearly restricted and illiberal in the main but stubbornly pluralist at the margins that the differentiated public sphere I described in the previous chapter has been able to develop. The Road to the EU: Bulgarian Political Movements since 1989 In stressing the role of philosophical ideas in the political arena, my account departs from most accounts of Bulgarian politics since 1989, which tend to prioritize contestation relating to economic policies (Barany 2002, Krastev 2002, Ganev 2007). The emphasis in the literature arises partly from the perception that the course of Bulgaria’s democratic era is most notable for the fact that a full economic transition to a market economy did not take place until the changes precipitated by the economic crisis of 1996–1997 (Ganev 1997, Barany 2002). However, this emphasis on economic issues is also a consequence of the fact that the liberal movement in Bulgaria has taken an economically liberal anticommunist character that may be sharply distinguished from the more activist, radical, and emancipatory character of Serbian intellectual opposition to the old regime. As I will show in this section, no political movement has consistently performed the role of educating the Bulgarian public with respect to the tension between what Mouffe describes as ‘non-negotiable moral values’ and liberal democratic pluralism. While it is clear that nationalism did not present such an

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existential threat to democracy in Bulgaria in the 1990s as it did in Serbia,27 I contend that the tension between liberal and nationalist ideas is no less vital to the question of popular identification with liberal democratic ideals in Bulgaria. The degree to which political movements in the country may be regarded as providing for ‘democratic’ identification in the Mouffian sense is thus no less dependent on discursive attempts to expand or restrict the inclusivity of the political community. The historical narrative and argument advanced in this section can be summarized as follows. Socialist-era Bulgaria was a genuinely authoritarian state in which open intellectual discussion of the quality required to foment political solidarities in opposition to state ideology was effectively repressed. Political competition in the 1990s revolved mostly around economic arguments and the related foreign policy orientations with the former communists of the BSP offering an economic protectionist (and Russophile) alternative to the pro-Western anticommunist alliance of the Union of Democratic Forces. However, the space for economic and foreign policy argumentation shrunk after the BSP dropped their opposition to economic liberalization and Euro-Atlantic integration from the late 1990s. The Union of Democratic Forces (hereafter UDF28) ultimately came closest to articulating a credible and philosophically-consistent political vision in the late 1990s after right-wingers successfully gained control over the party. However, while far more liberal than the corrupt economic order and insincere socialist discourse of the ex-communists of the BSP, this was a liberalism that was rooted firmly in economistic visions of the free market that never fully embraced civic elements of liberalism. After that period at the turn of the millennium, the following era of political consensus around pro-European market democracy has been dominated by personality politics based on charismatic appeals, leading to the elections of the former King Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 2001 and later of the celebrity Mayor of Sofia Boiko Borissov in 2009 (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011). It is perhaps obvious to claim that the current lack of philosophical differentiation in the Bulgarian political arena finds its roots primarily in the tight authoritarian control of the Zhivkov era. In this section however, I make the additional claim that the continued lack of philosophical definition owes its persistence to the fact that the UDF embraced economic liberalization while failing to distinguish itself sufficiently from the Bulgarian Socialist Party by either actively opposing the BSP’s exclusivist nationalism or resisting the urge to embrace quasi-autocratic 27 Nevertheless, the shadow cast by the Yugoslav wars was present in the thoughts of many who wrote about Bulgarian society during the 1990s, with some hailing the country as a successful example of the peaceful management of ethnic difference (Georgieva et al. 1994, Zhelyazkova 2001, Warhola & Boteva 2003). 28 To conform with dominant usage in the international literature, I am using the vernacular language abbreviations for Serbian political parties but a mixture of English and Bulgarian abbreviations for Bulgarian parties depending on whichever abbreviation has become more established for each party in the international literature. A key to these abbreviations precedes the text of this book.

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leadership practices. Thus, publics have been presented with some liberal ideas, but always in movements unwilling to consistently challenge illiberal political practices and conservative orthodoxies. Moreover, unlike in Serbia, Bulgarian civil society actors have been either unwilling or unable to compensate for the lack of liberal pluralism in the political arena. From Authoritarian Communism to the Democratic Era Under communist one-party rule, Bulgaria was an unreservedly authoritarian state in which dissent was barely tolerated and most significant public intellectuals were co-opted into the Bulgarian Communist Party (Kitschelt et al. 1995: 145). Within organizations like the Bulgarian Writer’s Union, more independently-minded intellectuals such as the author (and post-1990 vice president) Blaga Dimitrova found themselves ostracized and publicly- denounced. The consequences for those acting in open defiance of the state could be severe. In one extreme case, for example, the defector Georgi Markov was assassinated by Bulgarian agents with a poisontipped umbrella in London in 1978 (Crampton 1997). In such a political climate of intimidation and enforced intellectual conformity, it is hardly surprising that ordinary citizens were mostly either unwilling or unable to take part in rebellious acts countering state propaganda. The country’s first non-communist President, Zhelyu Zhelev, summed up this state of affairs when he complained that Bulgaria, uniquely in his view among Soviet bloc countries, had given rise to ‘no dissident movement worth the name’ and could ‘boast no practical attempt to topple the totalitarian system’ (cited in Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 82).29 The legacy of the communist past thus presented a twofold problem for the country’s first generation of leaders after the fall of communism. While some dissidents, such as Zhelev, Dimitrova and various ‘Eco’ movements had managed to become well-known opponents of the regime in the few years before the changes, as the repressive grip of the authorities loosened, they had not managed to form into movements whose ‘anti-communism’ could be grounded in widely-shared normative philosophical stances. Just as significantly, the wider public had received only minimal exposure to non-regime sanctioned ideas but had long been targeted by the indoctrination efforts of the state, which had promoted an ethnic-exclusivist brand of Bulgarian nationalism throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Gruev & Kalyonski 2009). In short, the conditions for the introduction of liberal democracy were not promising when the changes came. 29 Ironically, Zhelev himself was a daring author and dissident of rare calibre, although the fact that he spent much of the 1980s under virtual house arrest forbidden from participation in public life speaks for the determination of the Communist Party to deter dissent. See Ivan Vatahov, ‘Zhelyu Zhelev – The dissident president’, Sofia Echo, 17 April 2003. Available at http://sofiaecho.com/2003/04/17/632148_zhelyu-zhelev-the-dissidentpresident. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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The most ambitious attempts to create liberal political platforms (and by extension to facilitate liberal citizenship) on the part of Bulgaria’s political elites almost certainly took place in the mid-to-late 1990s, so I pay particular attention to that period. The period between communist dictator Todor Zhivkov’s overthrow by reform communists on 10 November 1989 and the electoral collapse of the Bulgarian Socialist Party in 1997 was a very politically turbulent time in which real political power was more often in the hands of the former-communist BSP than the anti-communist UDF that opposed them. Early 1990s survey research revealed that the BSP’s electoral supporters, rather like the principal backers of Milošević’s SPS, were generally older, more rural and less educated than the supporters of the UDF (Tzvetkov 1992: 34, cited in Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 255). Another parallel may be drawn with the Serbian case from the fact that these Socialist voters were also initially wooed through an articulation of political community that was nationalist and exclusionary (Stamatov 2000). Specifically, the BSP mobilized ethnic Bulgarians against the restoration of cultural rights to the Turkish minority who had been subjected to a forced assimilation campaign between 1984 and 1989 by the late communist regime. In that case, it was the intervention of liberals within the UDF (including Zhelev) as well as the emergence of the Turkish-dominated Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) as a political force that succeeded in upholding the basic cultural rights of Turks (Bulgarian Helsinki Watch 2002: 78–82, Ishiyama & Breuning 1998). It should be noted that the very existence of the MRF was precarious, as a clause had been inserted into the 1991 Bulgarian constitution, against a background of ‘heightened nationalist rhetoric’ (Ganev 2004), which forbade the institution of political parties ‘formed on an ethnic basis’. Of course, the clause was never designed to be invoked against Bulgarian nationalist parties, and thus it continues to deter the political expression of non-Bulgarian identities rather than Bulgarian nationalism itself (Rechel 2007). While the Constitutional Court narrowly upheld the legality of the MRF, the constitutional clause has necessitated the party’s flight from a position of ethnic advocacy (Warhola & Boteva 2003, Protsyk & Sachariew 2010) and, more broadly, has dictated that the political community of the nascent democratic state would be based on the majority rights of the titular nation (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 255, Rechel 2007). Any debate on the national question or the inclusiveness of Bulgarian citizenship more generally must therefore take place in the absence of any minority nationalist challenge in the constitutionally-delimited arena of political competition. The Bulgarian Socialist Party: Unrealized Social Democracy The ideological character of the BSP since the party broke with support for the forced assimilation of the Turks in the early 1990s is disputed. Rather sympathetically, Karasimeonov argues that reform communists gradually triumphed over an old guard during the early transition years, resulting in a reorientation towards social

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democratic ideas (Karasimeonov 1995). Less sympathetically, Ganev claims that leading BSP politicians such as Zhan Videnov, PM from 1994–1997, simply used anti-neoliberal, leftist rhetoric attacking ‘Western-style capitalism’ in order to win votes from voters suffering from economic hardship and insecurity at the same time that party members and their associates (principally former apparatchiks like ‘Multigroup’ boss Iliya Pavlov) became very rich by defrauding and asset-stripping the state (Ganev 1997, 2007). Bulgaria certainly became much more unequal during the period to 1997 when the BSP was at the helm, with their economic policies and widespread outright corruption ultimately resulting in hyperinflation, mass impoverishment and the intervention of the IMF in the economy. By the time that the BSP re-emerged as a political force with the unexpected victory of Georgi Parvanov in the race for the Presidency in 2001, the party had abandoned its anti-western position, bringing it in line with the pro-EU and proNATO positions of the Bulgarian right. In spite of this reorientation, the hopes of some scholars that the party would provide an intellectually-viable ‘social democratic’ alternative to dominant right-wing economic ideas (Karasimeonov 1995) remain largely unfulfilled. When the BSP served as the senior party in the Tripartite Coalition between 2005 and 2009 under youthful PM Sergei Stanishev, the party did succeed in gaining entry to the European Union on the agreed target date set by the EU before they came to power (1 January 2007). However, the BSP was once more observed to be more accommodating to its rich backers than its impoverished supporters, most transparently when it imposed a 10 per cent flat corporation tax (B. Vassilev 2011) and more opaquely in overseeing the misallocation of European funds on a grand scale, provoking the suspension of EU Structural Funds just a year after the country had gained entry.30 Considering that the BSP subsequently instigated a series of changes to the country’s electoral rules designed principally to give them a better chance of retaining power in the 2009 elections (Ganev 2013), it is fair to say that this party has hardly helped to provide for principled participation in parliamentary democracy. While some analysts once identified President Parvanov as one of the key figures of the ‘social democratic’, reform wing of the BSP (Barany 2002: 152), this did not ultimately prevent Parvanov from collaborating with the nationalist historian and then BSP member Bozhidar Dimitrov to create the so-called ‘Batak Controversy’ of 2007. Widely-publicized inflammatory statements of Parvanov, Dimitrov and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences brought public attention to an academic paper that had already been published one year earlier and a planned conference on processes of ‘myth-making’ surrounding the historical memorializing of Ottomanera atrocities. Displaying either stunning stupidity or, more likely, serious bad faith, the pious proclamations of senior BSP figures rested on the idea that the academics – the Austrian historian Prof. Ulf Brunnbauer and his then PhD student 30 Ganev was also alarmed by the presence of the well-connected senior minister Rumen Petkov who brought several communist-era military generals into the government (Ganev 2005).

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Martina Baleva – had sought to argue that the Batak massacre never happened. With this controversy whipped up by hysterical media attacks and very little examination of academic articles, the whole affair ultimately resulted in death threats and mass participation in online harassment of the academics concerned in the form of a petition to revoke Baleva’s Bulgarian citizenship. The central roles of Parvanov and Dimitrov can probably be explained by the fact that both men had been implicated by the release of Bulgarian secret police (Darzhavna Sigurnost) files revealing their collaboration with this repressive arm of the communist state (Roth 2010). All in all, it was probably the most successful attempt at whipping up nationalist hysteria since the BSP had mobilized people against the restoration of basic cultural rights to the ethnic Turkish population in the early 1990s. The BSP has thus only really served to discredit left-wing rhetoric while gaining support by means of the nostalgic votes of the information-poor who are targeted using the appeal of a promised return to ‘paternalistic social life’ within the homogenous confines of the ethnic community (Tismaneanu 2009) and clientelistic linkages with those who rely on jobs and favours from BSP factions in the generally rural areas where the BSP does well. Arendt’s point concerning when one might do well to dismiss discursive acts as ‘mere talk’ obviously applies to many, but probably not all, of the alleged social democrats of the BSP. The Union of Democratic Forces from Anti-Communism to Economic Liberalism The Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) is almost certainly the most philosophically consistent opposition that the BSP has faced to date. After participating in a series of short-lived and rather ineffectual cabinets in the early 1990s, the UDF really gained control of the state after the BSP-precipitated financial crisis of 1996–97. The UDF was to win the ensuing 1997 election convincingly, allowing it to shed some of the coalition partners that had limited the power of the right-wingers in the party. In fact, most scholars agree that 1997 marked the date when the UDF stopped being a broad and fractious ‘anti-communist’ coalition and became an ‘unambiguously centre-right party’ (Spirova 2005). PM Ivan Kostov’s administration was preceded into office by a few months by fellow UDF member Petar Stoyanov who won the presidential election in late 1996 just prior to the UDF’s landslide win in the 1997 parliamentary elections. In the following Bulgarian TV address, Stoyanov articulated the country’s goal of NATO membership together with a decidedly liberal vision of political and social life: [Membership in NATO] for us means not only reforms in the army, but democracy, a developed economy, a [high]living standard, free journalists, motivated young people, and above all, that way of life that has been chosen on the eve of the twenty-first century. (Cited in Barany 2002: 146)

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The UDF lived up to this liberal, Atlanticist rhetoric at least to some extent. Under PM Ivan Kostov, the UDF put Bulgaria firmly on the path to Euro-Atlantic integration and, by the turn of the millennium, the goals of NATO and EU membership had been adopted by all major parties. The country’s macroeconomic stability was brought under control and the conditions that saw Bulgarians protesting in the streets during the last days of the BSP administration were not repeated. Furthermore, there was some substance to the party’s claim to be economically right-wing: as Barany records, ‘By February 2000, the government had privatized 70 per cent of state assets and restored 95 per cent of the land that the communists had nationalized’ (Barany 2002: 147). In addition, the party won praise for introducing a currency board, in line with the recommendations of the IMF, which pegged the Bulgarian lev to the Deutschmark. I record the relatively dry economic facts of the UDF administration’s policy achievements in order to illustrate the fact that their claims to represent a right-wing nominally ‘democratic’ party cannot easily be dismissed as ‘mere talk’ in the Arendtian sense. The congruence of word and deed allowed for some degree of principled intellectual identification with the party platform. Nevertheless, by the end of the UDF’s outwardly successful term in office, it was possible to question the party’s credentials as the party to deliver liberal democracy to Bulgaria. Firstly, and perhaps most noticeably, the UDF leadership insisted upon rigid party discipline of a kind that belied its claims to make a break with the country’s authoritarian past, leading to the high-profile resignations of some leading figures: As rigid intraparty discipline, lack of dialogue, hunts for “enemies within” and the increasingly dictatorial and arrogant behavior of the UDF’s National Executive Committee began to invite comparisons with the communists, a number of outstanding politicians quit the Front’s ranks. In November 2001, Ivan Sofiyanski, the UDF’s single most popular figure, decided that starting his own party would be easier than working within the Front’s stifling and dogmatic atmosphere, and turned in his party card. (Barany 2002: 147)

It was this conspicuous lack of internal party democracy that allowed Georgi Karasimeonov, a political scientist generally sympathetic to the democratic credentials of the BSP, to claim with some degree of credibility that the latter contained more senior personnel who were ‘democrats by internal conviction’ than the UDF (Karasimeonov 2005). Secondly, and perhaps less damningly with respect to their democratic credentials, the UDF came to be perceived as presiding over corruption on a similar scale to their predecessors at a time when the country’s macroeconomic stabilization coincided with continued widespread poverty among much of the population (Barany 2002; for a limited defence of the UDF in this respect, see Ganev 2005). Tellingly, the US State Department, a source not known for its eagerness to condemn pro-Western governments carrying out

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rapid privatizations, strongly implicated the Kostov administration in widespread corruption on the Country Report page for Bulgaria.31 Finally, it ought to be noted that there was a lack of willingness in the UDF to break convincingly with the nationalist legacy of the recent past. This may seem like a harsh indictment of a government that, among other incremental positive steps in the direction of liberal accommodation, ratified the Framework for the Protection of National Minorities in 1999 and oversaw the re-introduction of a minor component of Turkish-language provision in some of the country’s schools (DeDominicis 2011). However, my interest is in accessing the degree to which this party, almost certainly the most progressive political force post-communist Bulgaria has seen, positively articulated a philosophical platform that went beyond mere economic liberalization to embrace those pluralistic elements of liberal democracy that conflict with conservative features of the country’s political culture. During the 1997 election campaign, Elster, Offe and Preuss record that the UDF joined the BSP in stressing its national credentials, shunning coalition with the Turkish-dominated MRF on these grounds (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998: 255). While it is certainly not necessary to be anti-Turkish to shun political cohabitation with the MRF, Kostov offered an interesting glimpse into the rationale behind his party’s reluctance to embrace cultural pluralism when he was interviewed during the 2000 municipal election campaign: Now we have to say what we don’t want to be, what we want to leave out of Europe. Hard thing. We want to leave a part of our morality, a part of our oriental nature. This is not an easy thing. From this point of view, there are still a lot of things we have to sacrifice. (Cited in DeDominicis 2011: 450)

As DeDominicis notes, it is not hard to see how Bulgarian Turks or Muslims, as living embodiments of this ‘oriental’ legacy, could find such statements insulting (DeDominicis 2011: 450). Perhaps more relevant to the task at hand, it is easy to see how the Bulgarian voters Kostov was targeting could possibly have interpreted the verbal cues in such discourse as signalling an articulation of a modern ‘European’ Bulgarian nationalism founded on an explicit rejection of the country’s errant oriental qualities.32 On the one hand, Kostov’s remarks are perhaps no less liberal than those of many fellow right-wing politicians on the campaign trail in Western Europe. However, when Kostov is seen as the figurehead of democratic reform in the country, his vision seems narrow-minded and exclusionary when compared to, say, Djindjić’s denunciation of ethnic nationalism. In summary, it is fair to say that 31 US State Department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, Bulgaria Country Report 2001, 4 March 2002. Available at http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2001/ eur/8238.htm. Accessed 20 January 2013. 32 After the UDF had lost office and splintered, Kostov contested the 2005 elections as the leader of a party articulating appeals to nationalism and right-wing politics, as the name Democrats for a Strong Bulgaria suggests.

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the UDF made a limited effort in the direction of instituting liberal tolerance from a legal perspective (though without changing the ethnically-restrictive constitution), but never tried to articulate a genuinely liberal philosophical basis for the crafting of an inclusive multi-ethnic form of democratic solidarity. Into an Era of Charismatic Leadership Overall, the degree of philosophical differentiation present in the mid-to-late 1990s has never been repeated. The UDF were unexpectedly expelled from office in 2001 by the National Movement of Simeon II (NDSV), a party vehicle of the deposed King Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whose official commitment to serve as a civilian did not rule out the idea of returning to the throne (Vassilev 2010). While the party was nominally designated as a ‘liberal’ party, its fortunes eventually declined with the political popularity of its leader, suggesting that the linkage with voters was charismatic rather than philosophical or programmatic.33 After the Tripartite Coalition years of 2005–09, which brought the ex-King’s ‘liberals’ into the same political tent as the BSP that they had energetically campaigned against,34 voters once again revealed a willingness to vote for a charismatic leader, electing the media-friendly Mayor of Sofia, Boiko Borissov, as PM. Borissov, a former bodyguard of communist dictator Todor Zhivkov, who had become famous as the public face of the fight against organized crime as Minister of the Interior between 2001–05, left the former King’s NDSV party in 2005 and subsequently established GERB (Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria, the acronym of which translates as ‘Coat of Arms’) after successfully running as Mayor of Sofia. Helped in no small measure by the fact that the EU had, just one year after Bulgaria’s 2007 EU Accession, suspended the allocation of structural funds to the country under the BSP-led Tripartite Coalition, GERB won the 2009 election on an anticorruption platform. The campaign accordingly placed little emphasis on economic and social policy, although Borissov did say enough about ethnicity to reassure voters that Bulgaria was not about to adopt 33 Simeon made bold election promises which he could not keep, but also undermined his credibility by transferring large tracts of prime real estate ‘back’ to himself on the basis that they were designated as royal estate lands when he was deposed in the 1940s. This act made Simeon II an instant multi-millionaire (Vasillev 2010). Furthermore, the NDSV generally did very little to earn the ‘liberal’ tag that it claimed. Specifically, its legislative voting record was inconsistent and the party made no move to alter the problematic clause forbidding ethnic parties in the Constitution (Rechel 2007). 34 Writing in the Journal of Democracy, Venelin Ganev did not find much to applaud in the arrangement, stating that, ‘In the eyes of many Bulgarians, the sudden disappearance of the political distances separating the NDSV, the BSP, and the MRF shows that what really matters in Bulgarian politics are undisclosed deals, unannounced considerations and unknown collusions’ (Ganev 2005: 77).

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multicultural policies any time soon.35 While one analyst was understandably puzzled by the official support afforded to GERB in the Bulgarian parliament by the openly xenophobic anti-EU Ataka Coalition, on account of the fact that Borissov’s party even has the word European in its name (Novaković 2010), the unreflexively commonsensical nationalist assumptions underpinning many of Borissov’s public statements can be added to more pragmatic considerations explaining why neither party considers it particularly politically damaging to be seen to work with the other. The Limited Scope of Civic Activism Unlike in Serbia, where the nationalism and corruption of the mainstream media is to some extent compensated for by the continuous presence of liberal voices at the margins, there is little evidence that liberal identities have been sustained through the persistence of the influence of independent journalism, either in traditional formats or in cyberspace. Citizens are faced by a handful of television channels and newspapers whose editorial policies retain a very low level of philosophical consistency of the kind that would enable Bulgarian citizens to identify with oppositional discourses in the way that their Serbian counterparts can. According to the vivid formulation of the anthropologist Ivaylo Ditchev, the public sphere, ‘constructed by the media’ is experienced by Bulgarian audiences ‘as a collage based on the “and-now-for-something-completely-different-principle”’ (Ditchev 2011: 36). The anthropologist Totka Monova provides an argument that can help to explain the lack of principled editorial direction, stating that throughout the transition period the primary purpose of the Bulgarian media has been to legitimate the enrichment of a new Bulgarian economic elite that can be identified chiefly through their connections to the former communist regime. Guided by the overarching imperative of not questioning the opaque political-economic system, the media has impeded rather than promoted ‘the development of new identities oriented to the democratic system’ (Monova 2011: 32). These perspectives are supported by the low quality of media coverage of the 2011 Presidential Elections in which most newspaper reports across all of the best-selling titles took the form of paid advertisements that were not labelled as such, and only those candidates

35 Ethnic issues made headlines on four or five occasions during Borissov’s election campaign in 2009. Perhaps most controversially, the candidate stated in the context of a lengthy interview that ‘the Revival Process (i.e. the forced assimilation of the Turkish minority) had the right aims, but was implemented badly’. ‘Sofia Mayor: Communist Revival Process Against Muslims Had Right Aims’, novinite.com, 31 October 2008. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=98431. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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who were able to pay prohibitive access fees were officially permitted access to national television coverage.36 The role of intellectuals in Bulgarian political discourse is something of a puzzle. Certainly, there are a small number of internationally-respected Bulgarian intellectuals, some of whom are also well-known inside the country. Probably the best-known Bulgarian intellectual at present is Simeon Djankov, the noted World Bank economist and Minister of Finance in the GERB government since 2009. While the choice of a serving politician may seem an inappropriate means of seeking to understand the country’s intellectual scene, he is certainly not unusual among Western-oriented intellectuals in representing a wholehearted embrace of economic liberalization as an alternative to the economic protectionism and corruption of the BSP. As Finance Minister, Djankov has followed classic austerity policies, including the freezing of the wages of all state employees as well as the reduction of the size of the state administration, leading to international praise of Bulgaria’s fiscal discipline. He has also directed provocative comments against the Russian state and has declared himself to be a committed ‘anticommunist’. Many of these are perfectly reasonable positions given the historical and political context that I have described in this chapter, but what these interventions lack is any kind of language that would enable citizens to identify with the liberal democratic system as something beyond just the embrace of individual autonomy or the absence of ‘communism’. The contrast that I have in mind is with the more activist intellectuals in Serbia where some, such as Ivan Čolović and Vesna Pešić, seek to supply normative visions of the kind that encourage citizens to challenge dominant discourses in political life. For example, while Pešić and Djankov would probably both identify as ‘liberal’ and ‘pro-European’, is it doubtful, given her history of principled resignations, that Pešić would have served in a government that oversaw such a curtailment of media freedoms as GERB has (Reporters Without Borders 2012). However, so long as liberal democracy is viewed primarily as a political system in which one embraces free-market economics and aligns oneself with America and the EU, then it becomes possible to live with curtailments of some liberal democratic freedoms.37 As the description of the Bulgarian green movement in the previous chapter suggests, civic activism in the country does not usually take on a recognizably liberal, progressive form. The co-existence of conservative orthodoxies alongside progressive civic activism is also evident with respect to other movements. For example, the Facebook postings of the nascent Occupy Bulgaria group throughout 2011 and 2012 are congruent with the international movement of the same name 36 Francesco Martino, ‘Bulgarian Mass Media’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Power’, Observatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 19 December 2011. Available at http:// www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bulgaria/Bulgarian-mass-media-suncomfortable-relationship-with-power-106768. Accessed 20 January 2013. 37 The paradoxes of prevailing Bulgarian conceptions of liberalism are discussed at length in Chapter 5.

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in the sense that the idea of solidarity with anti-austerity protests is evident, and yet interventions in Bulgarian domestic politics typically invoke the language and symbols of Bulgarian nationalism in support of dissent.38 In short, in the restricted discursive landscape that is provided in Bulgaria, even the most oppositional civil actors almost inevitably find themselves agreeing with the conservatives of the political elite with respect to the exclusive character of the Bulgarian political community. While the first few years of austerity politics passed off without significant protest, the country has been convulsed by protests over energy prices at the time of writing (Early 2013). Though it is too early to tell if the current events in the country, which have already occasioned the premature resignation of the Borissov cabinet several months before the summer 2013 elections, will push the country in a more or less liberal direction, the images from the protests themselves speak as usual of the mixed messages of Bulgarian civil protest. Many of the placards condemning the Czech energy supplier CEZ blamed for exorbitant fuel price hikes proclaim the company to be ‘Czech Janissaries’.39 The interpretation I cautiously advance here is that the protesters may be as impoverished by the constriction of progressive political discourse as they are by corruption and the asset-stripping of their country. Summary In summary, it would appear that Bulgarian political elites made a creditable effort to institute principled political competition during the first decade of the democratic era, with the UDF presenting a particularly coherent programme that provided an obvious point of reference for assessing the country’s liberal credentials as it set itself on the path to EU membership. Even the Bulgarian Socialist Party have generally fulfilled the minimal criteria of pursuing their aims, admittedly often tainted by ethnic particularism, within a declared framework of democratic pluralism. The country’s elites therefore clearly fulfilled minimal liberal democratic criteria including recognizing election results and refraining from nationalist violence, which obviously distinguished them from the Serbian 38 At the time of writing, this continues to happen just about every week. Posts usually link to the saprotiva.org website which carries articles such as this hagiographic ode to Bulgarian revolutionaries, lamenting in very general terms on the supposed failure of modern Bulgaria’s elites to live up to their ideals and heroism: ‘Безсмъртие по време на свобода’, Saprotiva, 2 June 2012. Available at http://www.saprotiva.org/bezsmartie-povreme-na-svoboda/. Accessed 20 January 2013. 39 ‘Janissaries’ were an elite corps of high-ranking Ottoman soldiers who were mostly taken forcefully from Christian families in the Balkans during the period of Ottoman rule between the late fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Bulgarian nationalist phraseology, janissary is an insult attributed to any countryman (or, in this case, fellow Slav) perceived as betraying the nation. ‘Люси Манова: Не ме е страх’, Saprotiva, 5 February 2013. Available at http://saprotiva.org/ne-me-e-srah-lyusi-manova/. Accessed 5 February 2013.

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Milošević regime during the 1990s. However, the main problem from the perspective of facilitating identification with the liberal democratic system is that Bulgarian politics lacked enough actors who were committed to making a maximal case for liberal democratic citizenship. In this sense, Bulgarian political discourse, largely mirrored by the relatively muted civil society and conservative media discourse, provides considerably less evidence of illiberal excess but also less evidence of positively liberal articulations of collective identity. Owing to the relatively unquestioned status of the nationalist constitutional clause and political discourse more generally, it is reasonable to observe that nationalism never seems to prosper merely because it has won the political stage.40 This situation persists because no significant political movement has ever really challenged the nationalist principles underpinning all democratic politics in the country. In the context I have described, it is certainly possible to identify as a democrat in the minimal sense of holding elections dear. However, it is no surprise that many of democracy’s most conscientious supporters among the Bulgarian electorate continue to yearn for a future in which the democratic system does a better job of promoting ethnic Bulgarian interests above those of other cultural groups. Concluding Discussion Before offering a comparison of the discursive historical data so far presented, it is worth reiterating the importance of political discourse in informing public sphere discussion and, through it, identification with the democratic system. As Laclau and Mouffe concede, ‘political identities are constituted and reconstituted through public sphere debate’ of the everyday kind that I highlighted in the previous chapter. However, in contra-distinction to much of the existing literature on political cleavage formation (after Lipset & Rokkan 1967), they view politicized social divisions as arising from politics and not the other way round. This is a theoretical assumption that, if heeded, has important consequences for the student of democracy. Rather than viewing political identities as an input into a system in which politicians must compete for votes, the political articulations of public figures are seen as producing the political identities that they come to represent (Torfing 1998). To a significant degree then, it is politicians who are responsible for creating the political culture in which they compete. Analytical attention to the observable discursive acts of political articulation is therefore crucial to gauging the democratic credentials of given political movements and the national political contexts that they collectively constitute. It is also crucial if we are seeking to understand whether the citizens of any given society have access to specifically democratic forms of collective identity (Mouffe 1999). 40 This is a paraphrasing of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s statement on ‘identity politics’. Appiah himself attributed the elegant phrasing to the late-sixteenth to early-seventeenthcentury writer Sir John Harrington’s thoughts on ‘treason’ (Appiah 2006: 15).

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The respective landscapes of political discourse that I have outlined in this chapter are distinguished in a variety of ways that point in sometimes contradictory directions with respect to the question of whether discourse is democratic and plural in the Mouffian sense of ‘agonistic pluralism’. The main conclusion that I wish to advance at this point is a seemingly paradoxical one: Democratic pluralism is more openly threatened in Serbia than in Bulgaria, yet this is the case only because political pluralism is more conspicuously present in the former. This is an idea that requires some elaboration, which I will do before discussing what this means from the perspective of the possibilities for liberal citizenship in each country. In Serbia, the influence and prevalence of voices that are obviously antithetical to the principle of agonistic debate have been (and probably remain) greater and therefore more worrying than in Bulgaria. In Bulgaria, by contrast, extreme xenophobic and militaristic elements in politics, though present, are largely restricted to the margins of public life. From this perspective, it appears to be the case that liberal democracy has more powerful opponents in Serbia than it does in Bulgaria. However, it can equally be argued that the very public and alarming attempts to clamp down on liberal political and civil society actors in Serbia is testament to the strength of the kind of progressive political identities that have yet to be articulated in Bulgaria. To the extent that pluralism has ever been enacted in the Bulgarian political arena, it has revolved mainly around attempts to present differentiated positions on economic policy while questions impacting upon the inclusiveness and cultural character of the political community have largely been kept off the political agenda. Even the country’s most progressive elites of the UDF-era took a ‘bare minimum’ approach to the introduction of liberal rights with EU accession in mind; such efforts do not bear comparison to the work of Djindjić, or even the LDP’s Jovanović, in opening up mainstream politics to those marginal voices that some seek to exclude. In the civil society arena, a similar contrast is present, with Bulgaria’s recent history lacking anything in the way of the radical anti-nationalist or rights-based activism that Serbia maintains. While liberal articulations of political identity remain very visible in Serbia, albeit at the margins of the political, media and civil society spheres, they remain functionally absent from a Bulgarian politics that is overwhelmingly pro-Western yet characterized by tacit nationalism, social conformism and a general lack of any call to liberal citizenship that goes beyond a narrow economic liberalism. The analysis I have presented above goes a little further in explaining the fundamental mismatch between Freedom House’s democracy scores for these countries and the ethnographic overview in the respective everyday public spheres that I presented in the previous chapter. From the perspective of the formalist observer of democracy, primed to recognize abuses of the basic institutions or ‘freedoms’ of democracy, it is understandable that Serbia may be interpreted as the more volatile and worrying political context. This, however, is a perspective that is prone to gauging the quality of democracy by considering only the number and influence of its enemies while neglecting consideration of its most ardent friends. From the Mouffian perspective that seeks to find a plurality of articulated stances

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in relation to which citizens will be able to identify, I contend that Serbia presents a more meaningfully plural political context with which citizens will be able to identify on a philosophical level. What is more, while Bulgarian political elites have generally promoted a minimal identification with the democratic system based on such features as elections and economic liberalization while forming a political consensus around the fundamentally conservative and ethno-centric character of the state, the more contested Serbian political context offers a greater possibility for maximal identification with liberal democracy in the sense that progressive ideas such as the embrace of difference and liberal challenges to nationalism have at various times been articulated together with a concern for formal democratic institutions. It is possible that such passionate pro-democratic impulses will only be strengthened by the prevalence and vehemence of recognizably illiberal movements in the country. Finally, the effects of liberal discourse in Serbia can be seen not only in the fact that recognizably liberal counterpublics now exist in towns across the country, but also in that those spreading illiberal discourse are presented with a choice between agonistic debate and evasion. No attentive nationalist or social conservative in Serbia can be completely unaware of the existence of liberal challenges to their ideas.

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Chapter 4

Publics and Counterpublics in Serbia: Public Sphere Pluralism in Niš The argument of this book rests in large measure upon the claim that, when observed ethnographically, the Serbian public sphere is seen to be pluralist, contested and, at least at the margins, liberal. I presented this conclusion up-front in Chapter 2 on the basis of rather selective data, promising that I would present a much broader survey of public discourse further on. Now I will address that task. In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate the breadth of political identification among ordinary citizens, on the basis of the observation of public discussion in Niš during the first six months of 2011. This is an attempt to present the data of my project in a manner that, while essentially supportive of the main argument of the book, is sufficiently broad to allow for the inclusion of data that is not selected merely to illustrate Serbian society’s liberal and pluralist credentials. It is only through the presentation of this more contextualized and fine-grained form of analysis that the reader may be empowered to judge the extent to which my findings may be applied to Serbian society as a whole and possibly to broader political developments in Central and Eastern Europe. I build on sociological debates in contemporary scholarship on Serbian society to help me to characterize various publics and counterpublics that I have identified through analysis of public sphere discussion. Partly in support of the idea that Serbian society remains polarized (Ramet 2011a), I show that both ‘hardline nationalist’ and ‘hard liberal’ discourses are clearly identifiable in my data. However, in line with critiques of this ‘divided Serbia’ narrative, most of the stances adopted by the citizens in my sample could reasonably be described as somewhere in between these discursive poles. It is thus my attempt to map out and differentiate the vast discursive hinterland between these ideal-typical positions that represents my primary contribution to this debate. Specifically, I argue that those Serbs adopting neither consistently liberal nor hardline nationalist stances can be divided into two groups based on key differences in their attitudes to the liberal democratic order. Obviously, this attempt at categorization is itself reliant on ideal-typical simplifications and thus not perfectly congruent with the complexity of actual practice. Nevertheless, I claim that it is a useful way of thinking about the ways in which people construct their identities and interests in a relational social arena in which the opinions of agents are at once unique and identifiable with wider discourses in terms of what Wittgenstein referred to as ‘family resemblances’.

