Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia 9781785338915

Citation preview

Frontiers of Civil Society

DISLOCATIONS

General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Don Kalb, University of Bergen & Utrecht University; Linda Green, University of Arizona The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged and theoretically imaginative responses to these important issues of late modernity. For a full volume listing, please see back matter

Frontiers of Civil Society Government and Hegemony in Serbia

_ Marek Mikuš

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2018 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2018 Marek Mikuš All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mikuš, Marek. Title: Frontiers of civil society : government and hegemony in Serbia / Marek Mikuš. Description: New York, NY : Berghahn Books, 2018. | Series: Dislocations ; Volume 22 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017053929 (print) | LCCN 2018002007 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785338915 (ebook) | ISBN 9781785338908 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Civil society—Serbia. | Post-communism—Serbia. | Democratization—Serbia. | Serbia—Politics and government—1992–2006. | Serbia—Politics and government—2006– Classification: LCC JN9656 (ebook) | LCC JN9656 .M53 2018 (print) | DDC 949.7103/2--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053929

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78533-890-8 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-891-5 ebook

In memory of my grandmother Viera Marušiaková, who has taught me to love language and nature.

Contents

List of Figuresix Acknowledgementsx Note on Transliterationxii List of Acronymsxiii

Part I. Introductions Introduction What and Whose Reform? Civil Society and Serbia’s Endless Transition Chapter 1 Historicizing ‘Civil Society’: Hegemonic Struggles and State Transformation after Tito

3

41

Part II. Struggles over Transnational Integration Chapter 2

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society

Chapter 3 The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society

79

108

Part III. Neoliberalization at the State–Civil Society Frontier Chapter 4 The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency

141

Chapter 5 Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities

172

– vii –

viii | Contents

Part IV. Liberal Civil Society and the Wider Society Chapter 6 Philanthropy Development: Indigenizing ‘Civil Society’, Reshaping the Public Realm

203

Chapter 7 Public Advocacy: Engaging Actually Existing Local Politics

234

Conclusions

265

Epilogue Civil Society and Hegemonic Re-alignments after Crisis

277

Bibliography

290

Index

322

FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 0.1

Map of research sites in Serbia

3.1

The corridor of Chetniks, Orašac, February 2011

120

5.1

Disabled protesters talking with the police

174

6.1

Virtus prizes

210

6.2

The Small Change is Not a Small Thing visuals

211

9.1

The Serbian Progressive Party posters, Belgrade, January 2011

281

27

Tables 2.1

Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund applicants

88

2.2

Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund grantees

89

4.1

The process of the founding of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society

144

4.2

The budget line item 481

155

4.3

The drafting and adoption of the Law on Associations

162

– ix –

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I have accumulated a fair amount of debts during the long life of this research and writing project that has now, finally, become a monograph. Inevitably, I will fail to acknowledge some of the people who helped me over the years, but I hope that they will understand and tolerate this. My fieldwork in Serbia would have been impossible without the openness and generosity of the leaderships, workers and members of many Serbian, Czech and Slovak governmental and nongovernmental organizations that granted me access to their premises, activities and documentation and patiently answered my questions. I would like to thank especially the collectives of the following organizations: the Balkan Community Initiatives Fund in Belgrade (now the Trag Foundation); the Centre for Democracy Foundation in Belgrade; the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society of the Government of the Republic of Serbia; the Pontis Foundation in Bratislava; the Via Foundation in Prague; ProAktiv in Niš; the Committee for Human Rights in Niš; the ‘Free’ City of Vršac Civic Parliament in Vršac; the Centre for the Development of Civil Society in Zrenjanin; the North Banat Organization of the Blind in Kikinda; and the Cobra Group in Donja Toponica. The following people were particularly helpful in providing various forms of assistance and inspiration: Tanja Bjelanović, Jelena Bjelić, Ksenija Graovac, Marija Mitrović, Tijana Morača, Miodrag Shrestha, Natalija Simović, Svetlana Vukomanović and Vjekoslav Vuković. I am extremely grateful to Deborah James and Mathijs Pelkmans, both of whom have been shaping this project from the very start and contributed with an incredible amount of expertise, advice and support. Slobodan Naumović has offered useful comments in the beginning of my fieldwork and provided administrative assistance. Stef Jansen, A.F. Robertson, Mukulika Banerjee, Charles Stafford, Rita Astuti, Fenella Cannell, Michael W. Scott, Hans Steinmüller, Rory Archer, Čarna Brković, Hana Červinková, Goran Dokić, Minh Nguyen, Steven Sampson, Srdjan Sremac and Theodora Vetta have read and –x–

Acknowledgements | xi

commented on earlier versions of this book or its parts. More recently, my postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology gave me the necessary time and resources to make the final revisions of the manuscript and Chris Hann in particular has encouraged me to get on with it at the right moment. Natalia Buier, Danilo Vuković and two anonymous peer reviewers read advanced versions of the manuscript and wrote critical and insightful comments. Over the years, many people responded to my presentations of various arguments in this book at conferences, seminars and invited talks; I would like to thank Ger Duijzings, Don Kalb, Jacqueline Nießer, Dušan Spasojević, Paul Stubbs and André Thiemann. The summer school on Neoliberalization of Socialism and Crises of Capital, which took place in Budapest in 2011, was an important influence on my thinking about this work. I would like to thank the organizers Johanna Bockman, Csilla Kaloscsai and Mary Taylor as well as all the fellow students. At the Max Planck Institute, Daniela Ana, Tristam Barrett, Charlotte Bruckermann, Natalia Buier, Dimitra Kofti, Matthijs Krul, Sylvia Terpe, Diána Vonnák and Hadas Weiss (thanks for all the lunch-time conversations!) have all been not just intellectual companions but great and supportive colleagues. I am equally grateful to colleagues at the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Comenius University in Bratislava: Viera Feglová, Martin Hulín, Daniela Jerotijević, Martin Kanovský, Ľuboš Kovács, Andrej Mentel, Juraj Podoba, and especially, my office palls Juraj Buzalka and Jaroslava Panáková. My work on this project was kindly supported by the LSE, the International Visegrád Fund (Out-Going Scholarships no. 51000924 and 51100669) and the Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research. The latter grant was based on my visiting fellowship at the Centre for Southeast European Studies of the University of Graz, for which opportunity I am grateful to the Centre and Florian Bieber in particular. My partner Goran Dokić has provided constant help and advice and sacrificed too much for any word of thanks as I struggled to carve out a career in the increasingly precarious European academia. My parents Tibor and Nina have stood by me as ever, as well as too many other family members and friends to be listed. A special thanks goes to Martin Falc for his work on the map of my research sites. I dedicate this book to my beloved grandmother Viera Marušiaková, who has been an immense influence on me.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

Written Serbian uses both the Latin and Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Quotes and bibliographic data written in Cyrillic in the original sources were all transliterated into Latin.

– xii –

ACRONYMS

Some of the acronyms used are established acronyms based on Serbian and Slovak names. When applicable, these are provided in brackets. AC – Antidiscrimination Coalition BCIF – Balkan Community Initiatives Fund BCSDN – Balkan Civil Society Development Network CALS – Centre for the Advancement of Legal Studies CDF – Centre for Democracy Foundation CDNS – Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector CI – Civic Initiatives CoE – Council of Europe CSFP – Civil Society Focal Points CSO – Civil Society Organization CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility DEURS – Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia DfID – Department for International Development DILS – Delivery of Improved Local Services DOS – Democratic Opposition of Serbia DP – Democratic Party EBRD – European Bank for Reconstruction and Development ECNL – European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law ECSD – European Centre of Serbian Diaspora EESC – European Economic and Social Committee EMinS – European Movement in Serbia EU – European Union FCO – Foreign & Commonwealth Office – xiii –

xiv | Acronyms

FCVCP – ‘Free’ City of Vršac Civic Parliament FDI – Foreign Direct Investment FENS – Federation of Nongovernmental Organisations (Federacija nevladinih organizacija Srbije) FRY – Federal Republic of Yugoslavia GDP – Gross Domestic Product GRS – Government of the Republic of Serbia HCHRS – Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia IA – Interim Agreement ICG – International Crisis Group ICTY – International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia IMF – International Monetary Fund INCVP – Institute for Nature Conservation of Vojvodina Province IPA – Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance ISAC – International and Security Affairs Centre ISC – Institute for Sustainable Communities JNA – Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslovenska narodna armija) JUL –Yugoslav Left (Jugoslovenska levica) LGBT – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender MFASR –Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic MoF – Ministry of Finance MP – Member of Parliament NARS – National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia NATO – North Atlantic Treaty Organization NCD – National Coalition for Decentralization NES – National Employment Service NGO – Nongovernmental Organization NSDFAPV – Nonprofit Sector Development Fund of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina OCCS – Office for Cooperation with Civil Society ODA – Official Development Assistance OECD – Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

Acronyms | xv

OSCE – Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe PCRS – Protector of Citizens of the Republic of Serbia PRSIFP – Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point RTS – Radio Television of Serbia SBRA – Serbian Business Registers Agency SCILPD – Serbia Center for Independent Living of Persons with Disabilities SDKÚ-DS – Slovak Democratic and Christian Union – Democratic Party (Slovenská demokratická a kresťanská únia – Demokratická strana) SEIO – Serbian European Integration Office SFRY – Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia SIV – Yugoslav Federal Executive Council (Savezno izvršno veće) SIZ – Self-Managing Community of Interest (samoupravna interesna zajednica) SMEs – Small and Medium Enterprises SNP 1389 – 1389 Serbian National Movement (Srpski narodni pokret 1389) SORS – Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia SRA – Strategic-Relational Approach SUB – Serbia Union of the Blind UN – United Nations UNCRP – United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities USAID - United States Agency for International Development VRER – Vršac Region – European Region Movement WWLBD – We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own YAB – Yugoslavia Association of the Blind

PART I Introductions

Introduction What and Whose Reform? Civil Society and Serbia’s Endless Transition

_

After the decade-long authoritarian rule of Slobodan Milošević had ended in 2000, the notion of ‘reform’ has become the buzzword of Serbian politics and domestic and foreign representations of the country. It is closely associated with so-called ‘pro-European’ politics and policies, which reflects the conditioning of Serbia’s integration into the European Union (EU) by a myriad of reforms. The scope of the term is extremely broad. Politicians periodically promise or claim to be already delivering reforms of just about everything, echoing the calls of various experts, the EU and other international institutions. A vast majority of citizens, too, agreed in a 2011 survey that the reforms required by the EU should be carried out to create a ‘better Serbia for ourselves’ rather than just for the Union’s sake (SEIO 2011: 5). That such reforms were something desirable, even inevitable, seemed taken for granted. And yet, during my doctoral fieldwork in 2010–11, I encountered a great deal of dissatisfaction with the achievements of the uncountable reforms. The general consensus was that poverty was pervasive, ‘corruption’ rampant, politicians unaccountable and public institutions ineffective. Serbians from all walks of life felt that their country was ‘at the bottom’, full of ‘misery and sorrow’ and in a state of ‘ruin’. What sense can we make of this seeming paradox? How much reform was actually there, and of what scope, depth and kind? Instead of assessing the successes and failures of reforms as if their benevolent purpose was self-evident, this book treats the very discourse and practice of reform as objects of analysis. It takes an ethnographically grounded and critical perspective on a set of internationally sponsored interventions that sought to transform the government of society and individuals in post-Milošević Serbia. By interrogating official rationales and attending to the regions of human experience ignored by much relevant scholarship and official documents,1 it seeks to develop a richer understanding of the logic, unfolding and outcomes of reforms. Some of the discussed interven–3–

4 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tions have remained visions or small-scale experiments rather than deep and extensive transformations. They were concerned with institutions at different levels: from the nation-state in the case of EU integration (Chapter 2) to local government in the case of ‘public advocacy’ (Chapter 7). With their varying scope and focus, these interventions offer complementary windows on broader social, political and economic transformations in Serbia in the early 2010s. The double emic meaning of reform itself supports such extrapolations. Politicians, experts and the media often use the term to denote changes to specific institutions. But they also talk about reforme (always in plural) in a far more general sense of progress towards what is commonly described, vaguely but suggestively, as a ‘modern’ and ‘normal’ country (Greenberg 2011; Mikuš and Dokić 2016). The dominant image of that country includes Western European levels of prosperity, liberal democracy, developed market economy and EU membership – parameters presented as intimately related or only attainable in a single package. This totalizing meaning of reforms is practically synonymous with that of ‘transition’ (tranzicija), another common colloquialism with roots in the jargon of international, mainly Western experts. Together with their local counterparts and policy-makers, they made it the dominant, rarely challenged framing of transformations after Milošević.2 Of course, the narrative of transition was prominent in the entire postsocialist Eastern Europe. It assumes a quick, smooth and managed passage from socialism to idealized representations of Western liberal democracy and capitalism. The language of reform(s) therefore contains an inbuilt slippage between two levels of abstraction: the one of the all-encompassing transition and the other of particular interventions conceived as its subprocesses. Accordingly, the study of specific reforms is a way of opening up the black box of transition. The interventions discussed below also allow for generalizations because they do not make up an accidental collection. What they have in common is the involvement of so-called ‘civil society’. In its dominant native sense in Serbia, civil society refers to the sector of liberal and pro-Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that are nominally separate from the state, party politics and business. Similarly to transition, this view of civil society is an idealized feature of Western modernity believed to be recent, scarce and fragile in Serbia. In recent decades, variants of this discourse became dominant in postsocialist Eastern Europe and other parts of the world. It presented NGOs as vanguards of transitions from socialism to capitalism or from illiberal regimes to liberal democracy. They were expected to play central roles in the construction of democratic polities, modern and efficient states, and open and cohesive societies. And, indeed, the

Introduction | 5

NGO workers who I worked with had a different relation to reforms than most citizens. While agreeing with the general consensus that reforms had largely failed to deliver, NGO workers were more likely to also highlight successes, analyse causes and results closely, call for specific further interventions and, most importantly, be involved. Looking at the intersections of civil society with reforms from a viewpoint a decade after Milošević, I am asking which agendas have been pursued in its name, to what effects and in whose interests.

Revisiting Civil Society and Postsocialism in Times of Crisis The questions posed by Frontiers of Civil Society engage anthropological scholarship on the contemporary discourses and practices of civil society. Important contributions in the 1990s and early 2000s were generally highly critical of its dominant Eurocentric and evolutionist view. They showed how it often justified support for bureaucratic, professionalized and project-oriented organizations that channelled foreign donors’ agendas instead of addressing local concerns, and as such could hardly stand up to their grand task of social progress. This book builds on these arguments and demonstrates their ongoing relevance in the contemporary Serbian context. Yet it also argues that there are at least two good reasons why we should not accept them uncritically as anthropology’s last word on the subject. The first is historical. I am writing this book in 2016–17 on the basis of my 2010–11 fieldwork, but with an awareness of developments that have since taken place in Serbia and Eastern Europe more broadly – informed by my ongoing interest in Serbia, a new research project in Croatia, and a recent spell of working and living in my native Slovakia. This perspective, which spills over the temporal and spatial confines of the fieldwork, attempts to balance a sense of longterm path dependencies with attention to the complexities of present conjunctures. Serbian and Eastern European contexts of the early to mid 2010s call for a revisiting of the established anthropological knowledge about civil society and transition in the region. On the one hand, the political economy of the NGO sector has changed such as to push it towards new, mutually complementary/contradictory strategies: an increasing orientation to the state (Chapters 2 and 4) and attempts to ‘indigenize’ this kind of civil society by embedding it in the national society (Chapter 6). On the other hand, after the 2008 global financial crisis, countries in this region experienced particularly severe and protracted economic crises of their own. This broader

6 | Frontiers of Civil Society

setting inspired Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat (2015: 1) to ask whether the narrative of the ‘seemingly endless transition’ had not been exhausted to the point where it could be finally buried. Their argument emphasizes the ideological bankruptcy of transition and the rise of a new radical left in former Yugoslavia. Indeed, while I will show that the time in which my fieldwork was undertaken was the peak of ‘Europeanization’ in Serbia, most of Eastern Europe has recently seen a rapid unravelling of the liberal ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992) and a surge of illiberal and ‘anti-systemic’ politics. From Poland to Bulgaria, not to mention Russia, the key tenets of the apparent liberal consensus came under attack: pro-EU and Western loyalties, the ‘rule of law’, human and minority rights (Kalb and Halmai 2011). Popular mobilizations have become more common and more radical, including in some post-Yugoslav countries. Despite the official assurances that economies are again ‘growing’, many ‘ordinary people’ feel that the prosperity promised by the transition narrative is now permanently out of their reach. Whether this really means that transition is dead is a question that this book asks for the case of Serbia. As a specific focus within this consideration, it takes stock of how the current dynamics brings about new tendencies or renews old ones, each of which challenge the anthropological stereotype of NGO-ized civil society: the experiments with indigenization (Chapter 6); the orientation to political rather than technocratic agendas (Chapter 7); and the resurgence of more radical mobilizations (Epilogue). Building on these historical points, I also seek to contribute to the anthropological theory of civil society. Anthropologists tend to regard the concept with deep suspicion, and not for a lack of good reasons: its promiscuity and vagueness; Eurocentrism; triumphalist liberalism; conflation of the normative and the empirical; the frequent reduction of its content to NGOs in practice; and association with the rather different registers of practitioners and political scientists. They see civil society as either an irrevocably ideological idea, which might be an object of analysis but never its tool, or as a concept that is a property of other disciplines with which we should have as little business as possible. I have received many hints that the contamination of my writing with civil society has made it unanthropological and that the quality of my fieldwork must have been compromised by my involvement with NGOs – detached from the wider society, depoliticized, boring and irrelevant as they were. There have also been more explicit suggestions that I should not give a semblance of scholarly status to civil society and that I should always use it in quotation marks. Many anthropologists further believe that civil society might have been a hype of the 1990s, but is now completely démodé.

Introduction | 7

I believe that these views are largely based on stereotypes. To start with the last, probably least substantial point, the fact that civil society is no longer peddled as a paradigm change in political philosophy or panacea in development practice does not mean that it has gone away. Far from it – it has become normalized and is set to stay. A search in Scopus, ‘the world’s largest abstract and citation database’, reveals that the number of documents with the phrase ‘civil society’ continued to grow steadily from practically zero per year in the late 1980s to more than 1,500 in 2012, only after which it declined slightly. The growth was particularly fast in the 2000s. The discourse of civil society is not only alive and well but also more dynamic and self-reflexive than anthropologists often imagine. For instance, the introduction to the tenth Global Civil Society yearbook, which epitomizes the mainstream perspective on the subject, claims that the meaning of (a global) civil society has shifted from parochial Eurocentrism and emphasis on international NGOs towards more culturally varied ideas that encompass a broader range of political practices (Anheier, Kaldor and Glasius 2012). Elissa Helms (2014) recently turned the conventional argument about the NGO-ization and depoliticization of social movements on its head, arguing that in Bosnia and Herzegovina one can rather observe a ‘movementization’ of feminist NGOs. In international development, too, there is a growing recognition that ‘NGOs constitute only one part of civil society’ (Banks and Hulme 2012: 5). Anthropologists certainly need to continue to problematize what civil society in these contexts means. However, our disregard for the idea as such might prevent us from appreciating all the claims, strategies and connections that it enables, and those that it could enable. In addition to its practical relevance, I contend that civil society may be a useful concept of anthropological enquiry. By ignoring its potential, anthropologists risk excluding themselves from the ongoing conversation and reinforcing the impression that civil society may be only evoked in ways that they oppose. The main theoretical objective of this book is to rethink civil society in a way that incorporates the anthropological critiques while also helping to address some of the gaps in the anthropology of postsocialist transformation. I rush to stress that I am aware of the longstanding doubts about the continued relevance and usefulness of the category ‘postsocialist’ for anthropological analysis (Buyandelgeriyn 2008; Humphrey 2002; Sampson 2002a). Nor do I believe that Serbia should be forever, and primarily, considered as postsocialist. Yet postsocialism does remain a pertinent concept in a context in which transition lives on as an unfinished business. The continued interconnections between postsocialist states, especially their peripheral integration into the European and global political economy, also

8 | Frontiers of Civil Society

caution against dropping the concept from our vocabularies just because people no longer mention socialism very often and the sped-up cycle of academic fads pushes towards new buzzwords. The abundant anthropological literature on postsocialism challenged the simplistic and voluntaristic narrative of transition by documenting diverse, uneven and often unintended national and local transformations, as well as the adaptation of socialist concepts, institutions and practices to new contexts (Bridger and Pine 1998; Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Buyandelgeriyn 2008; Hann 2002b; Makovicky 2014b; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Thelen 2011; West and Raman 2009). Anthropologists also developed a powerful critique of the teleological underpinnings of transition – its grounding in a pre­given end-point that served as the exclusive standard for assessing actually existing changes. However, this work left some issues underdeveloped. Initially, there was a lack of interest in the transformation of the state (Hann 2002a: 5). Often, ‘[t]he notion of state withdrawal . . . was adopted without question despite its one-dimensionality’ (Thelen 2011: 50). In recent decades, the anthropology of the state in general has been dominated by poststructuralist and phenomenological approaches, which led to a focus on the cultural and discursive construction of the state and micro-level ‘encounters’ with it (Sharma and Gupta 2006; see also Gupta 2012; Trouillot 2001). In its rush to deconstruct the state as a monolithic entity, the discipline became averse to its systemic and materialist consideration, now close to a positivist anachronism, and the issue of integration of distinct state agencies was approached only as an ideological ‘state effect’ (Mitchell 1999). In the anthropology of postsocialism specifically, poststructuralist frameworks resulted in engagements with the state – limited as they were – mostly in relation to subjectivity, representation, morality and so forth (Phillips 2005; SsorinChaikov 2003). These studies had less to say about changing forms and functions of actual state apparatuses and their interrelationships with wider social transformations. More recently, Stephen Collier (2011) examined reforms of specific state functions in post-Soviet Russia, but his focus was overwhelmingly on models and intentions rather than practices and outcomes in a context of broader social struggles. Robert M. Hayden, Jessica Greenberg and Stef Jansen have corrected some of these inadequacies in their work on post-Yugoslav states. Hayden (1992, 1999, 2013), whose perspective reflects his dual anthropological and legal training, offered refreshingly critical dissections of the constitutional and legal changes in post-Yugoslav states and their links to foreign interventions. While Greenberg and Jansen tended to adopt the usual anthropological focus on the experiences and discourses of the state, they also drew connections with

Introduction | 9

transformations in the international status of post-Yugoslav states (Greenberg 2011; Jansen 2009a). In addition, Jansen (2009b, 2014a, 2015) has become increasingly interested in the materiality of the state as reflected in infrastructures or housing. His recent monograph makes important advances in the anthropological analysis of the social implications of the key properties of the post-Dayton Agreement state in Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as limited sovereignty, fragmentation and ethnocratic and particratic state capture (Jansen 2015). While I share Jansen’s concern with an ethnographic grounding of these and similar abstractions in everyday popular discourses and interactions with the state, I focus more closely than he does on reforms of specific state apparatuses. And while I take on board the anthropological deconstruction and enculturation of the state, I suggest that anthropology needs to do more to account for its relationships with changing social formations. To do so, and to compensate for the relative silence of anthropologists of postsocialism on class (cf. Kalb 2009a, 2009b, 2014; Kalb and Halmai 2011; Kideckel 2002, 2007), I will seek to capture the articulations of class relations with the competing hegemonic projects while also bringing into focus other intersecting social distinctions and relations of inequality, such as gender, generation or disability. Further, I agree with Don Kalb (2002: 323) that the anthropology of postsocialism was more successful in documenting ‘paths through time’, or how prior conditions shaped postsocialist everyday life and emergent futures, than ‘paths through space’ – the ‘spatial inter-linkages and social relationships that define territories and communities’. My argument therefore lifts Serbia from its supposed exceptionalism and, through a focus on international interventions, European integration and new kinds of links within postsocialist Europe, puts it in its place in webs of wider spatial relations. In what follows, I propose to reconsider civil society in a manner that incorporates the anthropological critiques of its dominant contemporary model while situating the latter within a broader analytical concept of civil society as a field of practices that generate, reproduce and transform the distinctions and relations of the state, society and economy/market. Such an idea of civil society provides a dynamic and relational bridge between these frequently reified domains as well as between governmental ‘reforms’ and far-reaching transformations of social relations (‘transition’). Reconstituted along these lines, civil society is the conceptual tool that I use to address the guiding question from the title of this chapter: What and whose reform was there in Serbia in the early 2010s? The first part of the question enquires about the stated and implicit objectives of reform(s) in their double emic sense,

10 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the forms of rationality on which they were based, and the scope, depth and particular forms of their actualization. The second part asks who controlled the reforms and who was subjected to them, whose interests they served and whose they undermined. Bringing these analytical themes together, this book develops what I will define as a ‘historical anthropological’ perspective on the temporal and spatial dynamics, political rationality, social purpose and actual achievements of Serbian reforms in their complex relationship with civil society.

Civil Society Mainstream and Anthropological Critique I do not aim to provide a comprehensive review of the intellectual history of civil society – a task performed with admirable erudition by others (Chandhoke 1995; Cohen and Arato 1994; Wagner 2006). My much more modest intention is to point out the main issues with the contemporary dominant idea of civil society and to formulate an alternative approach that serves my objectives better. I find it useful to distinguish, undoubtedly with some simplification, two classical traditions of thinking about civil society: the liberal tradition and the line of Hegel–Marx–Gramsci, which might be called ‘radical’ (Lewis 2004: 303). While the contemporary discourse of civil society combines various theoretical traditions, there can be little doubt that its mainstream is largely a reworking of classical liberal concepts. The modern concept of civil society has been shaped by the consolidation of capitalism, the rise of the absolutist state and the liberal problematic of limiting its power. It was liberal political economists and moral philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith, who started to elaborate the distinction between the state and civil society. They understood civil society, which they identified with the capitalist Western societies of their time, as the most advanced stage of the natural evolution of society and its economic organization in particular. Its attributes were a complex division of labour, free competition, peaceable interaction and the ‘rule of law’, all of which were seen as the aggregate outcomes of the actions of individuals governed by the ‘laws’ of selfinterest and competition. An emphasis on the autonomy of the market and the natural liberty of the individual engendered the desirability of limiting government intervention.3 Nineteenth-century liberals, such as John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, introduced the focus on associations as the principal actors of civil society, thus distinguishing it more clearly from the market. Comparing American democracy to the despotism of

Introduction | 11

the postrevolutionary French state, de Tocqueville famously argued that American associations kept state power in check and served as schools of democratic participation. Moreover, he resolved the potential conflict between the liberal concern with the freedom of the individual and civil society’s need for activism by basing associations on the principle of free will (Chandhoke 1995: 107–12; Terrier and Wagner 2006: 21–23). To sum up, this classical liberal idea of civil society is: individualist, in being concerned with the relations of individuals rather than social groups; normative, in assuming the capitalist and liberal-democratic social order as natural and benevolent; and positivist, in modelling civil society as a kind of natural realm that functioned and evolved according to its general laws. The idea of civil society fell into near-oblivion in the twentieth century. However, it has returned as a kind of master concept for interpreting various ‘bottom-up’ political processes since the 1960s: feminist, student, pacifist and environmentalist movements in the West; dissent in Eastern Europe; and prodemocracy mobilizations, especially in Latin America and South Asia (Mercer 2002). Most relevantly for my focus, Western and Eastern European intellectuals interpreted the rise of dissident publics and movements in socialist Eastern Europe in the 1980s as a rebirth of ‘civil society’, which would be subsequently celebrated as the crucial factor in the overthrow of communist regimes.4 While the discourse and practice of civil society in this period is usually associated with countries such as Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland (the region later rebranded as ‘Central and Eastern’ or ‘East-Central Europe’), similar processes were under way in Yugoslavia, too. In the next chapter, I sketch this less-known part of the genealogy of the term and the subsequent narrowing of its initially relatively open meaning. Despite their variations, late socialist perspectives on civil society shared the dichotomous ‘viewpoint of civil society against the state’ (Arato 1981: 24).5 They posited civil society as inherently good, the sphere of freedom, autonomy and civic self-government, and the socialist state as bad, always scheming to repress civil society and advance its totalitarian designs. This normative dichotomy set the scene for the practice of ‘civil society building’ after socialism. The latter was an apparently technical item on the agenda of various international organizations working in the region, paralleled by similar programmes in other settings of political and economic ‘transition’. Anthropologists demasked these interventions as a Eurocentric and evolutionist export of idealized Western models of civil society to societies with their own traditions of association, public sphere and moral community (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999a; Hann and Dunn 1996). Civil society became something that appropriate technical interventions could, and should,

12 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘build’ or ‘strengthen’ wherever it was deemed to be absent or immature (Blair 1997; Howell and Pearce 2000). Quantifiable characteristics of NGOs in a given country were now taken as the indicator of the level of development of its civil society (Fisher 1998; Fukuyama 2001). At the same time, the immense variation between actually existing organizations in terms of capacity, constituency, mission, politics or relationship to the state was poorly understood. The model of civil society thus reproduced was clearly some way from the classical liberal concept. However, the continuities are obvious. The dominant contemporary discourse could be described as a neoliberal instrumentalization of the classical liberals, especially de Tocqueville. It equates civil society to (nominally) nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations, and characterizes it as a plural, tolerant and self-organized public that is autonomous from the state or, particularly in undemocratic settings, even ‘opposed’ to it (Diamond 1994; Harbeson, Rothchild and Chazan 1994). A strong civil society was defined as the virtuous counterpart of the liberal-democratic state that supports its accountability and shelters individual liberty and rights from its excessive intrusion (Baker 1999). Political scientists and practitioners emphasized the importance of civil society for democratization in postsocialist and postauthoritarian settings (Brown 2006; Li 2007: 236; Linz and Stepan 1996; cf. Mercer 2002). It would provide an open and bottom-up platform for citizens to organize around their common interests and values. It would increase the responsiveness, accountability and transparency of the state by activities such as monitoring, interest representation and civic participation in decision-making. Robert D. Putnam’s (1993, 2000) work on ‘social capital’, which proved extremely influential with policymakers and development professionals, connected the strength of civic associations in a given society to its levels of interpersonal trust, viability of institutions, rule of law and, ultimately, economic development. The world of international development further discovered NGOs as a superior alternative – more flexible, grassroots and efficient – to the compromised statist development. An unprecedented amount of resources was channelled to NGOs to provide health, welfare, education and other services instead of states hollowed out by neoliberal restructuring.6 NGOs were expected to reduce poverty by running microcredit, food-for-work and other economic development schemes.7 Even political and emancipatory agendas, such as subaltern ‘empowerment’ or gender equality, became resignified as within the remit of standard NGO practice.8 Substantial anthropological scholarship documented how civil society building in postsocialist countries resulted in the rise of

Introduction | 13

donor-driven NGO sectors (Hemment 2007; Mandel 2002; Wedel 2001: 85–122). Conditions for participating in what Steven Sampson (2002b) dubbed ‘project society’ and accessing its resources favoured well-connected elite and middle-class individuals who lived in big cities and possessed the required forms of social and cultural capital (Kalb 2002). Civil society building in Serbia and the rest of the postsocialist Balkans unfolded along these broad lines (Sampson 1996, 2002b, 2004; Stubbs 1996, 2001, 2007a, 2007b; Vetta 2009, 2012, 2013). The resulting NGO sectors were one of the main channels through which countries like Serbia became the target of one-size-fits-all development agendas, even though they were quite different from so-called ‘developing’ countries. At times, NGOs also played significant political roles. Particularly important and publicly visible was their involvement in the wave of so-called ‘electoral revolutions’ that ended several postcommunist authoritarian or hybrid regimes, including the 2000 ‘October Revolution’ in Serbia.9 In the aftermath of such regime changes, donor-driven civil society blossomed and, relying on its generous foreign support and reputation for reformism and cutting-edge expertise, lubricated the unblocked wheels of transition. Working with or even joining the new governments, these actors supported, participated and often laid down the basic parameters of the dominant model of transition to liberal democracy and internationalized free-market capitalism (Anguelova-Lavergne 2012).

The Frontiers of Civil Society The anthropological scrutiny of civil society building enabled a much-needed questioning of the common assumptions about virtuous relationships between civil society (aka NGO sectors), democracy and development. It challenged the simplistic view of civil society, the state and the market as separate and clearly distinguished institutional ‘sectors’ by documenting the circulation of personnel and emergence of hybrid organizational forms (Ferguson 2004; Mandel 2002; Vetta 2012; Wedel 2011: 85–112). This book stands in the line of this scholarship and much of what it does is developing, qualifying and updating its core findings. However, it goes beyond what has sometimes been a purely negative critique to point towards the possibility of reclaiming civil society as a concept of social analysis and political practice. Anthropologists seemed to have been led by their findings to treat civil society merely as a native, normative and ideological concept that obscures more complex and ambiguous practices. As such, it was to be deconstructed, not reconstructed. Another liabil-

14 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ity for the concept was its oft-noted ‘polyvalence, incoherence and promiscuity [that] may leave its status as an analytical concept fatally compromised’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999b: 8, emphasis in original). Such a promiscuity reflects not only the fuzzy and diverse ways in which it was recently reinvented but also its complex genealogy in political philosophy. Finally, the apparently exclusively Western provenance of the idea – an assumption itself in need of questioning – clashed with the relativism and anti-Eurocentrism of anthropology. This last issue has framed most of the more visible attempts by anthropologists to directly engage with the concept theoretically (Coombe 1997; Jung 2012: 23; Rutherford 2004: 127–28). Chris Hann (1996) argued that the obvious agenda for anthropologists was to particularize the Western notion of civil society and trace its transformations when exported to non-Western settings. He advocated a middle path between universalism and relativism that would acknowledge the global spread of Western models without assuming either that they completely displaced non-Western meanings and practices or that the latter were necessarily radically different (Hann 1996: 17–22). John L. and Jean Comaroff (1999: 4) similarly attacked the ‘neomodern myth’ that locates the origins of civil society exclusively in the West. They further stressed how the ‘Eurocentric tendency to limit civil society to a narrowly defined institutional arena’ excluded many African counterparts to the Western idea of civil society, for example, kinship with public functions (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999: 22; see also Karlström 1999; Lewis 2002, 2004). They concluded that civil society was an aspirational idea and ‘placeholder’ rather than ‘analytical construct’, and in effect replaced it with a battery of other, presumably more robust concepts, such as ‘publics’, ‘modes of association’, ‘media of expression’, ‘moral community’ and ‘politics’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999: 33). Hann (1996: 20) proposed a different alternative – an inclusive idea of civil society that would refer ‘more loosely to the moral community, to the problems of accountability, trust and cooperation that all groups face’. A number of anthropological studies followed these relativizing guidelines and extended the term ‘civil society’ to a range of non-Western analogues, including, for example, Mormon community life (Dunn 1996), reformist Islam in Niger (Masquelier 1999), traditions of interconfessional tolerance in Poland and Bosnia (Hann 2003) or community reconstruction initiatives in postdisaster Taiwan (Jung 2012). In some cases, anthropologists showed how local actors themselves appropriated the emblem of ‘civility’ for practices unlikely to be recognized as such according to the dominant liberal model, such as state veneration rituals in Turkey (NavaroYashin 2002: 117–54), government-run volunteering programmes in

Introduction | 15

Putin’s Russia (Hemment 2009: 45) or party-sponsored right-wing activism in Hungary (Halmai 2011). However, this position is not flawless. The Comaroffs essentially conclude that civil society is beyond hope as an instrument of social analysis. Bojan Bilić (2011), who has studied post-Yugoslav peace activism, also dismissed it as a ‘concept that means everything and nothing’ and praised the ‘social movements’ paradigm as the superior alternative. While the concerns are legitimate, the suggested solution has real costs – the particular analytical links of the concept of civil society are lost. Its ghettoization is, to some extent, arbitrary. Many key concepts of social enquiry, including those that the Comaroffs or Bilić perceive as less problematic, suffer from similar indeterminacies and yet are far from being abandoned by social scientists. Hann’s (1996) approach poses a different issue – it effectively expands the idea of civil society, already seen as promiscuous, to the even broader issues of social cohesion and moral community. It is also worth noting that the concern about the Eurocentrism of civil society has its limits in the Eastern European context with its own traditions of civil society thought, which I discuss more extensively in the next chapter. A more substantial anthropological literature – though still quite marginal in the wider discipline – focuses on ‘NGOs’ or, less commonly, ‘third sector’ rather than civil society (Bernal and Grewal 2014b; Bornstein 2003; Fisher 1997; Hemment 2007; Leve and Karim 2001; Mertz and Timmer 2010; Sharma 2006; Schuller 2009, 2012). If these works mention civil society at all, then it is typically only as an ideological signifier that framed and legitimated the promotion of NGO sectors (Elyachar 2005; Ferguson 2004; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Green 2012; Hemment 2007). However, the drawbacks of this conceptual choice might easily outweigh its benefits. While the rich referentiality and productive tensions of civil society are lost, the NGO concept does not compensate for this by introducing greater clarity. In fact, it suffers from many of the same problems associated with civil society. Already William F. Fisher (1997: 447) described in his landmark review article both the NGO sector and civil society as ‘black box’ categories that obscure a ‘tremendous diversity’ of organizations. More recently, Victoria Bernal and Inderpal Grewal (2014a: 7) argued that the very residual character of the term (its definition by something that it is not, i.e. as ‘non-state’) makes it sufficiently flexible to encompass all kinds of organizations. However, this analysis is only partly applicable to the Serbian terms for ‘nongovernmental organization’ (nevladina organizacija) or ‘NGO’ (NVO). While they do efface differences between various organizations, their meaning is actually much narrower than Bernal and Grewal assume. It is largely co-extensive with the emic category of

16 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘civil society’ (građansko/civilno društvo)10 that, as already noted, usually refers to particular kind of postsocialist, project-oriented and professionalized NGO. In other words, ‘NGO’ is in Serbia no more neutral and inclusive a category than ‘civil society’. In addition, the concept implicitly focuses attention on formal organizations at the expense of informal relations and processes that extend beyond their boundaries and yet arguably also make up civil society. I turn to the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist best known for the notes he wrote as Mussolini’s political prisoner in 1926–37, to develop an alternative concept of civil society for the purposes of my analysis. Unlike today’s civil society builders, Gramsci (1971) did not formulate prescriptive models to be replicated around the world. And unlike liberal thinkers, he did not start from a legal, formal, functional or normative definition of civil society and its boundaries with other domains of the sociopolitical order. Instead, creatively reworking Hegel’s and Marx’s ideas, he developed a relational, constructivist and historically and geographically sensitive concept of civil society embedded in his analyses of social domination and class relations in modern Italy.11 He distinguished: two major superstructural ‘levels’: the one that can be called ‘civil society’, that is the ensemble of organisms commonly called ‘private’, and that of ‘political society’ or ‘the State’. These two levels correspond on the one hand to the function of ‘hegemony’ which the dominant group exercises throughout society and on the other hand to that of ‘direct domination’ or command exercised through the State. (Gramsci 1971: 12)

This passage associates civil society with ‘hegemony’, defined elsewhere as rule by ‘consent’ and political, intellectual and moral ‘leadership’, and the state with ‘direct domination’ – rule by ‘coercion’. Other notes, however, seem to include civil society in the state (Gramsci 1971: 261) and the production of hegemony among the functions of the state (Gramsci 1971: 244). The key to this paradox is Gramsci’s (1971: 56, 257–63, 267) distinction between the state in a narrow sense, i.e. the government, coercive apparatuses etc., and the ‘integral state’ – the total political organization of a society, which also includes the ‘organisms commonly called “private”’, such as associations, political parties, trade unions or churches. The distinctions of the state/civil society and hegemony/coercion are therefore methodological. Rather than ‘two bounded universes, always and for ever separate’, the state and civil society are to be seen as a ‘knot of tangled power relations which, depending on the questions we are interested in, can be disentangled into different assemblages of threads’ (Crehan 2002: 103). In addition, Gramsci (1971: 208–9) oscillates between seeing civil society

Introduction | 17

as part of the ‘superstructure’ and as a ‘mode of economic behaviour’. Civil society should therefore be understood relationally: as mechanisms and practices that mediate between, and thereby reconstitute, the structures of the economy and the superstructures of ideology and the state. It is not a ‘sector’ naturally and clearly distinct from the state and the economy, but the field of practices that generate, reproduce and transform those distinctions. This further implies that civil society plays an ambivalent role in reproducing domination – it is a space where hegemony is continually re-enacted, but also one where subaltern classes may launch a counterhegemonic strategy. For Gramsci (1971: 52), the form of the state was a reflection of the resources and will to power of the ‘ruling’ classes. But he did not consider their ‘historical unity . . . realised in the State’ as unproblematic – it is a political and juridical challenge and an issue of hegemony to be won in civil society. Achieving hegemony entails surmounting the challenge of building a sufficiently broad coalition of social forces (‘power bloc’), in which antagonisms are provisionally neutralized through the articulation of a single hegemonic worldview (‘common sense’) and narratives of ‘common interest’. As William Roseberry (1994: 361) underscored, hegemony is to be seen as a project (process) rather than an achievement (condition), and what it constructs is ‘not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterised by domination’. Such an understanding is particularly acutely present in Sangeeta Kamat’s (2002) Gramscian analysis of the ‘NGO-ization of grassroots politics’ in India. Kamat performs the familiar dissection of the ways in which development discourse constitutes ‘civil society’ as nonpolitical, which echoes the typical anthropological critique of development (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007). But situating grassroots NGOs in a civil society reconceptualized as a dynamic field of hegemonic struggles ultimately enables her to offer a more nuanced and dialectical account of their relationship to development hegemony and leftist politics. I would like to visualize the Gramscian idea of civil society as delineated by multiple ‘frontiers’. In contemporary English, the word ‘frontier’ is rarely used to describe a simple ‘border’ between two countries. Rather, it is used in one of its more specific meanings listed by the Merriam-Webster dictionary: ‘a region that forms the margin of settled or developed territory’, ‘the farthermost limits of knowledge or achievement in a particular subject’ or ‘a new field of exploitative or development activity’. ‘Frontier’ is an unsettled, shifting kind of border that moves along with the advance of some kind of human activity, such as agriculture, capitalism or science. It has also military

18 | Frontiers of Civil Society

connotations arising from its etymological connection with ‘front’ – ‘a line of battle’, ‘a zone of conflict between armies’. The metaphor of ‘frontier’ has something useful to tell us about the dynamic, contested and porous boundaries of civil society with the state, the economy and wider society. These are continually reproduced and subverted through a variety of representations and practices, including network-like, ‘informal’ relations that extend across formal institutions and organizational domains – which is why I combine the hegemony perspective with a focus on relationships, practices and trajectories of individuals, taking inspiration from the ‘actor-oriented’ approach to development (Long 2001; Mosse 2005a; Mosse and Lewis 2005, 2006). This book shows that a major concern of the Serbian NGO sector was problematizing and modifying its own frontiers with other ‘sectors’. This includes the advocacy for reforms of the ways in which the state funds and cooperates with ‘civil society’ (Part III), as well as efforts to embed the latter more closely in the economy and wider society at both the national and the local scale (Part IV). But the state also attempted to transform its relations with civil society, for instance by promoting state–civil society ‘partnerships’ and transferring some of its welfare roles to NGOs. These are often two-way processes: similarly to armed conflicts, there is an agreement over the momentary line of battle, but the particular stakes of its movement – and of the war itself – may differ according to the perspective taken. And while one of the parties often takes the initiative and attacks the frontier, this does not mean that the enemy is defenceless and unable to make incursions into its territory in response. The contestations over frontiers were themselves embedded in broader hegemonic struggles in post-Milošević Serbia. My key empirical argument about the liberal NGO sector is that it was enrolled in a hegemonic project of transnational integration and neoliberalization, which was the actual social content of ‘transition’. The ‘project society’ and other actors reproduced the hegemony of this project by representing it as being in the society’s ‘common interest’ and the only possible route to modernization. In this context, the figure of the frontier also expresses the developmentalist and evolutionary underpinnings of the ideologies of ‘Europeanization’ and transition. Going beyond this, the NGO-ized civil society is itself part of a civil society understood analytically as a field of hegemonic struggles. Defining civil society in ways that exclude particular actors is itself a ‘fundamental hegemonic operation’ that sets limits on what may be recognized as such and what kinds of struggles it may accommodate (Miorelli 2008: 20; Munck 2002: 357). Accordingly, but without pretending to being exhaustive, I will contrast the liberal civil society to two other forms of civil society that

Introduction | 19

the former excludes and that pursue different counterhegemonic and subhegemonic projects. I call them nationalist civil society and post-Yugoslav civil society, respectively.12 The idea of the frontier will help me transpose Gramsci’s (1971: 106–14, 206–7, 229–39) military distinction between different modes of contesting and maintaining hegemony – ‘war of manoeuvre’ and ‘war of position’, respectively – into my own analysis of the strategies of these three ‘civil societies’ vis-à-vis each other and the state. In sum, then, I talk about three interrelated kinds of frontiers: first, the boundaries of civil society with the state, economy and wider society; second, the boundaries between the different kinds of civil society and their power projects; and, third, the temporal logic of the hegemonic ideology of transition.