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I term the first of these stances ‘authoritarian-nostalgic’. This stance is based on an assertion of the superiority of a Yugoslav past (that not all of its proponents are old enough to remember) relative to the democratic present. This nostalgia is rooted in the present economic insecurity and a corresponding rejection of the economic inequalities that speakers associate with the ‘democratic’ era, but often segues into endorsements of extreme nationalist politics. The final discourse is termed ‘careworn democratic’. It centres around a similar sense of economicallyrooted dissatisfaction with the present but also includes an explicit rejection of the militarism of those derided as ‘nationalists’. In this key sense, the terms in which formal politics is rejected by these disappointed democrats are implicitly supportive of the liberal democratic system. In conclusion, I recognize that these ‘publics’ exist in a relational public sphere in which each discourse affects the others. Since the ‘careworn democratic’ discourse is typical of citizens exhibiting a relatively low level of political engagement, I argue that it would be unlikely to retain its democratic character if the smaller but more vocal and politically-active ‘hard liberal’ counterpublic were to recede further into insignificance. I begin this chapter by describing the political events that occurred at the time of fieldwork in early 2011, relying on electronic and mass media sources in order to provide the kind of background information necessary to contextualize the subsequent words of my informants. These events include the efforts of the opposition Serbian Progressive Party to force early elections, culminating in the hunger and thirst strike of party leader Tomislav Nikolić. However, I also attempt to provide a survey of the political field at that time, giving some idea of the campaigning strategies of various political movements seeking popular support during those several months in early 2011. The analyses of this chapter continue with a brief discussion of scholarly debates surrounding the idea of a ‘Divided Serbia’, using this debate as a point of reference for my own findings. Following a brief description of the local, educational and media contexts that mediate between political discourse and my informants, I present the ethnographic data of this chapter. The main body of the data is sub-divided into evidence and explanations relating to the four ideal-typical discourses described above. In conclusion, I consider the evidence that is presented in the light of the prospects for Serbian democracy. Serbian Political Competition in Early 2011: The Story from Above At the time that the discussions analysed in this chapter took place in 2011, Serbia was still ruled by a coalition led by the Democratic Party (DS) who were governing in coalition with the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), the rapidly disintegrating G17+ party and some smaller parties. Despite the presence of Milošević’s former SPS colleagues, this coalition was broadly applauded as progressive and proEuropean when it came to office in 2008 (Ramet 2011). The notable arrests of the high-profile war crimes fugitives Radovan Karadžić (in 2008) and Ratko

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Mladić (late in the fieldwork period on 26 May 2011) served to cement this ‘proEuropean’ orientation, but this message was complicated by the maintenance of an uncompromising opposition to Kosovar independence. However, while these strands of foreign policy kept Serbian politics in international headlines, the focus on issues like Kosovo and European accession while unemployment was skyrocketing to over 20 per cent infuriated many. Over the three years since the previous election, it had become increasingly obvious that many of those who had voted for the DS in particular had become disillusioned with the rule of the DS-led coalition. As the DS gradually gained a reputation for corruption and opacity, President Boris Tadić attracted criticism for seeking to stifle criticism rather than addressing the concerns of those in previously friendly sections of the media.1 The DS further alienated those who had been unhappy with cohabitation with the SPS by welcoming into the cabinet figures who were compromised by association with Milošević’s regime.2 In this context of widespread popular and press disaffection with the DS, the nationalist opposition bloc, led by Tomislav Nikolić’s Serbian Progressive Party, gambled that the governing coalition could be forced to call elections at some point ahead of the May 2012 deadline, and so all major parties were already in electioneering mode by early 2011. It was generally assumed that when the elections took place, they would be a two-horse race, with Nikolić’s SNS the early favourites over Tadić’s DS. According to one poll carried in the Blic newspaper in late February 2011, the SNS were polling at 34 per cent, ahead of the DS on 29 per cent.3 Nikolić’s SNS, aiming to capitalize upon disaffection with the DS, wisely went about constructing their campaign around issues of socio-economic welfare and anti-corruption rather than the kind of bellicose nationalist agitation that many had expected from the personnel concerned.4 At the same time, I persist in referring 1 The restrictive regulations relating to the media that were pushed through by Tadić’s government are described at some length in the IREX country report. Serbia Media Sustainability Index, IREX 2012. Available at http://www.irex.org/system/files/u105/EE_ MSI_2012_Serbia.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2013. 2 As Eric Gordy writes, ‘by appointing as chief-of-staff the former commander of a unit connected with war crimes in Kosovo, [and] by making Zoran Stanković (an associate of Ratko Mladić) consecutively defence minister and health minister’, it seemed that the DS was in fact trying to cultivate a hardline nationalist constituency. Eric Gordy, ‘Serbia’s Election: More Defeat than Victory’, Open Democracy, 27 May 2012. Available at http:// www.opendemocracy.net/eric-gordy/serbias-election-more-defeat-than-victory. Accessed 20 January 2013. 3 Poll attributed to X Plus agency from a sample of 15,000, carried in Blic newspaper. Author’s fieldnotes 28 February 2011. Could not be accessed online recently. 4 Before his abrupt decision to advocate EU entry from 2009 onwards, Nikolić had impeccable nationalist credentials, having spent several years as the de facto leader of a Serbian Radical Party that never renounced the project of a Greater Serbia after the official party leader Vojislav Šešelj was sent to The Hague in 2003. The then deputy leader Aleksandar Vučić is known for his staunch past support of Ratko Mladić.

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to Nikolić’s party as ‘nationalist’ in this chapter for two reasons. Firstly, Nikolić’s sudden abstention from nationalist rhetoric on breaking with Šešelj’s Radicals in 2009 was perceived as a strategic move and convinced almost no one that the candidate had really been converted to ‘European values’. Secondly, most of my informants continued to describe Nikolić and his supporters as ‘nationalists’ and Tadić and his supporters as ‘democrats’ in spite of the shrinkage of the ideological distance between the parties. Nikolić’s past as a Radical meant that he could count on a relatively easy ride from large sections of the popular press promoting radical nationalist understandings of politics, often at the behest of owners who attained their status as a result of political alliances with politicians claiming nationalist sympathies.5 At the start of the fieldwork period, the SNS’s electioneering appeared to be going rather well, as up to 70,000 showed up to their rally in Belgrade on 5 February 2011.6 At the rally, Nikolić set the government a two-month deadline to call early elections or face a prolonged period of ‘nonviolent resistance’ that would ‘shut down Belgrade’ indefinitely until elections were called.7 The public statements of Nikolić and SNS deputy leader Aleksandar Vučić in the days before and after the rally articulated the grievances of their constituency in socioeconomic terms, decrying social hardship and government indifference. It was clear, according to Nikolić, that the government had no solution to the ‘crowd of problems’ facing the country, citing unemployment, a police strike, various other issues and, almost as an afterthought, an Islamist leader in Sandžak (Zukorlić).8 A few days after the mass rally in Belgrade, and conscious of the fact that many in the media were accusing the SNS of being better at identifying problems than offering solutions, Vučić outlined a basic economic plan to get the economy back on track and provide jobs.9 In spite of the SNS’s self-appointed role as representing the dispossessed, this can reasonably be described as a neoliberal platform. Vučić 5 Two of the more important titles to consider in this respect are the tabloid Kurir – known amongst other things for publishing threats against liberal civil society figures – and the broadsheet Politika, which had previously been under the control of the Milošević regime. For an interesting analysis of the post-2000 media situation in Serbia, including an analysis of the collusion of then President Koštunica with the nationalist press, see Kisić and Stanojlović 2011. 6 Vasović, Aleksandar, ‘Serbia Holds Biggest Opposition Protest in Years’, Reuters, 5 February 2011. Available at http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/02/05/uk-serbia-rallyidUKTRE71418Q20110205. Accessed 20 January 2013. 7 ‘Opposition gives government two months to call elections’, B92, 5 February 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm= 02&dd=05&nav_id=72541. Accessed 20 January 2013. 8 This list is attributed in my fieldnotes to statements made by Nikolić and Vučić on a radio news broadcast. Zukorlić is a Bosniak Muslim leader who was at that time agitating for some degree of autonomy from the Serbian state (authors’ fieldnotes, 7 February 2011). 9 These policy statements were attributed to Vučić in Blic newspaper (authors’ fieldnotes, 13 February 2011).

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proposed that the SNS would reduce bureaucracy and make the country more attractive to investors, which in turn would bring higher wages and improve the ‘money and jobs’ situation in the country. They also proposed to sack a lot of government employees, reorganize ministries, and so on. In the weeks following the protests, a series of smaller SNS rallies also took place in Niš. On 16 April 2011, just after Nikolić’s deadline had passed, predictably without the government capitulating and calling an early election, the SNS held another huge rally in Belgrade. At the rally, Nikolić did not call for a series of strikes to ‘shut down Belgrade’ as he had promised, but rather declared that he would immediately begin a hunger and thirst strike which he would only break when the government had called early elections. The strategy of the DS-led government at that time was to repeatedly claim that Serbia’s priority was to meet the necessary criteria of achieving EU candidate status by the end of June. Responding to Nikolić’s gamble, President Tadić stated: Elections should be part of our European path, not an obstacle. Rather than instability and constant veiled threats of violence, Serbia needs exactly the opposite.10

The implication was that Nikolić’s frequent recourse to non-parliamentary means to achieve his political goals would not impress the European Union, and an EU spokesperson from Caroline Ashton’s EU Foreign Policy office was swift in issuing a declaration that insisted all candidates should pursue their aims through ‘normal political processes’.11 Meanwhile, Nikolić was subject to criticism from some less expected quarters. Asked for a comment on Nikolić’s actions, the country’s most senior orthodox clergyman, Patriarch Irinej of Serbia immediately responded that self-harm in the form of a hunger strike was ‘not Christian’. This left the Progressives scrambling to save face, with Vučić initially confessing that he had ‘expected a different tone to come out of the patriarchy’ and Nikolić eventually declaring that he pleaded with Patriarch Irinej to forgive him if he was misunderstood, adding that he had never intended to commit suicide and that his hunger and thirst strike should be considered ‘fasting that is more rigorous than usual’.12 Photographs were published, showing Nikolić looking more downcast than famished in the bed of his private hospital room, while his 10 ‘Serbian Opposition rallies for early vote’, UPI, 16 April 2011. Available at http:// www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2011/04/16/Serbian-opposition-rallies-for-earlyvote/UPI-52571302977879/. Accessed 20 October 2013. 11 ‘EU watches Serbia developments with concern’, B92 [online], 18 April 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=04&dd= 18&nav_id=73862. Accessed 20 January 2013. 12 ‘Opposition leader says he’ll continue hunger strike’, B92 [online], 19 April 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=04&dd= 19&nav_id=73881. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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team complained that state broadcaster Radio Television Serbia, the Swiss-owned daily newspaper Blic, and the multi-format B92 had waged a campaign against the SNS. It is certainly true that some in the media enjoyed the spectacle. Blic lampooned Nikolić in a cartoon that imagined the SNS leader representing Serbian interests to various world powers and threatening to commit suicide in imaginative ways if he did not get what he wanted.13 By the middle of the first week, doctors had placed Nikolić on an intravenous drip and he had promised the Patriarch that he was ending his thirst strike. By the following weekend, Nikolić had broken his hunger strike too, swallowing an Easter egg at Orthodox Easter Sunday mass.14 The Democratic Party and their coalition partners had never appeared likely to deviate from their position of holding off from elections to concentrate on meeting the criteria for achieving EU Candidate status.15 For citizens unimpressed by both the DS and their SNS opponents, there were a handful of other parties with significant popular support at the time of the study (polling between 5 and 10 per cent in the February 2011 poll referenced above). For those unimpressed by the SNS’s embrace of the goal of EU membership, there was the option of the unreformed Radicals (SRS), still nominally under the leadership of ICTY-indictee Vojislav Šešelj. Similarly, Vojislav Koštunica’s Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) continued to oppose EU membership in favour of closer ties with Russia while cultivating an alliance with ultranationalists in the Serbian Orthodox Church. In comparison, Milošević’s former party, the Socialist Party of Serbia provided something of a middle-of-the-road alternative. Considering their embrace of EU membership and their co-habitation with the DS in government, the SPS had come to look like an increasingly attractive option for conformist voters who were unimpressed by the theatrics of Nikolić’s campaign but tolerant of the continuity of personnel with the Milošević era. By the end of the fieldwork period, the stock of the SPS and party leader Ivica Dačić (then serving as the Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister) was rising16 due at least in part to favourable press coverage.17 Finally, the Liberal Democratic 13 Author’s fieldnotes, April 2011. 14 ‘Nikolić ends hunger strike during Easter summit’, B92. Available at http://www. b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=04&dd=24&nav_id=73982. Accessed 20 January 2013. 15 This was eventually granted on 1 March 2012, after the end of the fieldwork period, but just ahead of the elections which took place right on the legally-mandated deadline of 6 May 2012. 16 ‘Dačić: Raste popularnost SPS-a’, B92, 9 July 2011. Available at http://www. b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2011&mm=07&dd=09&nav_category=11&nav_id= 524381. Accessed 20 January 2013. 17 A notable example of this was the coverage of the arrest on Dačić’s orders of two Kosovo (Albanian) police service members on the administrative line with Serbia, accompanied in the former state news agency Tanjug’s reportage by theatrical photographs of Serb gendarmes in balaclavas. Subsequent reports using the Tanjug sources also carried Dačić’s curt statements claiming a violation of the 1999 Kumanovo agreement, supporting

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Party under Čedomir Jovanović provided some ideological differentiation among the crowded field of pro-European parties in that it advocated a ‘harder liberal position’ throughout that time.18 By early 2011, Jovanović was already claiming that he would refuse to enter into coalition with any party that would not commit itself to the recognition of Kosovo. He also enthusiastically supported the right of the LGBT community to march in the annual Gay Pride event, which resulted in vicious attacks on participants from nationalist supporters in late 2010.19 However, while many perceived the LDP as the natural place for the progressive vote,20 others complained about Jovanović’s suitability on account of his allegedly unilateral leadership style, bombastic gaffe-prone rhetoric21 and preference for neoliberal economic policies (Marković 2012). These policies sit uneasily with many progressives in Serbia (social democrats, feminists and so on) who often stand for more emancipatory politics than the catch-all label ‘liberal’ suggests, so it is similarly unsurprising that Jovanović’s conspicuous wealth was perceived as a drag on his party’s appeal.22 For those willing to look past these objections, Jovanović’s LDP represented the closest thing to continuity with the progressive politics of the Djindjić-era, while others perceived the party as a damaged brand whose leader behaved in ways that were antithetical to progressive ideals.

the image of a politician prepared to robustly defend Serbia’s interests. ’Two KPS members arrested on administrative line’, B92, 31 March 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/ eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2012&mm=03&dd=31&nav_id=79546. Accessed 20 January 2013. 18 Zoran Stojiljković cited in ‘Serbians don‘t trust politicians, Analysts say’, B92, 11 April 2012. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2012 &mm=04&dd=11&nav_id=79718. Accessed 20 January 2013. 19 The Gay Pride event was subsequently suspended altogether in 2011, with the government citing safety concerns on account of nationalist threats to use violence once more. 20 ‘Čedomir Jovanović, Liberal Dressed With a Conscience’, Balkan Insight, 9 April 2012. Available at http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/cedomir-jovanovic-liberal-dress ed-with-a-conscience. Accessed 20 January 2013. 21 The veteran civic activist, Vesna Pešić, already uneasy with the direction the LDP was taking, abruptly left the party after Jovanović attacked DS Foreign Minister Jeremić’s visit to Colonel Gaddafi with the recommendation that he should think of the plight of civilians in Libya before ‘going to see cannibals in Africa’. ‘Protest Note Over LDP Leader’s “Cannibal” Remark’, B92, 29 March 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/ eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=03&dd=29&nav_id=73503. Accessed 20 January 2013. 22 In one TV debate in which Jovanović participated in July 2011, it was revealed that Jovanović was co-owner of a formerly state-owned pasta producing company, a fact that shows his support for swift privatizations in a potentially unfavourable light. This was aired on the weekly ‘Utisak Nedelje’ programme on B92 TV. Author’s fieldnotes.

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A Divided Serbia? The claim I advanced in Chapter 2 that the Serbian public sphere is a philosophically differentiated and hotly contested arena will not surprise readers familiar with key debates in the literature on Serbian politics and society in the past two decades. As can be seen from the analyses I offered in the previous chapters, several accounts of Serbia’s role in the Yugoslav wars stress the role of (intraethnic) conflict arising from societal divisions between the regime’s supporters and its opponents (Bougarel 1999, Gordy 1999, Gagnon 2004). More recently, Sabrina Ramet, writing after the 2008 elections in which votes were balanced almost equally between democratic and nationalist blocs, claimed that political divisions in Serbia were deeper by the late 2000s than during the Milošević-era (Ramet 2011a: 7). Furthermore, the narrative of a ‘Divided Serbia’, supposedly teetering between liberal and nationalist (illiberal) poles was being produced and reproduced in Serbian media discourse at least up to the time of the fieldwork in 2011 (Obradović-Wochnik 2013). Via an engagement with two recent articles that challenge this discourse of a Serbia divided between liberal, democratic, pro-European identities and illiberal, nationalist identities, I hope to situate the findings of this chapter in the context of debates on the Serbian public sphere. Taking my cue from Theodora Vetta (2009), I acknowledge the importance of economic concerns that cannot be interpreted in terms of orientations towards nationalist or civic/liberal identities. Specifically, I claim that nearly all of my informants were inclined to disapprove of the economic order and the social inequalities created as a result of the DS-led government’s adherence to neoliberal policies, regardless of whether or not they were inclined to support any of the DS’s nationalist opponents. It follows from this assessment that economic concerns, while important, do not provide suitable grounds for identifying distinct publics. In this vein, I build on the work of Jelena ObradovićWochnik, who argues that the image of a ‘Divided Serbia’ is largely created by the uneven access to the public sphere afforded to both civic activists and ‘revisionist’ nationalists while most Serbs do not adhere to either of these poles (ObradovićWochnik 2013). The evidence to be provided in this chapter suggests that Obradović-Wochnik is correct in this assertion: while both liberal and nationalist discourses were audible, both were minority positions. My subsequent efforts to characterize and differentiate the discursive hinterland between these well-known liberal and nationalist discourses is intended to be my primary contribution to this debate. Jelena Obradović-Wochnik takes on the ‘Divided Serbia’ narrative directly. She argues that the image of a ‘Divided Serbia’ is promoted through both academic surveys and the presentation of debates in the Serbian media. In the first instance, surveys often tend to show that public opinion is ‘divided’ with respect to questions which are an artefact of the researcher’s brief rather than a credible reflection of public discussion. For example, the author notes that one such survey, presumably based on a rather leading multiple choice questionnaire, found that

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the Serbian public believes the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to be ‘the greatest danger to national security’ (ObradovićWochnik 2013: 191). With respect to the presentation of debates in the media, the article focuses on a TV programme called ‘Ratko Mladić – Between Myth and Reality?’ broadcast on the B92 TV channel in the format of a debate immediately after the transfer of Ratko Mladić to the ICTY in The Hague in May 2011. The result was a confrontation between two civil society activists and two staunch allies of Mladić in which the former ultimately gave up trying to convince the latter of the importance of the court and the latter reacted with hostility and ‘snide remarks’ to the claims of the activists. Ultimately, there was no debate rooted in dialogue, but rather diatribes of ‘dismissive, destructive shouting matches’ and ‘stereotyping polarizing rhetoric and defensive reactivity’ (Obradović-Wochnik 2013: 184). Pointedly, the author argues that neither the liberal discourse of the activists nor the nationalist revisionism of their opponents can be recognized as a dominant public discourse, in spite of the oft-repeated nationalist claim to speak for ‘the Serbs’. Working away from the definitions provided by public sphere theorist Nancy Fraser, she argues that both discourses are better understood as the stances of counterpublics rather than reflections of ‘public opinion’: Whilst Fraser suggests that counterpublics are usually composed of subordinated social groups, it can equally be argued that in some cases, subordination of marginalisation can be a fluid category. For instance, despite speaking from elite positions, or positions of privilege (in that they have the resources and means of accessing the public sphere), the messages of both the civil society and the revisionists move frequently from centre to margins. (Obradović-Wochnik 2013: 194)

Elaborating on this statement, the author argues that though the civic activists’ perspective is privileged by Western political organizations on account of these activists’ participation in the liberal project of democratization, it is decidedly marginal in the context of domestic policy debates. Conversely, she adds, the revisionist perspective was once a reflection of state policy under Milošević, but has lost legitimacy (though certainly not public visibility) in recent years (Obradović-Wochnik 2013: 194–195). I would add to this that a shared sense of being marginal to the mainstream allows adherents of both of these counterpublics to present their viewpoints as being ‘oppositional’ and somehow subversive. This is certainly the case in my own data, wherein liberals typically imagine public opinion to be prey to nationalist manipulation and nationalists revel in victimhood at the hands of a supposedly anti-Serbian liberal international order and its Serbian proxies. If both of these discourses exist, but neither is suitably dominant to stand in for ‘public opinion’, then it is necessary to ask how politics is understood by the majority that Obradović-Wochnik sees as being ignored by the dichotomous

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presentation of the terms of debate. Based on fieldwork in northern Serbia, Theodora Vetta points to a cleavage based on economic class. In particular, she argues that nationalist voters are motivated less by ‘identity quests’ and more by the rational rejection of a pro-European democratic order that has resulted in their economic dispossession (Vetta 2009). In particular, she extrapolates from her own sample of middle-aged and professionally-qualified workers to challenge the ‘stereotype’ of nationalist voters propagated by representatives of ‘liberal’ Serbia: namely that they are uneducated, easily manipulable, wedded to unrealistic dreams of a Greater Serbia and incapable of economic ‘reflection’.23 While nationalist identity narratives do resonate to some degree among Vetta’s informants, in most political discussion these concerns are subordinated to economic laments, in which these citizens almost uniformly interpret politics in the light of biographical tales of their own impoverishment through privatizations and foreign takeovers of the companies where they work/worked (Vetta 2009). It was the nationalist politicians’ claim to dissent against European directives to liberalize the economy (rather than the democrats who embraced them) ‘that resonated most with ordinary peoples’ desire to reverse the increasing insecurity and economic deprivation they had experienced since the 1990s’ (Vetta 2009: 87). Thus, Vetta argues that from the perspective of her informants the decisive division can be understood in terms of class, between the ‘liberal elites’ who followed the ‘return to Europe’ advocated by Tadić’s bloc in the 2008 elections and the ‘ordinary people’ who sought only a return to economic normalcy (p. 87). My attempt to map this vast hinterland between ideological poles adhering to liberalism and nationalism accepts Vetta’s argument that economic issues are most important. Furthermore, I believe that it is also possible to perceive a cleavage based on class, but not in the terms that she describes. Vetta is probably justified in claiming that many of what might otherwise be left-wing votes go to nationalist parties in the absence of a ‘strong institutionalized left’. However, Vetta errs in endorsing the frames of reference used by her informants despite the questionable degree to which they correspond to sociological reality. Specifically, her claim that Tadić’s victorious European bloc in the 2008 elections aimed principally to ‘appease liberal elites’ gives the impression that there exists an electorally-decisive liberal constituency that has either attained a higher economic class status (an ‘elite’) than her nationalist-voting informants or was at the very least optimistic that their interests could be served through neoliberal means – privatizations, attracting investment and so on. On the basis of my data, I intend to argue that speakers identifying with liberal and democratic discourses usually do not perceive themselves as an elite and are just as likely to curse the unfairness of the socioeconomic order as those more sympathetic to nationalist politics. Class enters in a more cultural than purely economic form; specifically, it was unmistakable that 23 Vetta’s sample all supported the Serbian Radical Party during the 2008 elections. The author quotes a passage distributed by the Serbian Helsinki Committee in order to show the kind of negative stereotyping of nationalist voters that takes place.

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those identifying strongly with the cultural style of the city thought of politics differently, and responded to their economic insecurity differently, than those rural incomers who continued to identify primarily with the cultural style of the small towns of their birth. Like Vetta’s small town informants, the rural nostalgics of Niš yearned for a return to economic normalcy that they associated with the statesocialist past, tending to sympathize with the claims of populist-nationalist parties to provide a more egalitarian alternative to the economic risk their lives were subject to. However, those Nišlije identifying as urban citizens did not wholeheartedly embrace economic liberalism either, bemoaning the disappearance of the middleclass and the rise of criminal elites that they associated with market capitalism and privatizations. Far from embracing economic liberalism, these citizens were angry with it and most appeared ready to punish the DS for overseeing their pauperization. However, since these urban citizens tended quite reasonably to associate nationalist politicians with violence and criminality, transferring their support to figures such as Nikolić did not present itself as a sensible option. The result tended to be a more thoroughgoing rejection of politics altogether. Between Politics and the People: Local Context, Education and Media Environments In order to understand how the everyday public sphere emerges, it is first necessary to consider the educational, media and local contextual factors that mediate between the business of elite politics that has been described so far and the discussions of my informants in Niš that follow. Niš (population: 255,000) is a city with an industrial reputation that thrived as an electronic goods centre in the former Yugoslavia, while still supporting an urban culture whose participants were keen to distinguish themselves from those who came to live in the city from the surrounding small towns and countryside. If one is to characterize the city in relation to the cultural divide between ‘urban cosmopolitans’ and ‘peasant urbanites’ that much of the literature on Serbian social divides over the last several decades highlights (Simić 1973, Gordy 1999, Bougarel 1999, Jansen 2001, 2005), it is certainly fair to say that Niš has weaker cosmopolitan credentials than do the capital Belgrade (pop. 1,659,000) or its more upwardly-mobile rival for the symbolic claim of being ‘Serbia’s second city’, Novi Sad (342,000). Following the collapse of the town’s industrial base, the population has been kept stable by inmigration from the rapidly depopulating South of Serbia, which has compensated for the exodus of Nišlije to Belgrade and the West. Unemployment is higher and average wages lower than the than the national average.24 From a sociological 24 Statistical Office of Serbia figures for 2010 showed the city of Niš to have 287 employees and 131 unemployed for every 1,000 of population, compared to a national average of 258 employees and 100 unemployed. An expert at the city’s administration estimated the city had upwards of 35,000 working age unemployed in early 2011 (author’s

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perspective, Niš is also notable for its relatively large Roma population, officially numbering just 7,000 but almost certainly many times larger.25 The recent political history of the town is obviously of relevance in this section. When Milošević’s SPS resorted to rigging elections in 1996, they did not consider that it might be necessary to do so in Niš, a city which had come to be regarded as a ‘Red Fortress’ on account of its solid support for the ex-communists during the country’s short democratic history (The Fall of Milošević, BBC 2002). However, the SPS actually lost to the DS and its coalition allies in Niš, leading to a botched attempt to belatedly rig the vote. The resulting demonstrations and publicity thus spread outwards from the unlikely epicentre of Niš, a fact that leads many townspeople to continue to identify proudly with these anti-regime protests. Considering that Milošević was forced out a few years later after fresh rigged elections in 2000, the refrain that ‘the Revolution started in Niš’ is still often heard from the generation that took part in those protests. Of course, other recent historical events have also left their imprint on the memory of the town. Niš was one of the cities that suffered significant civilian casualties during the NATO bombardment of Serbia in 1999. At the time of the fieldwork, Niš municipality was administered by a DS-led coalition, although the 2008 local election results had shown an almost even split between nationalist and democratic bloc parties. In sum, Niš presents a historical political context with both notable nationalistauthoritarian and liberal democratic credentials. So far as education is concerned, the obvious point to make is that there was a significant rupture between the end of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1990 and the Serb-dominated Milošević-era Yugoslavia that emerged from its ruins, with particular respect to the content of history lessons, literature reading lists and other domains that typically dominate the agenda of nation-builders. The degree to which the SFRY authorities ever succeeded in supplanting Serb and Croatian nationalism is disputed, but any failures were not occasioned by the want of trying. Despite the maintenance of a considerable degree of autonomy for cultural elites at the republic level, ‘school texts were very similar across the entire fieldnotes, February 2011). In 2011, Niš’s average net wage (listed after stoppages) of 343 Euros per month compares to the national average of 394 Euros, 485 Euros for Belgrade and 464 Euros for Novi Sad (all of which are, in any case, insufficient to provide a good standard of living in contemporary Serbia). Data according Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. Available at http://pod2.stat.gov.rs/ObjavljenePublikacije/G2012/pdfE/ G20121017.pdf. Accessed 31 January 2013. 25 One municipal sociologist suggested that the true population was at least 25,000 (author’s fieldnotes 1 March 2011). As mentioned in a footnote in Chapter 2, I adopted a methodological blindness with respect to the ethnic composition of my sample, a strategy which did not deliver any representation of the Roma population in my sample. This is probably explained by the general social separation between the Roma and the rest of the townspeople, which made the ethnographic necessities of gaining contacts and building rapport an impossibility given the limited time allotted to an already ambitious fieldwork agenda. Thus I do not claim to address political identities among the Roma at all.

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Yugoslavia’ (Dutceac Segesten 2011: 31) and it was thus the case that the message of multinational South-Slav solidarity was spread far and wide. Most Nišlije born up until about 1980 retain clear and often fond memories of history lessons containing numerous stories mythologizing the life of Tito and a curriculum that celebrated the now defunct multi-nationalist mantra of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’. Since the mid-1980s, the Serbian school curriculum has been changing, gradually at first and then more sweepingly since 1990, to promote a Serbian national consciousness. As with other post-socialist countries, this has led to the textbook framing of even international history events from the perspective of the Serb nation, a sharp contrast from the Marxist internationalism of the socialist years. With respect to the tension between liberal and nationalist forces in postMilošević Serbia, Anamaria Dutceac Segesten describes the early attempts of some liberal voices to take control of the discourse, but ultimately argues that such attempts at the ‘de-ideolization of Serbian history textbooks were feeble in comparison with the opposite trend, visible especially after 2004, of using the textbook as an ideological precursor’ (Dutceac Segesten 2011: 34). The specific ideology she refers to is, of course, a heavily mythologized version of nationalism, drenched in discourses of victimhood and heroism (for medieval history) and defined by a revisionist agenda with respect to modern history. For example, Tito’s achievements are now typically denigrated in official Serbian history texts, with the stock of his Serb nationalist opponent and Nazi collaborator Draža Mihajlović rising accordingly. Of course, this should not be surprising in the light of the political context described above in which both the Democratic Party and their nationalist opponents seek to cultivate their nationalist credentials. At the time of the fieldwork, the DS was actually involved in a very public campaign to rehabilitate the reputation of Mihajlović.26 Such a lurch towards nationalism is also very evident in the Serbian university sector, where liberal academics increasingly complain of being frozen out on the grounds of their unwillingness to sing from a new hymnsheet.27 If the general movement in education has been one towards nationalist indoctrination, this has not happened without the constant friction of opposition. Predictably, this has been led by liberal intellectuals such as Vesna Pešić (Pešić 1994). More generally, the experience that many have of being partly or fully educated before the changes – or at least taught by teachers who had been – allows many ordinary citizens to look upon the nationalist mainstream as something constructed rather than natural and inevitable. One friend in his late twenties who had recently studied school textbooks was in this sense highly attuned to 26 Most conspicuously, the ruling DS-led government sponsored the eventually successful search to locate and exhume the body of Mihajlović in 2011. Biljana Pekušić, ‘Serbs Seek Closure on Draza Mihailovic’, Southeast European Times, 15 July 2011. http:// www.setimes.com/cocoon/setimes/xhtml/en_GB/features/setimes/features/2011/07/15/ feature-02. 27 [Anonymity preserved], interview with the author, January 2011.

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the influence of nationalist doxa on textbooks. He complained that a recent high school text dealing with the life and work of Djindjić, while broadly hagiographic in its praise, had mentioned only that ‘criminals’ had instigated his assassination, evidently whitewashing the fact that Djindjić’s most vehement and libellous critics (consequently suspected of involvement in his death) were political nationalists including many such as Koštunica who were still sitting in the parliament at the time of speaking. This kind of sincere outrage is not the only common method of registering opposition to nationalist tropes: satire and mockery is equally common. For example, I was introduced to the propaganda magazines of ‘Serbona’, a group of alternative historians contending that Slavs emerged from Serbs and not the other way round, not by a true believer but by an English-teaching colleague in his thirties who simply found them hilarious. If a heavily mythologized vision of history is ever to become hegemonic in Serbia’s cities as well as its backwaters, it will have to do so in spite of an older generation that are generally unwilling to malign the memory of Tito’s Yugoslavia and a younger liberal-minded intelligentsia (many of them schoolteachers) that regards these simultaneously paranoid and grandiose narratives of Serbdom as somewhere in the range between dangerous propaganda and light entertainment. The media in post- Milošević Serbia is similarly characterized by the clash of a conservative, nationalist mainstream (often traceable to the alliances of mediaowning tycoons with the Milošević regime itself) and a liberal opposition. What complicates this picture is that much of the most well-known mouthpieces of liberal Serbia have, over the past decade or so, either been exposed as underfunded and commercially unsustainable (such as the newspaper Borba) or have succumbed to market pressure to replace much of their principled editorial content with commercially-oriented content (sport or light entertainment). For example, from its roots as an independent mouthpiece of opposition to the Milošević regime, the multi-platform B92 has retained its place as one of the most successful media groups in the country by audience share, but has managed to alienate many of its intellectual viewers along the way by broadcasting endless celebrity-oriented reality shows and cutting down on serious news coverage. In this vein, it is not coincidental that the subject of Obradović-Wochnik’s critique of the sensationalist coverage of Mladić’s arrest in 2011 was a debate broadcast on B92 (ObradovićWochnik 2013) and it is worth noting that the famed political discussion show Peščanik had left the channel’s airwaves by the time of the fieldwork to continue its existence online as a podcast and current affairs blog. Of the titles that Ramet lists as mouthpieces of ‘Liberal Serbia’ in her 2011 essay described above (Ramet 2011a), not all could necessarily be described as equally intellectually coherent: for example, the Swiss-owned mass circulation daily Blic continued to follow the convention of having at least one topless young woman (evidently an internetsourced copy-and-paste) secreted in the inner pages each day, usually found underneath innocuous stories about wax museums in Jagodina or barbequed meat festivals in Leskovac.

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However, for all the banality of much of what passed for the liberal media in 2011, it would be misleading to argue that well-funded nationalist newspapers (such as the broadsheet Politika and the tabloid Kurir) and the turbo-folk kitsch and social conservatism cocktail of TV stations like Pink had succeeded in capturing the entire mainstream of media discourse. Readers of Blic were still exposed to the satirical cartoons of Marko Somborac28 that succeeded in belittling not only conservatives like Nikolić but also the DS’s own nationalist crusader Vuk Jeremić, perennially drawn as the cartoon character Sponge Bob Square Pants. Viewers of B92 were still able to watch the weighty investigative reports of Brankica Stanković on the Insajder (‘Insider’) programme, and readers of the group’s internet news site could still read the articles of the respected columnist Teofil Pančić. It should be noted that all of these liberal voices would have been available to the most casual of news observers and that a great deal more was available to those committed liberals who actively sought to find out the stories behind the stories. The online news and comment platforms Peščanik and e-novine and the very successful satirical fake news website njuz.net were all in one way or another making it rather easy for net-savvy individuals to maintain liberal identities at the time of the fieldwork.29 This should not disguise the fact that the liberal platforms in the mainstream media in the country have been forced either to downsize or to re-orient their content to commercial needs. Nevertheless, when seen in the context of the trend towards the decline of independent media across Central and Eastern Europe (Freedom House 2012a, Reporters Without Borders 2012), the Serbian media environment in 2011 can be understood as relatively diverse. Civic Participation Before I address the task of describing the discursive construction of publics and counter publics in Niš, I will focus primarily on data gathered by means of participant observation in order to make the point that public-spirited discussion about politics and life in Serbia is a recurrent feature of everyday interaction in Niš. The public sphere of discussion is not hidden or obscure but prominent: Nišlije have access to numerous contexts in which they may perform the roles of democratic citizens. This may be illustrated with reference to two specific contexts in which political talk emerged: heated debates during recreational activities and discussions prompted by the sharing of political videos via the internet.

28 Analyses of Somborac’s work have illustrated some of blog posts of the political scientist Florian Bieber. ‘Why Nikolić won and what it means’, Florian Bieber, 21 May 2012. Available at http://fbieber.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/why-nikolic-won-and-what-itmeans/. Accessed 20 January 2013. 29 Alas, e-novine suddenly backed the SNS prior to the 2012 elections and has since then gleefully turned its guns primarily against figures associated with liberal Serbia.

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During my stay in Niš, I was accepted as a member of a mountaineering club (planinarski klub) in which scores of men and women of a range of ages would spend their weekends getting up early to hike on the plentiful mountainous terrain within a short drive of the city. A significant minority of the hikers were current or former employees of Serbia’s armed forces, while others came from a range of social and professional backgrounds ranging from service sector employees to municipal economists and so on. It was very common to hear conversations about matters of politics both on the slopes and in the kafana30 afterwards. In these settings, I was witness to many heated debates on Djindjić’s legacy, the consequences of European Union membership for Serbian agriculture and many other topics besides. On one occasion that took place during an ascent, two male army pensioners were opposed by a currently serving army officer in a discussion relating to Serbia’s loss of Kosovo. The pensioners claimed that the democrats had betrayed Serbia by accepting the loss of Kosovo, whereas the younger man instead directed his anger against what he perceived as Koštunica’s efforts (as PM between 2004–08) to drag Serbia back to war. As often happened, voices were raised in this exchange with both parties sticking to their positions. Incidentally, it is possible that some such exchanges may have been prompted by my presence as a foreign scholar in Serbia, but it was obvious that political talk was frequent in these circles, not least because some of these heated discussions led to the recreational mountaineers addressing each other as ‘you nationalists’ and ‘you democrats’.31 Despite the vehemence of the speakers, the social settings of these discussions generally dissuaded discussants from antagonizing each other to the extent that Obradović-Wochnik describes with respect to the participants in the B92 programme on Mladić. The speakers were ultimately aiming to persuade each other, with raised voices occurring only when frustration set in: these were dialogues, often heated ones, but not diatribes. Interactions of this kind, as well as others that were more obviously benign, may be understood as intrinsically ‘democratic’ in the sense that they occasioned ‘performances of a distinct form of selfhood, one that revels in peaceful disagreement and is oriented towards an audience of deliberative strangers’ (Wedeen 2008: 114–115). Though the 30 A kafana is a traditional form of Serbian pub in which home-cooked meals and appetizers are usually served with alcoholic drinks. They are more typical of the countryside and urban suburbs than city centres and have attracted considerable sociological attention on account of the lifestyle that they support (Djordjević 2011). 31 Not all discussions could be understood in these terms of course. For example, the entertaining views of another army officer in his 30s are worth recording with respect to environmental concerns. In the context of a discussion about deforestation, the officer told of a state-owned company that had the right to participate in the large-scale commercial logging of Serbia’s forests, but had allegedly paid tax on only 100,000 Euros’ profits the previous year. This was allowed, he claimed, on the basis that the companies’ vehicles, employees’ mobile phone bills and so on were all written off as ‘expenses’. Finally, he delivered his policy recommendation: ‘Why doesn’t the government just let those bastards keep their 100,000 Euros and leave the forests alone?’

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mountaineering club was not an explicitly political organization, it obviously provided a context in which vibrant, contested public sphere activity took place. Far from being rare, intense political debate was very frequently hard to avoid. For those below about 40 years old, which is to say those belonging to generations accustomed to using the internet, the sharing of and discussion about video clips with political content, often posted with humorous or satirical intent, was a means through which politics permeated everyday life. The manner in which these videos were received is often suggestive of political standpoints, as I will show with reference to decidedly liberal responses. For example, one video posted on YouTube in February 2011, showed placard-carrying SNS supporters who had been filmed attempting to walk up a downward-moving escalator during one of Nikolić’s rallies in Belgrade. In the clip, passing Belgraders mock the protesters who gamely proceed with their futile attempt to get to the top of the downward elevator for around a minute. According to one conversation that took place between colleagues at the university faculty I worked at, this was held to be evidence of the rural origin and poor educational background of Naprednjaci (SNS supporters) who were thus portrayed as lacking the capacity to understand the intentions of their leaders. In a similar vein, when I spent a night drinking with a group of friends in their late twenties and early thirties, the night ended at one of the friends’ apartments in which they sat drinking beer while they played ‘top-10’ videos of the ‘worst’ domestic32 music videos on the web. Their enjoyment was derived from the clash between their own self-identifying urban, liberal worldview and the world of unreflexive male aggression and flamboyant female sexuality of some of their (generally small-town) compatriots. The fact that the group were keen to bring my attention to the assumed political preferences of the people they mocked (‘You see what we have to deal with here!’; ‘These people vote!’) reveals the ‘work’ that such satirical practices do in creating us-them distinctions with explicit relevance to identification for and against given political movements. For present purposes, it is not necessary to endorse or criticize such practices on ethical grounds33 to recognize their constitutive role in maintaining strong identities 32 Domestic or domaći is a genre-label referring to music or other forms of media that are produced in what I will call the Serbo-Croatian language. It is still typical for people in the former Yugoslav nations to consume cultural products from other (now independent) republics. The journalist Tim Judah has referred to this cultural space as the ‘Yugosphere’ (Judah 2009). Tim Judah, ‘Yugoslavia is Dead: Long Live the Yugosphere’, LSEE Papers on South Eastern Europe. Available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/europeanInstitute/research/ LSEE/PDF%20Files/Publications/Yugosphere.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2013. 33 The issue of whether these Bourdieuian practices of distinction may be understood as the oppressive denigration of the weak or as a form of resistance against an illiberal mainstream depends on the question of whether liberals are seen as being in a privileged position in contemporary Serbia. This question is hotly debated at present. For example, Cvetičanin & Popescu argue on the basis of survey and interview data that urban, liberalminded Serbs are forced to adapt their practices to fit in with the dominance of more rural, nationalist tastes in order to get on in life (Cvetičanin & Popescu 2009). Vetta on the other

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oriented to the political contestation upon which democratic pluralism depends.34 What unites these practices with the earnest arguments of the mountaineers is that both are examples of the penetration of politics into everyday life: discussion about politics is a means through which a great many of the Serbian citizens in my sample sought to ‘make their appearance in the world’ (Arendt 1958). It is on the basis of this point that I have claimed that it was usually rather easy to identify one’s acquaintances in Niš on the basis of their political convictions. With respect to the precarious financial circumstances under which most of my informants lived, it would have been very possible to make the case that most Nišlije suffer from limited access to the public sphere due to preoccupations with ‘making ends meet’. However, it was simply not necessary to make that argument because of the very frequent appearance of the public sphere in everyday life. It was striking how often these ordinary citizens chose to talk in ways that framed the problems of themselves and others (low pay, lack of opportunities, and so on) as part of wider issues at the societal level (the disappearance of the middle-class, the predominance of connections over qualifications and so on). It is this widespread capacity of citizens to exercise what Wright-Mills described as a ‘sociological imagination’35 that allows many Nišlije to conceive of their interests and identities in ways that both connect them to others with similar concerns and differentiate them from others who articulate their interests in other ways. Discourses in Political Talk in Niš It follows from this last point that it is indeed possible to detect distinct and differentiated discourses through which citizens attempt to make sense of politics. In presenting this data, I have attempted to corral together an admittedly far more diverse range of stances into just four ideal-typical discourses.36 I have termed each of these discourses respectively as 1) ‘hardline nationalist’; 2) ‘hard liberal’; hand appears to sympathize with the claims of her informants – the victims of the kind of stereotyping afforded to the SNS supporters on the basis of the YouTube clip – to argue against a ‘liberal elite’ (Vetta 2009). 34 This point corresponds with my endorsement of Mouffe’s valorization of the condition of pluralism (Chapter 3) and of Fraser and Warner’s arguments to the effect that a truly inclusive public sphere ought to consist of a plurality of discrete publics and counterpublics (Chapter 1). 35 Cited in Eliasoph 1998: 13. 36 While I have foregrounded the Weberian notion of ‘ideal types’, I claim my approach is epistemologically congruent with Pierre Bourdieu’s attempts to identify ‘structural homologies’ in the practices of agents. As Didier Bigo notes, Bourdieu was pragmatic from a methodological point of view (Bigo 2011), using multiple correspondence analysis where large survey datasets were available (Bourdieu 1984 [1979]), but also using qualitative data to make similar arguments, as in his use of obituaries to map the career trajectories of academics from different class backgrounds (Bourdieu 1988). The claims I

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3) ‘authoritarian-nostalgic’; and 4) ‘careworn democratic’. As I stated at the beginning of the chapter, this four-fold division is not perfectly congruent with the complexity of actual practice, but I claim that it is a useful way of thinking about a relational public sphere in which clearly differentiated discourses, explicitly oriented towards political contestation,37 are in fact discernible. The ‘Hardline Nationalist’ Counterpublic Obradović-Wochnik repeatedly stresses the marginality of ‘hardline nationalist’ discourse outside of media discourse to the extent that she risks giving the impression that these stances are rarely encountered in everyday life (Obradović-Wochnik 2013). It is important, then, to note that such perspectives were frequently aired by a sizeable and very audible minority in my sample. These ‘hardline nationalist’ discourses are characterized by the use of anti-Serbian conspiracy theories to explain problems observed in social and political life. Economic problems and social issues are prominent in these narratives, but anger is directed against America or the West and their perceived allies on the liberal side of the Serbian political spectrum. While such ideas certainly trace their intellectual provenance to older generations, at the everyday level they are particularly popular among young people of student age. On a few occasions just after the arrest of Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian Serb military commander wanted for orchestrating the massacre of up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, I heard statements from students claiming that while Mladić ‘might’ have done something wrong, his arrest was evidence of the tendency of the West to favour Serbia’s neighbours over Serbia itself.38 Public figures from the liberal end of the political spectrum and civil society typically enter such narratives cast as ‘traitors’ and ‘sell-outs’.39

advance in this chapter are based on a combination of group discussion transcripts and data gathered through participant observation. 37 Warner provides a useful selection criterion with respect to which kinds of public discourse may or may not be considered ‘political’: ‘as things stand now, it might be that the only way a public is able to act is through its imaginary coupling with the state … when alternative publics are cast as social movements – they acquire agency in relation to the state. They enter the temporality of politics and adapt themselves to the performatives of rational-critical discourse’ (Warner 2002: 89). 38 This idea was also present in one of the group discussions, wherein Mladić’s treatment was compared to that of the Kosovo PM Hashim Thaçi who has also been implicated in war crimes. One interesting variant I encountered was that the whole event of Mladić’s arrest must have been staged by America and their Serbian allies (Tadić and the DS) to distract attention from some unspecified event going on somewhere else. 39 Rather bemusingly, one young man claiming nationalist sympathies conceded that the LDP’s Čedomir Jovanović sounded more like ‘a normal guy’ than the other political leaders in the country, before adding that ‘But he is paid to say those things!’ by America.

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Speakers rarely actually condoned the physical harassment or assassination of non-nationalist figures (at least not in my presence),40 but attitudes to those who have found themselves in such positions are typically unsympathetic. In this vein, I can cite the words of one retired soldier who called former PM Djindjić a traitor for having taken shelter outside of Milošević’s Serbia during the NATO bombardment. The fact that the regime attempted several political assassinations at that time and that Djindjić was himself assassinated in 2003 evidently did not provoke a more sympathetic assessment from this speaker in retrospect. In the following exchange, a group of journalism students discuss the investigative journalist Brankica Stanković, who was at that time living under police protection in response to threats against her in the wake of reports on her Insajder show on B92 which exposed many powerful figures to unwelcome scrutiny. Matija (male, early twenties): … I could do what Brankica Stanković does with all these bodyguards around me. And then you’ll have Tadić and who knows who else lobbying … Predrag (male, early, twenties): That story about Brankica, it’s pure propaganda. Jana (female, early twenties): Yeah, right. M: She’s allegedly in danger and everything, and yet she gets all those exclusive guests. Tadić never goes to any TV shows, and then you see him in her show. She’s … J: You think she’s … P: She pays her guests to come and speak on the show … That’s done in America, it’s called ‘cheque booking’ journalism. (sic: kako se to kaže cheque booking novinarstvo). She’s a whole different story, believe me. I know that for a fact.

As is clear from this exchange, these speakers perceive the liberal perspective as the dominant one, backed by ‘[President] Tadić’,41 ‘lobbying’, ‘propaganda’ and allegedly extensive financial resources. Thus Obradović-Wochnik’s claim of the For my part, I conceded that I would be surprised if the US had never tried to support the LDP. ‘You see!’, he exclaimed. 40 One notable exception concerns a young woman in the group of journalism students featured further on in this section who spoke warmly of the underworld figure Milorad ‘Legija’ Ulemek who has been serving time for participation in former PM Djindjić’s killing. 41 The inclusion of Tadić in many diatribes against ‘liberal’ Serbia suggests that the DS’s attempts to cosy up to nationalist voters by appointing many compromised figures associated with the Milošević regime was failing to have the desired effect.

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marginal status of these discourses is actually supported by the words of these students who explicitly make the case for the subordinate status of their discourse. According to these speakers, this is an oppositional counterdiscourse, speaking against dominant power configurations. At some level, these discourses often contain appeals that are phrased in terms congruent with liberal concerns for transparency and the rule of law: in fact, it is more common to hear complaints about the honesty or competence of liberal figures than it is to hear complaints about anti-nationalist policies. This point may be illustrated with reference to another exchange from the group discussion cited above in which the speakers bemoan the influence of big money in politics and constraints on the ‘independent’ media. When Jana complains angrily about the LDP’s constant promotional activities, Matija tells a story of how the supposedly ‘independent’ radio station where he interned was bankrolled by Mlađan Dinkić’s G17+ party. Linking his point back to the subject of Jana’s complaint, he concludes, ‘And if LDP were paying our salaries, we’d probably be following them’. Taken at face value, these complaints could equally have been aired by a group of self-identifying liberals. Certainly, I heard many complaints from speakers who agreed with the LDP’s anti-nationalist platform but bemoaned the party’s alleged tendency to be indistinguishable from their nationalist opponents in many other regards. However, what stands out in nationalist talk is the partisanship: whether complaints are voiced in ways that imply a concern with liberal principles or in terms that claim to speak in the name of the nation, the targets of these complaints are nearly always associated with liberal Serbia. In the example above, it is therefore revealing that Matija does not remain focussed on the patronage politics he actually claimed to have observed on the part of Dinkić’s (ideologically vague) G17+ party, but claims a moral equivalency on the part of the anti-nationalist LDP: ‘and they would do it too’. The same level of scrutiny is not afforded to nationalist candidates, so the concern for the upholding of a liberal system based on the freedom of the press is strategic rather than sincere. The prevalence of this expressedly anti-liberal sentiment across a large part of the current and recent university students in my sample adds weight to the assertion of Ekiert et al. that in the Western Balkans, ‘today’s university students grow up suffocated by ethnocentric and antidemocratic propaganda’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 27). At a more local level, it also corroborates the complaint of one local social scientist (anonymity preserved, personal communication) who spoke of ‘reverse lustration’ in Serbia’s university system, by which he meant that those liberals who had once opposed the Milošević regime were now being purged from their faculty positions. These ‘hardline’ stances are usually expressed in opposition to liberal politicians rather than in support of nationalist ones, and yet it is quite clear that these impulses are well catered for in Serbian political competition. The ‘hardline nationalist’ position is discursively presented as a kind of subversive anti-politics, but it is probable that those adhering to it find themselves able to express their grievances at the ballot box. In this category we might possibly

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include the currently pro-European but recently hardline SNS, but certainly all points rightward from there (Radicals, DSS, Dveri).42 The main debate from this ideological nationalist perspective at the time of the study was whether or not to stick with Tomislav Nikolić in spite of his re-invention as a pro-European. The journalism students who are cited extensively in this section tended to discuss Nikolić sympathetically, defending the candidate against negative liberal media narratives casting him as uneducated. However, in a different group, one medical professional in his fifties described Nikolić and his deputy Vučić as ‘the greatest disgrace in Serbia’, firmly pinning his own hopes on the possible return of Šešelj43 and his unreformed Radicals. The ‘Hard Liberal’ Counterpublic The next set of discourses, corresponding to the civic activists’ position in Obradović-Wochnik’s article, may be termed ‘hard liberal’ in line with existing scholarly conventions (Ramet 2011: 6). In the context of early 2011, speakers typically located Serbia’s problems in both the corruption of the present DS-led order and the legacy of Serbia’s nationalist and militaristic past, and explicitly aligned themselves with liberal ideals and institutional practices that were mourned for their observed absence. While these discourses typically make use of a very high level of factual knowledge about politics, the key debate concerns whether or not to endorse any of the available options. The impassioned speech below of the bookseller (Darko) embodies many liberal themes and is made in response to a suggestion by this speaker’s friend (Danica) that in the context of the DS’s corrupt tenure there is little point opposing the likely victory of the (pro-European) nationalists of Nikolić’s SNS. Darko (male, bookseller, late 20s): In my opinion, the main problems in politics result from the failure to break the legacy prevalent even in current politics where the people who made the system in the 1990s are still part of the new system. In 1996, the protests against that kind of thinking, and that kind of system that was responsible for civil war, started here in this city. But this discontinuity never took place, not even after the Prime Minister was shot, nor after other things we’d waited for, and we went back to the old structure. That’s the main problem – this lack of discontinuity like there was in post-Hitler Germany. Danica said maybe we should let the SNS come into power. No, we shouldn’t! Never again! They 42 The Radicals (SRS) and DSS are referred to earlier in the chapter. Dveri (‘Doors’) is often referred to as a ‘clerico-fascist’ organization. 43 This was not so outlandish at the time of the study and has probably become more likely since. The ICTY has, since 2012, acquitted a number of high profile defendants who are venerated by their supporters for precisely the actions for which they were indicted by the court. Šešelj would fit into this category.

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had their chance back in the 90s, and we saw what they were about, they brought us death, suffering and isolation and all these people should be put in prison for that. I’m thinking Tomislav Nikolić, Vojislav Šešelj, Svetlana Ražnatović, Ivica Dačić, Slavica Djukić-Dejanović44 … they should all be put in prison. Jelena (female, translator early 30s): And banned from performing any kind of public work! Darko: Right, ban them from politics. That’s the first problem. Danica (female, unemployed, late 20s): But they’re not in prison, instead they are forming a coalition with the Democratic Party! And Dačić is the main man now!

Darko’s calls for the jailing of many Serbian public figures seen as tainted by association with the criminality and wars of Serbia’s ‘system in the 1990s’ and the invocation of the legacies of the 1996 anti-Milošević protests and Djindjić (‘the Prime Minister [who] was shot’) are used rhetorically to implore his friends to oppose the nationalists of the SNS in the present. However, Danica defends her position, complaining that Dačić, one of Milošević’s SPS colleagues, far from being in prison, was leading his SPS party which exercised considerable power in what was notionally a liberal, pro-European DS-led government. While these speakers are divided on the question of whether or not to vote, they are united in a normative liberal vision of the way that politics should be carried out – through the robust administration of transitional justice and a rupture with the legacy of Serbia’s illiberal past. In contrast to the nationalists quoted above, concerns relating to the liberal democratic system – rule of law, transparency and so on – are considered to be more important than partisanship. In this vein, many members of the ‘hard liberal’ counterpublic share a concern about the lack of symmetry between the way that liberal institutions ought to function in theory and the way that they are observed to do so in Serbia. The exchange quoted in Chapter 2 illustrates this point very well, but this impulse was also present outside of the structured context of group discussions. For example, I observed that one sociologist in his thirties took pains to explain to his students the problem of ‘blank resignations’ (beli ostavki) in which politicians were changing 44 Some of these figures have been described above, some not. Svetlana ‘Ceca’ Ražnatović is a popular singer and the widow of the warlord Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović. She has a long history of connections with underworld figures dating from the beginning of her career in the early 1990s. At the time of the study, she was perceived to have got off lightly for large scale embezzlement on account of her high-level (mostly SPS) connections. Slavica Djukić-Dejanović is a senior SPS politician who was serving as speaker of the Serbian Parliament at the time of the fieldwork. She had already held senior positions during the Milošević years.

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their allegiance to well-funded but ideologically-vague parties without even going through the pretence of claiming to be convinced by the platform of the new party. Similarly, it was a friend of mine in her thirties who brought it to my attention that an EU commissioner had criticized the government for appointing ‘unqualified persons’ to the judiciary, explaining that this usually meant that such officials would show loyalty to the people who had appointed them rather than worrying too much about upholding the law. The point here is that such everyday narratives can only emerge from people who consider that they know what liberal institutions are for and are thus able to feel cheated when the spirit of these institutions is compromised. Thus, the fact that many of those positioning themselves in these ways were dismissive of the political options available to them at that time emphatically does not mean that they had grown disillusioned with liberal ideas nor with democracy itself. The characterization of this counterpublic as ‘hard liberal’ conceals the fact that many so designated stood for more radical or emancipatory ideas: cosmopolitans, feminists, antinationalists and even some Marxists. When in such company, arguments concerning political and intellectual ideas were common; indeed, it is likely that many of those grouped together as liberals would claim, on justifiable intellectual bases that it is simply a misnomer to call them ’liberals’. However, I claim that this aggregative categorization is defensible on the basis that there is a widespread recognition of common purpose across these positions in contemporary Serbia from the perspective that all oppose nationalist politics as well as the movement of supposedly democratic politicians to embrace nationalist positions. The hard liberal position is also heterogenous with respect to questions of economic policy; in fact, it was more common at the level of everyday discussion to hear social democratic visions of economic justice than advocacy of economic liberalism. Thus, despite the obvious affinity of all these liberals with the democratic system, it does not follow that this necessarily goes together with an embrace of the neoliberal economic reforms and ‘risk’ society that have coincided with democratization. Rather than associating economic ‘risk-taking’ with an ‘open society’ as many self-identifying liberals of the East European right do (Tismaneanu 2009: 362), the liberals among my informants nearly always joined their fellow Nišlije in speaking of ‘the rich’, ‘tycoons’ and the ‘nouveau riche’ in a derogatory manner. For many in fact, it was a very emotive issue. The bookseller quoted earlier described a powerful scene of certain infamous tycoons arriving in Niš to open a new shopping centre while ‘an old woman in a torn sweater [watched it all] from a dilapidated building across the street, probably living off 5,000 dinars (about 42 euros) a month’. As the only experience that most local people have of the inequalities immanent to capitalism is one in which a largely criminal section of society became an elite, it is hardly surprising that many Nišlije, including the liberals among them, are so reluctant to accept the unequalizing of society as a sign of democratic progress. This ‘hard liberal’ positioning fulfills Warner’s criteria for classification as a ‘counterpublic’ discourse on the basis that speakers are reflexively aware of

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their own marginality vis-à-vis mainstream public discourse (Warner 2002). This awareness often became visible whenever speakers sought, usually pessimistically, to imagine how the wider public would react with respect to some given political event. This may be illustrated by the fact that a friend in her thirties mocked Nikolić’s hunger strike with apparent relish, but then imagined her grandmother and her friends admiring the sacrifice that ‘Toma’ had made for Serbia. This lack of faith in the critical abilities of older people paradoxically coincided with the conviction among many of the same people that the young who had reached adulthood since the fall of Milošević generally ‘believed in conspiracies’ and therefore fell prey to ‘the nationalists’, an argument that further helped to explain why political courses they personally considered to be unpalatable were ‘inevitable’ in Serbia.45 Thus a key component of identification with this liberal counterpublic was the idea that ‘most’ Serbs viewed the world through different glasses, marking this discourse out as a self-consciously oppositional one. I have so far described discourses that are broadly congruent with the categories mentioned in Obradović-Wochnik’s article, corresponding to the well-known liberal and hardline nationalist perspectives that are continually articulated through the media. Since these discourses are developed in the mass media and civil society, it is probably unsurprising that those citizens adhering to these discourses are usually able to articulate their own political opinions with a high degree of philosophical consistency. However, as Obradović-Wochnik suggests, most citizens do not adhere strongly to either of these poles. In fact, a majority are characterized by less intense degrees of civic engagement, being more identifiable in terms of their professions or as conspicuous patrons of coffee shops, kafanas, diskoteke or the outdoors rather than, say, identifiable feminists or liberals. Nevertheless, political talk was usually frequent enough to allow for the recognition of the political orientation of one’s acquaintances in vague terms. As I argue through the following characterizations, it became apparent over time that these orientations could usually be linked to the cultural orientations of citizens: those identifying with the small towns of their birth usually yearned for the securities of the socialist past in a manner that was not exclusive of support for populist-nationalist parties like the SNS and the SPS in the present. Those identifying with urban culture more often considered such political options as irredeemably compromised on account of their reasoned interpretations of the country’s recent past. 45 I should probably state on the basis of my fieldwork that I consider this liberal pessimism to be slightly exaggerated if certainly based in fact to some degree. While many young people were prone to believing in conspiracies, others were not even if liberal positionings were rare. Furthermore, in four group discussions comprised of people between their early 50s and their late 70s, not one person actually said a positive word about Nikolić’s hunger strike that was discussed in all groups. In fact, the generation who remembered Tito appeared in my data as more cynical than naive, albeit from perspectives than ranged from ‘hard liberal’ to ‘authoritarian-nostalgic’.

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The Authoritarian-Nostalgic Public In my sample, the members of this public are primarily people who have come to Niš from smaller towns typically in the south of Serbia, but also include many of those who arrived as refugees from Kosovo or other parts of the former Yugoslavia.46 This loose family of discourses, stressing social and economic concerns rooted in personal experience rather than responses to liberal democracy or the national question, are characteristic of a broader demographic than either of those so far described: roughly 30 per cent of my sample, more or less equivalent to the hard liberals and nationalists combined. By terming this discourse ‘authoritariannostalgic’, I am stressing the feature of a yearning for the past that is either dismissive of, or deeply ambivalent towards, the democratic present. ‘Democracy’ in this sense is understood primarily as a capitalist economic order that is blamed for first- or second-hand experiences of dispossession and impoverishment.47 The reflexive response of this public is to yearn for a return to a more centralized and authoritarian past in the image of Tito’s Yugoslavia. While this position is certainly characteristic of that significant proportion of over 40s who would have been too contentedly conformist to have ever personally discovered the pitfalls of one-party authoritarianism,48 this ‘nostalgia’ is not limited to those who personally lived under Tito (who died in 1980). In fact, it is common among many of those coming of age since the 1990s who have never been convinced of the relative merits of a democratic system over strong decisive leadership. Aleksandar (male, early 30s, cafe owner): … Every form of socialism was better than what we have now, even life under Milošević was better. But then again things were centralized more or less. Now, you have lots of parties, they all want their piece of the pie and a lot of money is squandered that way. Mirko (male, 20, engineering student): … it is a fact that we used to live better in the past, because there was one man who was in charge of the whole of Yugoslavia. I’m talking about Tito … he was a really good politician who had great communication with other countries and with the whole world so to say.

46 These discourses are correspondingly unusual, but not completely absent among those born in Niš; what I hope to stress, following Cvetičanin & Popescu (2009), is that the distinction is more correctly understood as a rural and small town cultural orientation that is learned and reproduced through sociological practice rather than a strict consequence of birthplace or origin. 47 Ekiert et al. (2007: 17) also note the folk conflations of democracy and capitalism across Eastern Europe. 48 I have in mind Gordy’s description of Milošević’s core support as consisting of those people, tending to be older, less highly educated and more culturally connected to the countryside than the city, who ‘simply like regimes’ (Gordy 1999).

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Ambivalence to democracy is obvious in such statements, but it does not necessarily follow that the bearers of such sentiments refrain from participation in democratic politics. In fact, many of my informants quite enthusiastically identified with what Tismaneanu has refered to as ‘populist-egalitarian’ parties that ‘promise [economic] security within the homogenous confines of the ethnic community’ (Tismaneanu 2009). For example, one retired army officer told the assembled company of one mountain hike in a somewhat guilty and confessional tone that he had now ‘followed’ four parties in his life, ‘The Yugoslav Communists, the Socialist Party of Serbia, the Reformists of Niš,49 and now the Naprednjaci (SNS)’. Like this man, many of those who conformed most willingly to Tito’s authoritarian order have tended to travel almost en bloc to populist-nationalist parties via the nationalist-authoritarian bridge of Milošević’s SPS. Even the younger ‘nostalgics’ often indicated a preference for either Dačić’s SPS or Nikolić’s SNS. Vetta claims that the focus on economic concerns on the part of those declaring support for nationalist parties reveals that the driving force behind such parties is an economistic class calculation of interest (Vetta 2009). This is partly true, but it downplays the importance of tolerance for nationalist excess. Seen from the comparative perspective of my cross-sectional sample, this tolerance for nationalist excess is probably the most important means of distinguishing these discourses from those of the disgruntled democratic voters to be described further on. For example, while the bookseller quoted in the ‘hard liberal’ section called for the arrest of figures such as Nikolić and Dačić on account of their complicity with the Milošević regime of the 1990s, this was simply a non-issue for most ‘nostalgics’. Most typically, supporters discussed Nikolić’s platform in terms of the candidate’s vague claims to represent those disappointed by Tadić’s government, not mentioning the candidate’s Milošević-era past or even his more recent agitation as the de facto leader of the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party. Several of those supporting Nikolić’s SNS on the basis of dissatisfaction with the government justified this on the grounds that ‘everybody else has had a chance [to govern Serbia]’. This assumption is debatable to say the least. Nikolić was a high-profile member of the Serbian Radical Party that participated in a coalition government with Milošević’s SPS in the late 1990s. However, I mention it because I was struck by the lack of discussion of the past biographies of political figures such as Dačić and Nikolić on the part of their supporters; discussion of such matters was so rare in these circles that some people seemed to be actually unaware of their Miloševićera complicity. The fact that ‘authoritarian nostalgics’ are unconcerned by the complicity of current politicians in their country’s violent past is no trivial matter from the normative perspective implied by my concern with liberal democratic practice. I am well aware that this kind of ‘moralizing discourse’ is criticized by some scholars of 49 A colleague in Niš assured me that the Reformists were a minor and short-lived conservative party based in Niš during the early 2000s.They have not left behind much in the way of an electronic footprint.

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modern Serbian politics (Greenberg 2010). However, my point is to argue that the small-town proletarian tendency to support nationalist political projects is based on more than just economic discontent: it also requires a degree of historical amnesia or even tacit approval of past violence that is not common to all Serbs, not even to all those suffering from economic insecurity. From the perspective of the voter, Nikolić’s claim to be motivated by the prospect of improving the living standards of Serbs50 only becomes credible when one is either unaware or unconcerned by his past support for Šešelj’s Greater Serbia project (and ethnic cleansing) or, for that matter, his past statements affirming that he did not regret the 1999 murder of the journalist Slavko Ćuruvija.51 It is thus unwise to interpret this support as simply the ‘rational’ calculation of impoverished voters in the ‘absence of a strong institutionalized left’ as Vetta does. Most Nišlije would probably have considered voting for ‘a strong institutionalized left’ social-democratic-type party if it had existed but only some of them considered politicians such as Nikolić and Dačić to be credible (on account of their murky pasts) or morally palatable (on account of complicity with the Milošević regime). The fact that most ‘nostalgics’ do not recognize any moral dilemma in supporting these candidates strongly suggests that they have never really been convinced of the merits of the liberal democratic system at all. The ‘Careworn Democratic’ Public The final set of discourses to be dealt with here may be termed ‘careworn democratic’. It encompasses a broad family of narratives – probably the median position in my data – around the rejection of current political options (with the implicit idea at the time of fieldwork that the DS, as long-term incumbents deserve most blame for current woes). However, it stops short of implying the endorsement of populist-nationalist discourses or abandoning an underlying concern for the democratic system. Like the ‘nostalgics’ above, most of these erstwhile democrats recognize that life was better at various points during the Yugoslav past. However, these democrats do not call for a return to centralized or authoritarian forms of governance, choosing instead to point the finger at problems conceived as being inherent to Serbian political culture rather than the democratic system. For many of these middle-of-the-road democrats, the assassinated former PM Zoran Djindjić stands as a paragon of democratic virtue, anchoring identities in the ideal of a democratic Serbia even when the current generation of politicians in the 50 ‘Opposition Rally Not a Pre-Revolutionary One’, B92, 5 February 2011. Available at http://www.b92.net/eng/news/politics-article.php?yyyy=2011&mm=02&dd=05&nav_id =72542. Accessed 20 January 2013. 51 ‘Biografija Tomislava Nikolića’, B92, 8 May 2007. Available at http://www. b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2007&mm=05&dd=08&nav_category=418&nav_ id=245466. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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democratic bloc are perceived to be corrupt and untrustworthy. In the sense that this position is marked by consistent efforts to disassociate itself from that of ‘the nationalists’, it aspires to an affinity with an urban and liberal-intellectual approach to social life even while speakers typically rely on commonsensical reasoning or stereotyping to make their point. For example, the man quoted below rebuffs his friend’s suggestion that only (Hague war crimes indictee) Vojislav Šešelj of the Radicals can fix Serbia’s politics by denigrating not Šešelj’s policies or rhetoric but his supporters: Žile (male, late thirties, physical education teacher): If he comes (Šešelj), his voters will be eager, and this is why I’m surprised at [his friend’s name], as all of his voters are extremely uneducated and primitive …

The use of the categories of ‘civilized/uncivilized’ to denigrate those who are described in political contexts as ‘nationalists’ is well documented in Serbia (Jansen 2005, Cvetičanin & Popescu 2009, Vetta 2009). As in this case, the effect is to identify the speaker with the more educated and modern section of Serbian society associated in particular with the long-standing populations of large cities (i.e. not newcomers from the countryside). In practice, such positions are typical of many of my informants who were born in Niš, as well as some of those who originated from smaller towns but sought to identify with the culture and habits of urban life. Thus, the vaguely progressive bias of some may be described in Bourdieuian terms as practices of ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984) at the expense of solidarity with ‘white-sock-wearing’ peasant urbanites (Jansen 2005), which helps to persuade many self-identifying urbanites to reject political options perceived as ‘nationalist’. However, these discourses should not be mistaken for the self-assertion of a dominant and privileged social class. In fact, the dominant theme is a pervasive disappointment with politics rooted in perceptions of falling living standards. A common lament concerns the disappearance of the middle class and the appearance of a class of ‘tycoons’ or ‘nouveau riche’ that are variously characterized as ‘uneducated’, ‘scumbags’, ‘criminals’ and so on. Most democrats date the rise of this class to ‘the 1990s’, implying a tendency to blame the Milošević regime, but it has escaped no one’s attention that many of Serbia’s democratic elites have managed to get equally rich over the past decade. Talk deriding ‘our leaders’ and ‘politicians’ as ‘thieves’ did not specifically identify the ruling Democratic Party in the same way that complaints about the problems in Serbian society would often be pinned on ‘nationalists’. However, the over-riding sentiment among these probable erstwhile DS voters is that they do not like what they have seen and are minded to punish the democratic elites who have overseen a perceived fall in their living standards. When conversation turned to elections, the choice appeared to be one of holding their noses to vote for ‘democratic’ politicians they saw as corrupt – or changing their habits in the more radical direction of voting for ‘nationalists’ like the SNS.