Reforms, Governmentality and Hegemony Gramscian ideas about civil society and hegemony also inform my thinking about ‘reforms’. However, I begin their analysis in a more low-flying mode. I take seriously the ‘will to improve’ of those who plan and conduct reforms (Li 2007) so that I can, at one level, understand their intentions on their own terms. In general, I found that the dominant mode in which reforms in Serbia tended to be conceived, conducted and assessed was similar to planned interventions in international development – as an ‘execution of an already-specified plan with expected behavioural incomes’ (Long 2001: 24). Their endpoints were fixed as clear, rational, benevolent and uncontroversial, and the focus was on the technicalities of getting there. Many anthropologists found the idea of governmentality useful for conceptualizing such planned interventions. Foucault (1991: 102) defined governmentality, his own neologism for ‘governmental mentality’, as ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics’ that target the population as the key object of government invented under Western modernity. He contrasted it with ‘discipline’, a form of power that isolates deviations such as madmen or criminals in specially designated spaces and normalizes them through close surveillance and enforced modifications of behaviour. Instead of supervision and coercion, governmentality ‘operates by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ (Li 2007: 5). It is a ‘conduct of conduct’: it treats its subjects as formally free individuals whom it encourages, stimulates and persuades to act in the desirable manner, so that this appears as an outcome of their own voluntary choices. It is an ‘environmental type of intervention’ (Foucault 2008: 160) that manipulates structures of constraints and possibilities within which subjects act.

20 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Foucault theorized governmentality as inseparable from the rise of liberalism in Western Europe. He understood liberalism ‘technically’ – not as a theory or ideology, but as a critique of ‘too much government’ and a method of rationalizing government according to the ‘internal rule of maximum economy’, which dictates to minimize costs and maximize profits (Foucault 2007: 29–54, 2008: 317–19). As I already hinted in the discussion of the liberal concept of civil society, liberalism conceives the individual as homo oeconomicus: an egoistic, economically rational subject who always seeks to maximize his own utility. The inability of the sovereign to ever know the totality of economic life, which makes her interventions always suboptimal to the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, constituted homo oeconomicus as the natural limit of government. According to Foucault, twentieth-century neoliberalism retains the assumption of the utility-maximizing subject, but approaches him not as nature, but a product of governmental interventions. These rearrange the entire social fabric in ways that ‘make [the subject] into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise’ (Foucault 2008: 241). So-called British governmentality scholars, whose work was a major source of governmentality theory for anthropologists, specified the actuarial, managerial, pedagogic and psychiatric techniques through which neoliberal governmentality produces the ‘active, choosing, responsible, autonomous individual obliged to be free, and to live life as if it were an outcome of choice’ (Miller and Rose 2008: 18). In Foucaultian anthropology and sociology, neoliberal governmentality refers to two types of ‘optimisation technology’ (Hilgers 2011: 358). Techniques of the self produce enterprising and ‘responsibilized’ subjects who optimize their individual choices through knowledge and perceive the world through the prism of competition. Techniques of subjection regulate populations to optimize productivity. Anthropologists working in this vein emphasized the mobility and flexibility of neoliberal technologies that coexist and develop ‘parasitical’ relationships with different governmental regimes and social formations (Collier 2005, 2011, 2012; Ong 2006, 2007). It is much less frequently noted that Foucault (2008: 291–316) also theorized civil society. Complicating views of the liberal concept of civil society as purely economistic, he argued that civil society had emerged in response to the need for a concept that would envelop the individual subjects of liberal government on their two mutually irreducible planes of existence: as economic men and as bearers of rights. Not all interests in civil society are thus economic. Nonegoistic interests enable the creation of bonds based on sentiment, sympathy and benevolence, though egoistic interests constantly threaten to

Introduction | 21

weaken them. Unlike the market, which theoretically encompasses the entirety of humanity, civil society is always a particular and localized ensemble. As such, it is easily substituted by the ‘nation’ or (national) ‘society’. Relations of power and subordination in civil society are believed to emerge spontaneously, ensuing from the individuals’ different talents and roles they play in relation to each other. Civil society therefore appears as prior to the state, so that the latter is only concerned with ‘how to regulate and limit power within a society in which subordination is already at work’ (Foucault 2008: 309). While civil society in classical liberalism is a quasi-nature that the government must govern as well as produce, Graham Burchell (1993) followed the spirit of Foucault’s notes on neoliberalism by arguing that the latter takes a more interventionist stance towards civil society. Gil Eyal (2000) extended these ideas, whose point of reference was the historical experience of North Atlantic states, to ‘transitional’ Eastern Europe. He showed that Czech dissidents understood civil society as a technology of an essentially moral self-government of individuals and society that had to be re-created after its destruction by the amoral state-socialist paternalism, and once in power after the fall of socialism they identified market mechanisms as the means of its recreation (Eyal 2000: 52, 67–71). Civil society building in Serbia was to a great extent such a purposeful effort to create a self-managing, market-conforming and depoliticized version of civil society. However, this book shows that the emergent liberal civil society was also influenced by more radical, egalitarian and rights-oriented strands of liberalism, giving rise to a more layered and conflicted set of orientations than Eyal’s argument implies. A burgeoning anthropological literature uses the concept of (neoliberal) governmentality to analyse the contemporary expansion and support for the ‘nongovernmental’ sector (Fisher 1997; Hemment 2009, 2012; Jackson 2005; Medina 2010; Sharma 2006). James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) laid out the underlying theme in a programmatic article: in an era of globalization and neoliberalism, the functions of government are increasingly transferred from the state to a range of (quasi-)nongovernmental and often transnational actors. This ‘transnational governmentality’ blurs the state/society and public/private distinctions, and undermines the spatial assumptions about the boundedness and ‘vertical encompassment’ of the nationstate (see also Clarke 2004b; Deacon 2000; Ferguson 2004). Foucault’s pervasive influence in this field of study is well illustrated by the way in which Bernal and Grewal (2014: 4–5) present the existing theorizations of NGOs as falling into two camps: the ‘classical liberal theory’

22 | Frontiers of Civil Society

and a ‘poststructuralist approach to the state’ based on the concept of governmentality, which implies that the latter furnishes the only relevant critique of the former. In addition to the work on NGOs and neoliberalism, the governmentality framework informed other poststructuralist anthropological literatures that are relevant to my concerns, such as those on postsocialist transformation (Collier 2011; Dunn 2004; Kipnis 2008; Makovicky 2014a; Phillips 2005), the state (Gupta 2012; Sharma and Gupta 2006; Trouillot 2001) and development (Ferguson 1990; Li 2007; Magrath 2010; Mitchell 2002; Mosse 2005b). This multiple pertinence of the concept of governmentality, and more generally the immense influence of Foucaultian approaches in anthropology and other social sciences, make it crucial to consider its potential as well as its limits. The tendencies noted by the governmentality literature, which could be summed up as a ‘denationalization of the state’ and ‘destatization of politics’ (Jessop 1999), come to the surface time and again in this book in the form of the increasing governmental role of NGOs and thereby often transnational networks. In particular, Chapters 2 and 4 discuss the transfer of policy- and law-making functions to NGOs, while Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the growing involvement of NGOs in the provision of welfare. The idea of neoliberal governmentality will be particularly useful for an analysis of government and NGO activities that deployed the norm of cost-efficiency to critique the extant relationships of the Serbian state and ‘civil society’, and reform them through the technologies of competition and ‘transparency’ (Chapters 4 and 5). In this latter case, the idea of ‘conduct of conduct’ captures how reformers devised methods based on assumptions about human nature in an effort to shape behaviour. I therefore make judicious use of the governmentality framework to study the minutiae of legal and administrative technologies and unearth the rationalities and intellectual genealogies that inform them. Nevertheless, Foucault’s theory is insufficient for my purposes for several reasons. To begin with, the dominance of the governmentality framework has contributed to the noted anthropological neglect of material and systemic aspects of states and their relations with societies. This seems related to what Foucault (2007: 116) explicitly described as his purpose of devising the concept of governmentality: ‘to tackle the problem of the state and population’. He ultimately reduced the state to an ideational and ideological epiphenomenon of governmentality: the ‘regulatory idea of governmental reason’, a ‘schema of intelligibility for a whole set of already established institutions’ and an ‘objective in this political reason in the sense that it is that which must result from

Introduction | 23

the active interventions of this reason’ (Foucault 2007: 286–87). This argument easily leads to an idealist obfuscation of the fact that state apparatuses are also material. It further becomes impossible to ask how they are related to the agencies and interests of particular social groups and how a measure of their integration in objective rather than merely ideological terms is achieved. The Serbian state is certainly subject to discursive construction, but the organizations hiding in this black box still have some very real effects – even if, as Gupta (2012) argues for the Indian state’s failure to eradicate extreme poverty, these might be largely due to their arbitrariness and lack of coordination. And although I highlight the governmental roles of NGOs, I do not want to lose sight of the fact that Serbian state organizations remain far more powerful than NGOs, as well as primarily oriented to other state agencies, even in the case of ‘projectified’ state organizations discussed in Chapter 2. In other words, I believe there is a need for a critical materialist and socialrelational concept of the state that would nevertheless take on board the insights generated by its enculturation and deconstruction. I offer one such concept in the next chapter and then use it for a historical discussion of the changing relationships of the state and civil society in late socialist and postsocialist Serbia. With that concept, I will be in a better position to draw on work in anthropology and critical geography to introduce a different, more political, historical and spatial approach to neoliberalism that is based on the concept of neoliberalization understood as a hegemonic state-based project of social transformation. In Part III, I will proceed to show how the highly specific reforms amenable to analysis in terms of neoliberal governmentality were not isolated or one-off processes, but on the contrary part of the broader project of neoliberalization. In addition to his unsatisfying treatment of the state, Foucault wrote a lot more about how power is conceptualized and expressed in discourse than about ‘power as a social reality in action’ – about how discourses inform practice (Callewaert 2006: 91). Studies of governmentality therefore often focus on the models and technologies of government and the intentions of those who use them, treating this in separation from ‘sociologies of rule’ that study how rule is actually accomplished in practice (Rose 1999: 19; cf. Kipnis 2008; Li 2007: 27). Governmentality provides an ‘empirically weak and suspiciously functionalist’ framework for an anthropological analysis of planned interventions – it is too vague about the social location of ordering power while being too certain about its supposed effects (Mosse 2005b: 14; see also Gould 2005). Anthropologists of development in particular became increasingly aware that in the nitty-gritty of their

24 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘implementation’, planned interventions rarely have the kind of single, unchanging purpose assumed by the figure of governmentality. Rather, several ends are combined to strike an uneasy and messy balance between various interests and are constantly re-adjusted according to shifting social relationships (Li 2007: 9; Mosse 2005a). As I will start to argue in broad terms in the next chapter, this point is particularly pertinent in a setting of complex, volatile and often obscure power arrangements in post-Milošević Serbia. Finally, Foucault’s and his followers’ focus on subjectless and discursive forms of rule, which supposedly operate ‘behind people’s backs’ (Ferguson 1990: 18), also evades questions about why and how particular groups or individuals benefit or lose from particular governmental interventions (Cheater 1999). To define their field, method and purpose of intervention as technical, governmental schemes consistently exclude ‘political-economic questions – questions about control over the means of production and the structures of law and force that support systemic inequalities’ (Li 2007: 11). However, the limit of this strategy of depoliticization is politics itself – the ever-present possibility of a critical challenge to the governmental power/knowledge nexus from those being governed (Li 2007: 7–12). Although Foucault did acknowledge the fact of resistance, he largely conceived it as dispersed and paired with power in a kind of universal dialectic, an almost mechanical relationship (Abu-Lughod 1990; Hansen and Stepputat 2001: 6, 32). This offers little guidance on why and how situated subjects become conscious of being dominated and get organized in response. To address these issues, I follow anthropologists and other scholars who rejected the rigid opposition between the Foucaultian and Gramscian approaches and attempted their crossfertilization (Hansen 1999; Hansen and Stepputat 2001; Jessop 2008; Li 2007; G. Smith 2011). I use the Gramscian concept of hegemony to understand why particular individual and collective actors support or resist the reforms of government that I study, and more broadly to account for how state forms reflect the ongoing articulation and politicization of class relations in civil society. Refusing economic determinism, Gramsci (1971: 238) emphasized the centrality of ideology for defining the terms of political struggles, organizing people into groups and constructing their sense of shared interests. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985: 11, 93–148) developed this point by arguing that discursive articulation is needed to translate individuals’ structural positions in systems of domination into ‘subject positions’, i.e. political identities identified with certain interests, which may become a basis for political mobilization. Subjects positions are also defined as ‘points of antagonism’ since they are constituted through

Introduction | 25

differential and equivalential relations with other subject positions (Hansen 1999: 22–29; Smith 1998: 55–63). Discourse and ideologies too are essential for the formation of hegemonic projects – the interests of multiple subject positions must be articulated in a manner that neutralizes their mutual antagonisms and assimilates them into a ‘common interest’ of the power bloc. Since the state is the authority that legitimately acts in the name of the common interest, hegemonic worldviews inevitably articulate visions of the state. It is in this sense that I talk about hegemonic struggles over state power and hegemonic projects of state transformation. I understand the various kinds of civil society as points of antagonism that are individually and collectively performed through practices, thereby becoming social forces involved in hegemonic struggles. Discursive subject positions cannot be derived from or equated with structural positions in systems of inequality. But neither does their articulation occur in an unstructured and limitless space of possibilities. As we will see, the subject positions as well as forms of organization and collective action characteristic for the various forms of civil society in Serbia made the participation of individuals belonging to various social groups and categories more or less likely.

Research Methods and Settings From the start, the questions that I set out to explore in Serbia over some sixteen months in the early 2010s concerned relations and processes well beyond the spatial and temporal radius of my fieldwork. When I came to Serbia in the summer of 2010, my plan was to follow as closely as possible two NGO projects that were each implemented by a consortium of one Belgrade NGO and one partner from either the Czech Republic or Slovakia. My direct motive for doing so was to learn about the emerging and little-studied practice of official development assistance (ODA) between postsocialist countries. The Czech Republic and Slovakia, which funded the two projects, were relevant and comparable as donors because both their ODA policies prioritized Serbia as a beneficiary and constructed it in similar ways. Their selection also had a personal subtext: being born and raised in Slovakia and having earned my first degree in the Czech Republic, I was interested how the ODA practices of the two new EU member states reflected and consolidated their supposed advanced position on (or even beyond) the teleological pathway of ‘transition’ (see Chapters 2 and 6). My native knowledge of Slovak and near-native proficiency in Czech aided me in communicating with NGO workers and govern-

26 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ment officials, analysing relevant documents, and learning Serbian, another Slavic language, more quickly. In addition, my Slavic and Eastern European identity marked me as an ambiguous outsider/ insider with whom some of my research participants presumed to share more cultural intimacy than with a stereotypical Westerner, which gave interactions extra flow and depth. Equally from the outset, however, I have approached postsocialist-to-postsocialist development cooperation itself as a way of getting a grasp on a set of broader processes and issues that it brought together, such as ‘civil society building’, the ‘reform’ of the state and ‘Europeanization’. As my data analysis and theorization advanced, I gradually translated these original concerns into the conceptual terms sketched above. Some of these issues have been developed relatively late and unevenly in anthropology, which is further compounded by the still somewhat marginal status of research on the former Yugoslavia in the wider discipline. This has led me to engage with relevant theoretical and empirical contributions in other disciplines, including sociology, history, heterodox economics and political science. Despite the interdisciplinarity of some of my discussion, I approached this as a primarily anthropological project. Instead of accepting the concepts and analyses of other disciplines as they are, I strove to read them through the prism of our anthropological commitment to sustained cultural (self-)critique, which necessarily includes a critique of dominant scientific paradigms, and in a constant dialogue with relevant anthropological theory. Broadly speaking, I sought to contribute to the anthropological literatures on civil society, the state, governmentality, development, and postsocialist (South) East Europe by developing a relational and critical materialist kind of ‘historical anthropological’ approach to these issues (Kalb and Tak 2005). Most of all, this means reaffirming the anthropological commitment to the study of localized social practices (and hence human agency and indeterminacy of social life), but always in their relationships with wider social forces; relationships that are power-laden and systemic as well as dynamic, contested and historically and geographically varied.13 My research objectives had important methodological implications. Clearly, I needed to go beyond the model of temporal fieldwork in smallscale communities, with participant observation as the main method and thick cultural description as the main product, which continues to be privileged (and taught to doctoral students) as the quintessential anthropological research design. While I retained an important role for participant observation and, more broadly, ethnography, I defined its primary object not as particular places, groups or organizations, but dynamically as processes (‘projects’, ‘reforms’ etc.) that unfold through

Introduction | 27

time, in space, and potentially also across various institutional settings and social domains. I combined two different temporal modes in their study: ‘retrospective microhistory’, which reconstructs past that has led to the present (e.g. going back to the origins of a particular ‘reform’ I studied), with ‘prospective microhistory’, which is concerned with the ‘emergence and development – unfolding, reproductive, haphazard, chaotic – of social practices in the present as these become futurities’ (Handelman 2005: 41). Tracking these processes in space, I engaged in a multi-sited ethnography in a host of field sites in and outside Serbia. This entailed a combination of vertical, horizontal and transversal manoeuvres, such as scaling down to a local subproject of a national-level programme, scaling up to EU institutions to which my research participants sought to address the products of their efforts, or ‘studying through’ (Shore and Wright 1997: 14) the various domains and settings that the particular process connected. As this led me to study ‘upwards and outwards’, my general method was quite along the lines of the extended case method – from the localized, real-time processes that I observed most closely (i.e. the ‘cases’), I ‘extended out’ by means of other techniques such as interviewing and the collection and analysis of a large corpus of textual, visual and audiovisual artefacts,14 to larger social relations and dynamics that variously enabled, constrained and shaped the former (Burawoy 1998). While I did follow the postsocialist-to-postsocialist development projects as originally planned, the gaps in their cycles left me with abundant time for developing other lines of investigation. From the very beginning, I also studied other activities of the two Belgrade NGOs that implemented them: the Centre for Democracy Foundation (CDF) and Balkan Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF).15 In these primary field sites, which I will discuss in more detail shortly, I volunteered and conducted participant observation, typically several days a week, from September 2010 until June 2011 (CDF) and December 2011 (BCIF). Beyond BCIF and the CDF, I chose a purposive sample of other field sites in Serbia proper16 and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (see Figure 0.1). BCIF, a foundation providing funding and services to NGOs across the country, proved particularly useful as a gateway to a broad range of organizations. In secondary sites, participant observation and interviews were carried out during shorter stays or repeated visits. I further accompanied BCIF workers on a number of so-called ‘monitoring’ trips – visits at grantee organizations. Finally, interview sites were those where I did formal interviews. (See Figure 0.1 for the number of interviews in each research site.) I also conducted participant observation and interviews during several short trips outside Serbia: in Bratislava, Brussels and Prague. Overall, I recorded and

28 | Frontiers of Civil Society

transcribed ninety-three semistructured interviews with NGO workers, nationalist leaders, government officials, politicians, civil servants and others, with an average duration of about seventy minutes. During my first monitoring trip, I learned about a BCIF-funded ‘public advocacy’ project in Vršac, which I then continued to follow as a localized instance of BCIF’s national advocacy programme and the broader development agenda of ‘democratization’ of which it was part (Chapter 7). Two more BCIF-funded advocacy campaigns became my secondary sites. These were concerned with the accessibility of public spaces for people with disabilities and led by the Centre for the Development of Civil Society in Zrenjanin and the Niš Committee for Human Rights. Through these projects, I became aware of so-called ‘traditional’ associations of disabled people with roots going back to socialist Yugoslavia and decided to study this post-Yugoslav kind of civil society in relation to the transformation of the welfare state (Chapter 5). In Niš, the third-largest city in Serbia, I spent a month volunteering for ProAktiv, BCIF’s friendly and grantee organization. This enabled me to follow the Niš advocacy more closely, interview members of local ‘traditional’ associations and somewhat balance my mostly Belgrade-centred experience. My engagement with the nationalist civil society (Chapter 3) was mostly through the topical prism of its mobilizations against the (LGBT) Pride Parade in Belgrade. Its resistance emphasized a concern for cultural autonomy and political sovereignty of the Serb nation, suggesting that the struggle over LGBT rights came to stand for broader issues of globalization. Similar themes were articulated by the crowd of various nationalist and right-wing organizations that I observed at the celebrations of the Statehood Day in Orašac in February 2011. The same month, I attended a press conference at which Dveri, one of the leading nationalist organizations, unveiled its plans to become a political party. I interviewed leaders of the best-known and most influential organizations as well as several nationalist and conservative intellectuals, and attended a number of nationalist protests and semipublic meetings in Belgrade. My final secondary site was the government’s Office for Cooperation with Civil Society in Belgrade established in January 2011. The Office was important for my research because of its mandate to regulate the relationship of the state and civil society, as is discussed especially in Chapter 4. I was able to occasionally visit its premises and attend semipublic and internal meetings from September to December 2011, when it was still hiring staff and defining its agenda. However, I got some insight into the Office’s discourse and activities even before then, for instance at a conference co-organized by the Office and BCIF.

Introduction | 29

Figure 0.1. Map of research sites in Serbia (created by Martin Falc).

30 | Frontiers of Civil Society

The CDF The CDF was one of the oldest liberal NGOs in Serbia. In the 1990s, it typified the first wave of NGOs in at least two major respects: it was funded by foreign bilateral, multilateral and private agencies (CDF 1999), and it was openly allied and closely linked to the antiMilošević opposition. Its history is entangled with the biography of Dragoljub ‘Mićun’ Mićunović, its president from the start and a veteran of Serbian politics.17 Born in 1930, Mićunović had already got into conflict with the Communist regime in the late 1940s and was sentenced to 20 months of forced labour in the infamous gulag of Goli otok (Mićunović 2000). He completed a philosophy degree in Belgrade in 1954. As one of the members of Praxis, the Yugoslav dissident school of humanist Marxism, he was expelled from Belgrade University in 1975 and left for Germany. He returned in the 1980s, joined the dissident intellectual circles and became one of the founders of the Democratic Party (DP) and its first president in 1990. By 1993, he and Zoran Đinđić, who would become the first prime minister after Milošević, were publicly accusing each other of cooperating with the regime and arguing over the proper way of building the party (Dokumentacioni centar ‘Vreme’ 2012). In the end, Mićunović resigned and Đinđić took over in January 1994. Months later, in July 1994, the Democratic Centre Foundation was registered with Mićunović as president (SBRA n.d.).18 Its founders included other prominent intellectuals and/or members of ‘Mićunović’s current’ within the DP, including the lawyer Slobodan Vučković (CDF 1999). His daughter Nataša Vučković became the foundation’s general secretary, a position she still held at the time of my fieldwork. In September 1994, Mićunović commented on the establishment of the CDF (which he described simply as ‘the Democratic Centre’ rather than an NGO): ‘The initial idea was that people would gather around certain ideas and act as a political movement . . . We’ll see from the reactions whether all of this will grow into something more’ (Bjekic 1994). It did – after Mićunović had left the DP in 1995, he founded a new party called the Democratic Centre in 1996. It stayed an elite party with limited constituency19 until it merged into the DP in 2004.20 However, it always succeeded in getting a handful of its candidates elected, including Mićunović, by joining broad electoral coalitions (in 1996 and 2000) or having them run on the candidate list of the DP (in 2003). The Democratic Centre MPs were recruited from among the founders of the CDF. Given this personal and nominal union, it is unsurprising that the media argued that the foundation ‘grew into’ the party (Dokumentacioni centar ‘Vreme’ 2012) or that Mićunović ‘transformed’ one into the other (Vulić 2000), but the two actually

Introduction | 31

existed simultaneously. Despite being registered as a foundation, the CDF was and remained a typical project-implementing NGO. Most of its activities – debates, roundtables, educational programmes, networking, research and publishing – were elitist in the sense of targeting politicians, civil servants, intellectuals and experts, and focusing on abstract and/or state-level issues (CDF 2004). The CDF became especially important in the run-up to the regime change in 2000. By the late 1990s, the chronically fragmented opposition came to understand that it could only defeat Milošević united. As the next chapter discusses in more detail, the liberal civil society was instrumental in mediating this unification and preparing the strategy for the 2000 elections that led to Milošević’s fall. In September 1999, Mićunović initiated a series of opposition roundtables that contributed to the formation of the united Democratic Opposition of Serbia in July 2000 (Dokumentacioni centar ‘Vreme’ 2012; Spoerri 2014: 61). As he told me in an interview, he used the CDF as a ‘link’ between the emerging oppositional bloc and the NGO scene. The CDF founders were leading opposition politicians and the CDF itself had been playing, in his own words, the role of the ‘coordinator of the nongovernmental sector’ by helping to establish the Forum of Yugoslav Nongovernmental Organizations, a network of Serbian and Montenegrin NGOs (CDF 2004: 34–35). In February 2000, the Forum organized a meeting between thirty NGOs and twelve opposition parties that were also attending Mićunović’s roundtables. The attendees adopted a joint statement in which they agreed to improve their cooperation and recognized their respective roles in the preparations for the elections (Paunović 2001: 14). The NGOs were tasked with organizing the ‘get out and vote’ campaign to mobilize voters, and the CDF was one of the NGOs that directed the campaign (Paunović 2001). After the regime change, the CDF continued to implement similar kinds of projects as it had in the 1990s, funded by the EU, the Fund for an Open Society, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Canadian International Development Agency, the Olof Palme International Centre, Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy and others. Mićunović remained the organization’s president and Nataša Vučković its general secretary while also pursuing a high-profile career in politics.21 There were six workers (all but one female) plus Vučković as the de facto boss. Mićunović had his own office on the premises and his personal assistant sat with the CDF staff, but neither was involved in the NGO’s work. The management board still included a number of former or current Democrat figures. It is therefore unsurprising that those with insider knowledge of the NGO scene associated the CDF

32 | Frontiers of Civil Society

with the party. The occasional phone calls to the CDF office from people who believed they were calling the party were another vivid illustration of the close association between the two. The CDF has not been using public funds – possibly in recognition that this might be perceived as problematic due to its partisan links. When I asked the executive director Svetlana Vukomanović about cooperation with the state and parties, she said that the CDF was a ‘bit specific because of Mićun and Nataša’. However, she insisted the two did not influence any of the projects, except the Democratic Political Forum, for which they chose keynote speakers and invitees. Vukomanović further pointed out that none of the projects (except perhaps the Forum) resulted in the ‘promotion’ of the party, that none of the staff were party members and that most did not even vote for it. However, given the historical and personal connections, the perception of the CDF’s partisanship was inescapable, and one cannot exclude the possibility that it influenced funding decisions by donors keen to assist Serbia’s ‘democratic forces’. Such considerations seemed to have influenced the decision of the Slovak NGO Pontis Foundation to approach the CDF to become a partner in the project that I followed (Chapter 2).

BCIF Unusually for a Serbian NGO, BCIF was a ‘grant-making foundation’ that provided project grants and other forms of support to other NGOs, with a preference for smaller organizations unlikely to obtain assistance from other donors. BCIF was also, as its workers would say, a ‘domestic foundation’ (domaća fondacija) rather than a chapter of an international organization, and the only such private foundation focusing on civil society development. It was a large NGO by Serbian standards, with an average of fourteen full-time and two part-time workers throughout my fieldwork. In 2011, 34 per cent of associations of citizens had five or fewer workers and another 37 per cent had between six and ten workers (Civic Initiatives 2011: 46).22 BCIF’s 2010 budget of €1.35 million was huge, considering that only 5 per cent of associations reported budgets in excess of €100,000 for the same year (Civic Initiatives 2011: 102). The history of BCIF began in the United Kingdom in 1999. According to the short account that BCIF reproduced in its annual reports and website: [A] peace meeting was held at the Central Hall Westminster where Jenny Hyatt, consultant of social practice [sic] from Great Britain, spoke against the NATO bombing [of Serbia]. Thanks to her speech, more than £2,000 was collected in less than five minutes to support small local initiatives in Serbia

Introduction | 33

and Montenegro. Jenny and her colleagues – experts on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) from Great Britain – used these funds to establish the charity BCIF UK so as to secure small donations for local communities in our country. (BCIF 2005: 2)

As this shows, BCIF’s focus on ‘local communities’ (see below) originated in this formative period. The London-based BCIF UK cooperated with advisors in Serbia and Montenegro who assessed funding applications from NGOs. It ceased to work in 2005 after the Serbian BCIF had been registered – a process that its first annual report described as ‘indigenization’ (indigenizacija) (BCIF 2005: 19). It has experienced a quick and sustained expansion since then; its budget, about a half of which was disbursed in grants, grew more than fivefold in 2005–10 (BCIF 2012: 8, 10). The team grew from five permanent employees in 2004 to sixteen people in 2010, which remained the status quo during my fieldwork. They were all Serbian citizens mostly in their thirties, with a few people in their twenties or forties. About two-thirds were women and although the executive director in 2009–11 was male, his predecessor and successor as well as the two second-tier managers and most management board members were female. Many workers were born or raised in Belgrade, but a group of six originally came from western Serbia; a pair had known each other since their early childhood. Nearly everyone finished or at least started university (usually social science or humanities degrees) and had a working knowledge of English. While some people kept their private lives separate, there was a ‘social core’ of five to seven workers who shared two adjacent offices and spent a lot of their leisure together and with common friends, some of whom worked in the organization earlier or cooperated with it on a contract basis. Considering the intensity of Belgrade social (and night) life, for me this meant invaluable opportunities to join the social circle for drinks, gigs and private parties. BCIF has had the same three ‘Programmes’ since 2004. The Philanthropy Programme focused on the development of corporate and individual philanthropy (Chapter 6). The Donations Programme encompassed BCIF’s core business of grant making through several thematic programmes. The Developmental Programme, which had no staff of its own unlike the other two programmes, helped NGOs build their capacities through education, networking and exchange of experiences. The line between the latter two programmes was blurred in practice since Donations Programme grantees also received education. Among BCIF’s most generous and loyal donors were foreign private foundations, especially the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which it ‘inherited’ from BCIF UK (BCIF

34 | Frontiers of Civil Society

2005: 1). It also had a particularly good relationship with the Co-operating Netherlands Foundations for Central and Eastern Europe and the Serbian branch of the Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), which managed the entire USAID funding for Serbian ‘civil society’. BCIF was supported by a number of other official donors, private foundations, corporations and, to a lesser extent, state bodies. If I described the CDF as elitist, BCIF’s consciously built image and self-understanding was ‘populist’. As I will show more closely in Chapter 7, its mission was understood in terms of developing (local) ‘communities’. On my pre-fieldwork visit, Snežana-Andreja Arambašić, the administration and finance director, told me that BCIF wanted to reach out to organizations ‘in the regions’, unlike other donors who focused on the capital. It was different from ‘cold’ and ‘bureaucratic’ donors who only ‘look at numbers’ and expect grantees to just submit paperwork and ‘tick the boxes’ on forms. Rather, BCIF ‘works with the people’. This was not just rhetoric but ideas that BCIF workers tried to put into practice. When decisions on grants were being made, care was taken to achieve a balanced geographical representation. Applicants from rural or poor areas, or ones with few NGOs, could get extra points. Down-toearth, clear applications that demonstrated the practical importance of the project idea for locals fared better than those written in the technocratic or obscure NGO-speak. Although the workers felt that they could not communicate with applicants and grantees as much as earlier when they received fewer applications, they still endeavoured to visit each grantee NGO in person. The purpose of these monitoring trips was to assess the grantees but also to simply get to know them better. BCIF tried to keep its procedures simple, answer all questions, allow extra time for paperwork if necessary and motivate grantees with humane, informal communication rather than just money and ‘technical support’. Many grantees I interviewed appreciated this approach. Some became friends with individuals in BCIF. The foundation’s efforts to develop local fundraising (Chapter 6) and public advocacy (Chapter 7) were guided by the idea that NGOs should become more embedded in their ‘communities’ and oriented to their needs. Notwithstanding BCIF’s community focus, one comparatively small segment of its activities focused on the state with the aim of reforming the legal and institutional ‘framework’ for the activities of the NGO sector. As I will show, BCIF was part of the group of ‘frontier masters’ – NGOs and individuals with a privileged access to and influence over the post-2000 reforms of the frontier of the central state and civil society. However, unlike the CDF, BCIF had no recognizable partisan links; the nature of these social relationships will have to be interpreted in a different manner.

Introduction | 35

Outline of the Book Chapter 1 can be read as an extension of this Introduction that historicizes the discourse and practice of ‘civil society’ in Serbia in relation to major political, economic and social transformations. After an ethnographic account of the practices through which the dominant model of ‘project society’ was reproduced, a ‘strategic relational’ concept of the state is introduced to develop the Gramscian theorization of civil society as a terrain on which social forces develop political strategies oriented to the state. The chapter then discusses, in chronological order, the diverse ways in which civil society was conceived in the late socialist period, the consolidation of its dominant liberal form in an opposition to the Milošević regime, and finally in broad strokes its role in the hegemonic project of transnationalization and neoliberalization after 2000. Overall, the chapter shows that the dominant model of civil society was only one possible articulation, which reflected particular historically and socially situated political agendas rather than any transhistorical and politically neutral reality. It also documents the mobile and often ambiguous frontiers of civil society with the state, institutional politics and the economy, which problematize the liberal norms of their clear mutual separation. Part II examines the contrasting engagements of the nationalist and liberal civil societies in hegemonic struggles over transnational integration. It reveals that transnationalization was the more explicitly narrated and contested of the two central tendencies of the post-2000 hegemonic project, but also that this politicization occurred in specific selective terms. Chapter 1 shows how the NGO sector helped build the hegemony of EU integration by either actively reproducing or failing to challenge the government’s narrative about ‘Europeanization’ as the only possible path to modernity. One of the reasons for this was that the same ideological frameworks of Balkanism and transition underpinned both this modernization myth and the subject position of the liberal civil society. The latter has also become increasingly materially dependent on the EU, which imposed further constraints on the possibility of its autonomy vis-à-vis integration. Finally, the growing availability of EU funding and the expanding scope of EU-related reforms stimulated demand for NGO workers in public administration and promoted their pragmatic involvement in the hegemonic project. Chapter 2 shifts from Europeanization to a competing kind of mythology articulated by nationalist organizations and movements. It shows how the attempts to hold the Belgrade LGBT Pride Parade occasioned material and symbolic struggles over public space between the nationalists and their supporters (including the Church), on the

36 | Frontiers of Civil Society

one hand, and the alliance of the liberal civil society with the Europeanizing state, on the other. It was also an attempt to mobilize popular support through a populist articulation of the universal suffering of the ‘nation’ caused by post-Milošević restructuring. Also offering an ethnographic account of the efforts of the nationalists to hijack the celebrations of the Statehood Day, I argue that they used these practices to promote their own counterhegemonic project vision of a centralized, sovereign and neotraditionalist nation-state. At the same time, the overlaps between this vision and the supportive nationalist elements of the hegemonic project, as well as the nationalists’ own orientation to party politics, marked their project as subhegemonic rather than counterhegemonic. Their populist strategy has so far failed to articulate the ‘common interest’ of Serbian society and assemble a new power bloc, but there are signs of a broadening support. Understanding the anatomy of the Serbian nationalists’ constituency necessitates attending to complex intersections between class, gender and generation, as well as mobilizations of particular forms of affect. Part III focuses on specific reforms at the state–civil society frontier as a facet of neoliberalization, the second main tendency of the post2000 hegemonic project. Chapter 4 shows that this included, first, efforts to transfer state functions to NGOs under the rubric of ‘state–civil society partnerships’ and, second, reforms establishing a regime of regulation of the frontier that was expected to make such partnerships cost-efficient and ‘transparent’. I trace the forms of critical reasoning, institutional frameworks and technological devices used to optimize to particular traditions of neoliberal and neoclassical thought. Documenting the ways in which this agenda was embedded in the transformations of the state driven by transnational, especially EU, integration, I further confirm the mutually reinforcing relationship between the two hegemonic tendencies. Nevertheless, the NGOs that shaped these reforms also pursued political agendas related not to neoliberalism, but competition over state resources with nationalist and ‘particratic’ networks, which was itself embedded in broader post-2000 hegemonic struggles. A relatively closed and stable informal network of NGOs and NGO-affiliated individuals has dominated these reforms and national civil society policy-making more broadly, thus itself subverting the norms of market-like competition and transparency being introduced. Chapter 5 examines the reforms at the frontier with a focus on welfare state transformation and so-called ‘traditional’ organizations of people with disabilities whose continuities with associational practices in socialist Yugoslavia mark them as a post-Yugoslav kind of civil society. The partnerships agenda sought to involve them in the performance of state functions, especially provision of social services

Introduction | 37

in the context of a neoliberalizing welfare system. However, their practices were considered to be insufficiently efficient and transparent, and as such were subjected to the same kind of reforms of state funding as in Chapter 4. Disability NGOs joined reformist state bodies in the critique of ‘traditional’ organizations and stereotyped them as obsolete and unprofessional in their practices, corrupt and opposed to the new state policies towards persons with disabilities. These stereotypes served as an instrument in a political struggle between the two kinds of organizations and glossed over more complex articulations between the historical legacies of ‘traditional’ organizations’ and the current exigencies. These included adaptations to welfare restructuring, subhegemonic efforts to maintain their established roles and counterhegemonic mobilizations for the preservation of established forms of welfare provisioning. Part IV turns from the transformations of the state and its frontier with civil society to the efforts of the liberal civil society to reconfigure a broader set of social relations at both the national and subnational (‘local’) levels, including its own frontiers with the economy, institutional politics and wider society. Chapter 6 focuses on the activities of BCIF and its foreign partners oriented to the development of corporate and individual philanthropy and the capacity of NGOs for ‘fundraising from local sources’. This reflected the declining availability of foreign funding as well as a wish to avoid dependence on state funding rooted in the liberal norm of a civil society autonomous from the state. However, the turn to businesses and individual citizens as new funding sources had to address the existing popular suspicions towards both philanthropic giving and NGOs. BCIF saw a solution in a shift from ‘traditional’ philanthropic practices, based on affective appeals and fleeting engagements, to a more modern brand of ‘rational philanthropy’ conceived as a long-term investment. The norms of cost-efficiency, accountability and transparency, and the particular techniques for putting them in practice connect this model to the neoliberal reforms of the state funding of ‘civil society’ and social service provision. Another continuity with Part III is the way in which this agenda pushed for a tendential privatization of the public realm in the sense of its decollectivization and quasi-marketization. The chapter further shows that fundraising NGOs tended to combine modern and traditional philanthropic models in practice and devise their own hands-on ways of addressing the social gap separating them from popular masses. These strategies reveal the precise nature of that gap, as well as the possibilities and limits of philanthropy development as a strategy of indigenizing the liberal civil society and building a new kind of public realm.

38 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Chapter 7 examines the discourse and practice of ‘public advocacy’ – a kind of NGO intervention sponsored by foreign donors that aimed at achieving policy changes in the public interest and, in the longer term, democratizing local governance by establishing NGO-centred mechanisms of public interest representation and the mobilization of community. This amounted to an effort to establish the liberal civil society as an institutional domain capable of mediating between the society, on the one hand, and the state and institutional politics, on the other. Nevertheless, in practice, the advice given to advocating NGOs as well as the realities of local politics did not lead them to prioritize community involvement. Rather, they focused on different ways of mediating between their own interests and objectives and those of local ‘decision makers’, other NGOs and donors. The practice of advocacy thus combined the neoliberal ‘government through community’ with a multilevel, crossdomain and transnational NGO brokerage. An advocacy project in Vršac is closely analysed to show how NGO workers activated their own networks of personalistic and partisan relationships, many of which extended well beyond the ‘local’, to engage with the resilient clientelistic and cliquish alliances that dominated local politics. While this was a pragmatic strategy of accommodation, it also enabled the advocacy actors to pursue their own deeply political and in some respects counterhegemonic project of resistance to the local power bloc.

Notes 1. Notably, the European Commission releases annual ‘progress reports’ on the reforms required by Serbia’s EU integration, which is thus represented as a comprehensive modernization process. Various international organizations, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and Transparency International, publish more specific annual or ad hoc reports. Serbian media frequently report on these assessments, with a special penchant for highlighting Serbia’s ranking below African or Asian countries in some of these reports. 2. In several Serbian-language edited collections with titles like Four Years of Transition in Serbia (Begović and Mijatović 2005), Five Years of Transition in Serbia I and II (Mihailović 2005, 2006), Reforms in Serbia: Achievements and Challenges (Mijatović 2008), The Results of Transition from Socialism to Capitalism (Mihailović 2011) or Labyrinths of Transition (Stojiljković 2012), leading Serbian economists, political scientists, sociologists and other academics and experts reviewed both the specific ‘reforms’ and the overall post-2000 ‘transition’. See Uvalic (2010) for an English-language monograph reviewing economic reforms.