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria J: Let’s go back to politics. You all said you’re apolitical. Is there any point in voting? Ana (female, mid-thirties, civil engineer): There is. So far we’ve voted every time, at least I have. Iva (female, mid-thirties, economist): There’s a point in the sense that you can cross out the ballot, because now that you go out to vote there’s no longer a minimum turnout of 50 per cent for a party to win the elections. Even if there’s a 20 per cent turnout, elections are considered legitimate. Personally, I wouldn’t vote for anyone now. Biljana (female, mid-thirties, sales clerk): I don’t know who I’d vote for. Ana: For the Naprednjaci [SNS]. (laugh) Iva: No, not them. I’d make the ballot invalid. Biljana: I don’t have any idea.

Both the main options of voting for ‘corrupt’ Democrats or ‘nationalist’ Naprednjaci (SNS) are seen as unappealing. The Democratic Party is generally agreed to have made things worse while the SNS are seen as the natural place for the votes of the uneducated and the misinformed. Another exchange fitting in with this idea of ‘respectable’ anti-politics is that between three housewives in their 50s who, following a long and generally scathing discussion of Nikolić’s infamous attempt to force early elections by means of his hunger and thirst strike (‘a dumb move’ … ‘stick with it till the end and drop dead’), discuss whether or not to vote, with one woman who identified herself as a former DS supporter suggesting that she would go into the ballot box and write ‘I’m deeply disappointed’. On the basis of such evidence, I would venture that, when elections finally came around in May 2012, a majority of these careworn democrats simply did not vote. Finally, it is important to note that these disappointed democrats are generally not intensely engaged in civic participation, nor are their democratic convictions characterized by any consistent adherence to liberal principles. The oft-proclaimed revulsion of ‘nationalist’ violence in these discourses is not evidently grounded in a principled anti-nationalism. In contrast to the ‘hard liberals’, these democrats usually represent a worldview that is broadly nationalist. Many of these democrats share the opinions of nationalist voters that Serbia is treated unfairly by the West, while at the same time they are convinced of the guilt of the country’s leadership in the 1990s. More generally, it is not typical to question received wisdom about Serbian national identity. For example, one male sports teacher in his late thirties described Serb ‘Četniks’ in the Bosnian war in the 1990s who would wear religious symbols, visit monasteries and take part in solemn religious rites one day

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‘and then kill fifty people the next’. He regarded them as ‘stupid’ on the grounds that they did not evidently understand the contradiction between Orthodox faith and violence. One is unlikely to hear any of those I have characterized as ‘hard liberals’ ground their criticisms of ‘nationalists’ in such an affirmation of Serbian identity or religious authority. The articulation of democratic political identity with conservative ideas about God and nation is mirrored by the persistence of socially conservative practices in everyday life. Thus, while these democrats recognize ‘skinheads’ and ‘hooligans’ as a grave problem in Serbian society, the principal victims of their violent acts such as gays and Roma remain more likely to enter conversation on the wrong end of politically-incorrect jokes than in any other context. These paradoxes in the everyday practices of Serbian democrats are probably no more contradictory than the policies of the Democratic Party under Boris Tadić, whose party pursued war criminals and EU membership on the one hand while opposing Kosovar independence and inviting controversial nationalist figures into his cabinet on the other. Thus this rather contradictory set of policies was more likely to alienate ‘hard liberals’ than the middle-of-the-road democrats described in this section. What the DS appear to have misjudged was the degree to which these citizens had become disillusioned by the failure to improve living standards. Conclusion: Philosophical Pluralism and Liberal Principles Remain Despite Pervasive Disaffection with Democratic Politics Probably the most important argument provided in this chapter was the one that took the least space to describe. Nišlije do discuss politics with some degree of regularity. Another way to express this point is to say that it was not hard to ‘find’ the public sphere in the town. When work colleagues joked about the placardcarrying Naprednjaci who had been filmed attempting to walk up the ‘down’ escalator during a rally in Belgrade, or when pensioners in a mountaineering club angrily debated the legacy of Djindjić during a weekend hike, it was easy to see that talking about politics was ‘a recurrent theme of everyday conversation’ (Fox 2004). The fact that many citizens felt it was both worthwhile and socially acceptable to do so leads to my conclusion that the everyday public sphere in Niš remains a contested and creative space ‘occasioning the performance of distinct forms of personhood oriented to agonistic debate’ (Wedeen 2008: 116). In other words, the public sphere provides a context through which persons are constituted and re-constituted as democratic citizens. The degree to which specifically ‘liberal’ forms of democratic citizenship are enacted is a rather trickier question that may be described with reference to the different parts of the public sphere described above. I have characterized the Serbian public sphere, accessed through political discussion in the city of Niš, as divisible into four coherent publics. This appears to support Obradović-Wochnik’s assertion that most Serbs adhere to neither the

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liberal nor the nationalist pole that are emphasized in scholarship and media discourse. She argues that the dichotomous framing of the debate continues to silence the ‘ordinary public’: But, rather than raising questions as to whether the ICTY will ever be the subject of a sustained debate in Serbia, what needs to be considered instead is the absence of any audible voices, that are able to engage with civil society, but also with the ordinary public, and present a credible opposition to the extremists and revisionists. (Obradović-Wochnik 2013: 199)

Obradović-Wochnik makes the reasonable recommendation that the voices of more ‘ordinary’ citizens should be presented in the media alongside those of (ardently liberal) civil society activists in order to get beyond the erroneous idea that the nationalist extremists who oppose them may speak for the people. In this chapter, I hope I have succeeded in showing that the vast hinterland between these positions contains the voices of those who are neither ardently liberal nor nationalist extremists. The presentation of more of these voices in the media and in scholarship could usefully complicate the picture of a divided Serbia. However, I claim that the polarizing terms of these debates has one major advantage: it represents a clear philosophical pluralism that permits identification with specific principles. For those ‘ordinary’ Serbs that are repulsed by the claims of extremists and at least partly convinced by those of the civil society activists, there are clear democratic principles available that are not likely to become so widely proliferated if civil activists did not benefit from such ‘privileged’ exposure to the public sphere. Firstly, as I have shown with reference to the discourse of ‘hard liberals’, some citizens can identify strongly with these civic/liberal discourses. Secondly, and just as importantly, a far greater number of ‘ordinary’ Serbs that I have characterized as ‘careworn democrats’ have come to identify strongly enough with basic democratic principles (the rule of law, renunciation of violence, and soon) that they persist in rejecting radical and nationalist political options even when their disillusionment with democratic politicians appears total. I argue that the presence of ‘hard liberal’ voices in the media and the corresponding ‘hard liberal’ counterpublic with whom these disappointed democrats mingle in everyday life is the decisive factor in ‘immunizing’ these citizens from ideas that may reasonably be called ‘bad’ from a normatively liberal democratic perspective. To paraphrase a popular maxim, he who stands for something need not fall for everything. Theodora Vetta sees the propensity of urban, ‘cosmopolitans’ to vote for ‘democratic’ parties in class terms. I have conceded that there is a class element: the scoffs and guffaws that accompanied mentions of the SNS/Naprednjaci communicated a sense of citizens who perceived themselves to be ‘above’ voting for the likes of these parties. When the urban citizens that I have characterized as ‘careworn democrats’ indulged in lengthy excoriations of the Democratic-led government and its failures, I would sometimes ask in neutral terms whether they would consider taking part in ‘the protests’. When they understood that I

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meant the Naprednjaci protests, the very idea seemed absurd to them: marching with the Naprednjaci did not seem to be something that self-respecting urban, educated people did. Their descriptions of these protesters were typically rather patronizing: the protesters/Naprednjaci were ‘disappointed people’, confused, dupes. Sometimes, the idea that nationalist voters were ‘primitives’ was voiced out loud. All of this sounds suspiciously like the words of a privileged caste policing a class boundary. Is it not then reasonable to recognize the propensity of the citizens targeted by this patronizing and sometimes dehumanizing language to vote for nationalists simply as a ‘rational’ reaction on the part of the dispossessed workers as Vetta does? I would argue that it is not. Even if one accepts the narrative that the democratic parties (DS, LDP) are remote and self-interested (and there are good reasons to do so), then it is reasonable to argue that ‘rational’ self-interest cannot explain the tendency of some to accept the claim of nationalist politicians to represent a proletarian alternative. Firstly, the Serbian politicians concerned (Nikolić, Šešelj, Dačić and so on) have never distinguished themselves through representing the underdog, but rather rose to prominence by aligning themselves with the oppressive policies of the state in the 1990s. Secondly, their policy statements in the area of the economy have never been very different from those of the democratic, Europeanist politicians they hope to supplant. Ahead of the 2012 elections, the SNS followed the SRS of 2008 in articulating an economic platform that was at least as neoliberal as that of their opponents. A basic examination of just a few policy statements (and nationalist politicians in Serbia do not tend to make many policy statements) reveals that those who have suffered financially under capitalism are hardly likely to have their livelihoods protected under nationalist rule. The fact that the nationalists were able to claim to represent the interests of the dispossessed can be attributed to two factors. Firstly, there was clever politics on the part of the nationalist politicians themselves (especially Nikolić and Vučić of the SNS) in recognizing that vague talk about improving the ‘jobs and money’ situation would hit home more than democratic talk of European Union entry and attracting investment. Secondly, there is the recognition by these politicians that enough voters would not recognize the contradiction between the claim to represent the dispossessed on the one hand and the appropriation of neoliberal policy language (cost-cutting, efficiency, reducing the size of the state) on the other.52 In short, it is very debatable just how rational it is for those who have suffered financially due to capitalist economic reforms to vote for nationalists; understandable certainly, but not necessarily rational. From the perspective of the citizens that I have characterized as ‘careworn democrats’, I argue that any committed democrat should applaud their reluctance to find common purpose with nationalist politicians and their supporters. While 52 With reference to the nationalist challenge of the Radicals in the previous election in 2008, Vetta notes that a similar combination of egalitarian rhetoric and neoliberal policies was employed (Vetta 2009).

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cultural stereotyping certainly plays a part in negative descriptions of SNS supporters, such practices of class distinction have only limited explanatory power. In fact, I argue that these are subordinate to the reasoned grounds upon which most these citizens actually did reject nationalist politics. These democrats were under no illusion that they were any kind of elite and most made no secret of their own straitened financial circumstances (‘struggling to make ends meet’), but no matter how much erstwhile democratic voters were dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, the usual reaction to any discussion of the main alternative of the SNS was one of scorn. Usually, speakers were able to refer to specific political events in order to make a convincing case for why such nationalist political options were unpalatable. This should not be too surprising. After all, the SNS is a party whose leader sought to force early elections on the basis of a poorly defined platform by means of hunger strike timed to coincide with Orthodox Easter. Before his Damascene conversion to pro-European politics, Nikolić was rubbing shoulders with proponents of ethnic cleansing and making bombastic nationalist statements that the candidate seems curiously unable to either remember or disavow since.53 It should therefore be recognized that voting for nationalist politicians like Nikolić in 2008 (and Šešelj in the previous election) for social reasons is based on the dubious idea that the same political figures who supported the 1990s policies that brought war and international isolation for Serbia will make good on their claims to improve the living standards of Serbs. The ‘careworn democratic’ public in my data are suffering financially, and commonly proclaim themselves to be sick of the Democratic Party. That they recognize the moral compromise and utter banality of supporting politicians like Nikolić and Vučić should be applauded by students of democracy including those who recognize, as I do with Vetta, that the gaping void on the left of Serbian politics is bad for democracy. For the democrat, not voting is a much more rational course of action in such circumstances than transferring one’s support to nationalist parties. Finally, it is worth speculating on the reasons why so many Serbs who tend to act out rather traditional, socially conservative norms in their everyday practices are evidently immunized from supporting nationalist politics. In order words, why do so many Serbs who laugh at jokes about Roma in the kafana recognize the dangers of supporting parties that are either openly intolerant or are led by politicians who are ‘compromised’ by links to the Milošević regime? After all, these ‘careworn democrats’, not prone to political activism, are unlikely to recognize themselves as being personally threatened by nationalist excesses: ‘hooligans’ targeting civic activists, gay parades and Roma. One key factor must be the fact that ‘careworn democrats’ are embedded in a relational social space 53 The political scientist Florian Bieber commented upon the evasiveness of Nikolić with respect to his past statements in a blog post at the time of the 2012 election. F. Bieber, ‘Why Nikolić won and what it means’, Florian Bieber, 21 May 2013. Available at http://fbieber.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/why-nikolic-won-and-what-it-means/. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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that also contains clear articulations of liberal principles, usually on the part of a counterpublic whose adherents would be unlikely to laugh at politically incorrect jokes with such abandon. When faced with the media projection of a divided Serbia of the kind that Obradović-Wochnik describes, these careworn democrats are able to recognize themselves to a greater degree in the rhetoric of civic tolerance and rule of law than in the rhetoric of war denial and one-eyed nationalism. It is important that these discourses are also audible at the everyday level: when one is exposed to strong forms of both liberal and nationalist discourse from one’s work colleagues and casual acquaintances, one is presented with a diversity of mutually exclusive philosophical approaches to understanding politics. Part of what distinguishes members of the ‘careworn democratic’ public from ‘authoritariannostalgics’ is that they reflexively favour the rationality and intellectual-cachet of the ‘hard liberal’ position over the breathless conspiracy theorizing of ‘hardline nationalists’. This influence of the ‘hard liberals’ over others was easy enough to discern in everyday life. One male university colleague in his thirties was prone to telling politically incorrect jokes to the chagrin of a senior colleague in his late fifties who often scolded him for this. While the younger of these two men was never conclusively cured of his predilection for politically incorrect jokes during my time in Niš, his political convictions, centring mostly around denigrations of politicians on the nationalist side of the spectrum – usually on grounds of wartime complicity or mafia connections – were undeniably pro-democratic if not consistently liberal. This cannot be uniquely attributed to the older colleague’s influence, but it was undoubtedly a factor, as was made explicit by the fact that he would often quote his elder colleague in support of his views. Due to the relatively low level of civic engagement underlying this disaffected, middle-of-the-road democrat position, its ‘vaguely liberal’ character relies on a wider public sphere in which liberal ideas are regularly articulated by others. To the extent that such ideas become sparse in the public arena – and it is often argued by civic activists and scholars that they are becoming more so54 – it is reasonable to imagine that the political ‘centre’ of everyday discussion may shift from a position of vaguely liberal disillusionment to one of an equally vague antipathy to the liberal democratic system. The burden of impelling Serbia’s political elites to enact the liberal norms underpinning the political system they claim to uphold thus rests disproportionately on the intellectual leadership provided by this narrow ‘hard liberal’ counterpublic, themselves torn between an idealistic impulse to continued activism and a creeping sense of hopelessness with political life consisting of ‘democratic’ and ‘nationalist’ blocs that actively undermine these same liberal norms.

54 Taken collectively, the contributions to Listhaug et al.’s recent edited volume Civic and Uncivic Values in Serbia construct a rather pessimistic picture of the future for liberal and civic ideas in the country (Listhaug et al. 2011)

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Post-Script: 2012 Election Results The parliamentary and presidential elections took place right on the legallymandated deadline of 6 May 2012, just under a year after I concluded the main Serbian portion of the fieldwork. The parliamentary elections resulted in the narrow victory of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) over the incumbent Democratic Party (DS). However, since the SNS gained only 24.0 per cent55 of the vote over 22.1 per cent for the DS, on a turnout of just 57.7 per cent with 4.4 per cent of spoiled ballots, the result was hardly emphatic. Many commentators reasoned that the DS had lost the election to a greater degree than the SNS had won it.56 This is largely congruent with my conclusion above that most citizens were disillusioned with the DS but remained unconvinced by the claim that the SNS represented a credible alternative. The SNS did eventually manage to form a government in coalition with the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), led by Ivica Dačić, which had performed above expectations with 14.5 per cent, and the United Party of the Regions (a vehicle of former G17+ leader Mlađan Dinkić) with 5.5 per cent. The other parties to succeed in getting above the 5 per cent threshold were the hardline nationalist Democratic Party of Serbia led by Vojislav Koštunica with 7.0 per cent and the Liberal Democratic Party of Čedomir Jovanović which was widely adjudged to have underperformed with 6.5 per cent. In the simultaneous race for the presidency, Tomislav Nikolić ultimately narrowly defeated the incumbent Boris Tadić in the decisive second round after coming second to Tadić in the first round. Following the post-election negotiations, the SNS controlled both the presidency and the governing coalition, although SPS leader Dačić occupied the Prime Minister’s office. Apart from the DSS, all anti-EU nationalist parties including the Radicals (SRS), and the ‘clerico-fascist’ youth organization Dveri57 failed to meet the 5 per cent threshold.

55 All of these election results are described in the following article: Bojana Barlovac, ‘Socialists Claim Key to New Serbian Government’, Balkan Insight, 7 May 2012. Available at http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/serbia-s-dacic-cruising-for-the-premiership. Accessed 20 January 2013. Additional information can be found on the website of cesid.org. 56 The political researchers Florian Bieber and Eric Gordy each advanced this view in blog posts at the time. F. Bieber, ‘Why Nikolić won and what it means’, Florian Bieber, 21 May 2013. Available at http://fbieber.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/why-nikolic-won-andwhat-it-means/. Accessed 20 January 2013. E. Gordy, ‘Serbia’s Election: More Defeat than Victory’, Open Democracy, 21 May 2013. Available at http://www.opendemocracy.net/ eric-gordy/serbias-election-more-defeat-than-victory. Accessed 20 January 2013. 57 Eric Gordy, 2012, ‘Elections in Serbia: Leaving it Up to You’, East Ethnia, 8 May 2012. Available at http://eastethnia.wordpress.com/2012/05/. Accessed 20 January 2013.

Chapter 5

Disenchantment without Coherence in Bulgaria: The Absence of Public Sphere Pluralism in Plovdiv In Chapter 2, I based my claim of the lesser democratic credentials of the Bulgarian public sphere relative to Serbia on a small and selective body of evidence. In this chapter, I will present a much broader range of political talk in order to provide a more nuanced depiction of what I ultimately represent to be a public sphere characterized by limited participation and the lack of any coherent challenge to illiberal and conservative orthodoxies. Firstly, I claim that the public sphere is relatively hard to locate in everyday life in Bulgaria on the basis that conversation rarely involved the linking of one’s personal concerns to the broader political context. In this sense, it was usually rather difficult to identify the political convictions of one’s peers through reference to everyday interaction. Secondly, when political talk was prompted through group discussion, it appeared that citizens were, as in Serbia, more likely to condemn politicians than support them. However, unlike in Serbia, it proved impossible to identify discrete publics and counterpublics through reference to discourse. With the exception of a very narrowly resonant intellectual discourse endorsing a purely economic ideal of liberal individualism, no coherent discourse linked citizens together as ‘a public’. This is a paradox: dissent against political elites was almost ubiquitous, but this did not evidently lead to any coherent ‘counterpublic’ discourse of oppositional solidarity. Most citizens evidently understood politics and social life through illiberal assumptions that contradicted their declared aspirations to hold corrupt elites to account in the name of ‘European’ and ‘democratic’ values. The first half of this chapter is given over to a review of scholarly discussions of Bulgarian political culture and of scholarly and journalistic accounts of the Bulgarian presidential elections of 2011. My review of the existing literature on the political culture of Bulgaria brings attention to a clash of definitions between one group of scholars employing an individualist and economically-loaded standard of liberal democratic virtue and another group who instead stress elements such as the inclusivity of the political community, the separation of powers and other anti-majoritarian features that do not equate liberal democracy with economic policy orientations. Both groups of scholars describe very similar empirical conditions with respect to Bulgaria’s political development, but arrive at widely diverging conclusions. Scholars in the first group, such as Ivan Krastev, stress the positive, arguing that Bulgarian democracy is heading in the right direction in

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spite of acknowledged popular disenchantment (Krastev 2011), while scholars in the second group are much less optimistic. For example, Karin Hilmer Pedersen and Lars Johannsen argue that Bulgarian elites have turned ‘constitutional democracy into a pathology’, stressing that the country’s democracy cannot be considered consolidated until ‘democratic values are embedded in the mindset of the people’ (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 79). Since I have repeatedly stressed an understanding of liberal democratic citizenship in terms of embodying principles of civic tolerance and recognizing the tension between freedom and equality, it will be obvious that I find myself in closer agreement with the second group. However, I devote most space to discussing Krastev’s insights as it is evidently the economistic definition of liberalism that resonates to a greater degree in the Bulgarian context. Since I recognize the potential for confusion inherent in this clash of definitions, I will provide a glossary at the bottom of this page.1 Following a brief description of the local, educational and media environments mediating between political discourse and the sphere of everyday discussion, the second half of this chapter focuses on ethnographic and group discussion data from Plovdiv during the last six months of 2011. This period coincided with the presidential and local elections, which took place in late October, and a nationwide wave of anti-Roma protests and riots that overshadowed one week of that same presidential election campaign in late September. Discussions of these prominent political events allowed citizens to adopt positions with respect both to party platforms and to an incident of illiberal mass mobilization. However, I argue that discussions of both the elections and the protests failed to reveal much evidence of distinct publics identifiable through discourse. Frustration with elites was almost ubiquitous, but attempts at dissent were bogged down in mixed messages and a lack of any coherent counterdiscourse around which solidarities could be discerned. In conclusion, I discuss these empirics in the light of the conflicting aspirations for liberal democracy in the country implied by the different conceptions of the term ‘liberal’. I argue that though a reliance on an elite-led drive for economic liberalism was sufficient to position the country to enter Western political and military organizations such as the EU and NATO, it is insufficient in the longterm to sustain a recognizably democratic state and society. So long as illiberal assumptions about the political community remain unchallenged – and no such challenge is articulated by the country’s pro-western ‘liberal’ elites – then there will be no widespread recognition among citizens that liberal democracy is not equivalent to illiberal majoritarianism. This, unmistakeably, is a persistent structural weakness in Bulgarian democracy. 1 As elsewhere in this book, unmarked uses of ‘liberal’ and its derivatives (liberal democracy, liberalism and so on) refer to norms such as liberty, equality, civic tolerance, inclusivity and so on. Its antonyms – illiberal, illiberalism – refer to exclusivity, authoritarianism, intolerance and so on. Economically-loaded, ‘neoliberal’ uses of ‘liberal’ or ‘liberalism’, are clearly flagged in the text.

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Bulgarian Political Culture: The Product of ‘Liberal Consensus’ or ‘Illiberal Democracy’? The purpose of giving space to scholarly debates concerning contemporary Bulgarian political culture is twofold. Firstly, the wide variation in the assessments of different scholars underlines the fact that there really is no consensus concerning the vital question of whether liberal democracy is progressing in Bulgaria or not. Secondly, the tendency of Bulgarian political scientists to conflate the ideas of (pluralist) liberal rights and economic liberalism in a way that ultimately stresses the latter at the expense of the former reveals the cultural privileging of a rather narrow, economically-loaded conception of liberalism that resonates beyond academia. This will be shown with respect to the following section on interpretations of the 2011 presidential elections and also through the words of right-oriented intellectuals in Plovdiv that feature in the group discussion data presented further on. This attention to Bulgarian intellectual discourse is thus necessary to contextualize the public sphere practices of citizens more generally. There is widespread agreement among scholars with respect to the fragile and unstable nature of Bulgarian democracy in the years immediately following the demise of the communist one-party state. The prospects for liberal democracy in Bulgaria were not very auspicious in 1990. The communist Zhivkov regime had overseen a classically authoritarian suppression of dissent that ranged from a system of concentration camps and the widespread abuse of minority human rights to the largely successful co-optation of most critical intellectuals into organizations controlled by the state (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 82). As the regime weakened, the opposition was small, divided and generally lacking in the capacity to mobilize publics in support of pro-democratic reform. Most scholars of democratization agree that the period until 1997 was politically dominated by an ex-communist Bulgarian Socialist Party that appealed to voters through a blend of nationalist chauvinism (Stamatov 2000) and anti-neoliberal pro-welfare rhetoric which was often flatly contradicted by an actual distribution of resources that instead tended to enrich well-connected party insiders (Ganev 2007). Where accounts begin to significantly diverge is with respect to the nature of Bulgarian politics from the moment of the 1997 victory of the right-wing UDF over the BSP, after which a political consensus in favour of Euro-Atlantic integration and pro-market economic liberalism came to define the centre-ground of mainstream politics. A group of scholars, including most Bulgarian scholars publishing in international political science journals, have tended to stress 1997 as a transformational moment beyond which a ‘liberal consensus’ propelled Bulgaria into the EU (Krastev 2007, Ganev 2007, Noutcheva & Bechev 2008) and ended speculation about whether the country was a democracy or not (Ganev 1997). Even the subsequent defeat of the right-wing UDF government, which had put Bulgaria on the path to EU membership, at the hands of a newly-formed party led by Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Bulgaria’s former King, is not generally perceived to have derailed the ‘liberal consensus’ (Krastev 2007). It should be

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admitted that some of these scholars typically do note the problem of a mass public that is increasingly disillusioned from these same political elites, but this is generally presented as a marginal concern in what is otherwise a rather unlikely success story (Smilov 2010, Krastev 2011). By contrast, several mainly West European scholars writing about Bulgarian politics over the same period in which the country achieved the EU’s conditionality requirements have been less inclined to stress the positive. For example, Wolfgang Merkel categorized Bulgaria as an ‘illiberal democracy’, defined as an ‘incomplete and damaged constitutional state [within which] the executive is only weakly limited by the judiciary’ (Merkel 2004: 49). Bernd Rechel questioned the narrative that Bulgaria has meaningfully accommodated its ethnic minorities into the political process, noting that minority parties (but never mainstream Bulgarian ones) continue to be constrained in their activities or even legally forbidden on the basis of an illiberal constitutional clause forbidding ethnic parties (Rechel 2007). Since the country’s EU entry, the voices questioning Bulgaria’s democratic credentials have grown even louder. Pedersen and Johannsen probably go furthest of all in arguing that Bulgaria’s specific transition lacked ‘a clear break from the communist past’, turning ‘constitutional democracy into a pathology’ that continues to define the country’s politics today: Once (EU) membership had been achieved, Bulgaria returned to the path where corruption again began to thrive, and to continuing voter volatility and antiestablishment populism. (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 77)

Far from lauding the achievements of the country’s political elites, then, it seems that those scholars from Western Europe working on this area seek to put into question whether Bulgaria’s post-communist political culture has ever been anything other than characteristically illiberal and exclusivist (Merkel 2004, Rechel 2007, Pedersen & Johannsen 2011). Ultimately, I argue that this question of whether Bulgarian political culture is liberal or illiberal is a question of emphasis. The analytical foci of Western European scholars suggest normative biases in favour of a liberalism that is defined somewhere in the range between the negative rights-based conception of Freedom House and the more embodied idea of liberal citizenship as a form of identity used by public sphere and discourse theorists. According to these scholars, Bulgarian democracy may be characterized as illiberal on several bases: because of insufficient separation of powers (Merkel 2004: 49), checks and balances, the rule of law (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011), minority rights (Rechel 2007), media independence (Štětka 2011) and finally because the ‘values’ that would allow citizens to hold their elites to account in these regards are not sufficiently ‘embedded in the mindset of the people’ (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 79). Those Bulgarian scholars who tend to argue that Bulgarian democracy remains in essentially good shape do not ignore these failings, but simply focus their attentions on other concerns. The main rationale given for positive recent appraisals is that the governing right-wing GERB party has managed to push through a platform

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of pro-European fiscal discipline during difficult economic times without being supplanted in voters’ affections by either the ex-communist BSP or the xenophobic populists of the extreme right (Krastev 2011, Rashkova 2012).2 In these accounts, implicitly grounded in an economically-loaded conception of liberalism, the pursuit of fiscal discipline and the continued alignment of policies with the West (not only the European Union, but also NATO) are seen as the primary benchmarks of democratic progress. While not applauded, some abuse of liberal principles such as free speech, the separation of powers and so on (such that GERB is widely acknowledged to have overseen) are not considered to be exclusive of the idea that Bulgarian democracy may be progressing. Ivan Krastev, the director of a well-known liberal think tank in Sofia,3 is probably the most influential scholar writing on contemporary Bulgarian politics, and it is for this reason that I explore his ideas at length in this chapter. Back in 2007, Krastev published an article in the Journal of Democracy titled ‘The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus’ in which the author aimed to explain the rise of the illiberal, populist parties then sweeping across Central and Eastern Europe. In the article, the author most often references ‘Central Europe’, but the cases he refers to range from Poland to Bulgaria and all points in between. In this section, however, I focus instead on the author’s conception of the liberal project, which he perceives as provoking the rise of populist politics. Near the beginning of the article, Krastev describes the death of the ‘liberal’ consensus in terms that stress a rights-based conception of liberalism: The picture is bleak and depressing. The liberal parties founded by former dissidents have been marginalized, the liberal language of rights is exhausted, and centrism and liberalism are under attack both as philosophy and as political practice. The new hard reality in Central Europe is political polarization, a rejection of consensual politics, and the rise of populism. (Krastev 2007: 57)

Here, the liberal is recognizable as the anti-communist dissident, a figure that is explicitly connected with a ‘language of rights’ (presumably liberal rights such as freedom of speech, individual liberty, minority rights and so on) in opposition to authoritarianism. As the argument progresses however, the image of the liberal as the defender of rights is gradually replaced by the image of the liberal as the neoliberal ideologue, the enthusiastic unequalizer of post-socialist society: 2 In addition, the quotes of Bulgarian political analysts in this article carried by the Sofia News Agency provide a good indication of the optimism among Bulgarian liberal political analysts when GERB was elected. ‘Former Wrestler Scores Big Takedown in Bulgarian PM race’, novinite.com, 9 July 2009. Available at http://www.novinite.com/ view_news.php?id=105570. Accessed 20 January 2013. 3 Krastev has for many years served as the director of The Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and is also a Permanent Fellow of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria The original sin of the postcommunist democracies is that they came into being not as an outcome of the triumph of egalitarianism but as a victory of an anti-egalitarian consensus uniting the communist elite and the anticommunist counterelite. Ex-communists were anti-egalitarian because of their interests. Liberals were anti-egalitarian because of their ideology. (Krastev 2007: 60)

In the sense that inegalitarian economic policies were largely pushed through by political elites who used the language of liberalism and were opposed principally by ex-communists who generally failed to make good on their egalitarian rhetoric, this is a highly insightful and plausible generalization. As Venelin Ganev has demonstrated through his empirical work, this model appears to fit the Bulgarian case rather well (Ganev 2007). However, it is questionable whether it is justifiable to lump all the region’s liberals together under the banner of neoliberalism. What Krastev really seems to be referring to is the political right, which happened to be best-placed to articulate their specific political programme in the language of liberalism after 1989, not the liberalism of diverse groups of anti-communist ‘dissidents’ that he referenced at the beginning. As Krastev’s article progresses, the link between ‘liberal elites’ and economic liberalism becomes increasingly strong to the extent that any connection with the rights-based discourse referenced at the outset is almost forgotten. As the author moves towards the conclusion, the ‘liberals’ seem to have gone full circle, from their initial appearance as ‘dissidents’ at the vanguard of democracy to elites who are fearful of democracy: Liberal elites fear that modern societies are becoming ungovernable. Populists fear that modern elites have become totally unaccountable. Both fears are legitimate. (Krastev 2007: 62) The real clash is between elites that are becoming ever more suspicious of democracy and angry publics that are becoming ever more hostile to liberalism. (Krastev 2007: 63)

According to these prognoses, the liberals, now principally identified by their advocacy of neoliberal economic policies and individual responsibility, have come to stand in opposition to a democracy that is evidently now the preserve of an illiberal populism based on nationalism and egalitarian rhetoric (but not, the author contends, egalitarian economic policy). It is worth considering to what degree the ‘liberals’ that Krastev describes merit the association with the liberalism assumed by democratic institutional forms. In the interests of advancing the state of liberal democracy in the country, just how much acting upon one’s suspicion of democracy is permissible on the part of ‘liberal elites’ seeking to keep their societies free of ‘populism’? If the language of liberal rights and attendant concerns with the freedom of speech, minority rights and so on have been progressively abandoned in favour of a narrow focus on

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economic liberalism on the part of political elites who have become suspicious of representative democracy itself, then on what basis is it possible to distinguish ‘liberal elites’ from ‘right-wing authoritarians’? It is different responses to questions like these that have led to such a wide divergence in evaluations of recent developments in Bulgarian politics. Some Bulgarian liberals, including most of the country’s senior pro-Western political journalists,4 but also some influential scholars such as Krastev himself (Krastev 2011), are inclined to extend a long line of credit to right-wing pro-Western elites while West European observers typically privilege non-economic liberal principles such as pluralism, civic tolerance and institutional practices such as the separation of powers and freedom of speech, leading to characterizations of Bulgarian political culture as illiberal (Merkel 2004, Rechel 2007, Pedersen & Johannsen 2011). The divergence between Bulgarian liberal comment and foreign observers may be illustrated with respect to the Bulgarian presidential elections of 2011. Interpretations of the Bulgarian Presidential Elections of 2011 The Bulgarian presidential and local elections of 2011 resulted in the ruling rightwing GERB party consolidating its power in the country (Rashkova 2012). The earliest and most prominent article to appear in international scholarship on this development was one written by Ivan Krastev for Foreign Affairs (Krastev 2011). Krastev applauded the victory of the GERB candidate Rosen Plevneliev as positive in the context of Bulgaria’s role within the European Union, emphasizing the defeat of the ex-socialists and the poor showing of the nationalist-xenophobic populists (Krastev 2011). However, this optimistic tone was not endorsed by everyone. In particular, media experts in Bulgaria and abroad noted the fact that there was almost nothing in the way of critical reporting of the main candidates, with most reportage taking on the character of an ‘advertising campaign’.5 Furthermore, international monitoring organizations noted significant deteriorations in diverse areas such as electoral processes (OSCE 2011, Freedom House 2012), judicial independence (Freedom House 2012) and of course, media independence (Reporters Without Borders 2012, Freedom House 2012). In short, it was certainly far from clear that democracy was being strengthened under the right-wing government of GERB, even if their presence in power kept out the populist xenophobes of Ataka and the ex-communists of the BSP. GERB (Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria), led by the charismatic former mayor of Sofia Boiko Borissov, swept to power in the 4 The journalistic sector is discussed further on in this chapter. 5 Francesco Martino, ‘Bulgarian Mass Media’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Power’, Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 19 December 2011. Available at http://www.balcani caucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bulgaria/Bulgarian-mass-media-s-uncomfortablerelationship-with-power-106768. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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parliamentary elections of 2009. The party had once been widely interpreted as ‘populist’ (Novaković 2010), in part because it was a new party (founded in 2006) led by a well-known public figure who was better known for his media persona than his political convictions.6 However, considering that Borissov was able to surround himself with a team of technocratic rightists including the famed World Bank economist Simeon Djankov, the party quickly gained acceptance among many of the country’s right-wing intellectuals. A key factor in the acceptance of GERB by voters was the unpopularity of the then government comprised of a tripartite coalition led by the Bulgarian Socialist Party and seen as synonymous with corruption (Ganev 2013). It is reasonable to conclude that GERB’s record over its first two years in office was mixed from the perspective of the long-term health of Bulgarian democracy. On the one hand, they persuaded the EU to resume the allocation to the country of the Structural Funds which had been suspended on the basis of alleged misallocation of resources under the previous BSP-led administration. At the same time, they responded to the global financial crisis by undertaking a harsh economic austerity programme as well as initiating the privatization of some remaining public services, such as the railways. However, two years after GERB came to power, few journalists were in any doubt that freedom of speech was declining. PM Borissov had come to enjoy largely uncritical media coverage from many of the country’s newspapers and television stations, often brusquely scolding journalists who dared to ask him unwelcome questions.7 Similarly, it was hard to be confident that GERB was working earnestly to reduce corruption when the interior minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov evidently considered it reasonable to stridently defend the practice of funding Bulgaria’s policing through a system of private donations even in the face of the European Commission’s

6 Borissov has the CV of an apparatchik-turned-democrat par excellence. Among other noted roles, he provided security to the former communist dictator Todor Zhivkov in the 1990s, rubbing shoulders with (allegedly even sharing office space with) Bulgarian underworld figures at that time. By the early 2000s, he had joined the former King’s NDSV party and served as Minister for Interior Affairs between 2001–05, gaining national prominence by arresting several of the protagonists in the country’s ongoing Mafia wars and performing well in front of the TV cameras, brusquely blaming the judiciary for failing to punish criminals appropriately. When the NDSV began to implode, Borissov broke away from the party to run for Mayor of Sofia, keeping him in the public eye and making his rise to the top of Bulgarian politics quite predictable. Part of this biography is described here: ‘Former Wrestler Scores Big Takedown in Bulgarian PM race’, novinite.com, 9 July 2009. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=105570. Accessed 20 January 2013. 7 This article in which Borissov dismisses those questioning his haste to build motorways in the face of opposition is not untypical of the PM’s brusque public manner: ‘Bulgarian PM shocks archaeologists with insulting treatment’, novinite.com, 11 January 2012. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=135624. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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condemnation.8 Tsvetanov was eventually forced to back down when he reluctantly accepted that the EC was not willing to let the matter lie. The field of realistic candidates for the October 2011 presidential election campaign was limited to three well-funded and thus highly visible campaigns on the part of the GERB candidate Rosen Plevneliev, the Bulgarian Socialist Party’s Ivaylo Kalfin and the independent Meglena Kuneva. Outgoing president Parvanov had completed his legally-mandated maximum of two terms and Plevneliev, who had been serving in government as Minister of Regional Development and Public Works, was the strong favourite to replace him. Plevneliev’s colleagues made much of the candidate’s evident success outside of Bulgaria, including a CV that included work for the World Bank and management of large construction projects in Germany.9 Plevneliev was opposed by the BSP candidate Ivaylo Kalfin, a longtime ally of the outgoing President Parvanov who had served as Foreign Minister during the BSP’s recent time in government between 2005 and 2009. Kalfin, conversant in English and German, presented himself as the European, democratic face of the BSP. The last major player was Meglena Kuneva, a former member of the 2001–05 NDSV government, who was known to the public as Bulgaria’s first member of the European Commission.10 As the clear frontrunner, Plevneliev and his backers in the ruling right-wing GERB attracted the most searching scrutiny on the part of the other candidates. BSP candidate Kalfin repeatedly claimed that the concentration of power in the hands of GERB PM Boiko Borissov posed the threat of a return to authoritarianism. In addition, he attempted to connect with the pensioners who are the BSP’s core voting demographic by claiming that the road-building projects undertaken by Plevneliev’s Ministry were funded from money intended for retirement pensions (Rashkova 2012: 463). Kuneva, while basically sharing Plevneliev’s economic conviction that the financial crisis had to be tackled by attracting investment rather than through public spending (Rashkova 2012: 464), seconded Kalfin’s contention that Plevneliev could not possibly be independent of the influence of GERB PM Borissov. Of course, Plevneliev denied these charges and was generally supported 8 ‘Bulgarian Police Set New Donations Record’, novinite.com, 8 August 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=130930. Accessed 20 January 2013. 9 The GERB Minister of the Interior (and Plevneliev’s campaign manager) Tsvetan Tsvetanov actually embarrassed Plevneliev during the campaign by telling an anecdote of how the candidate was told some years earlier that a bribe would be necessary to take care of a project in Sofia, but had refused, prompting journalists to ask why the incident had not been reported at the time. Maria Guineva, ‘Bulgarian Politicians – Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell: A Report from the Countryside’, novinite.com, 16 September 2011. Available at http://www. novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132157. Accessed 20 January 2013. 10 Kuneva’s campaign was clearly less well-funded than that of her GERB and BSP rivals, but it received an early boost in the summer of 2011 when the popular TV talk show host Slavi Trifonov gave her his public endorsement during an on-air interview. Author’s fieldnotes, July 2011.