Introduction | 39

3. This discussion draws on Chandhoke 1995: 88–107; Keane 1988b; Terrier and Wagner 2006: 11–17. 4. See Arato 1981; Havel 1989; Ivancheva 2011; Keane 1988a; Konrád 1984; Michnik 1985; Pelczynski 1988; Rupnik 1979. 5. See also Cohen and Arato 1992: 31–36; Keane 1988b. 6. See Alcock and Scott 2002; Banks and Hulme 2012; Hulme and Edwards 1997; Leve and Karim 2001; Miorelli 2008: 111–23; Robinson 1993, 1997; Schuller 2009, 2012. 7. See Bornstein 2003; Elyachar 2005; Gill 2000: 135–54; Karim 2008; Rankin 2001; Rankin and Shakya 2007. 8. See Bernal and Grewal 2014b; Hemment 2007; Kamat 2002; Rutherford 2004; Sharma 2006. 9. See Bunce and Wolchik 2011; Fisher 2006; Forbrig and Demeš 2006; Spoerri 2014. 10. The adjective građanski means ‘civil’ or ‘civic’ as well as ‘bourgeois’ and, similarly to its equivalents in other European languages, derives from the word for ‘city’ (grad). As such, građansko društvo has somewhat wider semantic field and different (especially historical) connotations than civilno društvo, which seems to have come into common use only in the postsocialist period and is normally used in the narrow sense of the sector of ‘nongovernmental organizations’ or ‘organizations of civil society’ (always organizacije civilnog društva, never organizacije građanskog društva). 11. The ensuing discussion draws on Buttigieg 1995; Chandhoke 1995: 116–56; Crehan 2002: 102–4; Gramsci 1971; Kumar 1993: 378–80; Smith 2004. 12. Another specific and lively kind of civil society in Serbia, which is nevertheless rarely if ever discussed under that rubric, is constituted by the many organizations of war veterans of the Second World War and 1990s wars (Dokić 2017; Mikuš and Dokić 2016: 271–74). These organizations have some ideological and social links with the nationalist civil society and more recently there were also instances of cooperation with the liberal civil society (Dokić 2017: 98). Because of their continuities with the Yugoslav period (most pronounced in the case of the organizations of Second World War veterans, but less directly present also in those of the veterans of the 1990s wars), they could also be considered a part of what I called the post-Yugoslav civil society. Nevertheless, as Goran Dokić’s work shows, they are distinguished by the specific social interests and constituencies that they seek to represent, which also inform the political agendas that they pursue in relation to the state. 13. See also Narotzky and Smith (2006: 2–4) for their related ‘historical realist’ perspective and the recent calls for a greater engagement with global history and economics in economic anthropology (Hann and Hart 2011; Hart and Ortiz 2014). 14. These included: various NGO documents related to the studied projects (concept papers, application forms, assessment sheets, reports, budgets, training agendas and handouts, and PowerPoint presentations); other NGO documents (strategic plans, annual reports, press releases, organograms, leaflets, booklets, publications, newsletters and websites); government documents (strategies, policy papers, action plans, statistical, analytical and other reports, budgets, guidelines for NGOs applying for funding and attendance lists); laws and other norms; newspaper, magazine and online articles; nationalist leaflets, websites, social media contents, newsletters and magazines; similar materials produced by associations of disabled people; graffiti, billboards, posters and stickers; TV news, advertisements and shows; online videos; documentary and feature films. 15. BCIF changed its name to the Trag (‘Trace’) Foundation in 2013. I use the old name as I deal with the pre-2013 incarnation of the organization. Also, I write the word ‘BCIF’ without the definite article since those working in or familiar with BCIF used it as an acronym (pronounced approximately as /b’tsi:f/) rather than an initialism.

40 | Frontiers of Civil Society

16. This term refers to the part of Serbia outside of the autonomous provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. It is not an administrative entity. 17. Mićunović has been a member (and at times the president) of the parliament, either of the rump Yugoslavia or Serbia as its constituent part, from 1990 up to the time of my fieldwork. 18. The name changed to its present form in 1997 (CDF 1999). 19. Mićunović received only 87,000 votes when he ran as the Democratic Centre candidate for the president of Serbia in 1997. When he tried again in 2003 as the candidate of the united Democratic Opposition of Serbia (with the DP as its backbone), he received almost 900,000 votes. 20. Mićunović then became the President of the Political Committee of the DP – an office he still holds at the time of writing. 21. After advising Mićunović while he served as the president of the federal parliament in 2000–03, Vučković became a DP member of the Belgrade city parliament in 2004 and a member of the national parliament in 2007. She has also held various party offices and was elected as the party’s vice president in 2011. 22. This comparison is not ideal, as BCIF was legally not an association of citizens, but rather a foundation, which is a rarer legal form of NGOs in Serbia. However, I am not aware of a representative survey on Serbian foundations comparable with the 2011 Civic Initiatives survey on associations (Civic Initiatives 2011).

– Chapter 1 –

HISTORICIZING ‘CIVIL SOCIETY’ Hegemonic Struggles and State Transformation after Tito

_ In November 2011, some fifteen people met in a boardroom of the Serbian branch of the American NGO Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC), which has managed the entire USAID funding for Serbian ‘civil society’ for the previous ten years. There was a single point on the agenda – to determine the 2011 ‘CSO Sustainability Index’ for Serbia. ‘CSO’ stands for ‘civil society organizations’ and the Index is produced each year according to a USAID methodology. Serbia’s scores feature in the annual CSO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia, a geographical catchall for postsocialist states in Europe and the former Soviet Union. The report for 2011 claims that the index measures the ‘strength and overall viability of CSO sectors’ (USAID 2012: i) or ‘civil society sectors’ (USAID 2012: 223), but more often it refers to its subject simply as ‘civil society’. Curiously, it does not define any of these terms, though a footnote implies that they are somehow broader than the category of ‘NGO’ (USAID 2012: i). The NGO network National Coalition for Decentralization, which received 88 per cent of its revenues in 2011–13 from USAID/ISC (NCD n.d.: 2), was in charge of the Serbian assessment exercise. It was theoretically responsible for convening a ‘panel of at least eight representatives of a diverse range of CSOs and related experts’ (USAID 2012: 223). The panel was supposed to include representatives of ‘local CSOs’ and ‘think tanks’, but also ‘community-based organizations’, ‘faith-based organizations’, ‘academia’, ‘CSO partners from the government, business or media’, ‘member associations’ and ‘international donors’ (USAID 2012: 225). However, a large majority of – 41 –

42 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the organizations on the 2011 panel – nine out of eleven – was of the kind that the participants themselves would describe as ‘nongovernmental organizations’. In terms of Serbian law, these are formally registered as ‘associations of citizens’, ‘foundations’ or ‘endowments’. But, as noted in the previous chapter, the native category of ‘NGO’ (or ‘civil society’, for that matter) is limited to a particular kind of associations and foundations: collectives of professionals established in the postsocialist period and focused on ‘implementing projects’. Such organizations channel the liberal agendas of their mostly Western funders: human rights advocacy, civil society building, monitoring state institutions, EU integration, and decentralization. Even NGOs specializing in, say, environment protection evoke such overarching objectives of transition in their statements of ‘mission’ and ‘vision’. In addition to sharing this general profile, four of the nine NGOs on the panel were members of the National Coalition for Decentralization and four other were what is often described as ‘leading’ (vodeće) NGOs: the largest, best-endowed, most visible and most influential NGOs working at the national level. The other two organizations represented were the government’s Office for Cooperation with Civil Society and a professional (journalist) association with social and political links to the NGO sector. The panel members generally seemed to know each other well: they addressed each other with the informal pronoun ti, first names and even nicknames. The meeting was chaired by Predrag,1 successful NGO consultant, coach and facilitator with strong links to the National Coalition for Decentralization and one of the NGOs on the panel. In the beginning, as if to anchor the discussion, he read out this definition of ‘civil society organizations’ written on a flipchart: [B]oth formal and informal organizations that are not part of the government, do not distribute their profits to directors or employees, manage their own affairs, and in which participation is a matter of choice . . . This definition thus includes private nonprofit service providers, schools, advocacy groups, agencies for social service provision, poverty reduction groups, development agencies, professional associations, organizations dedicated to social development, unions, religious (church) institutions, cultural institutions and many others.

However, the ensuing two-hour discussion was limited almost entirely to the experience of NGOs. There was not a single mention of labour unions, schools or churches. This was hardly surprising as such organizations were simply not represented, either directly or indirectly. In fact, a representative of one of the ‘leading’ NGOs noted

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 43

in the beginning that the scores only pertained to organizations established since the 1990s – there was a large part of the ‘sector’ with older origins ‘but we don’t know much about them’. I commented that the entire Index with categories such as ‘advocacy’ or ‘service delivery’ did not reflect their specific experience, which is the subject of Chapter 5. The woman retorted slightly impatiently that it did apply to them equally well; ‘we’ just did not know their situation. As this vignette suggests, the narrowness of the native concept of ‘civil society’ had not gone unnoticed and attempts were being made to rectify it, often with the aid of references to definitions used by USAID, the EU or the Council of Europe. However, despite evoking a very inclusive definition of civil society, the NGO-dominated panel excluded the voices of most other actors of that civil society precisely as it went about producing its authoritative representations. The scope of civil society was further limited in some less obvious ways: it was defined as consisting of organizations and as nongovernment and nonprofit, and hence clearly distinct from both the state and the economy. The assessment’s focus on the numeric measurement of indicators of sustainability – the assignment, aggregation and final consensual ‘adjustments’ of single-decimal values from zero to seven – showed that civil society was approached as a development project and technical, almost scientific intervention, not unlike the other kinds of ‘reforms’ in Serbia. The discussion revolved around the calibration of the 2011 scores in relation to those in previous years and other postsocialist countries, especially ones seen as even more delayed on their transitional pathway (think Albania). The objective was to create the ‘right’ representation for the foreign donor audience: one that would not appear to complain unrealistically, that would reflect the progress that must have resulted from all the past assistance, but that would also communicate that further help was needed.

Beyond ‘Project Society’: A Relational Approach to the State and Civil Society This episode may seem to suggest that the idea of civil society took a rather peculiar form in postsocialist Serbia. However, the scholarship discussed in the previous chapter documents the proliferation of similar models and practices in many other parts of the world after the Cold War. The USAID Sustainability Index illustrates particularly clearly the ahistorical nature of this concept of civil society. While concerned with differences between civil societies in various coun-

44 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tries, it treats civil society itself as a universal that is essentially the same anytime and anywhere. It can be decomposed into the same set of attributes, measured by indicators and compared in an evolutionary framework. But as USAID grants control over the assessment to its local clients, the ‘civil society’ being represented is actually a highly particular one in historical, political and social terms. This book turns this dominant model of civil society on its head. Instead of accepting its pretensions at timeless validity, it historicizes its emergence and development in Serbia. To do this, it also needs to problematize the way in which the dominant model assumes a clean separation of civil society and the state (and the economy). This obviously calls for a concept of the state. In the Introduction, I argued that anthropology should engage with more systemic and critical materialist perspectives on the state to counterbalance the one-sided emphasis on its discursive and cultural deconstruction, and enable an anthropological study of the relationships between states and wider social formations. I find Jessop’s (1990, 2008) ‘strategic-relational approach’ to the state useful for these purposes. Its condensed exposition might start with the preliminary ‘rational abstraction’ of the state as a ‘distinct ensemble of institutions and organizations whose socially accepted function is to define and enforce collectively binding decisions on a given population in the name of their “common interest”’ (Jessop 2008: 9). This definition rejects the Foucaultian reduction of the state to an idea and balances the emphasis on the dispersion of state organizations with some room for their potential integration. But Jessop does absorb the lessons of poststructuralism by arguing that the integration of state organizations is deeply problematic, that statal operations depend on a variety of social institutions and dispersed ‘micro-political practices’, and that boundaries between the state and political, economic and other orders are contested and unstable. He also recognizes that the precise content of the social purpose of the state is defined discursively and that ‘common interest’ is inherently illusory since it always marginalizes and privileges particular interests (Jessop 2008: 9–11). I find it useful to read this carefully qualified concept of the state alongside its more explicit relational and materialist theorization that Jessop formulated in his earlier work. He defined the state as a ‘system of strategic selectivity’: a system whose structure and modus operandi are more open to some types of political strategy than others. Thus a given type of state, a given state form, a given form of regime, will be more accessible to some forces than others according to the strategies they adopt to gain state power; and it will be more suited to the pursuit of some types of economic or political strategy than oth-

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 45

ers because of the modes of intervention and resources which characterise that system. (Jessop 1990: 260)

The state is both the object and site of political struggles, such as those between its different branches. Its current strategic selectivity is in part the product of past political strategies, which could have been developed within and/or at a distance from the state system and oriented to its maintenance or transformation. In turn, the subjects operating on the strategic terrain of the state are in part constituted by its own strategic selectivity (Jessop 1990: 260–61). This chapter uses this concept of the state for a historical account of Serbian civil society that describes, in broad strokes, its role in two hegemonic projects of state transformation that were formally inaugurated by regime changes in the early 1990s and 2000, but had been in the making for some time before then. The title refers to the 1980 death of the lifelong Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito, which is a conventional symbolic marker for the beginning of Yugoslavia’s unravelling as well as one of its enabling conditions. Building on my overall theoretical framework, I understand civil society as the field of practices that translate social antagonisms into subject positions, merge the latter in narratives of ‘common interest’ and reproduce as well as transform hegemonic mechanisms of domination – broadly accepted ideas and enactments of the nature and purpose of the social order and its constituent parts. In more strategic-relational terms, civil society is the wider terrain (beyond the state system, i.e. Gramsci’s state in a narrow sense) in which social forces develop and pursue political strategies vis-à-vis the state, reflecting its structural modalities and the sedimentation of past hegemonic struggles.

Civil Society in Late Socialist Yugoslavia In the 1990s, it had become commonplace to argue that the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY), like all ‘totalitarian’ socialist regimes, was entirely devoid of ‘civil society’ (Stubbs 2001: 91). An exception was typically only granted to Slovenia where critical intellectuals in the 1980s, in a conversation with prominent Western scholars like John Keane, appropriated the then voguish terms ‘civil society’ and ‘new social movements’ for antiestablishment groups and movements with which they sympathized (Blair 1986: 49; Mastnak 1992, 1994: 96, 2005: 342; Pavlović 1995: 33–34). This narrative is

46 | Frontiers of Civil Society

flawed in two important respects. First, in 1980s Yugoslavia, the idea of civil society has spread well beyond Slovenia in the discourses of intellectuals and emergent environmental, feminist, human rights and peace groupings and youth countercultures in the major urban centres: Belgrade, Sarajevo and Zagreb (Stubbs 2007a: 217–18). Civil society served as a conceptual and mobilizing device in political debates and initiatives that sought a reform of the Yugoslav socialist order, in particular its one-party rule. In Eastern Europe at the time, civil society was evoked in a variety of modes, some of which stressed values of social equality and community and aimed at a radical democratization of actually existing socialism (Baker 1999; Ost 2005). In Yugoslavia, too, some critical intellectuals and political activists, including reformist Slovenian Communists (Mastnak 1992: 56–57), envisaged socialist forms of civil society. Mihailo Marković (1981), Serbian philosopher and member of the Praxis school, criticized the unfreedom of civil society under both ‘bourgeois democracy’ and ‘real socialism’, and called for its full liberation in a democratic socialist framework. Laslo Sekelj (1987), Serbian sociologist and another Praxis member, argued that a specifically socialist civil society based on the principle of self-organization was a way out of Yugoslavia’s crisis, which was caused by the domination of the political over the economic and the social. Others, including Serbian intellectuals and future anti-Milošević and liberal politicians Zoran Đinđić (1987) and Vesna Pešić (1987), believed that what they defined as the collectivist ideology of socialism and the individualist liberal idea of civil society were inherently incompatible, and made it clear that they preferred the latter and its emphasis on individual rights and liberties. Both have also articulated their conviction that civil society could only coexist with a capitalist market economy. Crucially, however, these varied perspectives shared with one another and the wider European conversation about civil society a strong normative concern with its autonomy from the state. As expressed by Tomaž Mastnak (quoted in Blair 1986: 49), Slovenian sociologist and civil society ideologue, Yugoslav intellectuals saw the nascent sphere of civic self-organization as ‘facilitat[ing], in a curious way, the formation of a state which is differentiated from civil society’, with that distinction being previously absent in Yugoslavia. In other words, there was a controversy over the possibility of a socialist civil society, but the state/civil society distinction itself was treated as a reality to be achieved through reformist or revolutionary politics. The explicit discourse of civil society was thereby already at this stage wedded to an agenda of democratization while still accommo-

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 47

dating multiple visions and strategies for its attainment – liberal as well as socialist. The second and more substantial issue with the narrative about nonexistent Yugoslav civil society is that civil society in a more inclusive sense actually ‘thrived’ in Yugoslavia (Stubbs 2001: 93). The unique features of the Yugoslav Communist party-state – its ‘corporatist structures, limited pluralism, relaxed cultural policies, a measure of charismatic leadership and highly selective repression’ (Vladisavljević 2008: 49) – made it more tolerant and even encouraging of spaces of social autonomy than other socialist regimes. The power of the party and its fusion with the state were more curtailed than in the Soviet bloc, and increasingly so as the system evolved (Goati 1986; Vladisavljević 2008: 30–39). Since the break with the Soviet Union in 1948, official rhetoric has consistently emphasized decentralization, economic liberalization and de-etatization expected to lead to the eventual ‘withering away’ of the state. The key idea bringing these visions together was ‘self-management’ – a democratic worker control of production, distribution and consumption processes that was never fully realized in practice (Lydall 1984; Musić 2011; Rusinow 1977; Woodward 1995b). Nevertheless, the system did create, especially from the early 1970s onwards, a corporatist kind of civil society, organized partly from above but allowing for some effective popular participation in deliberation in various spheres of the socialist system (Jalušič 2001; Stubbs 2001: 93–94). Yugoslav civil society included several kinds of formal organizations: worker councils in ‘social’ enterprises, self-managing communities of interest, local communities2 and large numbers of what could be retroactively described as NGOs – associations of citizens and social organizations. Serbia had about 18,000 of these two types of organizations in 1990 (Paunović 1997), of which about 4,200 were still active in late 2011 (Civic Initiatives 2011: 13). My NGO interlocutors tended to characterize these organizations en bloc as ‘governmental nongovernmental organizations’.3 However, my own findings about socialist-period associations of disabled people, discussed in Chapter 5, indicate that the authorities granted a considerable degree of autonomy and support to organizations whose purpose and activities were not openly political. What is more, from the 1970s onwards, professional associations in the welfare and health sectors started to point to the inadequacies of service provision, while women’s and youth organizations, formally linked to the party, also assumed more autonomous roles (Stubbs 2001: 93–94, 2007b: 166–67). Social interests, demands and critiques of the system were also articulated

48 | Frontiers of Civil Society

through a number of other, more or less institutionalized avenues, such as relatively frequent strikes, student revolts and rich cultural and intellectual scenes, ranging from alternative arts to nationalist dissent (Bokovoy, Irvine and Lilly 1997; Carter 1982; Dragović-Soso 2002; Greenberg 2014: 26–29).

Social Discontent and Miloševic´’s Hegemonic Project A massive wave of worker strikes and popular demonstrations in late 1980s Serbia represented a partial break with the established pattern of a politically conformist civil society. Their scale and radicalism were unprecedented even in the relatively permissive Yugoslav context. The euphoric ‘rallies’ (mitinzi), which in some cases brought together hundreds of thousands of people, culminated in the so-called ‘antibureaucratic revolution’ in 1988–89 during which Milošević, who had been the leader of the Serbian Communist party since 1986, consolidated his power. Some accounts emphasized the ethnonationalist character of this broad social movement and linked it to the alleged hegemonic aspirations of Serbs within the federation (Cohen 2001: 57–88; Pavlowitch 2002: 184–98). The protests were also characterized as orchestrated by Belgrade nationalist dissidents and their allies in the Serbian leadership (Cohen 2001: 62–78; Gagnon 2004: 67). Nebojša Vladisavljević (2008) offered a well-substantiated account that complicates both of these claims. The protests actually responded to two sets of issues: the problems of Kosovo Serbs and the deepening economic crisis. It was only quite late (in the early spring of 1989) that a decisive shift to nationalist themes occurred. Furthermore, the protests were initially organized from below. Only during the ‘antibureaucratic revolution’ were there instances of topdown mobilization when authorities provided logistical support for the protesters and instructed party-controlled media to publish positive coverage. Starting in 1985, Kosovo Serbs, an ethnic minority in Serbia’s Autonomous Province of Kosovo, had been protesting, initially by means of petitions and letters to authorities and later rallies, against the discrimination, intimidation and acts of violence perpetrated against them by Kosovo Albanians. This was a genuine problem that was nevertheless soon wildly exaggerated by the Belgrade media (Vladisavljević 2008: 86–87). Belgrade nationalist intellectuals were also supporting these complaints and demands (Dragović-Soso 2002: 115–61). The Kosovo Serbs’ protests in Belgrade and across Kosovo

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 49

grew larger, more frequent and more radical from 1986 onwards (Vladisavljević 2008: 91–94, 109–45). The 1980s crisis, simultaneously economic and political, was one of the major contributing factors to the SFRY’s demise whose complex root causes I cannot do justice to (see Bieber, Galijaš and Archer 2016; Cohen and Dragović-Soso 2008; Ramet 2002). Yugoslavia has been experiencing a process of reperipheralization since the 1970s as a result of contradictions between, on the one hand, its developmental and governmental models and the class alliances formed around them, and, on the other hand, the radically changed conditions in the global political economy (Schierup 1992, 1999). Faced with a massive and increasingly unmanageable foreign debt, the federal government has implemented, since 1982 and with International Monetary Fund (IMF) guidance, macroeconomic stabilization policies of austerity, marketization and trade and price liberalization (Dyker 1990: 114–54; Woodward 1995a: 47–81, 1995b: 345–70). These reforms can be seen as initiating the transition to capitalism at earnest, problematizing the conventional epochal view of transition in Eastern Europe as beginning suddenly and only after the formal end of socialism and oneparty rule in 1989–90. Despite or perhaps because of these policies, the debt, unemployment and inflation rate continued to grow. Loss of jobs, price hikes, and wage and income restrictions reduced living standards by one-third between 1979 and 1988, compounded by rationing of electricity, petrol, flour and sugar (Vladisavljević 2008: 46). The increasingly heated discussions between the federal and republican leaderships over systemic reforms exacerbated the already well-advanced political conflict. Both domestic and foreign actors increasingly framed the crisis and the real or perceived distributional inequalities between the republics and regions in nationalist terms, thus contributing to an ethnicization of social discontent. In Serbia proper, unemployment hovered at 17–18 per cent, well above the Yugoslav average (Woodward 1995a: 64). According to a 1983 poll, only 16 per cent of Belgraders could cover their living expenses with their earnings, while 46 per cent said they could only do so with great difficulty (Dragović-Soso 2002: 66). Although worker strikes had previously not been uncommon, the crisis provoked their escalation countrywide (Liotta 2001; Marinković 1995: 83; Vladisavljević 2008: 112). In the summer of 1988, workers from Serbia and other republics started to stage protests in Belgrade, thus targeting federal authorities. Participants demanded higher salaries and subsidies for their firms, and called for measures against corrupt or unsuccessful managers and other officials.