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in this matter by much of the national media. When Bulgarians went to the polls on 23 October 2011, Kuneva came third with 14.0 per cent, trailing Plevneliev, who won with 40.1 per cent, and Kalfin who came second with 28.9 per cent. Plevneliev subsequently edged out the BSP’s Kalfin in the second round run-off by 52.5 per cent to 47.5 per cent, thus claiming the presidency. Following favourable results in the local elections which were contested on the same day, GERB had control of the government, the presidency and most major towns and regional authorities in the country. Writing in Foreign Affairs in the immediate aftermath of these results, Ivan Krastev enthusiastically applauded the outcome as positive for the European Union (Krastev 2011). For Krastev, the big story surrounding Plevneliev’s victory was of the ‘Dogs that Didn’t Bark’, which is to say that several likely pitfalls were avoided. Specifically, Krastev noted that the strong performance of the ruling party’s candidate had signalled an end to the country’s electoral volatility in which voters have tended to punish incumbents often to the benefit of ‘extraparliamentary part[ies] founded on the eve of the vote’. In addition, there had been no repeat of the strong performance of the xenophobic right-wing in the previous 2006 election,11 and the voters had not ‘swung left’ to elect an opposition (BSP) candidate, which would, he argued, have been likely to create political instability and make early parliamentary elections more likely. Furthermore, Krastev was complimentary about both Plevneliev, and also the man considered by most to be ‘Plevneliev’s boss’, the PM Boiko Borissov: But beyond Plevneliev, the election's real winner was current Prime Minister Boyko Borisov,12 a political maverick who combines Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's baroque political manner with an aptitude for German-style fiscal discipline. Since founding GERB, Borisov has won all the elections he has entered and has managed to turn GERB into the country's most powerful party since the fall of communism. (Krastev 2011)

In the context of the article, it is clear that Krastev’s reference to Borissov’s ‘aptitude for German-style fiscal discipline’ is a compliment that is intended to counter the dominant international perception of Borissov as a Berlusconi-style populist,13 a 11 In 2006, the Presidency was won comfortably by the BSP candidate Georgi Parvanov, but the xenophobic Ataka leader Volen Siderov unexpectedly got 21 per cent of the vote – and 24 per cent in the second-round run-off – coming second. 12 Krastev transliterates the PM’s name as ‘Boyko Borisov’. Obviously, this is the same person as the ‘Boiko Borissov’ referred to elsewhere: both forms are in regular use. 13 The analogy with Berlusconi is often made by Borissov’s supporters and detractors alike. For an example of the former, see the Krastev quote above. For an example of the latter, see Rosen Vassilev, ‘The Tragic Failure of Post-Communism in Eastern Europe’, Global Research, 8 March 2011. Available at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? context=va&aid=23616. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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characterization acknowledged in the previous line. In fairness to Krastev, he does acknowledge the concern voiced by ‘some observers’ that Plevneliev will not be independent of Borissov’s influence, which could lead to the President toeing the line of a GERB party that might ‘gradually grow less tolerant of the opposition and media’. However, Krastev does not seem overly concerned about this himself, concluding on a positive note: … at the very least, Plevneliev will not pull Bulgaria any further from the EU – an option that currently tempts many European leaders. Finally, consolidation of almost one-party rule will make it easier for the GERB government to pursue painful reforms in a time of fiscal crisis. (Krastev 2011)

The over-riding message of the article is thus that, at a time when Europe is creaking under the strain of economic crisis, it can rely on the support of a strengthened right-wing administration in Bulgaria. However, not all Western observers were as enthused as Krastev imagined they ought to be. The most high profile dissent came from the former US Ambassador to Bulgaria James Pardew, who told the Bulgarian daily Dnevnik, ‘I was honestly appalled by the level of corruption I witnessed in Bulgarian media during the electoral campaign’.14 Many media experts inside the country concurred with Pardew’s opinion, and it is not hard to understand why. While Bulgaria has a state television channel funded from the public purse (Bulgarian National Television – BNT), since recent reforms supported by the BSP and GERB the Bulgarian electoral codes bizarrely stipulate that, with the exception of three-minute segments at the opening and closing of their campaigns, candidates do not have access to air time unless they pay a prohibitively expensive rate for it. This applies not only to BNT, but also to the two other national terrestrial channels BTV and Nova. Thus, an unfair advantage was supplied to the candidates of the two bestfunded parties, GERB and the BSP, and to GERB in particular which benefited from the ubiquity of PM Boiko Borissov in coverage of his institutional activities as PM. The authors of the OSCE Election Report described ‘a de facto absence of journalism on the public broadcasters during the campaign period since journalists, while obliged to produce paid formats for candidates, were not able to ask critical questions or report on the campaign in other editorial programs’ (OSCE Election Report 2011: 16). It is therefore reasonable to conclude that citizens were unable to access diverse and critical political commentary through their television sets. If anything, the situation for journalists working in the print media was even more desperate. The patronage systems by which the country’s largest newspapers generated income by selling advertising space to government ministries was 14 Quoted in Francesco Martino, ‘Bulgarian Mass Media’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Power’, Observatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 19 December 2011. Available at http://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bulgaria/Bulgarian-mass-me dia-s-uncomfortable-relationship-with-power-106768. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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already well-established before 2011, and many had noted the concentration of over 70 per cent of the entire market in the hands of the New Bulgarian Media Group (Štětka 2011) whose elite-level links with senior figures in the ruling GERB Party, opposition BSP and the Turkish-minority MRF are well-documented. However, the recent elections brought the co-optation of the media to a new level, as Sofia University Professor Orlin Spassov explained: ‘The whole campaign can be interpreted as an actual marketing operation, but without people knowing it’.15 It is worth quoting the report of the Italian investigative reporting platform Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso in order to demonstrate the veracity of Spassov’s claim: It is enough to peruse the “Single Register of the Election Codes”, published by the Sofia Court of Auditors, to discover that tens of TV channels, radio stations, press agencies and dailies [were] declared to have stipulated contracts for the promotion of public relations of the parties and their candidates during the campaign.16

This marketing exercise for the candidates, in which just about every mass circulation newspaper in the country held official ‘Public Relations’ contracts with the largest political parties (with GERB best represented followed by the BSP), usually involved the publication of prominent ‘articles’ in which readers were not in any way notified that what they were reading was a paid advertisement. Notwithstanding the convenient alignment of Bulgarian economic policy with the zeal for ‘fiscal discipline’ then holding sway in Brussels and Berlin, it is nevertheless appropriate to question the basic integrity of elections conducted in the wake of such a comprehensive and coordinated campaign of news management. Thus, the Bulgarian electorate’s apparent rejection of left-wing and xenophobic parties, celebrated by Krastev, turns out to be at least partly the result of a GERB-rich information diet. It is true that the full extent of the abuses of media independence had not come to light at the time that Krastev was writing at the end of October 2011, in the immediate aftermath of the elections. However, it is unlikely that such a coordinated news management campaign could have escaped the gaze of seasoned political observers in Sofia. Firstly, candidates outside of the three most visible teams protested about their exclusion from TV debates and media coverage on 15 Francesco Martino, ‘Bulgarian Mass Media’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Power’, Observatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 19 December 2011. Available at http:// www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bulgaria/Bulgarian-mass-media-suncomfortable-relationship-with-power-106768. Accessed 20 January 2013. 16 Francesco Martino, ‘Bulgarian Mass Media’s Uncomfortable Relationship With Power’, Observatorio Balcani e Caucaso, 19 December 2011. Available at http://www.balcani caucaso.org/eng/Regions-and-countries/Bulgaria/Bulgarian-mass-media-s-uncomfortablerelationship-with-power-106768. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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several occasions, with candidates such as the independent Svetlo Vitkov and Ataka leader Volen Siderov explicitly claiming that they had been excluded from media coverage.17 The frustration of some xenophobic parties, including Ataka and VMRO-BND, at being priced out or excluded from the media was very possibly part of the motivation behind the orchestration of nationwide anti-Roma protests that interrupted the early weeks of campaigning in September 2011 (discussed at greater length further on in this chapter). Secondly, the uncritical and banal content of so much political journalism was striking at the time it appeared. To give a flavour of the character of journalism in Bulgaria’s mainstream news media, I will refer to an article that caught my eye in the print edition of the country’s biggest selling newspaper 24 Chassa (24 hours). In February 2011, several months prior to the announcement of the presidential candidacy of GERB government minister Rosen Plevneliev, 24 Chassa led with a front page interview in which Plevneliev denied any interest in running for higher office, declaring that, in his capacity as the serving Minister of Regional Development and Public Works in the GERB government, he had three motorways to build. It ran with the sub-heading, ‘The PM fights the [political] battles, Djankov18 guarantees stability, I lay asphalt’.19 A fuller version of the interview was printed on page 13 headed ‘My rating is not my purpose, there will remain three motorways’, with several competent soundbites highlighted in bold text and Plevneliev’s CV in an inset box. It is hard to imagine what could possibly justify the story’s front-page prominence other than the need to increase a politician’s visibility and popularity in preparation for candidacy for high office. In Sofia, many people spoke quite openly about the political PR campaigns. As one political insider told me, ‘You write the article about yourself, the journalist fixes it [into concise journalistic copy] and then you can make some changes to the final version’.20 Of course, these kinds of practices were no less mysterious to those marginalized by them. A representative of a smaller political party and an NGO worker independently explained that all access to media basically shuts down two months before elections.21 In this section, I have focussed on Krastev’s work in order to demonstrate that some Bulgarian liberal intellectuals prioritize economic liberalization to the extent 17 These claims are reported in separate news articles. ‘Bulgarian Rock Singer Complains of Denied Access to “All Inclusive” presidential debate’, 19 October 2011, novinite.com. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=133078. Accessed 20 October 2013. ‘Top Bulgarian Nationalist Stirs Turmoil, Foils TV debate’, novinite.com, 19 September 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132512. Accessed 20 January 2013. 18 Simeon Djankov, Minister of Finance in PM Boiko Borissov’s GERB administration. 19 Vyara Ivanova, ‘I am not going to become mayor, nor president. I have three motorways to build’, 24 Chassa (print), 16 February 2011. 20 Author’s fieldnotes, December 2011. 21 Author’s fieldnotes, December 2011. This practice appears to pre-date the 2011 elections, so it is reasonable to infer that GERB hegemony is not the only cause of media management.

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that they frequently contrive to downplay the suspension of non-economic liberal principles such as commitments to pluralism and media independence. Such intellectual voices are important because they can provide intellectual leadership for those citizens who are inclined to follow political developments closely. From what I have found, the tendency to de-emphasize the flaws of Bulgarian democracy when the right is in power is widespread among Bulgarian intellectuals. All of the published accounts of the elections that I could find in international journals gave the impression that the elections were basically fair, with one report noting the ‘small concerns’ of international monitors relating to the media situation (Kolarova & Spirova 2012: 52) and another stressing the angle that GERB would be able to accelerate the ‘reforms it had already been implementing’ (Rashkova 2012: 464). In part, this is simply a reflection of Western priorities in the CEE region where, as Krastev so clearly observed, ‘building capitalism’ has always been prioritized over ‘building democracy’ (Krastev 2007: 62). Furthermore, the tolerance of many Bulgarian liberals for a right-wing hegemony that has seen the country’s ranking plummet in media freedom (Reporters Without Borders 2012), corruption perception (Corruption Perception Index 2012) and – most pertinently of all – democracy (Freedom House Nations in Transit 2012) indices is understandable on the basis that alternatives such as the ex-communists of the BSP and xenophobic populists are viewed as less palatable (Ganev 2006, 2013). However, these attitudes provide a stark contrast with those of Serbian liberal intellectuals who were very vociferous indeed in their condemnation of the alleged concentration of power in the hands of the pro-European President Boris Tadić prior to the 2012 elections. Instead, liberal intellectual discourse in Bulgaria tends to prioritize the key ingredients of pro-European rhetoric and a specific economic policy orientation over the pluralist elements of liberal democracy, and sometimes over democracy tout court. The remainder of this chapter explores the question of what exactly the public sphere sounds like in a country where the elite promotion of liberal ideas has been largely limited to the advocacy of economic individualism. Between Politics and the People: Local Context, Education and Media Environments In order to place the data of the everyday public sphere in Plovdiv in context, it is necessary to provide some information covering the local, educational and media environments which mediate between elite political discourse and its intended targets. Plovdiv (pop. 338,00022) is a large provincial city distinguished by its cosmopolitan history and impressive architectural heritage in which numerous civilizations have left their mark since the city was founded, according to the 22 National Statistical Institute Republic of Bulgaria, ‘2011 Population Census Main Results Census’. Available at http://www.nsi.bg/census2011/PDOCS2/Census2011final_ en.pdf. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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traditional narrative, by Philip II of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great). During the early nineteenth century, Plovdiv was home to a bewildering variety of pre-national ethnic identities speaking Bulgarian, Greek and Turkish in almost equal measure (Detrez 2003). It is thus likely that Bulgarian only became the city’s main language around the time of large-scale emigration to Turkey following the liberation of the country from the Ottoman Empire during the Russo-Turkish war of 1878. As a result of the city’s status as an important administrative centre in the Ottoman Empire, Plovdiv became central to the Bulgarian struggle for independence. Following a decree by the ‘Great Powers’ of Europe, Bulgaria was divided into two halves, creating the notionally Ottoman-administered southern buffer state of Eastern Roumelia around Plovdiv. Seven years later, in 1885, it was in the city that the agreement on ‘unification’ of north and south Bulgaria was signed. Unlike Niš, in which the Roma community represents the only large nonSerb minority, Plovdiv has been a centre of relative ethnic diversity in Bulgaria throughout the post-World War II period. An Armenian minority roughly 3,000-strong continues to play a significant role in the social and cultural life of the city, although the town’s Jewish population, which was spared from the Nazi extermination camps by the Bulgarian authorities’ defiance of Hitler, mostly departed for Israel in the late 1940s. In any case, the Roma are by far the largest minority community, a reality that is complicated by the fact that a large proportion of this population continue to self-identify as Turks.23 Residing mostly in four large mahali 24 including the Stolipinovo neighbourhood, widely described as Europe’s largest ghetto with a population as high as 40,000,25 Roma probably account for roughly one in every seven Plovdivchani once obvious official undercounting is taken into account.26 From an economic perspective, the city benefited from the property-boom fuelled growth enjoyed by the whole country between 23 An academic leading a study tour of Stolipinovo quarter estimated that 85 per cent of the population there identify as Turks, even though they are routinely referred to as Roma or ‘Gypsies’ by Bulgarian residents of the city. For a theoretical description of the phenomenon of ‘ethnic mimicry’ in a different Balkan context, see ‘The Politics of Identity in Kosovo’ (Duijzings 2000). 24 Mahala is a word of Ottoman-era origin meaning ‘neighbourhood’, but in Bulgaria it is now used almost exclusively to refer to Roma-occupied ‘ghettoes’. It is even represented on maps, as in the names of the Plovdiv Roma areas of Sheker Mahala, Arman Mahala and Hadji Hasan Mahala. 25 This is the lower and probably the more plausible of the estimates that were provided on the tour of the quarter described in the footnote above. 26 The 2011 census figures are plainly unrealistic. Even if one were to tally the given populations of Turks and Roma (considering that many of the city’s Roma self-identify as Turks), the number still barely exceeds 25,000. Most estimate that the Stolipinovo neighbourhood alone has more Roma inhabitants than that, with as many as another 20,000 or so divided between the other three mahali and more still living in Bulgarian-dominated neighbourhoods.

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the late 1990s and 2007. Over the few years leading up to the study, however, it had become quite obvious that living standards in Plovdiv, which remains the country’s second city by population, had slipped behind most other large cities in the country. For the last quarter of 2011, the average monthly salary in Plovdiv was at 308 euros, almost identical to the then national average of 306 euros, which compares with 364 euros for the capital Sofia and 362 and 331 euros respectively for the largest coastal cities of Varna and Burgas.27 A very high proportion of young people educated in the city’s high schools in the past 20 years have evidently moved to the capital Sofia or emigrated abroad, with the population kept relatively stable by in-migration from surrounding towns and villages that have become depopulated quite rapidly. From a political perspective, Plovdiv is known as one of the centres of the Bulgarian anti-communist right-wing, leading political analysts to give it the nickname ‘Blue Fortress’28 for the tendency of its citizens to vote for UDF mayors throughout the 1990s and even beyond the party’s implosion in the early 2000s. For example, Ivan Chomakov, the mayor occupying city hall between 1999 and 2007, was re-elected under the UDF banner in 2003 even as the party was routed amidst a mess of high level personal disputes at the national level. However, politics in Plovdiv has become rather more complicated since 2007. Firstly, Slavcho Atanassov, until then mayor of the Plovdiv district of Trakiya, was elected mayor of Plovdiv under the banner of a small hardline nationalist party, VMROBND (then in a local coalition with GERB). However, he broke away to form his own ideologically-vague patriotic VMRO-NIE party while mayor in 2010.29 The city’s economic situation was not helped in the global recession years prior to the fieldwork period, during which GERB, the ruling party in the national parliament, was feuding publicly with the Atanassov-led Plovdiv municipality, deliberately withholding tens of millions of euros of European and central government funds.30 27 All of this data was accessed on the web page of the National Statistical Institute, with the euro values calculated by dividing the Bulgarian lev (BGN) values by two (possible because the lev was pegged to the Deutschmark in the late 1990s, meaning that it always trades at 2–1 with the euro). The unemployment statistics for early 2012 are less revealing: the National Statistical Institute provides data at the regional level, which shows that the South Central Region, where Plovdiv is located, had an unemployment rate of 11.8 per cent, a touch higher than the national average of 11.5 per cent for the first quarter of 2012. Available at http://www.nsi.bg/otrasalen.php?otr=5. Accessed 31 January 2013. 28 E. Kodinova, ‘Reading Room – Plovdiv: Predictable Politics’, Sofia Echo, 30 October 2003. Available at http://sofiaecho.com/2003/10/30/633969_reading-room-plovdiv-predict able-politics. Accessed 20 January 2013. 29 ‘New Nationalist Party Born in Bulgaria after VMRO breakup’, novinite.com, 14 March 2010. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=114184. Accessed 20 January 2013. 30 ‘Plovdiv Finally Gets Hefty Sum for Sofia’s Waste’, novinite.com, 14 December 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=134859. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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Atanassov evidently remained quite popular until his narrow and controversial defeat during the fieldwork period at the hands of the ruling right-wing GERB’s relatively unknown candidate Ivan Totev in the municipal elections of October 2011. Finally, it is also important to note that despite the ‘Blue Fortress’ tag, the BSP has never actually been insignificant in Plovdiv, with socialist candidates polling in the high twenties in 2003 and 2007, although this vote did collapse to some degree in 2011 when the socialist candidate came third with just under 10 per cent (after Totev and Atanassov).31 The influence of education upon the political socialization of citizens since 1990 owes a good deal to continuity with the didactic pedagogy and conservative nationalism of the period of Bulgarian Communist Party rule. 1990 did mark a partial change of symbols and aspirations in the sense that old narratives of common purpose with Soviet/ Russian kin would gradually come to be replaced by new alliances and orientations towards Europe and the West, a process that accelerated after the decisive triumph of the UDF in the 1997 parliamentary elections. However, these changes were only partial in the sense that old narratives, including the exclusivist narrative of nationhood, would simply be recast to fit the new alliances. The same highly mythologized historiographical tropes that were used to justify the forced assimilation of Turks in the 1980s and Pomaks in the 1970s – of forced conversions to Islam during the 500 years of Turkish ‘slavery’ – have retained currency into the present, albeit in a form that carries the more moderate language demanded by the liberal emissaries of the West. The long-term effects of such superficial alterations are unclear. Since the Ottoman Turks remain cast as the principal antagonist hindering the selfexpression of Bulgarians in the curriculum, the newer descriptions of the Ottoman rule as ‘occupation’ rather than ‘slavery’ tend to be seen by most Bulgarians as a mealy-mouthed affront to the suffering of their ancestors rather than some sort of precursor to a more nuanced national debate about the Ottoman legacy. Any re-orientation of the educational system in a more civic direction remains elusive since none of the country’s political parties have ever demonstrated the political will to advocate a less nationalist curriculum. Even the UDF’s President Stoyanov, who came to office in 1997 claiming that Bulgarians had made ‘a civilizational choice’ in favour of Western values (Barany 2002: 146) nailed his credentials firmly to the mast of nationalism when he bestowed the ‘Order of the Stara Planina First Class’ upon Anton Donchev in 2001. Donchev was the author of a popular 1962 novel Vreme Razdelno (‘A Time of Parting’) that was framed as a fictionalized account of real events even as Bulgarian historians were casting doubt upon the very premise of the novel – the contention that the conversions to Islam of thousands

31 Clive Leviev-Sawyer, ‘Parties and Places’, Sofia Echo, 28 October 2011. Available at http://www.sofiaecho.com/2011/10/28/1189408_parties-and-places. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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of Ottoman-era Bulgarians was generally carried out under duress.32 Since the novel was adapted into a lavish historical drama with state support at the time that the Zhivkov regime was carrying out its forced assimilation policies against the country’s Turkish minority in the mid-1980s (Todorova 2004), it is easy to argue that Stoyanov and his UDF colleagues knew perfectly well that their choice of literature was more likely to hammer home his party’s nationalist credentials than to improve the prospects for civic education in the country. As Albena Hranova, the author of numerous essays on historiography and civic education in Bulgarian argues, the conferring of the award on Donchev was indicative of the fact that both the right and left of Bulgarian politics could unite around a strict nativist line on historiography.33 As should already be clear from the earlier description of the role of the Bulgarian media in facilitating the political management of the 2011 presidential elections, there is not a great deal coming from the mainstream of the Bulgarian televisual and print media spheres that provides alternative political narratives for Bulgarian citizens. One prominent figure worthy of mention is the TV presenter Slavi Trifonov, who has for over a decade used the platform of his nightly variety show Slavi’s Show to attack the country’s political and economic establishment in the name of transparency and democracy. Back in July, Trifonov had used the candidate’s appearance on his show to publicly back the outsider Meglena Kuneva, doubtless boosting what had until then been a campaign waged in hope rather than expectation. In the immediate aftermath of the vote, he angrily blasted the mismanagement of the polling stations during the simultaneous presidential and local elections, arguing that the hundreds of thousands of voters who never got to cast their vote could have altered the result to the extent that Kalfin may 32 Albena Hranova, ‘Rodno: Dyasno I Lyavo’, Liberalen Pregled, 21 November 2008. Available at https://librev.com/index.php/component/content/article/413. Accessed 20 August 2013. 33 Albena Hranova, ‘Rodno: Dyasno I Lyavo’, Liberalen Pregled, 21November 2008. Available at https://librev.com/index.php/component/content/article/413. Accessed 20 August 2013. Hranova is unusual among Bulgarian scholars of education in that she regularly brings attention to nationalism as one of the barriers to the formation of civic identities in the country (Hranova 2011). This is unusual simply because it requires the ability to stand outside of nationalist doxa in order to critique it, which is easier said than done in a context so defined by ideological continuity as with the national question in Bulgaria. As recently as 2011, one scholar published an article in an international educational journal seeking to solve the puzzle of why Bulgarian students were evidently less able to understand their civic roles in democracy after a decade of civic education than they had been in the early 1990s before any civic education was added to the curriculum. Of 18 possible causes for this anomaly discussed in the article, the political consensus in favour of ethnic nationalism was not discussed in any form (Dimitrov 2011). In the context of such a thorough and meticulous article, the omission suggests an inability to perceive the effects of nationalism rather than a deliberate neglect; it could just be that red, white and green is harder to spot on a red, white and green background.

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have defeated Plevneliev or else that Kuneva could have pipped Kalfin into the second round run-off.34 However, despite Trifonov’s obvious independence from the main parties of GERB and the BSP, he does little to challenge the conservative and nationalist orthodoxies that define the centre ground of political competition in the country. In fact, he has consistently reserved segments of his show for the glorification of various historical figures and pursues a recording career which includes a repertoire of nationalist songs. In fact, the principle difference between the presentations of history on Slavi’s Show (or the show of his protégée-turned rival Rosen Petrov) and that of establishment TV historians, such as the erstwhile BSP member and more recent GERB cabinet minister Bozhidar Dimitrov, is one of tone. The former are much less bombastic, allowing the heroism evident from the narrated recordings35 to speak for itself, while Dimitrov’s style is that of a lecturer – a rather abrasive and thick-set one – who aims to impart his knowledge to the audience.36 Considering that attempts to dissent against the power of establishment elites are thus more likely to co-opt the symbols of nation than to contradict them, it should hardly be surprising that civil society attempts at fomenting new forms of political solidarity tend to follow a similar pattern. In fact, this kind of articulation of national symbols with civic activism is so common that it is sometimes carried out rather unreflexively. When I asked of a friend working in a senior role for a nature NGO (one that energetically opposes the designs of powerful financial interests to encroach on wild regions in the country) why their publicity videos showing birds of prey soaring over the countryside are usually accompanied by a soundtrack of ‘Bulgarian national/ folk music’,37 he confessed that he had never really thought about it. Another interesting facet of the phenomenon of 34 Author’s fieldnotes, November 2011. 35 An interesting departure from the usual format of the sepia-tinted footage overlaid with narration was this segment, broadcast during early 2012, which shows a choir of visually-impaired children humming the Bulgarian national anthem. It is an interesting example of how a social text, while still supportive of an essentially conservative orthodoxy, may seek to introduce inclusive and progressive elements. Slavi’s Show, 15 March 2012. Available at http://www.slavishow.com/Химн на България/. Accessed 20 August 2013. 36 From the few occasions I have observed Ataka leader Volen Siderov talking history on SKAT TV (before the channel broke with Ataka in 2011), it would seem that his approach is in another category altogether, delivering angry polemical monologues (such as that Bulgaria’s population would rival that of Britain or Germany if the country had not been subject to historical genocides) in front of nostalgic backdrops incorporating nineteenth-century maps and so on, before concluding by staring into the camera with his finger raised, stating, ‘And that is a fact!’ 37 Bulgarska narodna musika, where the adjective narodna is translateable as both ‘folk’ (meaning ‘of the people’) and ‘national’, refers to a diverse repertoire of folk tunes that are typically sold in packets bearing the national flag. Musically, it can be identified by the use of ‘national’ instruments such as the gayda (bagpipes) or distinctive choral singing styles.

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pro-nationalist progressives is that most large Bulgarian towns sustain a youth culture whose adherents style themselves as ‘alternative’, usually comprising some combination of reggae-influenced ‘ska’ music, clothing styles opposed to the obsessively-groomed norms in Bulgarian popular culture and quite often, dreadlocks. However, to find oneself at such a bar or concert is not usually to escape the Bulgarian tricolore but to find double helpings of it. When I suggested to a young man who had set up a website catering to ‘alternative’ tastes that alternative groups elsewhere typically reject the symbols of the conservative establishment, he proceeded by trying to impress the mystical and spiritual qualities of ancient pagan Bulgarian culture upon me. Nationalism in these parts is nothing if not malleable. The Elusive Public Sphere in Plovdiv In spite of the narrative of a bitter factional dispute for political control of the city, my main finding is that Plovdiv was hardly gripped by election fever during the 2011 election campaign, nor was political talk on other topics particularly frequent. If one is to define the public sphere as an aggregation of sites and institutions where citizens discuss public matters (Habermas 1989, Eliasoph 1999), then I claim that it was a rather elusive ‘object’ in Plovdiv, even in the midst of a closely fought election campaign. The relatively frequent practices of talking about politics (albeit often in cynical and unserious ways) that permeated everyday life in Niš were considerably less evident in Plovdiv. In Niš, the political talk and identifications that I heard in group discussions were often recognizable as the structured, rhetorical dimensions of political practices I had already observed in everyday contexts, but practices of political talk simply seemed to be much less evident in the unprompted everyday life of Plovdivchani. Many of those who participated in the group discussions recorded below were personally known to me before they agreed to help me in my data collection, but it was only in rare cases that I knew anything of the political orientations of informants before they participated. Plovdivchani obviously do discuss their personal and professional concerns with each other, but I argue that it is rare that they articulate these concerns as having wider relevance for ‘the common, public good’ (Eliasoph 1999: 16). It is not easy to describe abstention from political talk, but I will strive to provide some illustrations of this aspect of life in Plovdiv. It is relevant from this perspective that many of Plovdiv’s younger and more highly-educated citizens evidently uphold the idea that there is simply no point in wishing that society were organized along different lines. The abstention from discussion of wider societal concerns on these grounds is probably influenced, although not necessarily at a conscious level, by the pervasive and undeniably political idea of economic individualism, since this abstention tends to be imagined by adherents as apolitical.

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This point may be demonstrated with reference to a story from my fieldnotes. Provoked by two female friends at a cafe joking casually about an advertising billboard revealing a woman with her private parts concealed by a tyre (‘I wonder what she’s supposed to be doing?’), I asked what they thought of the situation of women in Bulgaria. In response, one woman in her early thirties with working experience in several office-based roles told me that she was ‘quite sure’ that she had never been discriminated against because she was a woman. Sceptical, I told her that I had recently read an article which revealed that men still earn higher wages in all age groups in Bulgaria in spite of the generally higher qualifications and better foreign language abilities of young women in particular. She responded by saying that, ‘It’s like a completely different world, all this talk of social problems’, adding, ‘We are all individuals in Bulgaria, nobody relies on the state for anything’. However, the tone in which she laid down this individualist doctrine was matter-of-fact rather than assertive, for she added, ‘You know so much about these things, but I have never even thought about them’. Seeking to re-phrase the problem in everyday terms, I told her that I knew of several young women who had worked unpaid as waitresses on the basis that the first two weeks of work were classed as ‘training’ only to be dismissed without reason as soon as the owner-boss – usually a man – actually had to pay her. Prompted by this example, both of my companions shared similar stories from their own biographies. The woman who had earlier declared that she had never been discriminated against told a particularly revealing story. Upon arriving for an interview for a ‘Personal Assistant’ position some years earlier, she found an elderly man surrounded by ‘semi-naked’ young women (she clarified that she meant they were ‘dressed for a nightclub’). After a vague introduction in which the man introduced himself as ‘Uncle [name withheld]’ and mentioned the ‘entertainment’ industry, he said that he would show a promotional video. As she had begun to suspect, the work of the company was in producing pornographic videos, one of which was being broadcast for her benefit at that moment and the job turned out to be that of a pornographic actress. At the point when the man stopped the video and asked her to stand up and turn around for his appraisal, she explained that she didn’t think she was the right person for the job, made her excuses and left. In telling the story, her attitude had been one of embarrassed amusement rather than distress, and she was keen to clarify afterwards that she did not regard the women working at the company as ‘victims’. I asked whether she considered it a problem that she had been auditioned for pornographic work under false pretences and she conceded that that was wrong. The point I wish to emphasize here is that this woman was only able to claim that she had ‘never been discriminated against’ in any way because she did not consider this experience (and some other less striking anecdotes they had mentioned) as ‘discrimination’. Furthermore, she had come to view ‘social problems’ as something separate from her own ‘individual’ experience even though she had some direct personal experience of what social scientists routinely define as problems. My aim is certainly not to criticize her for trying to make the best of less than ideal circumstances but only to note that

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such modes of thinking can forestall the ability to recognize the constant interplay between the personal and the political. As Nancy Fraser contends, ‘politics’ can be hidden in almost any topic and this is a prime example (Fraser 1987, cited in Eliasoph 1999: 14). Since the feminist drive for gender equality is not yet a popular cause in Bulgarian civil society, it is worth mentioning that more widely resonant issues such as corruption also commonly fail to excite normatively-committed debate. Encouraged by a friend in the green movement, I went to Sofia in December 2011 to attend a roundtable on ‘Illegal Land and Forest Swaps in Bulgaria’. According to those presenting, Bulgaria’s governments over the period 2002–2009 had presided over swaps of public land for private land on a hectare-for-hectare basis in spite of the fact that most of the previously state-owned land was situated in highly sought after locations such as the Black Sea coast and near ski resorts, in some cases worth hundreds of times more than the land it was swapped for.38 This was allegedly carried out to the benefit of some 82 private citizens, and a case study described a plot some 6 km long and 500 m wide along the northern Black Sea coast that had come into the possession of a well-known ‘controversial businessman’ who was familiar to me as the owner of a top-flight Bulgarian football club. Seeking to corroborate this information, I was able to find a few quite low-key online reports stating that a deadline was approaching in early 2012 after which the GERB government (which had served since 2009) had to make good on its promise to reverse the land swaps or else be fined 1.5 billion euros from the state budget by the EU for ‘illegal government aid to private citizens’.39 Returning to Plovdiv, I was curious about whether people in the city knew anything about these cases and I raised the matter with a few of my acquaintances. My interlocutors listened intently and only those in the green movement claimed to know anything about these events. However, rather than the surprise I had expected, my interlocutors assimilated these stories with a sense of resignation. One man in his thirties working as a municipal lawyer simply told me that, ‘Things like that are always happening here’. As we continued talking about corruption and Bulgarian politics in general, he told me that his grandfather had told him when he was younger that he ought to join ‘the most powerful party’, reasoning that he wished he had done – a statement that I took to indicate an appropriately cynical response to credible evidence of the massive corruption of the political system. However, shortly afterwards he made clear his reservations about publicizing these kinds of occurrences, asking, ‘You’re not going to write bad things about 38 Author’s fieldnotes, December 2011. 39 One Sofia News agency story had been printed by the time of the election campaign. ‘EU Pressures Bulgaria on Land Swaps Probe’, novinite.com, 5 October 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132702. Accessed 20 January 2013. However, the ‘scandal’ has subsequently attracted more publicity. ‘Bulgarian AgriMin “Stunned” by Ex Cabinet Murky Land Sales’, novinite.com, 30 January 2013. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=147395. Accessed 30 January 2013.

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Bulgaria, are you?’ This man took it for granted that Bulgarian political elites were corrupt, but was evidently convinced, on patriotic grounds, that the best response to specific evidence of corruption was silence. Moreover, this was probably not the most surprising response I received to my tales of land swaps. A young woman working for a green NGO told me that she thought a colleague was wasting his time in worrying about the land swaps ‘because most of it is protected land anyway’ (under the EU’s Natura 2000 programme). When I asked why certain ‘controversial businessmen’ were suddenly interested in conserving nature, she responded that she saw no difference between the Bulgarian state and these businessmen, both of which were ‘corrupt’. While neither of these speakers approved of the private appropriation of the country’s resources, the shared idea of the futility of resistance suggests that there is little room for solidarity40 in the face of a problem that can easily be argued to impact negatively upon the common interests of all Bulgarians. There were, of course, some exceptions to the generally depoliticized character of everyday interaction. Some people were inclined to take a normative stand on issues conceived of as impacting on society rather than just on one’s own health or budget. As I describe in the section that follows, a small highly-educated elite in the town did talk regularly about politics and society, usually in ways that acknowledged the suffering of their compatriots afflicted by low pay and rising living costs while retaining faith in what they identify as right-wing economic policies. Furthermore, the mass mobilization of citizens against ‘Roma crime’ (to be described in detail further on) demonstrates that many Plovdivchani were keen to affect the public arena through participation, even if these protests were not very encouraging from a liberal perspective nor, as I argue, communicative of any coherent oppositional solidarity. Overall, the most remarkable thing about the public sphere in Plovdiv was just how rarely it was encountered. It is appropriate to consider in this context that I have deliberately focussed upon those among my acquaintances in Plovdiv who would generally be considered most likely to engage with political discussion. My point here is that the avoidance of politics in Plovdiv is much more pervasive than in Niš in the sense that it was prevalent among the young, the educated, the financially successful as well as in those sections of the population among whom one might expect lower levels of political activity, such as rural incomers and the lesser-educated among the elderly. In my Plovdiv fieldnotes, there is simply no equivalent of the vibrant communities of everyday debate and satirical dissent that I encountered in Niš. The most vivid illustration of this idea that I can think to provide is that whenever I felt that I knew somebody in Plovdiv well enough 40 Eliasoph tends to use the phrase ‘civic power’ in a similar sense to which I use ‘solidarity’ (Eliasoph 1998). Both are the result of citizens using the public sphere of discussion to generate political power and may be defined according to the words of Arendt cited by Eliasoph: ‘Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse’ (Arendt 1958: 200).

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to ask them to assemble a focus group from among their friends or colleagues, I usually found it impossible to predict what kinds of identifications would be likely to emerge when these people discussed politics. In the remainder of this chapter, I push the argument even further: even when these citizens were prompted to discuss politics in the managed setting of the group discussion, it was still exceedingly difficult to identify clearly differentiated stances on matters of public concern. As I hope to demonstrate in the analysis of discussions of the Bulgarian presidential elections that follows, the majority of groups were characterized by a general disillusionment with politics premised on an implicit endorsement of the twin projects of democracy and Europeanization that politicians are perceived to abuse. These perceived problems were, however, almost invariably articulated together with identifiably illiberal concerns in citizens’ political talk. The Intellectual Right Plovdiv at least partially lives up to its ‘blue’ reputation in the sense that a distinct and philosophically coherent right-wing stance is usually evident in the company of the town’s intellectuals. For such speakers, the acceptance of Bulgaria into the European Union remains a point of pride, justifying some degree of economic hardship. In one group, a woman identifying as a journalist, literary critic and employee of the municipal administration acknowledged some of these hardships, but argued that they have resulted from the fact that the changes of the ‘transition’ have not been implemented quickly enough: Yana (female, early fifties, journalist): I consider that the 20 year transition is going in the right direction, but I think the process has been slowed down and this has brought us some negative results. I do not deny the transition; on the contrary I have given 15 years of my life supporting it with my political and personal activity. But I’m not completely satisfied with what I see and I think that these negatives are the result of the delayed and poorly implemented transition.

Just as I argued that the widespread Serb liberal abandonment of liberal politicians did not signal a philosophical abandonment of liberal ideals, the disappointment of many avowed Bulgarian rightists with the results of economic transition should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in the capitalist economic system itself. The ‘right liberal’ positioning is distinguished by the tendency of speakers to make it clear that their recognitions of economic hardship should not be addressed by deviating from ‘the European path’ or by reversing the economic liberalization evident through privatization and the hollowing out of the socialist welfare state. The fact that many intellectual rightists continue to explain their political identity with reference to the time of Kostov’s late 1990s UDF administration led to mixed attitudes to the right-wing GERB party, dominant at the time of the fieldwork. GERB has managed to persuade some former right-wing UDF voters

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with its firm austerity policies and rhetoric of ‘fiscal discipline’, mainly on the part of the Finance Minister Simeon Djankov. The same woman quoted above describes her response to GERB: Yana: … The role played by the former blue parties is now being taken by GERB, and not by the UDF. In future, this party will have to prove how rightoriented it is. In times of crisis it is very hard to use only right methods of government, maybe sometimes they will have to act like a left-oriented party and push through their political activities in such hard times. I strongly approve of their financial discipline that they put into practice in our country. I am a sympathizer of the former blues because I grew up with the UDF, but when I look at things objectively I see that GERB has become the new right in Bulgaria. Now it will be a game between left and right parties with a new right player. That’s just how it is.

It is fairly obvious from such explanations that the idea of voting for ‘left’ parties is unpalatable for voters who once identified with the UDF, which presented itself as the polar opposite of the BSP, meaning that a lot is at stake when parties like GERB claim to be ‘right-wing’.41 The speaker’s reference to ‘financial discipline’ shows that she is able to articulate her right-wing preference together with specific policy prescriptions and to judge GERB’s leadership accordingly. At the time of fieldwork, GERB had not managed to convince all of these right liberals of its sincerity in this regard. Two highly-educated acquaintances of mine in Plovdiv separately raised the idea that GERB, like the former King (and ex-PM) Simeon II’s NDSV, was likely funded by BSP sympathizers with so-called ‘red money’ in order to ‘destroy the right’, meaning the UDF and its successor parties.42 While this is a conspiracy theory, the long-standing opacity of Bulgaria’s political arena and the escalating control of the media under the stewardship of GERB means that talk of conspiracies cannot be easily dismissed. Despite the disagreement of many committed rightists with respect to the question of whether Boiko Borissov’s GERB party really represents their interests, these are citizens that share the characteristic of standing for a clearly articulated political position that actually does inform much elite policy-making in the country. The strong normative arguments in favour of specific low-tax and ‘small state’ economic policies reveal that it is possible to understand these rightists as a distinct public identifiable with reference to a coherent shared discourse. 41 Actually, there probably is one occasion in modern Bulgarian politics when significant numbers of committed right-wingers have voted for the BSP. In the second round run-off for the 2006 presidential elections, the BSP’s Parvanov was faced by Volen Siderov of the ultra-nationalist (and economically protectionist) Ataka. ‘Last Rites of the Bulgarian Right’, 23/10/2006, novinite.com. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_ news.php?id=71597. Accessed 20 January 2013. 42 Author’s fieldnotes, September 2011 and October 2011.

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These citizens do also typically stand for other liberal ideas such as pluralism, civic tolerance and so on, but these are secondary narratives which emerge rather infrequently. The activist liberalism of those numerous Niš cosmopolitans who were eager to challenge the illiberal assumptions of their peers was generally absent. For example, in my group discussion data, rightists were quick to oppose pro-Russian sentiment or any suggestion that life was better under socialism, but they typically failed to either endorse or refute anti-Roma sentiments or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories coming from their peers,43 views which are not untypical for non-intellectual supporters of right-wing parties in the country. So far as intellectual rightists are concerned then, it is the articulation of Europe together with the embrace of individual risk that anchors identities primarily to the ‘right’ and only secondarily to pluralist dimensions of liberalism. Disenchantment without an Oppositional Counterpublic For most Plovdivchani, however, approval of economic liberalization was not a badge of identity. Broadly speaking, most were opposed to the economic order they associated with Bulgarian society since the 1990s. It is my purpose in this section to argue that this very widely-shared sense of dissatisfaction, rooted primarily in the idea of economic injustice, did not lead to any coherent oppositional solidarity. These citizens represent diverse perspectives that are not linked by any specific normative discourse, but only a very general sense of disenchantment with the present. Complaints about the opacity of the media and the autocratic behaviour of the ruling party were commonplace, suggesting that appeals to a liberal democratic system of checks and balances and the rule of law resonated at least for some. However, almost without fail, these appeals were articulated together with illiberal ideas drawn from a menu that included authoritarian visions of order, attacks on the alleged privileges of Roma and other minority groups and pleas for a return to more ‘Bulgarian’ (nationalist) values. Despite the resonance of many illiberal narratives, it was not easy to argue that any given section of this public consistently stood for nationalist or illiberal values either. Rather, most speakers offered a mélange of seemingly paradoxical ideas. In one group consisting of male and female students, impassioned pleas for the 43 For example, a GERB supporter in the group discussion already cited in this section described his unease with the strong performance of the independent candidate Kuneva on the grounds that, ‘She has a Jewish streak, is linked through an ancestor, and even though we are told to dismiss the idea, it does have a meaning’, before elaborating that the PR system in the parliamentary elections allows people in the shadows to ‘pull strings’. As the discussion progressed, those participants endorsing economic liberalism agreed with this speaker’s concerns that the PR system allows some well-funded candidates to hold the balance of power without directly addressing the racist angle that the speaker had emphasized.

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preservation of nature in the face of over-development for which shadowy elites were blamed gave way to enthusiastic calls for an end to alleged police bias in favour of the Roma population. In another group consisting of businessmen in their sixties, the participants spoke in glowing terms about how American and British politicians act in the interest of the nation regardless of which party gets elected, before swapping admiring stories about supposedly draconian prison sentences handed down for minor offences in ‘England’ and the vigilante heroes of an American western. The most striking example of these mixed messages involved a young woman educated to master’s level, who was interning at a prestigious democratic institute in Sofia. She railed against politicians ‘acting like there are no laws and selling our forests’ before proposing a radical solution: What we need is for a team of rich and successful businessmen to be put in control of politics. Rich enough not to be tempted by corruption.44

These instances show that Bulgarians claiming to support liberal democracy and aligning themselves with the idea of a ‘European’ Bulgaria frequently also endorse distinctly illiberal ideas. More generally, they reveal that it is actually possible to identify with ‘democracy’ in contemporary Bulgaria without discerning any contradiction between liberal and illiberal – sometimes even explicitly antidemocratic – visions. The discursive context helps to explain these mixed messages. If it is hard to credit that a person working voluntarily for a democratic institute could put her trust in an oligarchy of unspecified rich businessmen, then it becomes easier to understand when one considers that the veneration of business elites is a common theme among some ‘liberal’ intellectuals in Bulgaria. At the time of the fieldwork for example, the Sofia News Agency – a mouthpiece of liberal Bulgaria if indeed there is one – frequently repeated the idea that those successful in business were less corruptible than politicians of more humble origins, a point made unambiguously by the journalist Maria Guineva in her analysis of aftermath of the Presidential elections.45 In this vein, it is also worth considering the assumptions behind this question asked by Ivan Dikov, editor of the agency’s English-language platform Novinte.com, to the political blogger Ivo Indzhev:46 44 Author’s fieldnotes, July 2011. 45 Maria Guineva, ‘The Lost Dignity of the Loss’, novinite.com, 4 November 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=133656. Accessed 20 January 2013. 46 Indhev, whose blog was receiving several thousand hits per week at the time of fieldwork, is one of a small number of journalists whose outspoken views have resulted in them being blacklisted from mainstream media organizations. On the eve of the 2011 elections, Indzhev was alleging that the elections had been ruined by a backroom deal on spheres of influence between the key figures of the two main parties, GERB and the Bulgarian Socialist Party. While the size of Indzhev’s following suggests that his

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Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria What is today's role of the Bulgarian oligarchy? Does it have the potential and the interest in becoming a true “elite” of the nation – of the type that propels the Western societies in order to lead its own nation towards development, prosperity, and stronger international standing?47

From the perspective that even intellectuals sometimes attribute Western success to direction by economic elites, it need no longer be seen as a mystery that some well-educated pro-Western Bulgarians wonder why elections and other democratic procedures are necessary. In this context, it should not be very surprising that not one of the 12 group discussions had a majority of participants which either convincingly and consistently endorsed liberal principles or explicitly rejected liberal democracy. The conflation of philosophical opposites was the norm rather than the exception.48 In order to illustrate what I have presented as a public sphere that is simultaneously characterized by the ubiquity of discontent and the absence of coherent opposition, I will draw primarily on discussions of the protests against ‘Roma crime’ that interrupted the early weeks of the presidential election campaign in late September 2011. Although this stands as an archetypal example of an illiberal and exclusionary mobilization event in respect to the declared motives of the political backers of the protests, it is clear from the transcripts that many, perhaps most, of the protesters and their supporters did not perceive their actions in nationalist terms, nor did they support the xenophobic political movements at the their forefront. The main factor uniting the protesters appears to have been a rather vague sense of frustration with politics and a rejection of the status quo rather than any embrace of xenophobia or any other specific discourse. Many of those sympathizing with the protests even described their primary motivations in rather inclusive, liberal terms. Since protesting alongside crowds assembled for the primary purpose of venting displeasure against the Roma is only really an effective means of expressing intolerance, discussions of ‘the protests’ with those Plovdivchani who convincingly presented themselves as yearning for a better interpretations strike a chord, his efforts are obviously limited by the fact that he lacks the resources of a major media organization. 47 To be fair, since this is a question, the assumptions need not necessarily reflect those of the journalist. However, expressed neutrally in the context of the general rightwing editorial policy of the news platform, it is not unreasonable to assume sincerity. Ivan Dikov, ‘Secret Accord of President Parvanov, PM Borissov Mars Elections’, 27 October 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=133402. Accessed 20 January 2013. 48 Further to the data to be offered in this section, it is possible to consider also the Plovdiv discussion extract featured in Chapter 2, in which speakers’ attempts to understand the liberal international order they evidently endorse are repeatedly impeded by characteristically illiberal assumptions, including authoritarian ideas about order and exclusivist nationalist conceptions of national community.

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democracy provides a fine illustration of the lack of philosophical coherence in Bulgarian repertoires of dissent. Talking About ‘The Protests’: Anti-Roma Mobilization of September 2011 The wave of anti-Roma mobilizations that led to large scale protests in every major Bulgarian city in September 2011 was triggered by the death of a 19-yearold Bulgarian man under the wheels of a minibus driven by an associate of the well-known Roma clan leader and alleged crime boss ‘Tsar Kiro’ (Kiril Rashkov) in the village of Katunica49 near Plovdiv. The extent to which the subsequent riots in the village and protests across the country were coordinated by political forces is unclear, but it appears that politicians from the xenophobic parties of Ataka and VMRO-BND were already seeking to generate political capital from the disturbances in the days when the leadership of GERB and the BSP were still struggling to keep up with events. With respect to the initial trigger, the national (BSP-leaning) tabloid Trud reported that Bulgarian villagers, including the deceased’s father, had already exchanged angry words with a convoy of Roma travelling from the Plovdiv ghetto of Stolipinovo the day before the young man was run down and killed by a minibus carrying six of Rashkov’s guests on Friday 23 September.50 The Trud report also stated that several hundred Bulgarian residents of Katunica gathered in front of Rashkov’s luxurious properties, demanding that the family be evicted, with some attempting to break police cordons, start fires and pull Roma passengers from cars. However, it seems that the occupants of the houses escaped after being evacuated by local gendarmes on the Friday night. The conflict claimed a second life on the Saturday afternoon when a 16-year-old friend of the deceased with an existing heart condition passed out and died during the protests against Rashkov, prompting many of those supporting the rioters to speak at the time of two ‘victims’.51 Events escalated that evening when the local Bulgarian villagers were joined by around 2,000 incomers, many of them football fans who had travelled to the village after the weekend’s fixtures in nearby Plovdiv and the capital Sofia. This mob, some of whom wore masks, was able to overwhelm the police at the site, even though police numbers had by then been reinforced by units from nearby cities. Reports on private TV station BTV showed a silhouette of a man within the gates of a property owned by Rashkov raising a ‘Nazi’ salute as the property burned behind

49 Katunica may also be transliterated as ‘Katunitsa’. 50 These events are attributed in my fieldnotes to a timeline provided in the print edition of Trud on Sunday 25 September 2011. Author’s fieldnotes, September 2011. 51 In fact, the first I heard of the events was when I received a text from an acquaintance on the Saturday evening in which the sender endorsed the Katunica riots on the basis of the ‘murder’ of ‘two boys’. Author’s fieldnotes, September 2011.

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him.52 The driver of the minibus involved in the initial fatality was detained on the Saturday evening but only named in press reports the following week. Xenophobic parties were quick to capitalize. The very day of the initial riot (Saturday 24 September), the VMRO-BND53 party was already sending its activists to support the protesters in Katunica, and the politician Angel Dzhambazki was calling a ‘national protest’ for Sofia the following weekend under the reported slogan ‘No More Gypsyness’.54 On the Sunday, while the deceased’s funeral took place in Katunica, anti-Roma protests spread to major towns and cities across the country. Some 3,000 protesters, led by bikers, marched from Ploshtad Suedinenie (Unification Square) in the centre of Plovdiv to the edge of the city’s (and Europe’s) largest Roma ghetto, Stolipinovo. Some Roma stood at the entrance to the ghetto brandishing makeshift weapons as the crowd passed, with clashes narrowly avoided due to the intervention of police and local councillors who persuaded the Roma to return to their homes.55 The Sofia News Agency reported that several protesters later gathered around the city’s central mosque, pelting it with stones and beating those of Roma appearance with their fists.56 Meanwhile, hundreds of arrests took place as Bulgarian police and large crowds of protesters clashed in the cities of Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Pleven and Pazardzhik. In many cities, crowds peaked in the several thousands, with protests continuing over four or five days. The VMRO-BND’s activities in one case led to the arrest for rioting and subsequent release on grounds of political immunity of the party’s

52 The reporter fronting some of these initial reports, Mirolyuba Benatova, was subsequently targeted by supporters of the riots for bringing attention to the presence of football hooligans and racist chants. Threats were made to her personal safety and her Facebook page was closed when a coordinated campaign to ‘flag’ her profile as offensive succeeded. ‘Bulgarian Journalist Banned from Facebook over Report From Katunica’, novinite.com, 1 October 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id =132580. Accessed 20 January 2013. 53 VMRO stands for ‘Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization’, implying continuity with the anti-Ottoman group of the same name, founded in 1878 at a time when many Slav Macedonians identified primarily as Bulgarians. It is therefore unsurprising that territorial revanchism is written into the party’s statutes. The appendage BND stands for ‘Bulgarian National Movement’ (ВМРО – Българско Национално Движение). 54 ‘Bulgarian Nationalists Head to Village Engulfed in Ethnic Violence’, novinite.com, 24 September 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132358. Accessed 20 January 2013. 55 ‘170 Arrested in Bulgaria after second night of Anti-Roma Protests’, novinite.com, 28 September 2013. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132473. Accessed 20 January 2013. 56 ‘170 Arrested in Bulgaria after second night of Anti-Roma Protests’, novinite.com, 28 September 2013. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132473. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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mayoral candidate for the eastern city of Varna.57 By Monday 26 September, the Ataka leader and Presidential candidate Volen Siderov was demanding that the national security apparatus should be immediately convened to discuss what he termed ‘Roma crime’ and petitioning for the re-introduction of the death penalty for ‘especially violent murders’.58 The slogan of ‘Roma Crime’ was the title of an ‘information’ leaflet59 that the party handed out across the country on Tuesday 27 September, and this slogan was used repeatedly by Siderov as Ataka competed with other nationalist and xenophobic groups to channel the support of citizens mobilized by the protests. The protests placed the country’s most senior politicians in a difficult position. Neither GERB PM Boiko Borissov nor the outgoing BSP President Georgi Parvanov were averse to making populist nationalist statements themselves. Borissov had swept to power in 2009 on the back of an anti-corruption campaign during which he accused the Turkish-dominated MRF party of ‘stoking ethnic tensions’60 as well as failing to convincingly distance himself from the communist government’s forced assimilation policies.61 Since then he had enjoyed the support of the xenophobic Ataka party in parliament (Novakovic 2010). In 2007, President Parvanov had himself helped to instigate a large-scale nationalist mobilization against scholars who dissented from nationalist historiographical narratives (Roth 2010). However, faced with an illiberal mobilization that neither had any role in initiating, both politicians ultimately proved rather adept at restoring the peace. Presenting a united front by visiting Katunica together after the weekend’s rioting, the politicians moved to calm tensions while avoiding being seen to directly oppose a cause that clearly had popular support. The public statements released by Borissov from the day of the Katunitsa events onwards were attempts to reconcile these two themes, arguing on the one hand that the events were ‘criminal, not political’ and promising to arrest and prosecute rioters, while simultaneously declaring sympathy with the plight of the Bulgarian villagers and promising that ‘Tsar Kiro will not continue to live the way he has been doing these past 57 ‘Police Bust More than 100 in Bulgaria for Violence on “Roma Protests” Night’, novinite.com, 27 September 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news. php?id=132438. Accessed 20 January 2013. 58 ‘Bulgarian Nationalist Leader Demands Reintroduction of the Death Sentence’, 26 September 2011, novinite.com. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news. php?id=132418. Accessed 20 January 2013. 59 This leaflet contained emotive descriptions of numerous rapes and murders allegedly committed by Roma against ethnic Bulgarian victims. It was discussed by participants in some of the group discussions. 60 ‘Former Wrestler Scores Big Takedown in Bulgarian PM race’, novinite.com, 9 July 2009. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=105570. Accessed 20 January 2013. 61 ‘Sofia Mayor: Communist Revival Process Against Muslims Had Right Aims’, novinite.com, 31 October 2008. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php? id=98431. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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22 years’.62 Parvanov, appearing on TV together with Borissov on Sunday 25 September, spoke in similar terms, arguing that the Katunica incident had occurred ‘between individuals not nationalities’ and warning that rioters would be harshly prosecuted. While many Roma and several journalists were attacked by rioters in the week of unrest, leading to hundreds of arrests, the situation never escalated to full-scale pogroms as many had feared. After a few more prominent rallies in Sofia and Plovdiv at the start of October, the protests receded from the headlines and were barely an issue in the late campaigning in the presidential campaigns that culminated just a few weeks later with the polls on 23 and 30 October. On the surface, it appears quite obvious that this mobilization event was illiberal and exclusionary. Nationalist politicians and groups such as bikers and football hooligans had led the disturbances with the unambiguous intent of targeting an entire community, the Roma. However, a powerful counter narrative quickly emerged that played down the emphasis on xenophobic agitation and depicted the protesters in a more sympathetic light. This narrative, resonating broadly among ordinary citizens, suggested that the media (especially the state-owned TV channel BNT) had sought to present the protests as dominated by marginal figures such as bikers and football hooligans when they were in fact mostly attended by ordinary citizens fed up with elite collusion with organized crime figures, of which Tsar Kiro was merely ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back’. According to this narrative of ‘respectable’ protests, the mobilization was not about ethnic hatred at all but was simply the expression of ordinary citizens who had grown tired of putting up with organized crime. To the extent that racism was evident at all, this was simply the result of extremist political figures hijacking the spontaneous and justified demonstrations of decent citizens who could not bear to see people killed and the perpetrators walk free. It is easy to dismiss this narrative in the face of the evidence available from the mainstream media that I have relied on in this section. Certainly, it is hard to sympathize with those protesters who used such narratives as justification for attacking journalists who attempted to cover the disturbances.63 However, the sheer scale of the protests – several thousand people on the streets over several days in many major cities – suggests that the protests did indeed have far wider resonance than the emphasis on ‘bikers’ and ‘hooligans’ suggests. In fact, a majority of my sample claimed to have either personally participated in the protests or to have sympathized with those who did. Support for the protests was particularly strong among those under 40, both male and female, although some older people also voiced support.

62 ‘PM: Impunity Will Stop With Bulgarian-Roma Violence’, novinite.com, 26 September 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132397. Accessed 20 January 2013. 63 ‘Bulgarian Journalist Banned from Facebook over Report From Katunica’, novinite.com, 1 October 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php? id=132580. Accessed 20 January 2013.

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I will now turn to the task of presenting responses to the protests. It is possible to divide my sample into three roughly equal camps on the basis of their stances relating to these events. The first two of these stances did actually fit in with the dominant media narrative of ethnic conflict. At one end of the scale there were those who claimed that Bulgarians were threatened and that they were pleased that Tsar Kiro and his people had been punished by the rioters. Little attempt was made by these speakers to avoid ethnically-charged language (‘We made it hot for them [by starting fires in Katunica]’, ‘For this loathsome Gypsy life has no value’). At the other end of the spectrum were those who explicitly opposed the protests, citing either disapproval of the ‘extreme right’ or sympathy for the Roma, a majority of whom were argued to be blameless: Iliya (male, mid thirties, carpenter): This guy [Ataka leader Volen Siderov], just look at him and observe his movements. He is not a normal person you know. And then how can you support this man and go protest? This way you become part of the ideas in his head … Viktor [male, early thirties, student]: Well, a friend of mine is of the Roma ethnicity. He neither lives nor communicates with other Roma people. He communicates more with Bulgarians and lives away from the Roma people. He complained to me that as a result of the past events, whenever he was passing by skinhead teenagers they were shaking their heads and acting provocatively.

Most of these opponents of the protests assumed Tsar Kiro’s guilt, speaking of ‘murder’, but they followed the country’s most senior politicians in claiming that it was a private, criminal matter that ought not to impact upon ethnic relations in the country. The final third of my informants generally supported the protests, but did so in ways that denied that ethnicity was the primary motive for their support. These ranged from those who claimed that the protests were principally about establishing law and order while admitting that defending the rights of Bulgarians against Roma ‘criminals’ was a secondary consideration, to those who claimed to act only in the interests of establishing ‘civil society’ and rebelling against corrupt elites. Since explanation of these positions is less straightforward, I will describe them at greater length. Some of those supporting the protests actually demonstrated quite a strong affinity with liberal democratic principles. Prior to discussing the Katunica protests, which had occurred about six weeks earlier, a group of male and female students had been discussing flaws in the electoral process in Bulgaria. Specifically, they agreed upon the generally negative influence of big money in Bulgarian politics, which was seen as delivering an unfair advantage to the best-funded candidates, prompting suspicion of what they perceived as the easy ride afforded to PM Borissov by the media. In addition, they discussed the patronage systems through which politics was carried out in small Bulgarian towns (including those where

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some of them were born), describing these practices as a clear subversion of the principle that representatives should be elected based on the consideration of policies. When the conversation turned to the protests, they appeared divided with respect to the question of whether or not they should have been supported. Naum and Martin, who did take part in the protests, acknowledged the presence of racist voices among the protesters, but claimed to represent a majority who were campaigning for equal application of ‘the rule of law’ to the powerful – a universalist rather than a particularist aim. Nina, who did not support the protests, depicted the protests as the ethnicization of a criminal issue: Naum (male, early twenties, student): There is a preface to what happened there [in Katunica]. The reason for all this to happen was that people needed some justice. The reason was that some laws apply to some people, and for others who have money the very same laws do not apply. I was amazed that this happened because I thought that people just did not care anymore. Two boys died – it was a high price to pay. The cup overflowed. Many people think that some people can afford to disobey the law. Actually, it happens everywhere and we confront it all the time. There are many examples. JD (author): Were the protests organized? Nina (female, early twenties, student): Of course, they were organized. However, this is a private case. We are talking about Katunica. We are talking about the people who lived there and they felt powerless against one person – Tsar Kiro. The case of the murdered boy and the other one who died shortly after are particular cases. Then the cup overflowed. All the people in the country who have had a problem with people from this ethnic group felt involved and this is why these protests were organized. Martin (male, early twenties, student): This is not true. I was there at the protests. Nina: What did you protest about? Martin: For the things that were mentioned just now. Because they [the police?] can never find the arsenals of weaponry. Because underage people drive cars through the village and cities and nobody stops them. They have fake driver's licenses … Nina: This is exactly what I am saying. We are talking about Katunica; we are not talking about the entire country. Martin: Tsar Kiro is a mafia boss. Don’t you understand that? There are many people like him. It is important that he is a Gypsy. If he were not a Gypsy, there would be no big protests. I am not saying it is irrelevant.

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Nina: Hatred poured over all the Gypsies. Subsequently we heard the name of the person who ran over this child three or four days later. I heard the name after a couple of days. I think we all should have heard who did it on the day of the accident and not later. Martin: It does not matter that we all heard who did it after three or four days. I am talking about the reason for the protests to happen. The protests would not be so intense if it hadn’t been a Gypsy. But I do not say that it was the main reason. In one way or another there would be protests, maybe less, but I think the main reason is the lawlessness. This is the truth. Nina: I believe that everyone should follow the laws. Authorities should ensure that everybody obeys the rules. The bad thing is that it is not happening. [Section of conversation omitted.] Naum: I know that many people refused to protest just because of racism among some of the people. Not all of them had a racist attitude. If we divide them into two groups: those with racist slogans and non-racist slogans, then if those with racist slogans, through these slogans put the others off from protesting, then it will turn out that everything covered by the media will be about ethnic issues. I decided that I should not give up, because we needed more people like me there who are against the racist slogans and to eventually reverse the events, we had to influence those with racist slogans. In the last two protests that I participated in, there was not a single racist slogan, even in Plovdiv. The people were much fewer in number, perhaps only half of the protesters were there, but there were no racist slogans. Ultimately, I was interested to know what happened in the media. It seems that in the end we have won by the fact that there were no racist slogans and it was a cause for justice and law.

For the young men in this exchange, attending the protests does not conflict with their earlier hopes for more transparent and democratic politics in the country. Neither of them denies that some of the marchers were motivated by racism, but they argue that it is nonetheless important to march in defence of law and order. Martin is careful to blame police collusion with those undertaking criminal practices even if the use of ‘they’ does suggest that he has an ethnic ‘other’ in mind. Naum articulates an explicitly anti-racist position. While many often claimed not to be racist before laying out racist rationale (the not uncommon ‘I’m not racist, but …’ approach), there seems little reason to doubt Naum’s sincerity. Other supporters of the protests were similarly keen to stress that their anger did not derive from ethnic animosity, with many, for example, claiming that Roma villagers also despised Tsar Kiro. Many Plovdivchani compared the protests with those of contemporary Greek protesters in spite of the vast ideological gulf between left-wing anti-austerity

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protests and the mobilization against ‘Roma crime’. In fact, the idea of ‘becoming more like the Greeks’ was a narrative used by many who saw their Bulgarian compatriots as seemingly willing to put up with almost any degree of corruption. Thus the protests could be applauded by those projecting their hopes onto a more European and democratic future as a case of Bulgarian ‘civil society’ making its voice heard. In these narratives, the anger of protesters was primarily directed at the state, which was held to be guilty of colluding with mafia figures like Tsar Kiro. The media entered these narratives as a stooge of the authorities, keen to discredit the cause of the protesters by focussing on violent and racist elements: Malena (female, early thirties, student): If you do not pay VAT and you own a company, till the 20th day of the month, data is being processed and you will receive a tax penalty from the taxation authorities. It turns out such things never happened to him [Tsar Kiro] because our governors use him for their deeds [probably a reference to Kiro’s alleged coordination of vote buying among Roma]. The rebellion is not based on ethnic problems. All those things happened because people were tolerating the wrongdoing of someone for a long time and he was never was penalized for his misdeeds. Protests were held against the iniquities in the state and the media did not accurately reflect the events. I do not know if any one of you took part in the protests. I am a mother of two children – one is 2 years old and the other one is seven. I think we should have civil society. And to build civil society we must all participate. At the protest there were many parents with children, people like me. None of the cameras took a shot of these parents.