50 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Neither the workers nor the Kosovo Serbs challenged the legitimacy of the state and the party. On the contrary, they employed official symbolism widely. What they were calling for was a reform of the socialist order and federation. This remained true during the antibureaucratic revolution that unfolded between September 1988 and January 1989 in Serbia proper, Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro. While Milošević and his faction in the Serbian leadership had initially been merely tolerant of the protests, they started to openly support them in September 1988. The ensuing rallies were even larger and often, though not always, (co-)organized by authorities. This support was motivated by the fact that the protesters targeted the leaderships of Vojvodina, Kosovo and Montenegro because of their opposition to the Serbian leadership’s calls for the recentralization of Serbia,4 eventually forcing them to resign. The participants included Kosovo Serbs and their supporters, workers, students and the general public. Their varying demands came to be framed by the overarching populist theme of people struggle against the hated high officials, branded variously as ‘bureaucrats’, careerists (foteljaši, lit. ‘armchairers’), ‘red bourgeoisie’ and, in the case of the Vojvodina leaders, ‘autonomists’. This was the lowest common denominator on which all the groups could agree as an explanation of their various grievances while also conforming to the official Yugoslav mythology of people power (Vladisavljević 2008: 170–76). The combination of crisis conditions and extraordinary popular mobilizations would seem to define the antibureaucratic revolution as a ‘war of manoeuvre’ in Gramsci’s (1971: 106–14, 206–7, 229–39) terms, that is, a sudden ‘frontal attack’ on the state. However, this is complicated by its restorative rather than revolutionary objectives and the fact that Milošević and his associates (a faction of state elites) ultimately co-opted it for their own agenda of eliminating political foes and centralizing their control over the rump Yugoslavia. These are features more consistent with the idea of an elite-led ‘passive revolution’ (Gramsci 1971: 106–14, 229–39). Milošević’s expressions of sympathy for the protests and the demagogic addresses he delivered at some of them made him popular in a manner that few Yugoslav Communist leaders had enjoyed. Outspoken and exuding an air of sincerity, he perfected a posture of the charismatic protector of popular classes against the alienated bureaucracy. This was a significant innovation on the formal and secretive style of erstwhile Communists. So was Milošević’s embrace of nationalism that, aided by the propaganda in the state-controlled media, redefined ‘ordinary people’ as ordinary Serbs. Unlike leaders in the other republics, Milošević could not adopt a nationalist po-

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 51

sition to criticize the federal government over the unpopular austerity measures because the antifederal rhetoric was anti-Belgrade and anti-Serb. He therefore combined the populist opposition to ‘bureaucrats’ with a more subtle nationalist register of victimization. Adopting the language of Serbian nationalist dissidents, he evoked huge sacrifices that Serbs had made for Yugoslavia in both World Wars, only to be supposedly discriminated against afterwards. Since the republics were generally perceived as ‘national homelands’, the fact that more than a third of Serbs lived outside of Serbia and that the Serbian government could not impose its decisions on the Vojvodina and Kosovo provinces was easily presented as an injustice. The cause of Kosovo Serbs added to this defensive and righteous brand of nationalism. The regime media accordingly branded the mass happenings ‘rallies of truth’ and ‘rallies of solidarity’, implying that they exposed a muted truth about injustices against Serbs. However, Milošević’s earlier biography as a committed communist and his aboutfaces in the 1990s suggest that his nationalism was an instrument rather than a mission. His nationalist and populist strategy helped him construct a broad social coalition of: Serb nationalists of all social strata, both anti-communist and communist; unskilled and semiskilled workers; police; junior army officers of predominantly Serbian nationality; anti-Titoists purged from the party in campaigns that included a hint of anti-Serb bias (especially in 1948–49, 1966, and 1972); country people; and local party bosses. (Woodward 1995a: 93)

Milošević thus succeeded in articulating most forms of dissent – elite as well as popular, based on nationalist fears as well as socioeconomic grievances – into a single hegemonic project of Serbian ethnonational empowerment and social justice. In a characteristically populist manner, differences and inequalities within the ranks of ‘the people’ were suppressed in a narrative about a common identity, common sense of deprivation (Comaroff 2011: 104–7) and, in Gramscian terms, ‘common interest’ of Serbian society. In line with the idea of the strategic selectivity of the state, Milošević’s strategy also succeeded in taking control over the late socialist state because it tapped into its key institutional resources (the party, the media, the military and the secret services) and mobilized broad popular masses, including workers with their ideological importance for state legitimacy. Accordingly, after Milošević had created his Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS) in 1990 as the heir to the Communist party, it styled itself as a conservative, moderate and centrist force. Its campaign before the first multiparty elections in December 1990 made vague promises of stability, social

52 | Frontiers of Civil Society

security and political change to ‘modern federalism’ and electoral democracy (Gagnon 2004: 88–102; Woodward 1995a: 121). Milošević won the presidential election easily with 65 per cent of the vote, while the SPS took 194 seats in the 250-seat parliament.

Building and Maintaining Political Capitalism During the 1990s, the form of the Serbian state changed from a late socialist federation to a capitalist nation-state. In the absence of a coherent public narrative about what kind of state and society Serbia was becoming, the transformation was a largely a subterranean, creeping ‘passive revolution’ defined by the composition and strategies of the hegemonic forces, particularly the SPS, which inherited its organizational infrastructure, cadre and control of the state apparatus from the Communist party (Pavlaković 2005: 23). This gave a strongly ‘political’ and informalized flavour to the emergent forms of capitalism and statecraft. The semiauthoritarian regime relied on nationalist and populist modes of legitimation, as well as control of the media and much of the economy, to maintain the loyalty of its predominantly working-class and state-dependent social base. But the initial legitimacy was gradually eroded as mass impoverishment deepened and Milošević diluted his already hazy ideological programme through pragmatic adjustments to the quickly evolving military and foreign-political context. After the 1990 elections and the dissolution of the SFRY (formally sealed in 1992), Milošević established in the rump Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY), with Serbia and its satellite Montenegro as the only constituent republics,5 a regime that political scientists describe as ‘hybrid’ or ‘competitive authoritarianism’ (Gould and Sickner 2008; Levitsky and Way 2002; Vladisavljević 2016). A façade of democracy was preserved – there was political pluralism, some media independent from the government, and formal democratic procedures including partially free elections. However, Milošević’s rule was highly personalized: he was the power centre, disregarding his formal office in any given moment. Security and intelligence services and regime-friendly criminal networks intimidated and brutalized opposition leaders while the state media denigrated them. The regime also attempted to rig elections in 1996 and 2000. The official rhetoric and symbolism expressed a great deal of continuity with socialism, including relatively extensive welfare rights (Arandarenko and Golicin 2007: 168–69; Pavlaković 2005: 19). Unlike

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 53

the new Slovenian and Croatian constitutions, the 1990 Constitution adopted a decidedly nonethnic definition of citizenship (Vasiljević 2011). However, a huge gap separated the law and rhetoric from everyday life. Formal rights meant little in the context of economic degradation and mass impoverishment. The new public culture emphasized themes of Serb national identity, rediscovered or invented traditions and Serbian Orthodox Christianity (Blagojević 2006; Gordy 1999; Živković 2011). Vojvodina and Kosovo had already been deprived of their autonomous status in 1990. Serbia became the state of the Serb nation in all but law. During the wars in Croatia (1991–95), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–95) and Kosovo (1998–99), nationalism, which had driven some of the spontaneous mass mobilizations in the 1980s, increasingly became the regime’s instrument of demobilization (Gagnon 2004). Serbian citizens did not exactly rush to fight for a Great Serbia. In 1991, the Yugoslav People’s Army (Jugoslavenska narodna armija, JNA) transferred its allegiance from the Yugoslav federation to the Milošević regime. It fought on the Serb side in Croatia and Bosnia until it officially withdrew from both republics in 1992. But the mobilization of JNA reservists in Serbia and Montenegro faced massive evasion and desertions from the very start (Backović, Vasić and Vasović 1998). Some 300,000 people, mostly young men, were estimated to have emigrated by 1994 to avoid conscription and mobilization (Aleksov 1994: 26). The regime used nationalist rhetoric as a strategy of demobilization when faced with popular, often antiwar protests at home. It called for a national unity against external enemies, stereotyped as ‘“separatist” Slovenians, “irredentist” Albanians, “fascist” Croats or “fundamentalist” Muslims’ (Vasiljević 2011: 11), and denounced the opposition and protesters as ‘traitors’. But when it needed to mobilize voters, it presented itself as moderate and preoccupied with the economy, welfare and peace. Although it had initially supported the Serb armies in Croatia and Bosnia, it started to abandon them by 1994. As a result, much of the opposition adopted a self-defeating strategy of nationalist overbidding (Stojanović 2000). The SPS orchestrated the transformation of Serbia’s social order to a patronage-based and criminalized form of capitalism. A de facto shift to capitalism had already occurred with the reforms of the last Yugoslav government in 1989–90, which dismantled the system of self-management and legalized the privatization of public property (Woodward 1995b: 280, 351). Even though regime rhetoric preferred to emphasize continuities with socialism, the 1990 Constitution, which remained in force until 2006, formalized the shift to capital-

54 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ism by eliminating ‘socialist’ from the name of the state and instituting the liberty and legal equality of private ownership and business, though without scrapping ‘social’ property. A new entrepreneurial elite would gradually emerge and command political influence, but initially it was mainly the former Communist nomenclature that succeeded in entering the ranks of the new economic and political elites in and around SPS and its satellite, the misnamed Yugoslav Left (JUL) led by Milošević’s wife Mira Marković (Gagnon 2004: 118–19; Lazić 2000; Sörensen 2003: 74).6 These people used their political power and connections to capture public property through insider privatization and primitive accumulation-like processes. In 1994, the ‘social’ enterprises privatized by the federal reforms were ‘resocialized’, while some companies that were still ‘social’ were directly nationalized (Lazic and Sekelj 1997). Both moves empowered the regime to appoint its clients as managers and executive board members, and let them loot the enterprises (Miljković and Hoare 2005; Palairet 2001: 910–14). Clientelistic and criminal networks, linked mostly to the SPS and the JUL, also penetrated the public administration, judiciary and security forces. Early on, Jadwiga Staniszkis (1991) used the term ‘political capitalism’ for the system resulting from a similar conversion of nomenclature into private owners in Poland in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was later argued that political capitalism was more suitable as a category for postsocialist Russia and China than East-Central Europe (Eyal, Szelényi and Townsley 1998). Various analytical distinctions were also made, for example, between ‘partially appropriated states’ and ‘clan-states’ (Wedel 2003). The degrees and forms in which politics and capital in postsocialist societies were entangled inevitably varied, but the common characteristic that the concept of political capitalism serves to flag up is that it was generally more direct and naked than in consolidated capitalist liberal democracies and that capital was initially much less autonomous in relation to politics. The point is not that other forms of capitalism are somehow not political, but that their relationship with politics tends to be more socially indirect, culturally mediated and institutionalized. I prefer this concept to that of ‘state-centred capitalism’ used by the Serbian sociologists Mladen Lazić and Jelena Pešić (2012: 23) to highlight a ‘centrality of the state in the total social life’ not only under Milošević but also during the entire development of modern Serbia. In my view, this misrepresents the state as unitary and as an actor in its own right rather than the heterogeneous ensemble and object of social struggles that it is.

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 55

A more accurate way of understanding the ‘centrality’ of the state under Milošević is that the Communists cum capitalists preserved some of their allocative power at the same time as they drained its resources (Verdery 1996: 213). This strategy allowed the regime to combine elite self-enrichment with the support or at least pacification of the working and middle classes. After the United Nations (UN) had imposed economic sanctions on Serbia for its involvement in wars in the other post-Yugoslav states, the government adopted a law that prevented the enterprises from laying workers off; instead, they had to send them on ‘forced vacation’ and continue to pay their salaries and social contributions (Pošarac 1995: 331; Uvalic 2010: 64, 68). Its grip on the economy also enabled the regime to keep down the prices of electricity, housing, heating and other essential goods, and redistribute much of the national income to the population, often in nonmonetary forms (Lazić 2011: 78). Until the Kosovo War, the wars avoided Serbia’s territory but still shaped these developments. The sanctions contributed to the informalization and criminalization of the economy (Andreas 2005; Spoerri 2014: 104–7). To engage in profitable embargo busting on a larger scale, criminal networks needed official patronage, for which they paid ‘tributes’ to the regime (Sörensen 2009: 167–82). The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing, causing damage estimated at $30 billion, completed the general devastation (Grupa 17 1999). Predictably, industrial output, employment, real wages and the entire formal sector plummeted. By 2000, Serbia’s real gross domestic product (GDP) was about a half of its 1989 level and the average net salary was 95 Deutschmarks (Uvalic 2012).

The Other Serbia Serbian ‘civil society’ in the sense reproduced by the USAID sustainability assessment has assumed its defining characteristics in opposition to the Milošević regime. As noted above, there were what could be retroactively described as NGOs already in Yugoslavia. However, the type of organizations that Serbians commonly recognize and describe as ‘nongovernmental organizations’ or ‘(organizations of) civil society’ only originated from the 1990s onwards, while Yugoslavperiod organizations and more recent ones following the same template are usually labelled ‘associations (of citizens)’.7 For example, a 1995 article about the ‘nonprofit/voluntary sector’ in Serbia and Montenegro admitted that there were various ‘relatively autonomous . . .

56 | Frontiers of Civil Society

associations of citizens’ in Yugoslavia, but maintained that a true civil society only appeared with the ‘new groups and social movements’ in the 1980s (Stanisavljević 1995: 98–99). Sociologist Sreten Vujović ([1992] 2002: 77) similarly argued that a ‘separation of the state from civil society’ occurred as ‘citizens form new associations [and] new social movements (peace, environmental, feminist, urban)’ in response to state dysfunctionality and corruption. The dominant discourse therefore continued the tendency to dichotomize civil society and the state, and restrict the former to particular kinds of organizations and agendas. In the introduction to the landmark edited collection Repressed Civil Society, political scientist Vukašin Pavlović (1995: 12–13) described his contacts with British political theorist John Keane starting in the 1980s and Keane’s key role in enabling a British-Serbian research project that led to the publication.8 Indeed, Pavlović’s (1995: 19) discussion of ‘five models of the relationship of civil society and the state’, which he describes as stemming from the ‘history of liberal political thought’ and concerned with ‘the establishment of a boundary between nonstate and state spheres’, is fully based on Keane (1988a: 35–52).9 In effect, he limits civil society theory to liberal political theory – he dismisses Marx’s critique of civil society as contradictory and erroneous (Pavlović 1995: 25–28) and does not even mention Gramsci. What he presents under the neutral heading of ‘contemporary concept of civil society’ is an unmistakably liberal concept, based on private property, separation from the state and politics, and ‘collective action not based on politics and class’ (Pavlović 1995: 30). At different points, he also makes the standard neoliberal critique of contemporary Western states as ‘interventionist’ and ‘too expensive’, and suggests that the limited degree of privatization of the Serbian economy is detrimental to civil society (Pavlović 1995: 31–32, 39). The discourse on civil society thus already combined classical liberal and neoliberal emphases in this period. The liberal model of civil society has clearly become triumphant in the 1990s. At the same time, foreign donors and their local beneficiaries framed the provision of funding to antiregime NGOs and NGO/ movement hybrids in terms of aid to ‘civil society’. The effect was to increasingly replace the politically diverse and potentially radical late socialist visions of civil society with its notion as an instrument of liberal democratic state building under international guidance. The characteristically liberal political concerns, such as those with individual rights and liberties, the rule of law or self-regulating markets, were retained as compatible with this framing and privileged.

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 57

The emergent liberal civil society was (self-)defined as a force that protested against the regime’s involvement in the wars, documented human rights abuses, criticized the violations of democratic rules and nationalist and populist rhetoric, and often worked closely with the opposition. In response, the regime media stigmatized NGOs as ‘enemies of the Serbian nation’, ‘foreign mercenaries’ and ‘domestic betrayers’, which has had a lasting impact on how many Serbians perceive NGOs (see Chapter 6). ‘Civil society’ thus came to denote a specific subject position that was in an antagonistic relationship to the regime and other subject positions. Its meaning and membership closely overlapped with the societal opposition to the regime known as ‘Other Serbia’ (druga Srbija) or ‘Civil Serbia’ (građanska Srbija), which also included some media and public institutions such as universities (Bieber 2003a: 19; Kostovicova 2006: 27; Mikuš 2013). These metaphors have some historical antecedents, but were revived in the early 1990s by cultural, intellectual and political elites and middle classes that assembled around antiwar, antinationalist, liberal and pro-EU politics, and in opposition to what they dubbed the ‘First Serbia’ of the regime and its supporters (Čolović and Mimica 1992, 1993). This dichotomy of ‘two Serbias’ interprets Serbian society as divided into two camps that are distinguished in political, social and cultural terms superimposed on top of each other (Jansen 2001; Naumović 2002: 25–26, 2005). Taking an ostensibly underdog but morally superior position, the Other Serbia developed a somewhat missionary self-understanding, which was articulated particularly clearly by philosopher Radomir Konstantinović (2002: 11): ‘The “Other Serbia”, that is the European Serbia, is a marginal Serbia even today, and precisely as such – marginal – it is the only possible future of Serbia.’ As I already implied, the liberal civil society was also defined in class terms. The adjective građanski means ‘civil’ as well as ‘bourgeois’, and in a similar fashion to its equivalents in other European languages, it derives from the word for ‘city’ (grad). There are thus strong semantic associations between civility, urbanity and middleclass identity (Spasić 206: 222). In his introductory chapter discussed above, Pavlović contradicts his own argument about the nonclass nature of civil society by drawing attention to: the impoverishment of the urban civil (urbani građanski) and middle strata in general as the most important social base of the concept and practice of civil society (civilno društvo) [and] the strengthening of the elements of rural and patriarchal relationships at the expense of urban and civil ones. (Pavlović 1995: 36)

58 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Another chapter in the same volume is even more explicit and expands the dichotomy of two Serbias into a triad. The ‘premodern’ Serbia, about a third of the population, is predominantly rural, concentrated in the hilly areas in the south-east, least educated, elderly and supportive of the SPS. The ‘incompletely modern’ Serbia, almost half of the population, corresponds to the working class, some peasants and civil servants. It lives in the ‘central area’, is of lower and middle education, ‘dependent on the state’ and politically divided. Finally, the ‘postmodern’ Serbia, some 15–20 per cent of the population, is younger, well educated, concentrated in ‘the north’ (Vojvodina), Belgrade and ‘other university centres’, and supportive of the ‘civil’ opposition parties. Predictably, ‘the nuclei of civil society should be sought in the postmodern circles’ (Pantić 1995: 96). These analyses clearly draw on crude essentialism and outdated modernization theories. However, they contain the proverbial grain of truth. A survey in 2001 – almost immediately after the regime change – found that more than two-thirds of NGO activists had a university degree (NGO Policy Group 2001: 22). A study in the mid 2000s revealed that NGO leaders were predominantly ‘middle class’: highly educated ‘experts’ or university students (Lazić 2005: 61–98). A 2011 survey of the legal category of ‘associations of citizens’ likewise found that 25 per cent of their employees and more than 40 per cent of contract workers had a university degree (Civic Initiatives 2011: 45). These are striking figures for a country where only about 9 per cent had university education in 2011 (SORS n.d.). Most NGO workers I knew had either obtained or were working towards a university degree. Nearly all had at least some proficiency in English and many were fluent. They had attended a number of courses, trainings and seminars to achieve the specialist skills and knowledge deemed necessary for project work. Their taste in music, literature and visual arts tended to be of the ‘global urban’ kind characteristic of the Serbian ‘upper classes’ (Cvetičanin and Popescu 2011). The accumulation of such cultural (and social) capital increased access but also resulted from participating in the NGO sphere, which offers opportunities for education, networking and foreign travel. Anthropologists studying civil society building in the Balkans (Sampson 1996, 2002a, 2002b, 2004) and Serbia specifically (Vetta 2009, 2012, 2013) tended to argue that the local NGO staff were a type of comprador elite: familiar with and loyal to Western and cosmopolitan values, anglophone and very well paid. However, this description does not entirely fit the contemporary Serbian context. While there is a strong case for considering NGO workers as a cultural elite,

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 59

the extent to which they constitute a bureaucratic and political elite is a more complex matter that will be addressed throughout this book. As for being an economic elite, Sampson (2002a: 310), one of the proponents of the elite argument, himself observed that ‘this class has no resources of its own: they are wage earners working for foreign projects’. Few NGO leaders converted their salaries into capital and started their own businesses. NGO budgets and salaries remained largely dependent on project funding; only the biggest and most established organizations, such as BCIF, received ‘institutional funding’ (i.e. one that is substantial, long-term and not bound up with specific projects) from foreign donors. Moreover, NGO salaries at the time of my fieldwork were far from spectacular. True, the staff of international NGOs could expect to earn €1,500 a month (pretax) or more. But the far more common indigenous NGOs were a different story. Even in the largest Belgrade NGOs, only the top management made about €1,500 a month. Many workers earned salaries close to the national average of some €400. In smaller NGOs and almost all NGOs out of the major cities, salaries were actually project-based ‘honoraria’ – fixed-term and tightly budgeted. At least a half of the sector’s workers were estimated to be engaged on a contract basis (Civic Initiatives 2011: 45). When the NGO implemented several different projects or one large project, contract workers might earn €400 or more, but in leaner periods, they might make as little as €100. Workers of smaller, non-Belgrade NGOs in particular tended to hold other primary jobs with a more steady income, typically in the public sector (education, healthcare, welfare and public administration). The social origin of the liberal civil society therefore seems more adequately described as a middle-class faction defined by the use of the NGO form, liberal politics, high education and global cultural capital. This tallies with the suggestion that establishing and working in NGOs in the 1990s was, in part, a coping strategy embraced by the old socialist middle class of professionals, intellectuals and experts, especially those younger and fluent in English (NGO Policy Group 2001: 22–23; Sörensen 2003: 65, 73). This class suffered greatly due to the economic disruption and growing inequality (Sörensen 2009: 167– 82). Revealingly, relevant scholarship suggests that the broader societal opposition to the regime was also predominantly middle class. Although workers and peasants suffered significantly in absolute terms, their fortunes were less affected relative to the middle classes (Lazić 2011: 68–80). Some continued to vote for Milošević’s party in the latter half of the 1990s, while social categories such as housewives and pensioners increasingly made up the bulk of its support (Slavu-

60 | Frontiers of Civil Society

jević 2006). These groups were especially dependent on state redistribution for their basic survival. The passivity of labour unions also contributed to worker quiescence (Arandarenko 2001; Grdešić 2008; Stanojević 2003). The old middle class, for its part, declined in both absolute and relative terms and was more likely to participate in antiregime struggles. The first big victories of the opposition in the 1996 local elections occurred in larger cities with a greater concentration of the middle classes. The regime’s attempt to rig the elections led to a sustained wave of protests over the winter of 1996–97, in which people with above-average education and students were heavily overrepresented while workers were notably absent (Babović 1999).

Electoral Revolution The growth of the NGO sector accelerated in the run-up to the regime change in 2000, clearly in connection to the new Western policy of supporting the opposition and using ‘democracy aid’, in an unprecedently explicit manner, to bring about a regime change (Bunce and Wolchik 2011: 102–5; Spoerri 2014: 55–120). While about 500 NGOs had been established in 1994–97, more than 1,300 emerged over the next three years (Paunović 2006: 49). The increased availability of funding clearly contributed to this trend. Between mid 1999 and late 2000 alone, the US government and private foundations spent $40 million on ‘democracy programmes’ in Serbia (Carothers 2001). US and European governments and foundations combined spent an estimated $80 million in 1999–2000 (Spoerri 2014: 75). NGOs were cropping up especially in the opposition-led municipalities (NGO Policy Group 2001: 18). Many accounts of the regime change therefore attribute a significant role to the Western-supported liberal civil society, which mediated the unification of most opposition parties into a broad electoral coalition, contributed to the formulation of its reform agenda, mobilized people to vote for change and monitored the election process (Bieber 2003b; Bunce and Wolchik 2011: 100–2; Minić and Dereta 2007; Uvalic 2010: 110–12). In addition to performing these tasks, NGOs served as indirect means for the Western funding of the opposition, which was complicated by the supposed nonpartisanship of democracy aid and obstacles under Serbian and donor countries’ laws (Spoerri 2014: 78; Vetta 2009: 29). The opposition and their foreign supporters would narrate the regime change as a ‘revolution’, a peaceful defence of fair elections and the beginning of ‘democratic changes’ (demokratske promene). How-

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 61

ever, the international involvement has given rise to controversies in and beyond Serbia. These were particularly explicitly articulated in the case of Otpor (‘Resistance’), the biggest anti-Milošević organization/movement. Some authors upheld its self-representation as a genuinely popular, indigenous and diffuse youth movement (Golubović 2007, 2008). More critical commentators generally acknowledged the importance of Otpor for overthrowing Milošević, but pointed to its more conventional features of a hierarchical political organization (Ilić 2001), its strong links to opposition parties and foreign, especially US governmental and paragovernmental bodies (Naumović 2006, 2007; Sussman 2012; Sussman and Krader 2008), and the Orientalist and neoliberal elements of its discourse (Marković 2001). Another issue is the likelihood that, as Marlene Spoerri (2014: 2, 184) has recently argued, the intended effects of foreign democracy aid have been quite inflated and mythicized. She instead places emphasis on the role of domestic actors, especially opposition parties, in the regime change and points out numerous failings of aid in relation to both the instrumental objective of regime change and the alleged concern with developing Serbia’s democracy. While hers is a welcome sobering voice in what has often been a self-congratulatory ‘US regime change marketing’ (Sussman and Krader 2008), it should not lead us to the opposite extreme of concluding that the liberal civil society played a negligible role. While foreign aid was undoubtedly its key source of funding at the time, the case of Mićunović’s Centre for Democracy Foundation described in the Introduction suggests that these actors were also able to make important contributions to the regime change due to their command of resources that had little to do with aid, especially social networks and a ‘feel’ for the right strategy in the given moment. Their role in the regime change is best understood in terms of organizational, tactical and ideological contributions to the building of a new hegemonic project. In particular, they helped neutralize the ideological and personal disagreements between opposition politicians and, together with the opposition, de-emphasize the particularistic interests and demands of various social groups in the name of one ‘common interest’ – ousting Milošević and reversing his nationalist and ‘conservative’ policies. That this was both a necessity and a daunting challenge is reflected in the debates about the nature of the regime change (Dolenec 2011; Spasić and Subotić 2001). After Milošević had attempted to rig a federal presidential election, hundreds of thousands of people flooded into central Belgrade and stormed the parliament and the state TV on 5 October 2000. This so-called ‘October Revolution’ was variously

62 | Frontiers of Civil Society

interpreted as an ‘electoral (colour) revolution’ (Bunce and Wolchik 2006a, 2006b; Kalandadze and Orenstein 2009), an ‘unfinished revolution’ (Pavićević 2010), ‘betrayed revolution’ (Pešić 2010) or a negotiated settlement enabled by a deflection of business elites, mafia and key state agencies (military and security apparatuses) to the opposition (Gagnon 2004: 128, 185; Gould and Sickner 2008). It appears clear that multiple processes have intersected in a complex event whose final outcome was uncertain until quite late on. The unprecedently large and courageous protests, in the face of a not unlikely violent response, undoubtedly delivered the decisive final blow. However, this ‘frontal attack’ on the state was preceded by a much longer period of ‘war of position’ during which the new hegemonic project matured in Serbia’s civil society. The opposition’s cooperation with the state security services, which decided to disobey Milošević’s orders to use force against civilians, is also documented (Pešić 2010: 28–30). The continued economic decline and the international isolation after the Kosovo War increasingly threatened the business elites, some of whom also started to support the opposition (Lazić 2011: 65). It seems logical that they would recognize their interest in the neoliberal reform agenda of the anti-Milošević opposition, which its ‘policy wing’ G17 Plus, an NGO set up by a group of Serbian economists, formulated with input from the US Center for International Private Enterprise (DOS 2000; Spoerri 2014: 81–82; Uvalic 2010: 93, 110–12). Similar reformist visions were put forward by many other NGOs as well as Otpor and elicited the support of the pauperized middle classes and, by October 2000, judging from their participation in the protests, also many workers and peasants. The regime change is thus best understood as a successful frontal attack on the regime led by a highly heterogeneous (and to at least some extent transnational) power bloc supported by a strategically superior alliance of parts of dominant and subordinate classes.

Transition Unblocked? The uncertainty about the nature of 5 October 2000 is reflected in the academic and public debates about subsequent developments. On the one hand, most scholarly accounts treat 5 October as an end to a preceding phase that they describe variously as Serbia’s ‘delayed transition’ (Bieber 2003b; Uvalic 2010: 63), ‘blocked transition’ (Bolcic 2005) or ‘blocked (postsocialist) transformation’ (Lazić 2011: 68–80; Lazić and Pešić 2012).10 Accordingly, in an explicit or implicit

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 63

contrast to the Milošević years, they present the post-2000 period as ‘unblocked postsocialist transformation’ (Lazić 2011: 62–68; Lazić and Cvejić 2005; Lazić and Pešić 2012) or simply one when the previously ‘delayed’ transition actually got under way. On the other hand, and seemingly paradoxically, academics have been extremely critical of the achievements of the ‘unblocked’ transition. They believe that Serbia’s democracy is affected by a number of grave institutional absences or dysfunctions, with one typical list mentioning ‘a lack of checks and balances, a weak judiciary, a politicized media, a lack of sufficient civilian oversight of the country’s security apparatus, and pervasive political corruption’ (Spoerri 2014: 123; see also Dawson 2016: 34–35). The majority expert opinion on the economic transformation is similar: there has not been a ‘deep, consistent and quick reform’ of what remained a ‘mixed administrative-market economy’ (Prokopijević 2010: 74, 76; see also Madžar 2011). Some therefore reached a position directly opposite to the unblocked transition thesis: that there had actually been no true ‘deblocking’ (V. Pešić 2006). The analyses of transitional failures invariably attribute the brunt of responsibility to the national political elites, though popular masses with their real or alleged traditionalism, passivity, lack of concern for democracy and preference for paternalism and populism have not escaped criticism either (e.g. J. Pešić 2006; Vujadinović 2009: 141–62). Citizens themselves largely agreed with the scholars. For instance, a 2010 survey found that only 17 per cent believed that Serbia’s political system was democratic, while 53 per cent considered it as ‘mixed’ and 18 per cent as undemocratic (Matić 2012: 315). Numerous studies conducted throughout the 2000s revealed that citizens did not trust government institutions and political parties, and saw similarities rather than differences from their modes of operation in the Milošević period (Greenberg 2010, 2014; Golubović 2005; Spasić 2005, 2013: 99– 174). I am not aware of any study that would elicit citizens’ opinions on whether Serbia had a market economy, but the same 2010 survey found that 60 per cent perceived themselves as the economic ‘losers of transition’ and only a quarter as its ‘winners’ (Matić 2012: 308). As stated in the previous chapter, I encountered a strong discourse about a ‘ruin’ of Serbia even among NGO workers, hardly the typical transition losers or enemies of marketization (Mikuš and Dokić 2016). Policy-oriented think tanks served as organizational platforms for many of the most visible intellectuals and experts critical of the reforms, some of whom were NGO leaders themselves. Examples of such NGO critiques crop up throughout this book.

64 | Frontiers of Civil Society

While seemingly contradictory, the two widely held convictions – that 5 October ‘unblocked’ Serbia’s transition and that there was little change in the ensuing years – are both variants of the same transition framework, as the continued use of the term itself signals. The first offers a more optimistic and the other a more pessimistic assessment, but they both share an essentially normative assumption that the post-Milošević transformation is, or was supposed to be, a planned and managed passage to a pregiven end-point: Western-style liberal democracy and capitalism. The metaphors of ‘(un)blocking’ and ‘delay’ reveal the belief that transition is inevitable (with or without delay) or at least the only possible path to progress for former socialist countries, which Serbia has strayed from. In addition to being teleological, the transition framework is also ahistorical and evolutionist, since it assumes idealized models of Western modernity as the apex of a unilinear pathway of progress. As such, it is an updated version of the 1950s modernization theory, which tends to internalize the causes of ‘failed’ or ‘unfinished’ developmental projects to the given society while downplaying, or ignoring altogether, the processes of uneven development and the centre–periphery relations of the global political economy (Musić 2014; Sörensen 2009: 18–23). In the particular Serbian variant (‘blocked transition’), it also focuses on the continuities of personnel and formal institutions at the expense of the changes of social relations and practices, and hence underestimates the extent to which a systemic transformation has occurred already in the 1990s. Despite these serious shortcomings of the transition framework, I would suggest that its contradictory interpretations of post-Milošević transformation reveals the contradictions of the transformations themselves, and as such have something valuable to tell us. The unblocked transition thesis is right to point out that 5 October did inaugurate some crucial shifts, while the failed transition thesis correctly emphasizes that there has been a great deal of continuity and that what change was there was partial, uneven and contested. What is needed, then, is not to choose the ‘correct’ of these two positions; rather, the partial insights of both should be taken on board within a radically different analytical framework. Instead of approaching the post-Milošević transformation as a ‘transition’ to be assessed according to predetermined, officially sanctioned, normative objectives (‘democracy’, ‘market economy’), I suggest to understand this transformation as a hegemonic project: deeply political, path-dependent and never really complete. This perspective does not take the official rationales at face value, but it also avoids automatically assuming

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 65

that they are propaganda camouflaging ‘true’ agendas. Rather, they are ideological metanarratives articulating the common interest of the power bloc. To become and remain hegemonic, they must at least appear to encompass the various interests of its constituent parts (though their relative weights are unequal and dynamic) and bear a sufficiently close relationship to what actually occurs in their name. With this in mind, I identify neoliberalization and transnational integration as the two defining tendencies of the post-2000 hegemonic project. While consolidating a capitalist order in Serbia, they partially reversed Milošević’s de facto policy of maintaining the illiberal and closed form of political capitalism. Its capacity for self-reproduction, save expansion, has become quickly exhausted due to its reliance on redistribution rather than accumulation, the drastic reduction of the economic base and the international isolation that prevented capital imports. Rather than ‘unblocking’ a pregiven course of transition, the new hegemonic project inaugurated a significant shift in the form of the Serbian state. This was articulated (also formally as the official agenda of the opposition) as a reversal of Milošević’s state project and as the common interest of the dominant parts of the new power bloc, which were involved in its long-term build-up rather than just the 5 October frontal attack: political (opposition) and state elites, the capitalist class, their Western patrons and, more ambiguously, the middle classes. The inclusion of some actors of the old order injected a dose of continuity into the emerging new political economy. By introducing the concept of neoliberalization, I depart from the understanding of neoliberalism in the Foucaultian literatures I reviewed in the Introduction. Anthropologists taking this approach associated ‘neoliberal governmentality’ with mobile and flexible ‘technologies’ that govern individuals and populations according to the rule of maximum economy but in the context of highly diverse political projects (Collier 2005, 2011, 2012; Ong 2006, 2007). While I did find this approach useful in the analysis of budgeting and accounting devices that the liberal civil society promoted to reform the state (Chapters 4 and 5), its take on neoliberalism suffers from a number of issues. As I have written elsewhere (Mikuš 2016: 213–14; see also Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010: 203–4; Kalb 2012: 321), it ignores the political nature of neoliberalism due to its one-sided focus on ideas and techniques rather than, for example, policies and regimes, and the conviction that the former are truly technical, i.e. politically neutral. The radical opposition to anything identified as ‘structuralism’ (e.g. Collier 2012: 189) results in a failure to grasp the actualization of neoliberalism at larger scales than that of localized

66 | Frontiers of Civil Society

projects and reduces the possible relations between such projects to a depoliticized and indeterminate ‘circulation’ (Collier 2012: 194) or ‘decontextualization’ and ‘recontextualization’ of ideas and techniques (Ong 2006: 12, 14). Here, however, I want to show that market calculus, the core of neoliberal ideology also identified by Foucault, came to inform a hegemonic project of the transformation of the Serbian nation-state, and that this was itself conditioned by its place in transnational relations. I therefore build on the rich literature in anthropology and other disciplines that approaches the actualization of neoliberalism as a hegemonic, albeit temporally and spatially uneven, state-based political project of capitalist transformation (e.g. Harvey 2005; Jessop 2013; Kalb 2012, 2014). Critical geographers argued particularly convincingly that projects of neoliberalization are indeed polycentric, shaped by endogenous path-dependencies and historically and geographically variegated, but at the same time interconnected by a thickening web of policy transfers and transnational regulatory regimes that make the spread of neoliberalism more likely and constrain the possibilities for its reversal (Brenner, Peck and Theodore 2010). The resulting cumulative ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’ is especially relevant in peripheral and crisis-stricken states, where international organizations and leading capitalist states are in a particularly strong position to impose neoliberalism that they themselves have already implemented and to which they are committed (Jessop 2013: 71). I have already discussed some the key moments of such a specifically Serbian but transnationally conditioned pathway leading to the post-2000 neoliberalization – the market-oriented restructuring that Yugoslav leaders implemented under the auspices of the IMF, and the formulation of a neoliberal reform agenda by the internationally sponsored anti-Milošević opposition. After the regime change, the new government rushed to re-establish relations with international financial institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) whose aid it acutely needed to stabilize and reconstruct the economy (Uvalic 2010: 121); these, together with the EU, went on to provide neoliberal policy advice and impose similar conditionalities up to the present day (Arandarenko 2006; Mikuš 2015a, 2016). Unsurprisingly, then, governments in the 2000s implemented most of the six defining policies of neoliberal projects – liberalization, deregulation, privatization, market proxies in the public sector, internationalization and cuts in direct taxation (Jessop 2013: 71; Uvalic 2010: 127–33). Foreign trade and prices of most goods and services were rapidly liberalized. The four largest state-owned banks were closed down and the rest were

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 67

privatized so that four-fifths of banking assets were foreign-owned by 2012 (Uvalic 2012: 91). The bulk of foreign direct investments (FDIs) was aimed at the banking and financial sectors (Becker et al. 2010: 238). However, transnationals also bought some of the largest and most profitable companies in sectors such as oil, metallurgy, tobacco or telecommunications. The level of FDI inflows was low compared to most ‘transitional’ countries in East-Central and South-East Europe (Uvalic 2010: 186–90). Privatization advanced but was still relatively modest: the private sector share of the GDP grew from 40 per cent in 2001 to 60 per cent in 2010, less than in all postsocialist countries except Bosnia and Herzegovina and a few post-Soviet states (EBRD n.d.). By 2005, the corporate tax rate had been reduced to 10 per cent, one of the lowest rates in Europe (Ranđelović 2010). These reforms and the favourable global environment, especially financial markets awash with credit, resulted in high rates of GDP growth in 2001–8. Living standards improved, the poverty rate fell and net wages increased more than fourfold. Nevertheless, this was a ‘jobless growth’ based on credit, imports and consumption (Arandarenko 2006; Upchurch and Marinković 2011; Uvalic 2010, 2012). Industrial output has not recovered, but has continued to drop and real GDP reached only 72 per cent of its 1989 level by the end of this period. Persistently high unemployment rates and swelling trade and current account deficits signalled the limits of this model, which were fully revealed by the global crisis that hit Serbia in late 2008. The major ‘winner of transition’ was the national and increasingly also transnational capitalist classes, closely entangled with politicians and technocrats. The chosen model of privatization, based on politically controlled tendering and auctions, suited the interests of these ‘three interwoven elites’ (Arandarenko 2010: 79; see also Uvalic 2010: 179–215). Capital further benefited from the low corporate taxes, liberalization, radical ‘flexibilization’ of labour law, limited market competition, generous subsidies for select investors and impunity for Milošević-period ‘tycoons’. At the same time, GDP growth, FDIs, privatization proceeds and substantial foreign aid enabled the government to maintain a relatively high level of public spending. However, its structure was such as to promote rather than reduce social inequality. Spending on social assistance and labour market interventions as a share of GDP was about a half of the EU and OECD averages (Arandarenko 2010: 81). Welfare schemes targeting the poor and ‘vulnerable’ groups were underfunded and limited in coverage during the entire post-2000 period (Perišić and Vidojević 2014: 183–85; Vuković and Perišić 2011:

68 | Frontiers of Civil Society

246; World Bank 2009: 48). Serbian economist Mihail Arandarenko (2010) made an intriguing argument that a disproportionate share of public expenditure was spent on public-sector salaries and pensions. Pointing also to the de facto regressive taxation of labour in 2001–7 (Arandarenko 2006), he maintained that the state essentially redistributed the benefits of the post-2000 growth from the unemployed and the working poor in the private sector to public-sector employees and pensioners – the most powerful ‘horizontal redistributive coalitions’. However, the relevant evidence is mixed. Serbia’s pension spending as a share of GDP is indeed one of the highest in Europe, but its expenditure per beneficiary is among the lowest (Eurostat 2016b). While the World Bank (2009: 12–14) has repeatedly criticized the pension system as too ‘generous’ on the basis of comparisons with OECD countries, it is unlikely that the recipients of full-career pensions at the level of about 60 per cent of the net average salary experience their benefits as lavish, as salaries are among the lowest in Europe and prices of essential goods converge with Western Europe. In addition, even if no statistics exist, it is generally believed that many pensioners use their modest but steady income to help their even less fortunate relatives. The situation of public-sector employees is likewise more ambiguous than Arandarenko (2010) implies. While the average net public-sector salary was 9 per cent above the national average in April 2014, salaries in several sizeable parts of the public sector, such as local public enterprises, education and culture, and health and social care, were actually below the average (MoF 2014: 35). On balance, the 2000s is a decade best described as a decade of elite consolidation and limited middle-class restoration relative to the position of the working classes (Lazić 2011: 153–60). The post-Milošević middle classes were not of an exclusively public-sector provenience. In the liberalizing economy, there also emerged a small but politically significant ‘layer of urban professionals, employed in the branches of foreign multinationals and local corporations’ (Musić 2014: 384). Another middle-class faction that has been (partially) independent of the public sector is the NGO workers. As for the deteriorating relative position of the working class, one could hardly overestimate the cumulative impact of the continued deindustrialization, mass unemployment and the precarization and informalization of work (Musić 2013). Even in the relatively prosperous period of ‘jobless growth’ in 2002–7, the informal sector, in which salaries are lower and earnings inequality higher than in the formal sector, expanded from 28 per cent to 37 per cent of total employment (Krstić and Sanfey 2010). The