These calls for an active civil society certainly do not communicate any hostility to liberal democracy, even though the logic of joining these particular demonstrations in order to attack elites is questionable to say the least. Oddly, this association between corrupt elites and the events at Katunica resonated among a great many people. When discussing their support for the protests, another group consisting of casual workers in their twenties conflated the problem with that of the corrupt privatizations through which state insiders enriched themselves in the 1990s. The idea that such corrupt elites might not necessarily be most effectively targeted by joining marches in which some people chanted ‘Let’s turn gypsies into soap’ (as Malena subsequently described referring to the emphasis on racist elements in the media coverage) was not evidently sufficient to cause these speakers to withdraw their support. From a normative liberal perspective, it is easy to recognize that participating in protests sparked by ethnic nationalist claims-making is not a good strategy for improving ‘civil society’, advocating the rule of law or fighting elite corruption. So why did so many evidently well-intentioned citizens imagine that it was? In the first instance, it is necessary to recognize the frustration caused by the difficulty of protesting against political and economic elites in a discursive context that is almost

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entirely under the control of those same elites. The Bulgarian anthropologist Totka Monova’s contention with respect to Bulgarian media discourse applies here: To my mind, it is impossible to speak of participation of the Bulgarian media in redefining social roles or of the construction of new social identities adequate to the situations imposed by globalization and the new century. This is an objective result of the specific media environment created by the former communist party nomenklatura with the help of different intermediaries. For two decades, the Bulgarian media had one basic function: to legitimate to Bulgarian society the transformation of the roles from the former repertoire of power into a new repertoire, to legalize the transformation of national capital into private property. They have performed this task successfully. (Monova 2011: 32–33)

According to this overview then, the over-arching long-term aim of Bulgarian media discourse has been to legitimate the enrichment and empowerment of the same beneficiaries of transition that most of my groups claimed to dissent against: beneficiaries of corrupt privatizations, company directors depriving workers of their shares, ‘monopolists’, outright ‘mafia’ figures.64 While citizens have thus been impeded in developing ‘identities’ that would have allowed for the formation of coherent oppositional solidarities, an underlying sense of frustration has built up, allowing citizens to applaud almost any mobilization so long as the authorities are seen to oppose it. Naum (male, early twenties, student): I am just surprised that Bulgarians finally woke up. I am surprised that so many people gathered in one place for such a cause.

By this token, the philosophical character of the mobilization is of secondary importance to the fact that it occurred at all. Any protest, many seemed to believe, is better than none. However, this does not explain why these citizens, evidently so convinced of the need for democracy, civic participation and the rule of law, were simply unable to grasp that swelling the numbers of an anti-Roma mobilization was antithetical to these aims. In this sense, I argue that the problem is that the tension between liberal democracy and the will of the majority is not widely proliferated in the country. Daniel Smilov touches upon the problem when he notes that ‘the frustrated and discontented democracy that is emerging in the country is more illiberal, more majoritarian than the EU would hope for’ (Smilov 2010: 99). The contrast with Serbia is very clear in this sense. Whereas Serbian liberal intellectuals 64 On two separate occasions, informants (in both cases young men) repeated the maxim that ‘Other states have a mafia; in Bulgaria, the mafia has a state’. The alleged underworld links of PM Boiko Borissov were invoked on at least one of these occasions. Author’s fieldnotes, September 2011.

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stress principles such as inclusivity and civic tolerance in a way that allows even casual observers of politics to grasp the idea that simple majoritarianism and liberal democracy are not the same thing, Bulgarian liberal intellectuals instead stress principles of economic individualism and a pro-western foreign policy that evidently fail to provide the same kind of normative guidance to a broader public. In both cases there are, of course, many that are inclined to reject the normative articulations of liberal democracy in favour of more nationalist, exclusivist visions. The key difference lies in the fact that so many of those Bulgarians who have evidently chosen to embrace the idea of ‘a modern European path’ remain prone, understandably in the context, to conflating liberal and illiberal norms. The citizens described in the preceding section imagine themselves as supporting liberal democracy but frequently contrive, usually unwittingly, to undermine it through their actions. Conclusion: Incoherent Dissent and the Intellectual Neglect of Democratic Pluralism At the start of the empirical part of this chapter, I outlined the claim that the public sphere was not very evident in everyday life in Plovdiv, that speakers rarely linked their everyday concerns to those of the wider society. In the light of the subsequent descriptions of massive anti-Roma mobilization, this claim might appear to be difficult to support. If people tend not to recognize the interplay between the personal and the political, then it is reasonable to wonder how on earth the whole country suddenly erupted in a frenzy of street protests. However, the absence of everyday forms of civic engagement in Central and Eastern Europe is actually widely recognized as a cause of illiberal and often violent mobilizations. Vladimir Tismaneanu describes this relationship in an article dealing with disenchantment in region: Howard’s (2003) insights on the demobilized nature of civil societies within the post-communist countries go a long way towards explaining the absence of a middle way between apathy and violence. The comprehensive penetration of society by the state under communism produced a “monstrous autonomy of the political” (Lefort 1999), or a hypertrophy of the pseudo-political, leads to malaise, disengagement, mistrust of voluntary associations, and deep engagement in private rather than public spheres of interaction. (Tismaneanu 2009: 360)

According to Tismaneanu’s account, the ‘middle way’ that is ‘absent’ is exactly what I refer to as the public sphere: everyday contexts in which citizens engage in critical discussion of matters of common concern. When the public sphere is more prominent, dissatisfied citizens are able to connect their own actions to the political context, recognizing the efficacy of airing their opinions, persuading adversaries,

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telling political jokes and ultimately ‘formulating [oppositional] interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs’ (Fraser 1992: 123). The explosion of very generalized and poorly articulated dissatisfaction in the form of the protests after the events at Katunica reveals that the public sphere in this sense had failed to provide a context in which these disenchanted persons could form solidarities through practices of self-organized discourse. In the absence of clearly articulated discourses of dissent congruent with the claims of my informants to pursue more democracy, elite accountability and indeed more tolerance, they found themselves demonstrating for less of it. How could this happen? Was 1997 not the moment of epochal change, when Bulgaria’s pro-European liberal right-wing elites decisively gained the upper hand over the Russophile ex-communist BSP, putting Bulgaria firmly on course for democratic consolidation and the EU? (Ganev 2007, Bechev & Noutcheva 2008). If so many of these citizens identify with ‘Europe’ and state their claims in the language of ‘democracy’, then how is it possible that they fail to recognize that classically illiberal practices, including but not limited to militant xenophobia, are exclusive of these ideas? The answer I offer is that post-1997 political culture in Bulgaria has been defined by a very shallow victory on behalf of a very shallow interpretation of what constitutes liberalism. Both at the level of elite politics and that of everyday public discourse, I argue that the preference for economic liberalism has gradually come to push the liberal pluralism enshrined in the specific institutions of liberal democracy into the background. When observed closely, Bulgaria’s liberal intellectual right turns out to be more consistently rightwing than it is positively committed to liberal democracy. Certainly, there was once a serious elite effort to articulate the ideas of European integration with liberal ideas of ‘democracy’, ‘free journalists’ and so on, even if it was always accepted that the priority was the liberalization of the economy.65 This kind of liberal-right articulation is still probably the dominant normative position of Bulgarian social scientists for whom liberal democracy and European integration are presented as a twin project that involves economic and political dimensions: the promotion of a doctrine of fiscal discipline and economic individualism on the one hand and the promotion of an open civil society, ethnic tolerance, freedom of speech, and checks and balances on the other. In the Bulgarian context, in which the political context is shaped partly by an ex-communist left that has never made good on its claims to favour the dispossessed (Ganev 2007) nor decisively broken with the nationalist chauvinist policies of the Zhivkov era (Stamatov 2000, Roth 2010), it is certainly for the better that many aligning themselves with the political right evidently do also perceive their role as pushing for an open society, ethnic 65 In this sense, it is possible to quote the former President of Bulgaria Petar Stoyanov who was elected in 1997: ‘[Membership in NATO] for us means not only reforms in the army, but democracy, a developed economy, a [high] living standard, free journalists, motivated young people, and above all, that way of life that has been chosen on the eve of the twenty-first century’ (cited in Barany 2002: 146).

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tolerance, and so on. Furthermore, the alliance of right-wing economic thought with some degree of commitment to liberal pluralism has helped to hasten the acceptance of Bulgaria into the exclusive club of Western nations. In this sense, the specific right-wing character of the ‘liberal consensus’ in the country was no doubt as much a consequence of outside pressures as it was of domestic convictions as the country’s elites jumped through the necessary hoops to join first NATO in 2004 and then the European Union in 2007. Furthermore, it also appears to help Bulgaria maintain friendly bilateral relationships with powerful states like Germany and economic organizations like the European Central Bank and the IMF wherein policies of fiscal discipline are promoted. This allows those identifying with the Bulgarian right to claim a number of successes with some degree of justification. The compatibility of economic liberalism with democracy is not questioned by most scholars of democratization. However, to say that economic liberalism is ‘compatible with’ liberal democracy is not the same as saying that it is a necessary condition of its existence (Schmitter & Karl 1991). This point evidently escapes many intellectuals of the Bulgarian right who routinely conflate the promotion of liberal democracy with the advocacy of specific economic policies, giving rise to two distinct problems. Firstly, as Krastev himself recognized, the articulation of right-wing economic policies with democracy itself tends to delegitimize dissent against economic liberalism as undemocratic and anti-European, feeding support for populist anti-system politics (Krastev 2007). In this light, it can be seen that many of those demonstrating against the Roma in 2011 wanted mostly to vent grievances about living standards, elite corruption and other ideas that have been derided as the domain of ‘populism’ by the press, or otherwise excluded from respectable ‘pro-European’ politics. These ideas, unlike the xenophobic agitations of ethnic nationalists, are obviously not exclusive of liberal democratic principles and should therefore find expression in democratic politics, or at least in civil society. If Bulgarian liberals are serious about the commitment to political pluralism, then there must be some recognition that not every democrat will necessarily embrace the economic arguments of the right. Secondly, and this is the nub of my argument, when Bulgaria’s liberals promote right-wing economics and democracy together, the economic side of the argument tends to dominate this position so completely that the political side – commitments to pluralism, checks and balances, ethnic tolerance and so on – is marginalized or even forgotten. In this sense, it is revealing that some scholars (Krastev 2011) and most pro-Western intellectuals more broadly have continued to present the electoral success of the right-wing GERB party as a positive development in Bulgarian politics even as the country’s ratings in media freedom (Reporters Without Borders 2012), corruption perception (Transparency International 2012) and democracy (Freedom House Nations in Transit 2012) indices continue to decline. In this context, it is hardly surprising that the intellectual right in Plovdiv seemed more concerned about fiscal discipline than they did about, say, ethnic tolerance or the freedom of the press. This is unfortunate from the perspective of the long-term

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prospects of liberal democracy, because economic policy preferences provide the citizen with no grounds for recognizing the tension between freedom and equality that provides the philosophical rationale for the institutions of liberal democracy. No matter how much it is possible to link the terms ‘Europe’, ‘democracy’ and ‘fiscal discipline’ rhetorically, a commitment to public spending cuts does not provide any impetus at all for the preservation of pluralism, the separation of powers, the representation of minorities, or almost any political practice that most scholars would consider to be integral to liberal democracy. A comparison with the Serbian case, where being liberal generally does not entail any specific economic orientation, illustrates this point rather neatly. Liberals in Serbia generally articulate their political aims around the principles of tolerance of ethnic and sexual minorities, human equality and the specifically institutional correlates of these non-majoritarian principles such as equal representation, the separation of powers, the rule of law and so on. This enables those citizens identifying with these principles to recognize when political elites – even ‘pro-European’ ones – subvert democratic institutions and thus to resist and dissent against these subversions in clear and unambiguous terms. A ‘liberal counterpublic’ with considerable ‘civic power’ is thus discursively constituted in a manner that serves to uphold the liberal democratic system itself. Perhaps more importantly still, the establishment of these clear and unambiguous principles through the everyday talk of Serbian liberals allows a far greater mass of people – those I identified in Chapter 4 as the ‘careworn democratic’ public – to recognize the difference between democratic and anti-democratic mobilizations. Among these politically disenchanted citizens, there existed a very healthy derision for the militarism and occasional resort to violence on the part of those they described variously as ‘nationalists’ or ‘hooligans’. Thus, even citizens characterized by a low level of political engagement were able to recognize that some forms of majoritarian political expression were antithetical to the democratic system that they still forlornly identified themselves with. Another way to phrase this would be to state that a great mass of Serbs appear to be immunized against a specific set of illiberal ideas. Obviously, this recognition is less widespread among the notionally proEuropean, pro-democratic centre of the Bulgarian public to whom being ‘modern, European and democratic’ is usually presented as embracing policies of fiscal discipline at the macro-level and embracing individual risk at the personal level. Of course, this helps not at all when it comes to the challenge of facing down the key challenges to Bulgarian democracy. Some of these challenges include an entrenched and notionally pro-European political establishment consisting mainly of the ruling GERB party, the opposition BSP and the Turkish minority MRF that each have well-documented close and unhealthy relationships with economic elites (Pedersen & Johannsen 2011: 89), share contempt for the independence of the media and the judiciary and have worked together to alter the electoral framework to effectively bar entry to new political forces (OSCE 2011). These challenges also include a widespread resonance of xenophobic rhetoric that is

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certainly not confined to the supporters of small and marginal political parties such as Ataka and VMRO-BND. Perhaps the greatest challenge of all is to develop an open and tolerant liberal civil society in the likely context of long-term economic insecurity. In order that all of these challenges may be negotiated in a way that strengthens rather than weakens Bulgarian democracy, it is necessary that citizens are encouraged to identify with principles that allow them to distinguish illiberal political mobilizations from liberal-progressive ones, between national majoritarianism and liberal pluralism, and to understand the rationale behind such institutional principles as the separation of powers. Whether that can possibly be achieved through the narrow promotion of economic liberalism in the name of ‘Europe and democracy’ is highly doubtful. Of course, elite identities are shaped by the public sphere in much the same way that ordinary citizens are. When asked by journalists what could be done about the xenophobic politicians seeking to stir up ethnic tensions in the wake of the events at Katunica, PM Borissov answered ‘Nothing. Nothing is ever done against political leaders. This is democracy’.66 To be sure, most Bulgarians similarly recognize no reason to limit the pursuit of ethnic majoritarian interests in democracy. What Borissov’s cocksure response reveals most of all is that the national conversation about what is and is not democracy has barely begun in Bulgaria.

66 ‘PM: Tensions in Bulgaria are Politically Motivated’, novinite.com, 1 October 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=132578. Accessed 20 January 2013.

Conclusion: Evaluating Democracy through the Public Sphere The ultimate fate of the liberal project of democratization depends on the extent to which the specific principles enshrined in democratic institutions – individual liberty, political equality and civic tolerance – become embedded in the practices of citizens. It is this rather commonsensical proposition that has guided my particularistic analyses of the public spheres of Serbia and Bulgaria as they are constituted through the rhetoric of politicians, the editorial choices of media organizations and, most vitally, the manifold ways in which persons become constituted as democratic citizens through everyday discussion. Put simply, liberal democratic institutions will function better when they are staffed by officials and approached by citizens who are more impressed by political appeals in the name of civic tolerance and democratic accountability than those in the name of strong, decisive leadership and national chauvinism. What I have endeavoured to achieve through the application of public sphere theory to these problems is to challenge the perception among empirical students of politics that the evaluation of these philosophical aspects of democracy is somehow ‘impractical’ (Ekiert et al. 2007: 17). So long as one accepts that the public sphere consists of ideas that reveal themselves through the self-organized interactions of citizens and thus cannot be reduced to aggregated survey responses or indeed any other metric that seeks to remove these ideas from the contexts in which they are intelligible, then the tone and character of public discussion will reveal itself plainly enough to any scholar patient enough to analyse it. Furthermore, when this data is analysed by means of an engagement with existing normative democratic theory, as I have done in this book, the result is not merely descriptive but also evaluative. The literature on the public sphere provides scholars with a rich resource of empirically sophisticated and normatively-committed concepts that aid the scholar in evaluating such cultural dimensions of democracy. There are several reasons why this literature is particularly useful for addressing the blindspots of formal, institutionally-focussed modes of democracy measurement. Firstly, the study of the public sphere is grounded in the understanding that the development of the modern liberal form of democracy took place primarily in the realm of civil society (Habermas [1962] 1989) and was only later codified into liberal institutional forms. As many theorists of public discourse recognize, accepting this need not necessarily lead to the underestimation of the importance of legally-binding institutions (Habermas 1996, Kapoor 2002), but it does help scholars to disabuse themselves of the twin fallacies that a) institutions are all there is to democracy and

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b) that institutions can sustain themselves without an ‘embedment in some kind of shared culture’ (Blokker 2009: 2). If the project of democratization is ultimately to succeed in improving the lives of people in societies subject to it – and there is little reason to doubt the good faith of the vast majority of scholars working in this area – then these fallacies need to be jettisoned and the institutionally-focussed modes of democracy measurement that derive from them need to be altered to (seriously) take into account the philosophical content of public spheres. The EU could alter its conditionality procedures to be less technocratic and more commonsensical so that the respective roles of liberal-progressive and national-chauvinist political campaigning could be assessed in a more honest way that drops the unconvincing veneer of legalistic impartiality. Freedom House could continue describing with numbers, but could do so in a smarter way. Secondly, ever since Habermas argued that ‘one-to-many’ forms of mass communication in the twentieth century had transformed the public sphere of western societies in a deleterious manner, public sphere theory has been used by scholars to criticize supposedly ‘mature’ democratic societies on the basis that the emancipatory potential of democracy is all too frequently subverted in spite of the persistence of the characteristic institutional forms of liberal democracy (Habermas 1989, Eliasoph 1998). Thus, the normative valorization of principles such as civic participation, egalitarian debate and active democratic citizenship in most of the public sphere literature is oriented towards the appreciation of such democratic practices everywhere rather than the transplantation of specific practices from one place to another. To be sure, since most of the public sphere literature (including this study) valorizes specifically liberal forms of discursive activity,1 critics would be justified in suggesting that these ideas have a historically Western origin. However, unlike the promotion of specific institutional forms or even of neo-Weberian attempts to find out what certain societies have that less successful ones do not (Almond & Verba 1963, Putnam 1993), a normative evaluation on the basis of public sphere theory need not benchmark non-Western societies against Western ones.2 In the sense that public sphere theory provides no defined end-point for when one might suppose democratization to be complete, it is oriented to the production of more and not less scrutiny of, say, contemporary British immigration discourse or German discourse on economic policy. Public sphere theory shakes 1 Public sphere theorists endorsing explicitly liberal frameworks include Habermas and his many followers, but also those researchers who stress the emancipatory dimensions of the public sphere – what Mouffe has called ‘radical liberal democracy’ (Laclau & Mouffe 1998) – such as Fraser (1992). Even scholars such as Eliasoph who claim only to promote ‘better quality’ discussion could be argued to be pursuing a recognizably liberal agenda (Eliasoph 1998). 2 For example, Wedeen recognizes that democratic practices approximating to public sphere discussion exist in countries such as Yemen that are simply coded as ‘authoritarian’ by most scholars of democracy on the basis of their lack of western-style institutions (Wedeen 2008).

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Western complacency and can actually help to stimulate the ‘constant yearning for something more’ that helps to sustain democracy (O’Donnell 2008). For example, if we imagine that the EU’s democracy monitoring apparatus were recalibrated to shine a harsh light on the public spheres of old members as well as new, then there really could be an impetus towards a stronger form of liberal democracy across the continent (rather than the ethically-dubious pressure for alignment with the policies of the strongest member states that currently prevails). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the application of public sphere theory to democratization debates can re-introduce consideration of the basic emancipatory purpose of democracy promotion. It is of course very obvious that democracy would not be worth promoting at all if it were not seen as a means of enfranchising and empowering citizens who might otherwise be excluded from participation in the governance of their own lives. Public sphere theory is perhaps the most appropriate lens through which to study democracy from this perspective. Democratic virtue is recognized in citizens coming together to knit the bonds necessary for a more humane society, helping citizens to recognize and thus counteract the ‘often morally unsavoury assumptions hidden in the market and in the bureaucracies’ (Habermas 1985, paraphrased in Eliasoph 1999: 11). The public sphere is also recognized in people ‘acting in concert’, forming solidarities, exercising civic power. These emancipatory and thus promotionworthy dimensions of democratization are all too frequently marginalized or even forgotten in contemporary democracy promotion discourse, wherein a prevailing preference for an objectivist language of ‘necessary reforms’ and ‘technical criteria’ cannot fail to diminish the enthusiasm both of those tasked with implementing these reforms and those subject to them. This problem of the rhetorical divorce of democratization from ideas of popular enfranchisement is only exacerbated when the promotion of democracy is analytically conflated with, and even subordinated to, the promotion of a particular neoliberal form of capitalism, as is evident in continuing Western engagements in CEE (Ost 2005) and in much of the evaluative literature cited in this project (Tismaneanu 2009, Krastev 2011). From this perspective, the surprisingly elusive and philosophically-narrow public sphere observed in the Bulgarian data of this project is suggestive of the pitfalls of too close a marriage between democratization discourse and technical economic criteria. Before I proceed to a brief concluding discussion of some of the wider implications of the findings I have set forth in this book, I will digress briefly to describe an ethical conundrum that cannot be avoided whenever the domains of ethnographic inquiry and normative evaluation coincide. To evaluate the public sphere in terms of civic participation and discursive content – to say nothing of the valorization of a liberal benchmark congruent with the philosophical rationale underpinning the democratic institutions of the state – is to apply a consistently critical attitude to the words and practices of ordinary citizens in general, and specific persons who agreed to aid me in my research in particular. Even allowing for the fact that I have followed standard academic protocols in protecting the

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anonymity of my informants, it remains that I have laid open the thoughts of these people to sometimes unflattering scrutiny. This is, as any normatively committed scholar should be aware, an unsettling experience that should provoke serious reflection. I am painfully aware of the irony of reporting the words of the man – the friend – who concluded our discussion of the land swaps saga with the words, ‘You’re not going to write bad things about Bulgaria, are you?’ It is, of course, entirely understandable that citizens who earnestly love the societies in which they reside (regardless of whether they curse their leaders or not) may not appreciate the kind of evaluation that I have attempted through this project. All that I can really offer in my defence is that I consider the emancipatory potential of democratic public spheres to be something worth promoting, even worth causing offence for. If my study provokes any kind of debate – or outright criticism – among my colleagues who share my desire to see democracy actually working for citizens in either Serbia or Bulgaria, then I claim that the intrusiveness of this study will have been worthwhile. Possibilities for Further Research: Re-thinking the ‘Particular Problems Facing the Western Balkans’ The scope of this research project has been descriptive and evaluative rather than general and explanatory. However, on the basis of the main findings of the research I conducted in Serbia and Bulgaria, I contend that it is possible at least to offer some propositions relating to the quality and content of democracy beyond the borders of these two countries. In particular, I intend to argue that several former Yugoslav societies (besides Serbia) might turn out to share the ideological and discursive landscape of characteristically illiberal, nationalist mainstreams opposed by strident liberal-progressive counterpublics with historical roots in progressive late-Yugoslav activism. These might possibly be contrasted with several former Warsaw-Pact societies (besides Bulgaria) sharing illiberal, nationalist mainstreams in which the encroachment of liberalism is tolerated only up to the point that it conflicts with the fundamentally exclusivist principles underpinning political competition. In the sense that most scholars of democratization would agree that liberal democracy has a better chance where it has stronger advocates in civil society, I suggest that scholars working on this area might do well to complement the (justified) widespread recognition of the negative legacies of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s with a countervailing recognition of the positive legacies of Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav liberal-cosmopolitan activism. Further study may reveal that it is the positive legacy of such activism in the progressive ideas and identities of higher-educated urban citizens of post-Yugoslav states that constitutes the most significant difference in the quality and content of democracy in these societies relative to the former Warsaw Pact societies now in the EU, where such progressive activism has much shallower historical roots.

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In the interests of building my critique, a little contextualization is in order. In undertaking this project, I was aware that the countries of the Western Balkans, especially those of the former Yugoslavia, were not usually included in the same studies as those CEE countries that had already entered the European Union between 2004 and 2007. Comparative research including case studies of both Bulgaria and Romania (Bechev & Noutcheva 2008, Spendzharova & Vachudova 2012, Ganev 2013), or of both Serbia and Croatia (Gagnon 2004, Stojić 2006, Ramet 2011c) are, for example, rather more common than those covering say both Serbia and Bulgaria or both Hungary and Bosnia. In part, this case selection is an artefact of the tendency within political research to construct ‘controlled’ comparisons, in which cases are selected on the basis of the fulfilment of specific criteria, usually of similarity. For example, some significant comparative studies of politics in CEE countries explicitly rule out consideration of former Yugoslav countries on the basis that these countries were either part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia or were afflicted by wars during the recent past (Elster, Offe & Preuss 1998, Stroschein 2012). This is understandable from the perspective of scholars seeking to derive generalizable research findings, but it tends to reinforce the boundary between the two sub-regions. In the absence of much political research pitting these societies directly against one another, contemporary perceptions of the relative status of these two sub-regions can be reified on the basis of little more than earlier perceptions, what is sometimes referred to as ‘received wisdom’. When articles appear which purport to characterize political developments across the entire post-socialist space in Eastern Europe, including Western Balkan countries, this latter group of countries are usually presented as exhibiting all of the usual ‘pathologies’ of CEE politics (populism, clientelism, corruption and so on) as well as having ‘particular problems’ relating to the legacy of nationalist wars. Ekiert et al’.s article is a case in point (Ekiert, Kubik & Vachudova 2007). Those particular paragraphs devoted to the Western Balkans almost uniformly deal with problems of war and nationalist excess: Yet the bloody civil war in the former Yugoslavia and its legacies are a stark reminder of the potential difficulties faced by divided societies in their quest to build democracy. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 14) Many post-communist states, including Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Serbia-Montenegro, and Croatia, are emerging from a long period of isolation. In these countries, today’s university students grew up suffocated by ethnocentric and antidemocratic propaganda. (Ekiert et al. 2007: 28)

Tellingly, the impression relayed by these authors is consistent with that imparted by Freedom House which, as of 2013, still records that no single Western Balkan country is as democratic as any single CEE country in the European Union. To be clear, I do not wish to argue that one ought to give any less emphasis to the challenges faced by post-Yugoslav societies. These are real problems, and the

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authors are justified in referring to them in their overview of democratization in the region. However, the point I wish to make is that, besides the continuing negative legacy of mistrust and hatred engendered by war, the societies of the former Yugoslavia also maintain considerable comparative advantages relative to countries now in the European Union when it comes to the authors’ declared goal of ‘building democratic cultures’. It is some of these ‘comparative advantages’ that I claim offer the most plausible explanation for the wide disparity between the public spheres in Serbia and Bulgaria in the data of this project, as I will now describe. As regards the question of why Serbs appeared to be, on the whole, more able to fulfil the role of liberal democratic citizens, I would argue that the overview of the countries’ recent political histories that I provided in Chapter 3 provides a suitable body of evidence to support some informed speculation. Specifically, I am inclined to argue that the main factor appears to be that liberal ideas have been actively promoted in Serbia over many years in a way that actively challenges existing illiberal orthodoxies, which is to say that much liberal discourse has taken on an explicitly civic, anti-nationalist character. It helps in this respect that articulations of numerous political identities oriented towards maximal identification with this pluralist and emancipatory conception of liberalism – cosmopolitans, feminists, LGBT activists, social democrats, and so on – pre-dated the establishment of liberal democratic institutions in the country. By contrast, it is hardly surprising that ordinary Bulgarian citizens tend to understand democracy in ways that fail to distinguish simple national majoritarianism from liberal ideas of rights and pluralism. I have argued that the persistence of this prevailing confusion as to what liberal democracy entails is a consequence of the fact that the elite-led drive to enter the European Union has been overwhelmingly focussed on adopting liberal economic policies in a way that has generally allowed political elites to avoid any confrontation with the persistent illiberal orthodoxies in Bulgarian society. To this effect, Bulgarian political culture has lacked any prominent political movement that has unambiguously advocated a consistently liberal vision of what democratic politics is and a clear disavowal of what it is not. To clarify, I claim that strong forms of democratic citizenship in the sense of consistent identification with the principles underpinning a liberal system of representation, the separation of powers, minority rights and so on are very rare in Bulgaria mainly because maximal, pluralist, emancipatory projections of liberalism have never been prominent in either elite political discourse or in civil society. Seen in the light of this overview, it would be very surprising indeed if Bulgarian political culture, observed at the ethnographic level of public sphere discourse, had turned out to be even nearly as contested, pluralist or liberal as that across the border in Serbia. My hunch, and this where I depart from the safe ground of direct extrapolations from the empirical data of this project, is that the social and historical conditions that have bequeathed contemporary Serbia with a more prominent, pluralist and liberal (at the margins) public sphere relative to Bulgaria are largely common to other countries in the former Yugoslavia with well-established liberal-cosmopolitan

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urban intellectual cultures; I am thinking principally of Slovenia and Croatia, but also of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since Slovenia’s relative success in the realm of democratization is well-known, it is hardly insightful to suggest that it too benefits from the specifically Yugoslav historical influence of the kind of intellectual currents I have in mind. This would suggest, according to my line of thinking, that the liberal institutional reforms that propelled Slovenia into the EU might actually be embedded in ‘some kind of cultural understanding’ (Blokker 2009: 1) such that democracy there may be spared from such severe backsliding of the kind observed elsewhere in CEE. On the other side of the equation, I propose that states such as Hungary and Romania, and possibly other CEE countries previously lauded as democratization success stories,3 could turn out to have less liberal and less contested public spheres than any of Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. I should stress that this is no more than a hunch, informed partly by my own research and partly by scholarly and journalistic accounts of post-EU accession politics in some CEE countries.4 In my judgement, the words of Paul Stubbs, a sociologist based at the Institute of Economics in Zagreb, ring true: The wars and their legacies have, of course, changed things, but even in terms of the much over-used idea of “democratic deficits”, one would be hard pressed to argue that Croatia, for example, is in a worse situation than contemporary Hungary. (Stubbs 2013)

Although Croatia has now acceded to the EU, this kind of comparison retains significance in the real political arena. The political dysfunctions of post-socialist countries that entered the EU between 2004 and 2007 could easily have devastating 3 Since I confess that my contextual knowledge diminishes as I travel north in CEE, I will leave it to others scholars to consider which societies might possibly be added to this list. But I am sure that the conceptual conflation of economic liberalism and liberal democracy that has evidently hindered attempts to evaluate democratic progress from Bulgaria to Hungary until recently has prevailed to some extent across the post-socialist region. For a wonderfully banal example of how the transition right across CEE was until recently assumed to be a bona fide success story, see Edward Lucas, ‘Farewell to Eastern Europe: Mud, Chaos, Vodka and Crime? Not Any More’, The Economist, 22 October 2010. Available at http://www.economist.com/node/17493330. Accessed 20 October 2013. 4 Articles about the Hungarian debacle are plentiful and generally depressing. For example, Dan Bilefsky, ‘Hungary Tests the EU’s norms’, 11 March 2013, New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/world/europe/12iht-hungary12.html. Accessed 11 March 2013. The scant regard for democratic norms on the part of those claiming that the Hungarian crisis is overblown because ‘criticisms mostly come from the left’ and ‘investors haven’t lost faith’ is probably an even more powerful indictment of the low quality of democratic discourse in the country. Tibor Fischer, ‘Why on earth is this ignorant nonsense being spread about Hungary?’ The Guardian, 3 April 2013. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/hungary-ignorant-nonsense. Accessed 3 April 2013.

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repercussions if they deter powerful member states from accepting the democratic credentials of those other (Western Balkan) post-socialist countries still pressing for admission. This psychological reflex could be all the more powerful if the dominant impression – that the CEE bloc now in the EU is still more democratic than Western Balkan countries in spite of the eye-catching banality and illiberalism of much contemporary politics in the former – remains largely unchallenged. I hope that my project has gone some way to interrogating these perceptions, and I further contend that more comparative research is needed to explore the political cultures of CEE societies inside the EU alongside those that are outside of it. Are Bosnians (2013 Freedom House Democracy Score: 4.39) or Hungarians (2.89) better prepared to hold their elites to account according to the norms of liberal democracy? It is definitely worth asking. To conclude, I ought to acknowledge that the idea of questioning the narrative of the ‘successful rapid democratization of the former Warsaw Pact countries over the never-ending transition of the Western Balkans’ is certainly not new. Similar ideas, mostly in the form of non-intellectual gossip and thinly-disguised mudslinging on the part of ex-Yugoslav nationals, have been around for as long as CEE countries have been gaining entry into the EU. One particular anecdote, dating from my time as an intern for a Western NGO in Sarajevo in 2007, provides a fitting illustration of the incredulity with which many former Yugoslavs, not all of them necessarily identifying in liberal terms, have long received the reports that CEE countries were making giant strides in democratization. In the context of the apparent inability of Bosnian lawmakers to agree on a way forward with respect to police reform, the EU had dispatched an official to make a presentation to the Bosnian parliament on the subject of the EU’s acquis communautaire. Apparently keen to avoid approaching the issue of police reform in too much detail (the main sticking point seemed to be the refusal of the Serb entity to unify the police structures under central command in Sarajevo), the young man from the Netherlands repeatedly stressed the idea that the lawmakers should consult technocratic experts, on the grounds that meeting EU conditionality was ‘90 per cent technical and only 10 per cent political’. The presentation seemed to be genuinely well-received and the closing question and answer session began with a number of sincere questions about how to proceed. However, the last question of the day could not have failed to darken the mood of the EU’s emissary. One lawmaker asked: Why don’t we just do it like a nation now in the EU (that I won’t name) did with their “judicial reforms” by simply cutting-and-pasting Slovenia’s laws and not even bothering to delete the word “Slovenia”?

The rebellious politician’s question could easily have been a rumour gathered in the canteen downstairs. However, having since explored the field of formal democracy measurement for this project, I find myself reflecting that it is sadly rather plausible. The continued emphasis on legal-institutional form over

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anthropological content continues to predict the recognition of democracy where it is sparse and the neglect of it where it is vibrant. The very shallowest and most symbolic of democratic reforms continue to be applauded while the vital project of winning hearts and minds to the liberal democratic cause is still only recognized by a minority of scholars and policy-makers. Through this project I hope I have at least succeeded in demonstrating that, in order to gauge the depth of identification with liberal political reforms, one needs only to listen to the discussions of those who are subject to them.

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Postscript: On the Bulgarian Protests of 2013 and the Spectre of Authoritarian Populism in Serbia In this book, I have advanced the argument that the progress of states in implementing liberal democratic institutions to the satisfaction of the European Union is not a reliable guide for ascertaining whether or not liberal democratic ideas have taken root in those societies. This argument is grounded in the findings of comparative ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Bulgaria and Serbia, mainly during the 12 months of 2011 with shorter return visits to each country at the time of the Serbian parliamentary and presidential elections in May 2012. On the basis of that fieldwork and a corresponding analysis of elite political and media discourse that extended until about the end of 2012, I found that the Serbian public sphere is clearly more contested, pluralist and (at the margins) liberal relative to its Bulgarian counterpart. Specifically, I have argued that the resonance of liberalcosmopolitan ideas with a significant minority in Serbia has prevented an illiberal, exclusivist consensus from forming around conservative orthodoxies on nation and society as has happened in Bulgaria. The purpose of writing this postscript is to acknowledge that these societies have undergone periods of accelerated political and – to some degree also societal – change in the 18 months or so since the end of the fieldwork period, and to consider the extent to which the very succinct empirical argument at the heart of my book may be in need of revision. The waves of popular protest that convulsed Bulgaria throughout 2013 have undeniably resulted in the formation of a bolder civil society that is prepared to mobilize against powerful political-economic elites at exactly the same time that the country’s democratic credentials have regressed in international databases and been publicly questioned by senior EU diplomats. In Serbia meanwhile, the emerging political hegemony of the hardline nationalists turned European conservatives of the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) has led many liberal intellectuals to publicly voice their concerns about the rise of authoritarian populism embodied by the emergent leader Aleksandar Vučić. Nevertheless, I argue that the importance of both of these developments can best be understood in the light of long-term struggles over political ideas in each of these societies. In short, I argue that the legacy of many decades of illiberal hegemony in Bulgaria has not been decisively overturned during the past year of protests, just as the many decades of liberal-cosmopolitan activism in Serbia have not been extinguished by the current emergence of Vučić’s political machine. Since there is little evidence

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that Bulgaria’s anti-government protesters aspire to any emancipatory vision approaching the philosophically-consistent liberalism of the cosmopolitan, antinationalist, feminist and LGBT movements still audible from the margins in Serbia, the list of post-EU accession societies that remain less plural and less liberally democratic than Serbia would still realistically include Bulgaria. Nevertheless, the protests of 2013 could mark a watershed moment in the democratic history of Bulgaria if, as seems likely, that country’s political elites will never again enjoy the same degree of impunity. That Bulgarian civil society was comparatively lacking in progressive activism until the emergence of massive anti-government protests in 2013 is not a very difficult case to make, even with these turbulent events in the rear-view mirror. Then civil society was still almost as dormant as at any time since massive street protests had helped to depose the Bulgarian Socialist Party government of Zhan Videnov in 1996–97. One news story from December 2011 suitably illustrates this point. In an international context in which the Arab Spring protests had unseated long-standing authoritarian regimes and the Occupy Wall Street protesters joined European anti-austerity protesters in challenging the authority of neoliberal elites to shape democratic competition, Time magazine declared ‘The Protester’ to be the title’s prestigious Person of the Year for 2011, with the edition’s cover showing a dramatic cartoon of an anonymous young person wearing a woollen hat and a kerchief so that only the eyes were visible. With impressive haste and obvious satirical intent, a little known Bulgarian blogging site called Black Station quickly improvised a ‘Special Bulgarian Edition’ that declared ‘The Non-Protester’ to be Person of the Year. The attached picture showed an overweight man drinking rakia.1 The underlying premise that Bulgarians endured political injustices rather than confronting them resonated sufficiently to gain exposure on the online platform of the Sofia News Agency and was widely-shared on social networks. While this depiction of Bulgarian passivity ignored both the nationwide antiRoma protests that had marred the build up to that year’s presidential elections (discussed at length in Chapter 5) and the environmental protesters that were then mobilized against the then right-wing GERB government’s plans to allow shale glass drilling,2 the satirists did have a point. Neither of the protests referred to above aimed at constructing the kind of broad-based popular alliance against the country’s political-economic elites that was even remotely analogous to the contemporaneous events of the so-called Arab Spring or even of the anti-austerity protests across southern Europe.

1 ‘Bulgarian blog: Non-protester is real person of the year’, novinite.com, 15 December 2011. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=134889. Accessed 20 April 2014. 2 These protests subsequently succeeding in forcing a policy u-turn when a moratorium was placed on the practice of hydraulic fracturing or ‘fracking’ early in 2012 (A. Dimitrova 2014).

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By mid-2013, such criticisms could no longer be levelled. By then, two distinct waves of sustained mass protest had brought thousands onto the streets. Both waves fed off popular revulsion at the cosy accommodation between the oligarchic networks that control the country’s economy and the supposedly democratic political parties tasked with regulating them. In early February 2013, protests sparked by anger at rising fuel prices filled the streets of cities across the country, with crowds in Sofia numbering in the tens of thousands for several days. Against the backdrop of the Eurozone crisis, these protests were understandably interpreted by many as anti-austerity protests (Pop 2013). However, it was ultimately the failure of the right-wing GERB government to distance itself from shady oligarchic networks – or, to use the language prevalent on the street, the ‘mafia’ – that brought about the collective resignation of PM Borissov’s cabinet later that month. The trigger for the unexpected collapse of a government that had been widely expected to win re-election at the parliamentary elections scheduled just three months later was the dramatic suicide by self-immolation of the 36-year-old protester Plamen Goranov outside the city hall of the coastal city of Varna.3 Goranov had voiced explicit protests against the GERB-backed mayor’s accommodation of the shady business syndicate TIM that dominated the region’s economy. Borissov’s GERB government abandoned all hope of damage limitation when TIM was revealed to have shares in the Czech energy company whose bills had provoked the initial mass protests.4 What looked like classic anti-austerity protests from afar thus turned out to have much more proximate triggers. However, the fact that they occurred at all showed emphatically that it was possible to mobilize large numbers of Bulgarian citizens against the country’s political-economic elites in spite of the long-standing success of the latter in using control of the media to douse and re-direct popular anger against elite corruption and low living standards (Monova 2011). If anything, the next wave of protests attracted even more international attention, although it must be said that they were more concentrated in the nation’s capital Sofia (and correspondingly less dispersed through the country) than the winter protests had been. In mid-June, the newly-formed governing coalition of the Bulgarian Socialist Party and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms under the ‘technocratic’ leadership of PM Plamen Oresharski5 had brazenly attempted 3 In spite of the subsequent collapse, Goranov’s self-immolation was to be the first of several by protesters throughout 2013. This disturbing trend is explored in a video report by Vice magazine. ‘The Burning Men of Bulgaria’, vice.com. Available at http://www.vice. com/vice-news/burning-men-of-bulgaria. Accessed 25 May 2014. 4 Georgi Medarov, ‘The Unfolding of the Bulgarian Political Crisis of 2013’, LeftEast, 25 April 2014. Available at http://www.criticatac.ro/lefteast/unfolding-bulgarianpolitical-crisis/. Accessed 25 May 2014. 5 Oresharski is perennially described as a ‘technocrat’ in English-language press reports. This choice of adjective appears to be a synonym for ‘neoliberal’, stemming from the fact that Oresharski was widely-credited with the introduction of Bulgaria’s 10 per cent

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to rush through the appointment of 32-year-old media baron Delyan Peevski as head of the country’s national security apparatus. Once again, however, politicians seemingly unacquainted with the very notion of ‘accountability’ found themselves threatened by people power. Within hours protesters had mobilized online and creative slogans attacking the government were being shared in their thousands. The response on the streets of Sofia was enormous. Even the subsequent reversal of Peevski’s appointment could not contain the protesters’ anger, who vowed that they would only be satisfied with the government’s resignation, hammering this point home by adopting the very simple chant ‘Ostavka!’ (Resignation!). On 8 July 2013, by which time these massive daily protests had continued for almost a month, senior European diplomats entered the debate on the side of the protesters. Using unusually direct and undiplomatic language, the French and German ambassadors to Bulgaria released a joint statement proclaiming that ‘the oligarchic model’ of politics was not compatible with ‘civilized’ European norms.6 The response of the protesters, enthusiastically waving the EU’s star-studded flags and even dancing to the strains of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, suggested that the European diplomats had judged the mood well. Faced with this symbolism, many analysts found it hard to resist the conclusion that the young and educated denizens of Sofia had collectively chosen to reject their own illiberal and kleptocratic political elites in favour of an explicitly European and democratic vision of the future.7 This picture is partly true. At the same time, however, it is also quite clear that the protests have done very little to challenge the exclusivist assumptions underpinning political competition in the country. As I have argued throughout this book, the key problem with Bulgarian civic activism is not that liberal ideas are absent, but that they are almost uniformly conflated with illiberal ideas that hinder and are ultimately liable to trump progressive aims. While I am not denying the essentially hopeful fact of citizens uniting against ‘the mafia’, I maintain that the wave of pro-European mobilizations occurring since mid-2013 remains hindered by the continuing salience of socially exclusive narratives. This point can be illustrated with reference to the popularity of a widely-shared poster that appeared immediately prior to the botched appointment of Peevski in the immediate aftermath of the formation of the BSP-MRF government in late May 2013. The flat tax for corporations when he served in the BSP-led tripartite coalition government of 2005–09. 6 ‘France, Germany urge Bulgarian Government to cut links with oligarchy’, novinite. com, 8 July 2013. Available at http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=151850. Accessed 25 May 2014. 7 This article, titled ‘Cultural Revolution (Why the First 200 Days of Oresharski have Historical Significance)’, by the respected columnist Evgeni Dainov is indicative of the mood of Bulgarian liberal intellectuals during the summer 2013 protests. ‘Kulturna revolucija (zashto purvite 100 dni na Oresharski imat istorichesko znachenie)’, Dnevnik [online]. Available at http://www.dnevnik.bg/analizi/2013/09/02/2133026_kulturna_revol juciia_zashto_purvite_100_dni_na/. Accessed 25 May 2014.

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poster shows the pictures of BSP leader Sergei Stanishev, MRF leader Lyutvi Mestan and Volen Siderov of the xenophobic Ataka party (whose cooperation in parliament was required to form a coalition) against a backdrop of the Bulgarian flag. Each leader is tagged respectively with the words ‘The Gay’, ‘The Bey’ and ‘The Villain’ over the message, ‘Oh Mother, my Sweet Motherland!’ As a lament on the political predicament of the country, it certainly struck a chord. Within a few days, it had gained over 15,000 shares on Facebook (and perhaps 10 times as many ‘likes’), and all of this on the part of an online public that can be safely assumed not to be supporters of the BSP, MRF or Ataka.8 The point of this anecdote is to demonstrate something that ethnic minority Bulgarians understand all too well9 – that nationalist appeals augmented by anti-Turkish (and here also homophobic) rhetoric actually play quite well among the social network savvy demographic active in last summer’s protests. Thus, it is not a great surprise that Sofia-based progressives, very much concentrating on maintaining large numbers of protesters on the ground, have generally opted to avoid any challenge to the country’s majoritarian political culture. Similar arguments have been made with respect to the economically-exclusive rhetoric of some summer protesters, who sought to present their own struggle as distinct from those of the winter protesters on the basis that the materialist demands of the latter for cheaper fuels bills lacked the moral authority of upstanding middle-class citizens demanding democracy (Ivancheva 2013). In short, most of the taboos underpinning Bulgarian political discourse are still very much intact (Tsoneva 2014). If the protesters eventually do achieve their immediate aim of unseating the government – the protests are still ongoing to some degree at the time of writing – then it is not at all clear that the political culture to emerge will be any more inclusive than the one that currently prevails. If it is premature to declare the emergence of a strongly liberal civil society on the basis of the Bulgarian protests since 2013, then it is equally premature to proclaim the demise of liberal Serbia on the basis of the ascendancy of Aleksandar Vučić and his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) government and the recent decimation of the ‘democratic’ parties. Before I describe the current fears of some Serbian intellectuals for the health of their country’s democracy, it is first necessary to pick up the narrative where I left off in Chapter 4 after the elections of 2012. After gaining power following the eventful election campaign described

8 I have made a similar argument, based on some of the same evidence, in a blog article. James Dawson, ‘An Inconvenient Challenge for Bulgarian Civil Society’, UCL European Institute, August 2013. Available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/european-institute/ highlights/dawson. Accessed 25 May 2014. 9 This point was made forcefully by the ethnic-Turkish Bulgarian author of a popular blog post last summer. Emine Gyulestan, ‘Protestat na Edna Mrusna Turkinya’, 19 June 2013, webcafe.bg, http://www.webcafe.bg/id_1377383083_Protestat_na_edna_mrasna_tur kinya. Accessed 20 May 2014.

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in Chapter 4,10 it is fair to say that the SNS successfully managed to allay the worst fears of erstwhile DS voters that they would ‘drag Serbia back to the [international isolation and economic catastrophe of the] 1990s’ by entering into constructive (but inconclusive) negotiations with the Kosovo government over the ‘normalization’ of Belgrade – Pristina relations.11 Supported by fawning press coverage from nationalist tabloids, and even some erstwhile mouthpieces of liberal opposition such as e-novine, the SNS was able to call early elections for March 2014 with the widely-presumed aim of cementing the party’s power by shedding the powerful coalition partner of Dačić’s SPS and installing Vučić, mentioned in Chapter 4 as the right-hand-man of the hunger-striking Nikolić, as PM. In the event, the SNS won almost half the votes (48.35 per cent), allowing the party to admit as many or as few coalition partners as it wished on terms it could dictate. Ominously, the combined votes of the two remaining splinters of the Democratic Party amounted to less than the 13.49 per cent gained by the SPS in second place. The Democratic Party (DS), under Tadić’s successor Dragan Djilas, got 6.03 per cent, while Tadić’s New Democratic Party (NDS), in coalition with the Greens, got only 5.70 per cent. An even worse fate befell Čedomir Jovanović’s LDP, which did not even meet the 5 per cent threshold to enter parliament. After some post-election coalition negotiations, the SNS has ended up allowing the SPS to re-enter the government, although the PM’s office was reserved for SNS leader Vučić. In spite of the widespread abandonment of Serbia’s ‘democratic’ parties at the ballot box, it is important to note that this emphatically does not mean that Serbia’s erstwhile democratic voters have abandoned liberal principles, still less that any significant proportion of them voted for Vučić’s SNS. In the first instance, such a reading would unjustifiably credit these ‘democratic’ parties with consistently representing liberal ideas with some degree of competence. Second, while the 48 per cent share garnered by the SNS was enough to gain control of nearly all of the country’s political institutions it still, considering the turnout of just over 53 per cent, only adds up to the votes of about a quarter of all eligible voters. These points should not blind us to the fact that Vučić does not disguise his ambition to stifle the media and cultivate a personalistic form of leadership.12 This represents a clear danger to Serbian democracy, which should not be underestimated. Yet any

10 This long campaign was notable for the attempt of then party leader and presidential candidate Tomislav Nikolić to force early elections in 2011 by means of a hunger and thirst strike (as described in Chapter 4). 11 ‘Serbia and Kosovo reach landmark EU-brokered deal’, BBC, 19 April 2013. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-22222624. Accessed 25 May 2014. 12 Florian Bieber, ‘What the Floods Reveal, Consequences of a Disaster’, 28 May 2014, personal blog. Available at http://fbieber.wordpress.com/notes-from-syldavia/blog/. Accessed 28 May 2014.

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brief survey of those sections of the press the SNS does not control reveals that this danger is not underestimated by the country’s liberal intellectuals.13 In this pessimism, I find hope in the sense that intellectuals may exert an influence on the public sphere that is out of proportion to their appearance in the media simply because, as I have stressed at various points in this book, their arguments are more attractive to a great many disillusioned democratic voters than the partisanship and occasional conspiracy theorizing of the pro-Vučić press. Furthermore, the name that many intellectuals and analysts give to their fears is revealing: ‘Orbanization’.14 Invoking the figure of the conservative, constitutionvandalizing leader of neighbouring Hungary, Viktor Orbán, these commenters evidently fear that Serbia may one day be dominated by a personalistic regime only weakly scrutinized in a banal and ultra-conservative public sphere. That Serbian liberals are openly dreading a ‘Hungarian scenario’15 implicitly reveals an assumed pecking order in which Serbian political culture still has some way to fall before it approaches the bleakness of a society that has already been in the EU for over a decade. Of course, the relative verdict of these commenters is both at odds with the EU’s accession judgements and yet entirely plausible given recent accounts of Hungarian political culture (Bánkuti et al. 2012). I would add to this that the despair of most Serbian liberals with the rise of the pro-European authoritarian populist Vučić may be fruitfully contrasted with the acquiescence of most Bulgarian liberals to the rise of the Pro-European authoritarian populist Borissov a few years earlier.16 In short, the consistent pessimism that characterizes 13 I had hoped to quote certain articles that I had read in the online comment platform Peščanik. As it turns out, however, the fact that Peščanik is not online at present provides an even better illustration of the current efforts to scrutinize the government and the circumstances under which they do so, as I will explain. On 2 June 2014, Peščanik published a story supported by detailed evidence alleging that the SNS Interior Minister Nebojša Stefanović had plagiarized his PhD thesis at a private Belgrade university called Megatrend. Within hours however, a series of ‘Denial of Service’ attacks had forced Peščanik’s website to close down. Some of the attacks appear to originate from IP addresses inside the university itself while others come from Serbia and abroad. However, since PM Vučić was quick to defend his colleague in terms that showed scant regard for the weight of evidence presented, it was immediately speculated that the SNS-led government itself was involved. ‘Website hit in Serbia plagiarism row’, BBC [online]. Available at http://www. bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27676579. Accessed 3 June 2014. 14 Dragan Stavljanin, ‘Is Serbia headed for Orbanization?’, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, 18 March 2014. Available at http://www.rferl.org/content/serbia-one-partydominance/25301622.html. Accessed 25 May 2014. 15 Ivan Kovanović, ‘Serbia’s “Progressives” prepare to tighten their grip on power’, Keleti Station, 17 February 2014. Available at http://keletistation.tumblr.com/post/769462 08981/serbias-progressives-prepare-to-tighten-their-grip. Accessed 25 May 2014. 16 I am not arguing that Borissov should be perceived as equally threatening as Vučić, whose biography does, after all, include enthusiastic support for war criminals. However, as a politician who similarly traded on a strongman image rather than any political conviction,

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the analyses of Serbian liberals with respect to their own political culture betrays an unrealized ambition for a strong, participatory and emancipatory form of liberal democracy that is unmatched by the imaginings of critical minds in Bulgaria and some other societies inside the EU, where almost any politician ready to malign the communist past and embrace the European future is lauded as a democrat. This postscript, written in order to account for events which have taken place very recently, has unavoidably privileged empirical description over theoretical argumentation. It is for this reason that it is necessary to re-assert that my aim in foregrounding the comparison of these societies in this book has been to highlight the way that democracy is promoted more generally. Of course, I do not dispute that I will feel vindicated if I have succeeded in persuading some fellow scholars of Bulgarian democracy that society’s political culture is less liberal and inclusive than is commonly thought, since that is most definitely an idea that lacks sufficient exposure in most existing accounts of the country’s politics. As for my recognition of the considerable achievements of a perennially unsatisfied civic sector in Serbia in keeping liberal pluralism alive, I hardly need to say that this does not amount to any desire to whitewash the patently troubled democratic travails of Serbia. My overriding concern throughout my engagement with these two cases has been to bring attention to the pitfalls of the naive institutionalist approach to democratization which assumes that where liberal institutions are implemented, liberal political cultures will necessarily follow – a line of thinking that is evidently still influential in the way that the EU perceives democracy. In its place, I have tried to promote the very commonsensical idea that liberal democratic institutions will only be upheld by national publics to the extent that progressive liberal challenges to authoritarian, ethnic nationalist and socially conservative assumptions triumph in the public sphere. For scholars, this implies that analysis of the workings of democracy in any given context requires sustained attention to societies as well as states, and to elite and public discourses as well as institutional procedures. For democratic activists and sincere democratic politicians in old democracies as well as new, this means an unceasing struggle to popularize (and re-popularize) ideas such as individual rights, political equality and civic tolerance, and to actively confront the socially exclusive, inegalitarian and authoritarian tropes that have almost certainly been in evidence in every single historical case of actually existing democracy. JD, London, July 2014

most observers were not particularly surprised to find out that Borissov had limited tolerance for critical press, and it was quite predictable that his government would oversee a steady decline in Bulgaria’s media freedom (RWB 2012) and democracy scores (FH 2012). Thus, the fact that many Bulgarian liberals were still applauding Borissov as a pro-European democrat two years into his tenure (see Chapter 5) does reveal a sharp contrast with Serbian liberals who, before Vučić’s pro-Europeans came to power, were prone to denouncing even Tadić’s pro-European Democrats as ‘authoritarian’ (see Chapter 4).

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Index

24 Chassa (‘24 Hours’, Bulgarian tabloid newspaper) 145 America, United States of (USA) American public sphere 15–16, 35–6 Djindjić on American ‘patriotism’ and the US experience of Vietnam 72 Serbian conspiracy theorizing about 115–16 Armenians in Bulgaria 48, 147 Ataka (Bulgarian political party) 90, 139, 142, 145, 151, 157, 161, 163, 165, 174, 189 Atanassov, Slavcho 37, 50–51, 148–9 authoritarianism 4, 15, 33, 35 authoritarian tendencies in contemporary Bulgarian politics 87, 135, 139 authoritarian tendencies in contemporary Serbian politics 79–80, 189–91 authoritarianism in Communist-era Bulgaria 82–3, 135 authoritarianism in former Yugoslavia 70 popular resonance of authoritarian ideas in Bulgaria 48–50, 158–60 popular resonance of authoritarian ideas in Serbia 53, 122–4 B92 (Serbian TV channel and online news platform) 81, 102, 105, 110–12 ‘Batak Controversy’ of 2007, the (Bulgarian nationalist mobilization) 85–6 Belgrade 25, 36, 74, 80, 100–101, 107–8, 113, 127, 190–91 Blic (Serbian tabloid newspaper) 99, 102, 110–11

Borissov, Boiko 82, 89–90, 92, 139–43, 145, 157, 160, 163–5, 169, 174, 187, 191–2 Bosnia-Herzegovina 23, 44, 181–2 EU accession process of 182 Serb Republic (Republika Srpska) in 72–3, 76 war and its legacy 69, 115, 126, 179 Bosniaks (Muslim minority of Serbia) 44–7, 100 Bourdieu, Pierre 17, 113–14, 125 Brubaker, Rogers 13, 39–40, 48, 63, 66, 68 BTV (private Bulgarian TV station) 143, 161 Bulgarian Communist Party 83, 149 Bulgarian protests anti-‘fracking’ mobilizations from late 2011 186 anti-government (BSP-MRF) protests from mid 2013 188–9 anti-government (GERB) protests of early 2013 187 anti-Roma mobilizations of September 2011 161–9 Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) 82, 84–6, 87, 89, 91, 135, 137, 139–46, 149, 151, 157, 161, 163, 171, 173, 188–9 Centre for Anti-War Action 78, 80 civil society 4–8 and the public sphere 16, 61 in Bulgaria 5–7, 62, 90–92, 151–2, 185–9 in Serbia 28, 47, 62, 77–9, 189–92 class and socio-economic identification 36, 55, 63–4 in Bulgaria 172–4, 189 in Serbia 106–7, 123–5, 128–30 Čolović, Ivan 79, 91

208

Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria

corruption discussions in Bulgaria 50–52, 154–5, 159–60, 165, 167–9 discussions in Serbia 45–6, 125–6 perceptions relating to Bulgarian politics 32, 59, 82, 85, 87–92, 136, 140, 146, 172, 187 perceptions relating to Serbian politics 32, 76, 99, 118 cosmopolitanism (see ‘nationalism and anti-nationalism’) Croatia 10, 23, 108, 181 war and its legacy 69, 179 Cvetković, Mirko 44–6 Dačić, Ivica 26, 75, 102, 119, 123–4, 129, 132, 190 democracy and democratization formalist/institutionalist measurement 3–9, 27, 33–5, 58–9, 61, 94, 136, 175–7, 179, 181–3, 185, 192 liberal democracy and economic liberalism 23–4, 171–4 liberal democracy and nationalism 22–3, 24–6, 65–7 normative evaluation through public sphere theory 1–2, 12, 14–21, 24–6, 175–7 recognizing liberal democratic citizenship 12–13, 21–6 the cultural project of liberal democracy promotion 1, 11–12, 175 the reliance of democratic institutions on the public sphere 1–3, 6–8, 10–12, 21–2, 27, 57–9, 175–7, 180–83, 192 the search for ‘democratic cultures’ in Central and Eastern Europe 9–12 democratic institutions and accountability in Bulgaria 58–9, 94–5, 143, 172–3 in Serbia 44–7, 53–4, 94–5, 119–20 Reliance on Cultural Embeddedness in Public Sphere 1–3, 6–8, 10–12, 21–2, 27, 57–9, 175–7, 180–83, 192 Democratic Party (DS) 44, 46–7, 55, 71, 73, 76, 79, 98–104, 107–9, 111, 115–16, 118–19, 124–7, 129, 132, 190

Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS) 33, 71, 73–5, 102, 118, 132 Dimitrov, Bozhidar 26, 85–6, 151 Dimitrova, Blaga 83 Dinkić, Mlađan 44, 117, 132 discourse (see ‘methodology’ and ‘public and counterpublic discourses’) Djankov, Simeon 91, 140, 145, 157 Djindjić, Zoran 23, 71–4, 76–8, 88, 94, 103, 110, 112, 116, 118–19, 124, 127 Drašković, Vuk 74 Dzhambazki, Angel 162 E-novine (Serbian online news platform) 111, 190 ethnography (see ‘methodology’) Europe and Europeanness discussions in Bulgaria 48–50, 54, 88–90, 149, 156–9, 171–3 discussions in Serbia 53, 75–6, 104–6 European Union (EU) 2, 34, 137, 179, 191 Bulgaria within the EU (since 2007) 35, 40, 137, 139, 143, 169, 185, 188 Bulgaria’s successful accession process (to 2007) 2, 31, 34–5, 85, 92, 134–6, 142, 172 Bulgarian opposition to EU 82, 90 democracy promotion/conditionality 2, 5, 9–10, 58, 59, 101, 120, 169, 171, 178–83, 188, 191–2 EU pressure on Bulgaria due to illegal ‘land-swaps’ 154–5 Serbia candidacy for full member status 2, 31, 34, 40, 69, 73–8, 101–2, 112, 120, 127, 129 Serbian opposition to EU 74, 99, 102, 132 suspension and resumption of structural funds to Bulgaria 85, 89, 140 European Values Study (EVS) 17, 29 Feminism lack of resonance in Bulgaria 152–4 resonance in Serbia and former Yugoslavia 26, 70, 80, 120–21, 180–86 Theory 18–19

Index Fraser, Nancy 18–20, 27, 43, 55, 67, 105, 154, 171, 176 Freedom House 1–12, 27–8, 31–5, 37, 57–9, 94, 111, 136, 139, 146, 172, 176, 179, 182 G17+ (political party) 44, 98, 117, 132 GERB (Citizens for the European Development of Bulgaria) 26, 37, 50–52, 56, 59, 89–91, 136–7, 139–46, 148–9, 151, 154, 156–9, 161, 163, 172–3, 186–7 Germany 72, 118, 141, 151, 172, 188 Goranov, Plamen, self-immolation and death of 187 green movement in Bulgaria 56, 91, 156 Habermas, Jürgen 2, 8, 12, 14–20, 22, 27, 47, 57, 62, 72, 152, 175–7 Hobsbawm, Eric 11, 13, 68 Hungary 179 democratization ‘success story’ 181 illiberal political culture under Victor Orbán 2, 181–2, 191 identity, discursive constructions of 7, 11–14, 16–19, 28, 41, 61–7, 93–4, 97, 136, 178 in Bulgaria 84, 90, 93, 150–52, 156–8, 169, 174 in Serbia 59, 72, 80, 104–6, 111, 113–14, 126–7 illiberalism (see sub-entries under ‘liberalism’) International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 71, 80, 102, 105, 118, 128 Jeremić, Vuk 76, 103, 111 Jews in Bulgaria 147, 158 Jovanović, Čedomir 77–9, 94, 103, 115, 132, 190 Kalfin, Ivaylo 141–2, 150–51, 158 Karadžić, Radovan, arrest of 98–9 Kosovo as an issue in Serbian politics 73, 76–7, 99, 103, 112, 127

209

Belgrade–Pristina relations 69, 102, 190 war and its legacy 69, 99, 115, 122 Kostov, Ivan 86–8, 156 Koštunica, Vojislav 33, 71, 73–6, 100, 102, 110, 112, 132 Krastev, Ivan 8, 10, 23, 133–9, 142–6, 172, 177 Kuneva, Meglena 141–2, 150–51, 158 Kurir (Serbian tabloid newspaper) 100, 111 Laclau, Ernesto 8, 11–14, 28, 61–7, 93, 176 LGBT politics and activism in Bulgaria 56 in Serbia 26, 77, 103, 180, 186 liberal democracy (see sub-entries under ‘democracy and democratization’) Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) 46, 77–8, 94, 103, 115–17, 129, 132, 190 liberalism (see also sub-entries under ‘democracy and democratization’) 12–13, 21–24 as a ‘civic’ alternative to nationalism in CEE 24–6 everyday conflation of liberal and illiberal ideas in Bulgaria 2, 43–4, 48–53, 91–3, 158–61, 165–70 liberal-cosmopolitan ideas in Serbia 2, 43–7, 53–4, 109–11, 118–21, 178–81, 185–6 ‘right liberalism’ in Bulgaria 57, 86–9, 91, 135–9, 156–8 why nationalism is not necessarily illiberal 23–4 Markov, Georgi, assassination of 83 media landscape of Bulgaria 2, 59, 85–6, 90–93, 139, 143–6, 150–51, 187–9 of Serbia 71–4, 79, 81, 99–102, 104–5, 110–11, 113, 117–18, 128, 189–91 methodology discourse analysis 61–2, 65–9 ethnographic comparison 35–7, 42–4 group discussions (informal focus groups) 39–41 participant observation 38–9

210

Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria

Mićunović, Dragoljub 71 Mill, John Stuart 22, 26 Milošević, Slobodan 14, 26, 33, 46, 69–74, 78–9, 84, 93, 98–100, 102, 104–5, 108, 110, 116–17, 119, 121–5, 130 Mladić, Ratko, arrest of 69, 98–9, 105, 110, 112, 115 Mouffe, Chantal 8, 11–14, 18, 20–22, 24, 28, 37, 54, 61–7, 81, 93, 114, 176 Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) 84, 88–9, 144, 163, 173, 188–9 National Movement Simeon II (NDSV) 89, 140–41, 157 nationalism and anti-nationalism anti-nationalist politics and activism in Serbia 70, 77–81 Djindjić’s attempts to reframe the national question in Serbia 71–3 everyday nationalism in Bulgaria 48–50, 91–2, 150–52, 158–9, 164 everyday nationalism in Serbia 53–4, 123–4, 126–7 nationalism and liberal democracy 22–3, 24–6, 65–7 nationalism in ‘centrist’ politics in Bulgaria 26, 85–6, 88–90, 149–50, 163 nationalism in ‘centrist’ politics in Serbia 69, 74–77, 98–9 nationalist historiography and education in Bulgaria 85–6, 149–52 nationalist historiography and education in Serbia 108–10 xenophobia and tacit support for nationalist violence in Bulgaria 158, 161–5, 168 xenophobia and tacit support for nationalist violence in Serbia 74, 115–18 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 1999 bombardment of Serbia 71, 74, 80, 108, 116 Bulgaria’s 2004 accession to NATO 2, 85–7, 134, 137, 172

Nikolić, Tomislav 44–6, 75–6, 98–102, 107, 111, 113, 118–9, 121, 123–4, 126, 129–30, 132, 190 Niš, Serbia historical, demographic and economic context 36–7, 107–8 local politics of 37, 108 njuz.net (Serbian satirical current affairs website) 53, 81, 111 Oresharski, Plamen 187–8 Parvanov, Georgi 26, 85–6, 141–2, 157, 160, 163–4 Peevski, Delyan, appointment as National Security (DANS) chief and resignation 188 Peščanik (online current affairs platform) 81, 110–11, 191 Pešić, Vesna 47, 78–9, 91, 103, 109 Plevneliev, Rosen 139, 141–5, 150–51 Plovdiv, Bulgaria historical, demographic and economic context 36–7, 147 local politics of 37, 50–52, 148–9 Politika (Serbian broadsheet newspaper) 100, 111 Przeworski, Adam 3, 5, 8 public and counterpublic discourses 18–21 authoritarian-nostalgia in Serbia 98, 122–4 ‘careworn democrats’ in Serbia 98, 124–7, 129–31 disenchantment without coherence in Bulgaria 2, 43–4, 48–53, 91–3, 158–61, 165–70 ‘hard’ liberalism/cosmopolitanism in Serbia 2, 43–7, 53–4, 109–11, 118–21, 131, 178–81, 185–6 hardline nationalism in Serbia 74, 115–18 ‘right liberalism’ in Bulgaria 57, 86–9, 91, 135–9, 156–8 public sphere, the normative evaluation of democracy through public sphere theory 1–3, 12, 14–21, 24–6, 175–7

Index publics and counterpublics (pluralism and contestation) 18–21, 61–7 recognizing democratic citizenship in 1, 12, 14–18, 27 the reliance of democratic institutions on 1–3, 6–8, 10–12, 21–2, 27, 57–9, 175–7, 180–83, 192 Ražnatović, Svetlana ‘Ceca’ 44–7, 55, 119 Ražnatović, Željko ‘Arkan’ 44, 119 Rashkov, Kiril (aka ‘Tsar Kiro’) 161, 163–8 Reporters Without Borders 91, 11, 172 Roma Bulgarian anti-Roma mobilizations after Katunica incident (of 2011) 134, 145, 155, 161–9, 172, 186 Bulgarian discussions about 48–50, 158–60, 165–9 in Niš, Serbia 36, 41, 108 in Plovdiv, Bulgaria 36, 41, 48, 147 Serbian discussions about 127, 130 Russia, political sentiment towards in Bulgaria 82, 91, 147, 149, 158, 171 in Serbia 74, 102 Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Simeon (former PM and King Simeon II) 82, 89, 135, 157 Serbian Orthodox Church 54, 74, 79, 101–2, 127 Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) 44–6, 76, 79, 98–102, 111, 113–14, 118–19, 121, 123, 125–6, 128–30, 132, 185, 189–91 Serbian Radical Party (SRS) 74–6, 100, 102, 118, 125, 129, 132 Šešelj, Vojislav 74–5, 80, 99–100, 102, 118–19, 124–5, 129, 130 Siderov, Volen 142, 145, 151, 157, 163, 165, 189 Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) 70, 108, 179 Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) 71, 74–5, 84, 98–9, 102, 108, 119, 121, 123, 132, 190 Sofia 25, 36, 50–51, 82, 89, 137, 141, 144–5, 148, 154, 159, 161–2, 164, 187–9

211

Sofia News Agency 137, 154, 186 Srebrenica massacre, the 115 Stanishev, Sergei 85, 189 Stanković, Brankica 111, 116 Tadić, Boris 47, 75–6, 79, 99–101, 106, 115–16, 123, 127, 132, 146, 190, 192 Tito, Josip Broz 109–11, 121–3 Totev, Ivan 37, 50, 149 Trifonov, Slavi 141, 150–51 Trud (Bulgarian tabloid newspaper) 161 Tsvetanov, Tsvetan 140–41 Turks (ethnic minority of Bulgaria) communist-era forced assimilation campaign against Turks 84, 90, 149–50 conditions of Turkish minority in Bulgaria 88, 189 in Bulgarian politics 84, 88, 90, 173, 189 in Bulgarian national historiography 149–50 in Ottoman-era Plovdiv 147 Union of Democratic Forces (UDF) 82, 84, 86–9, 92, 94, 135, 148–50, 156–7 Videnov, Zhan 85, 186 VMRO-BND (Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization – Bulgarian National Movement) 145, 161–2, 174 VMRO-NIE (Faith, Moral, Patriotism, Responsibility – National Ideal of Unity) 37, 50, 148 Vučić, Aleksandar 99–101, 118, 129–30, 185, 189–92 Warner, Michael 2, 17–20, 27, 62, 114–15, 121 wars of Yugoslav succession (of 1990s) 1999 NATO bombardment of Serbia 71, 74, 80, 108, 116 anti-war activism in Serbia 69–71, 78–80 political legacies of war 35, 178–81

212

Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria

Serbian involvement 28, 69–71, 99, 104, 118–19, 126, 130–31 transferral of Serbian war crimes suspects to ICTY 98–9, 115, 125, 127 Women in Black (Belgrade-based activist group) 80 World Values Survey (WVS) 17, 52

Zajedno (‘Together’, political coalition) 71, 78 Zhelev, Zhelyu 83–4 Zhivkov, Todor 82, 84, 89, 135, 140, 150, 171 Zukorlić, Muamer 44–7, 100