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 69

economic crisis, which has been particularly severe and protracted in Serbia, only deepened these tendencies. The economy sank into a deep recession, many factories and private firms went bankrupt, and the already low rate of formal employment, which is a better indicator of the extent of Serbia’s unemployment issue than the unemployment rate, dropped to 45 per cent in 2012, lower than in all EU member states (SORS n.d.). It should probably come as no surprise that Serbia recently displayed the highest income inequality among the thirty-three countries participating in a European survey, at a level comparable to that in the United States (Eurostat 2016a; Matković, Krstić and Mijatović 2015). In this context, the nation-state and its redistributive mechanisms have become perhaps even more prominent as the focus of social struggles, as Arandarenko (2010) is right to emphasize. During the crisis, the perceived size and privileges of the public sector became intensively problematized. The media, economists and politicians unleashed a veritable moral panic about a ‘huge’, ‘cumbersome’ and ‘inefficient’ public sector that was allegedly ‘parasitizing’ on the private sector (Mikuš 2016). Many NGO workers I knew were very forthright in naming the problem – the government was ‘buying social peace’ by paying masses of civil servants for ‘drinking coffee’ and ‘doing nothing’. However, in an absence of reliable data and even a clearly defined and shared concept of the public sector (Mikuš 2016: 216–17), these views reflected the decline of manufacturing, agriculture, construction and mining rather than the actual size of the public sector, which is not particularly large by international standards and has not expanded dramatically in the post-2000 period. Nevertheless, economists and international financial institutions urged politicians to adopt radical neoliberal reforms, including cuts to public spending and a switch to a ‘new growth model’ based on exports (Arandarenko 2011). The government vacillated between ‘freezing’ and ‘unfreezing’ pensions and public-sector salaries according to the terms of IMF stand-by arrangements, and since 2013 there have been bans on new recruitment in the public sector, linear cuts to salaries and several rounds of dismissals. Yet the impact of these policies was uneven and pockets of privilege in the public sector were maintained (Mikuš 2016: 217). These developments reflect a preservation of some elements of the political-capitalist model in the liberalizing setting. While the formal trappings of liberal democracy were gradually installed, a narrow focus on institutions obscures the continuities of social relations and practices based on clientelism and patronage (Cvejić 2016), which I

70 | Frontiers of Civil Society

discuss more extensively in Chapter 7. The sociologist and, by now former, liberal politician Vesna Pešić (2007) argued that Serbia was a case of ‘state capture’: an openly acknowledged and institutionalized ‘feudal division’ of the state by party-based clientelistic networks. Leading businesspeople are widely assumed to fund parties or individual politicians to obtain preferential treatment. At the same time, ruling parties ‘split’ the numerous state-owned enterprises as well as public institutions between themselves. When a party acquires a ministry, all organizations under its competence, including huge state companies, are considered to ‘belong’ to the party. The parties then use their ‘feuds’ to do business with their financiers and provide lucrative appointments to party elites and more humble jobs to the rank and file (Dragojević and Konitzer 2013).11 The pattern is replicated at the local level with its proliferation of public enterprises and often fiercely competitive politics (Avlijas and Uvalic 2011). This system has become particularly important in the numerous economically devastated municipalities where the public sector is the biggest employer. Even some private businesses reportedly preferentially employ members of their ‘friendly’ parties. Public intellectuals, the media and many Serbian citizens, including my NGO research participants, dubbed this actually existing political system a ‘particracy’ (partokratija). The witticism that ‘not even a cleaning lady can get a job without the right party ID’ illustrates the general assessment of its extent. Stories about overemployment and nonmeritocratic hiring were endemic during the time of my fieldwork. This was assumed to occur in cycles: many people got jobs before elections when parties sought to mobilize voters, whereas a change of government led to large-scale firing and hiring. Clientelism was also based on other forms of identity and loyalty, such as kinship, friendship, ethnicity or simply the all-pervasive ‘links and little links’ (veze i vezice). But parties were clearly considered extremely important. Young people were believed to join and volunteer for partisan youth organizations with their future careers in mind. Criticism of this system coloured the calls for reforms of the public sector. Apart from simple ‘rationalization’ (i.e. downsizing), the demands were also for its ‘depoliticization’, ‘professionalization’ or, most explicitly, ‘departicization’ (departizacija) (Mikuš 2016: 216). The second hegemonic tendency of post-2000 transformations can be identified in the broad consensus among political and economic elites on the desirability of Serbia’s transnational and especially EU integration (Lazić and Vuletić 2009). This hints at the increasingly transnational strategies of elite social reproduction in postsocialist

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 71

South-East Europe (Sampson 2002a), but relevant empirical studies on Serbia are missing. Already the official agenda of the anti-Milošević opposition vowed to begin negotiations on an ‘associated member ship’ in the EU (DOS 2000). This presumably referred to the Stabilization and Association Process that the EU was then launching as a flagship preintegration policy in the ‘Western Balkans’, its own geopolitical construct for former Yugoslavia minus Slovenia, plus Albania (Petrović 2014: 3–5). Acting on these promises, the first post-Milošević government defined the ‘return to Europe’ as a priority (Kostovicova 2004: 24). It moved quickly to improve Serbia’s international relations and negotiate its membership in a large number of international organizations (Uvalic 2010: 119–24). Nevertheless, the relationship of political elites with the EU continued to be fraught with tensions, related especially to the Kosovo issue and the failure of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to deliver ‘transitional justice’ and ‘reconciliation’ in the region (Clark 2008; Di Lellio 2009; Hayden 2011, 2013). Politicians argued endlessly (and mobilized voters) over these questions, for instance whether to extradite Serb war crime suspects to the ICTY, which was one of the EU’s conditions for further integration. Yet all the feelings of injustice yielded rather nationalist demagoguery than a realistic alternative vision of national development. As elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the various elite factions either actively pursued or passively accepted the EU accession as the ‘only credible and realistic external objective’ (Anastasakis 2005: 82) and as a ‘political if not economic and geo-strategic escape mechanism’ (Pridham 2005: 12). While the EU interrupted negotiations on the Stabilization and Association Agreement in 2006–7 due to arguments with the government of the nationalist Prime Minister Vojislav Koštunica over its cooperation with the ICTY, it was the same government that started the talks in 2005 and Koštunica and his allies, for all their rhetoric, never abandoned the process either. As I show in the next chapter, the government incumbent at the time of my fieldwork, formed by so-called ‘pro-European’ parties, took crucial steps to accelerate integration and elevated ‘Europeanization’ to its central policy. The deepening sense of inevitability contributed to the gradual marginalization of radical nationalism in institutional politics, though with signs of a recent rebound discussed in the Conclusions. Moreover, it has set the context for the emergence of a nationalist counterhegemonic project, which is the subject of Chapter 3. The two defining tendencies of the post-Milošević hegemonic project were mutually supportive. As I have already hinted, the interna-

72 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tional financial institutions and Western aid agencies approached the ‘Western Balkans’ as a periphery to be ‘stabilized’ and subjected to neoliberal reforms (Baker 2012; Petrović 2014, 2015; Sörensen 2009). The EU, which has quickly emerged as the single most important foreign actor, pursued essentially the same strategy towards the region through the Stabilization and Association Process (Štiks and Horvat 2015; Türkeş and Gökgöz 2006). The EU project itself had undergone a thorough neoliberalization since the late 1980s that steered it away from the alternative neomercantilist and social-democratic concepts (McNamara 1998; van Apeldoorn 2002). The monetarism of the European Central Bank and the budgetary discipline of the Stability and Growth Pact lead the member states to adopt national competitiveness strategies based on cutting taxes and public spending and deregulating labour markets (Drahokoupil 2008; Scharpf 2002, 2010). In relation to Serbia specifically, the EU has focused its energies on promoting trade and capital movements liberalization while conditioning further integration by cooperation with the ICTY and Kosovo (Uvalic 2010: 216–48). Serbia thus seems set for an even more ‘streamlined’ version of the EU’s eastern enlargement, which was characterized by a focus on neoliberal restructuring at the expense of ‘social cohesion’ goals (Bohle 2006; Bruszt and Langbein 2017; Holman 2004; van Apeldoorn, Drahokoupil and Horn 2009).

The Reframing and Reshaping of ‘Civil Society’ after Miloševic´ While the particular effects, responses and roles of the liberal NGO sector in the post-2000 transformations are the subject of much of the rest of this book, it is useful to close this chapter by providing a general context. To begin with, foreign donors, in an effort to consolidate the achievements of the regime change and lock in the new hegemonic project, pumped vast amounts of aid into the country. According to OECD data, nonrefundable multilateral and bilateral grants in 2000–11 amounted to $12.2 billion in current prices (OECD n.d.). A more modest estimate talks about €4.3 billion (Ćurković and Mijačić 2012: 2). It is not known how much of this aid was absorbed by NGOs, but the rapid expansion of the sector in the early 2000s is telling. From 2000 to June 2006, about 8,500 new NGOs were founded in Serbia and Montenegro (Paunović 2006: 49), of which some 80–90 per cent may be estimated to be in Serbia. More resources were also available for the NGOs already established in the 1990s.

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 73

Second, the arrival of the opposition to power made it much easier for ‘civil society’ leaders, activists and workers to switch to politics and/or the public sector. Such ‘boundary crossing’ might have been ‘consecutive’ (consisting of a single move), but probably more often ‘extensive’ – individuals extended their activities and networks to the state while maintaining their original base (Lewis 2008: 126). It has been justified by the state’s needs for specialist expertise and sophisticated human resources (Mikuš 2015a; Vetta 2012). The typical destinations of former NGO workers were ministries with connections to usual NGO agendas (such as education or social policy) and some newly created, reform-oriented agencies (see Chapter 2). Within NGO circles, there have been critiques of those overly motivated by power and money in their pursuance of state carriers. Some NGO workers proudly told me that unlike many of their colleagues, they did not see their NGO jobs as an ‘elevator’ to the public sector or politics. Third, there were also cases of boundary crossing by entire organizations, especially in the early 2000s. Otpor transformed into a political party, but merged with the DP after a debacle in the 2003 elections. Even then, scores of Otpor leaders and activists went into politics and/or civil service, some into high and influential offices (Miladinović 2010). G17 Plus, the neoliberal think tank mentioned above, also morphed into a party in 2002, but with considerably more success than Otpor. Up to its demise in 2013–14, it managed to control important line ministries in nearly every government, usually economy or finance-related. Fourth, the regime change made state institutions more willing to fund and cooperate with NGOs, although NGO workers often argued that much of the public sector was still ‘closed’ to cooperation due to the lingering stereotype of NGOs as troublemakers, a failure to recognize their importance or a lack of democratic outlook. Even then, state funding has become increasingly important for NGOs as foreign funding started to peter out in the second half of the 2000s. As Chapter 4 will show in more detail, the deepening neoliberalization and transnationalization of the Serbian state promoted the expansion of cooperative relations, which in turn reinforced the NGO sector’s implication in the hegemonic project. Nevertheless, the changing relationship of the liberal civil society and the state was also a source of significant threats to the former. First, the rapprochement undermined its identity as autonomous and critical of the state. One way in which I heard NGO workers put this was along the lines of ‘we used to be against something [Milošević] so we’re struggling to find our place now that that something has

74 | Frontiers of Civil Society

gone’. This loss of negative unity occasioned much soul-searching and discussion of the acceptability of cooperation. As already mentioned and developed more closely below, the liberal NGO sector’s voice was an important one in the chorus of reform critiques. However, various emphases in this critique gradually emerged, some of which were related to the ongoing tensions between different strands of liberalism (classical political liberalism, social democratic/left liberalism, neoliberalism) with their varying ideological emphases in the liberal civil society. On the one hand, a group of influential, especially human rights-focused NGOs established in the 1990s remained particularly critical of post-Milošević governments due to what they saw as their imperfect break with Serbia’s nationalist past. By the time of my fieldwork, this group seemed to be losing ground as most people in NGOs argued for the desirability of what they presented as pragmatic and ‘technical’ cooperation with the state. Some claimed that the human rights NGOs were ‘stuck in the 1990s’ and even harmed the image of civil society through their obsession with antinationalism and the past. On the other hand, many saw cooperation as morally problematic due to ‘corruption’ in politics and the state. They argued that the reliance on state funding reduced civil society’s watchdog potential. Others believed that civil society went from one dependence to another and, as a result, remained preoccupied with ‘lounge’ (salonski) issues at the expense of a closer engagement with its supposed beneficiaries – the citizens. Nevertheless, nearly all organizations accepted some forms of cooperation that they defined as pragmatic, as opposed to what would have been political involvement. Second, the fact that individual boundary crossing was often partymediated signalled that the liberal civil society, despite its criticism of the particratic system, was not immune to it. NGO workers often joined or became ‘close’ to ruling parties, as a result of which they obtained state jobs. Some individuals became active in politics without joining public administration. The parties in question were, as a rule, those of the ‘civil’ and ‘pro-European’ orientation: the DP, the Liberal Democratic Party, G17 Plus and a host of smaller parties. Third, the nonpartisan self-image of the liberal civil society was also threatened by boundary crossing in the opposite direction, illustrated by the case of the Centre for Democracy Foundation. This was essentially a pattern of politicians establishing NGOs as transitional or permanent instruments of doing politics by other means. Two other cases in the mid 2000s concerned two former Democrats who had thus responded to their marginalization in the party and later reentered politics by launching their own party projects. There was also

Historicizing ‘Civil Society’ | 75

much talk at the time of my fieldwork about local-level ‘party NGOs’. A letter surfaced in which the DP youth organization in Vojvodina instructed its local chapters to establish their own NGOs (Tomić 2011). At least sixteen such organizations have indeed been founded across Vojvodina and received funding from the DP-controlled provincial government and municipalities. Allegedly, this was really just the tip of the iceberg and most parties had their ‘satellite NGOs’ (Valtner 2011). The champions in this discipline were deemed to be the DP, the Liberal Democratic Party and G17 Plus, but I also heard about satellite NGOs of the League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina and the nationalist and conservative Democratic Party of Serbia. Through these organizations, parties were thought to funnel public funds earmarked for civil society to ‘their’ people. Naturally, such publicity did little to improve the low standing of NGOs with many citizens. The problematic rapprochement with the state might have contributed to the conspicuous emphasis that many in the liberal civil society came to lay on their own technocratic competence, rather than the vilified particratic links, as a basis for their legitimate access to the state and its resources, including jobs and funding. This technocratic/ particratic dichotomy became an important discursive device with which the liberal civil society attempted to redefine its identity as well as the identity of its foes in the new post-2000 context. With most politicians now paying lip service to the agendas for which it was fighting in the 1990s, ‘civil society’ partly shifted the focus of its critique from ideology to morality and experience. As Part III will show, the NGO sector invoked the corrupt ways of the particratic elites and their clients to put in doubt their sincere commitment to the reformist agendas, while at the same time reinventing its own raison d’être in terms of a preoccupation with the efficiency of the state. Yet these critiques mostly stayed within the remit of the hegemonic project. The next chapter turns to the relationship of the liberal civil society to EU integration to begin the enquiry into why this was the case and in which particular forms this apparent consent or even support has manifested itself.

Notes 1. Research participants were anonymized wherever necessary and practicable. In some cases, the argument necessitated the disclosure of a set of attributes of a person (e.g. that they were a director of a named NGO) that excluded effective anonymization,

76 | Frontiers of Civil Society

2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

and hence real names are used. In such cases, I sought to use only information already in public records; if this was unavailable, I considered carefully whether the publication of my own data could cause harm. The latter two institutions are briefly mentioned in Chapters 5 and 7, respectively. For a similar treatment, see NGO Policy Group 2001: 17; Paunović 2006: 42. The 1974 Constitution of the SFRY made Serbia the only Yugoslav republic that encompassed two ‘autonomous provinces’: Vojvodina and Kosovo. These were ‘granted their own constitutions, legislative, executive and judicial jurisdiction and party control almost identical to that of republics, as well as direct representation in all federal state and party organs, and effective veto power over federal policy’ (Vladisavljević 2008: 36). In the 1980s, the autonomy of Kosovo vis-à-vis the government of Serbia became increasingly seen as one of the major reasons for the Albanian discrimination against Kosovo Serbs. The FRY was reconstituted in 2003 as a loose confederation called the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro. The State Union ended in June 2006 when Montenegro declared independence. Former dissident intellectuals split – some joined the SPS and some the opposition, both nationalist and moderate/antinationalist (Dragović-Soso 2002: 206–53). ‘Nongovernmental organization’ has never been a kind of legal subject in Serbia. Until 2009, this field continued to be regulated by SFRY laws and their later amendments, which recognised ‘associations of citizens’, ‘social organizations’, ‘foundations’, ‘endowments’ and ‘funds’ (Paunović 2006). Legal reforms in 2009–10 abolished social organizations and funds and reregulated associations of citizens, foundations and endowments, as discussed in Chapter 4. Keane was already well known to Serbian and other Yugoslav intellectuals in the 1980s, owing to personal contacts (see Keane’s interview with Mastnak and other Slovenian intellectuals under the pseudonym E. Blair (1986)) and the inclusion of his work in two edited collections on ‘civil society’ (Mastnak 1986) and ‘new social movements’ (Pavlović 1987). This discussion is closely reproduced in Pavlović’s more recent monograph on civil society (Pavlović 2004: 30–34). Vuletić, Stanojević and Vukelić (2011: 336) mention further similar metaphors found in the literature, such as ‘infantile phase of transition’ or ‘involution’. See Jansen (2015: 189–220) on equivalent practices in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

PART II Struggles over Transnational Integration

– Chapter 2 –

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society

_

In April 2011, I attended an internal workshop of BCIF, one of my two primary field sites, held in a hotel in the Belgrade city centre. The NGO’s whole team took four days off their busy schedules to develop a strategic plan for the next five years. At the close of the first day, which was mostly spent discussing the organization’s ‘mission’ and ‘vision’ of a future Serbian society, the debate turned to an analysis of various ‘forces’ (political, economic, social and technological) that might impact on BCIF’s ability to pursue its mission. Several people argued that EU integration was a positive force that opened more space for BCIF to pressurize the government and participate in policy-making. Some also expressed hopes that the EU would enable regranting, referring to its lack of support for the practice since large funds had been embezzled in Romania and Bulgaria in the late 1990s. This was a major issue for grant-making foundations like BCIF and other large, ‘resource centre’–type NGOs with programmes based on redistributing donor funding to smaller organizations – such as the two BCIF programmes discussed in Part IV. However, BCIF workers were not as unequivocally positive about the EU as these comments might seem to imply. Just a few hours earlier, when we split into groups to draft our versions of the vision, Davor, a member of my group, wondered whether we should refer to the EU. ‘Serbia might become a member, but what kind of EU it will be by then?’, he asked rhetorically. In a manner that seems visionary in retrospect, he explained his doubts by the fact that France and Italy had just put forward proposals to, as he said with little circumvention, ‘cancel the Schengen Agreement’. In the end, we decided not – 79 –

80 | Frontiers of Civil Society

to mention the EU in our vision. Another group did, and wrote that Serbia should become an ‘equal and respected member of the EU’. But Ratko, who presented the draft, commented with a slight smile: ‘We were in a bit of a doubt here . . . I mean, there’s no doubt that it won’t be a respected member.’ This provoked a spate of cynicism: ‘And frankly, not equal either.’ ‘And what about a member?’ ‘Well, we thought about it as a utopia’, Slavica, member of Ratko’s group, said with a grin, referring to how we were instructed to imagine the vision. The argument made in the workshop that integration was something from which BCIF could benefit was not unfounded. PostMilošević governments tended to see ‘civil society’ as inherently supportive of integration and potentially useful in advancing it. Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić – a major symbol of the early post-Milošević reform who was assassinated in 2003 – articulated such expectations in a speech on the ‘role of nongovernmental organizations in a democratic society’. Arguing that 95 per cent of Serbians say they ‘accept democracy, market economy, European integration’ in opinion polls, but do not follow this ‘value system’ in their everyday lives, he suggested that NGOs could precisely involve these people in an authentic popular building of a ‘modern system and a European Serbia’ (Đinđić [2002] 2007: 12). These views were translated into policies that attempted to engage ‘civil society’ in a deepening of support for EU integration. For instance, the government’s Serbian European Integration Office (SEIO) and a group of thirty NGOs signed a Memorandum on Cooperation in the European Integration Process, which stated that the parties would ‘cooperate in organizing activities whose goal is to promote European values and the European integration process’ (SEIO 2005a, 2005b). The government strategy of integration PR likewise expected ‘organizations of civil society’ to participate in ‘communication activities’ and provide ‘constructive criticism’ of reforms undertaken on the ‘path to the EU’ (GRS 2011b: 13). Since 2012, the SEIO has been offering grants for integrationrelated NGO projects. But the government was far from being the only patron of such activities – as this chapter will show, the EU or foreign governments also supported them. All of this would seem to confirm that the liberal civil society was the same clearly ‘pro-European’ social force that it had been in 2000 when it allied with the opposition in order to initiate Serbia’s ‘return to Europe’. In other words, it would confirm the impression that the NGO sector was resolutely and stably supportive of EU integration – the symbolically and materially central form of Serbia’s transnation-

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 81

alization, which was itself one of the two pillars of the post-Milošević hegemonic project. However, the discussions at BCIF’s strategic planning meeting suggested that this supportive stance was surrounded with tensions and ambiguities that were ultimately glossed over, and this chapter will show that this was by no means an exceptional occurrence. Why did BCIF workers officially adopt a positive stance on integration and why did NGOs in general mostly accept their expected role of integration cheerleaders or at least refrain from critiquing the integration process in other than technical terms? To address this question, this chapter interrogates the relationship between the liberal civil society and integration at several different levels. I will start by arguing that the narrative of Europeanization is a modernization myth that derives its truth-value from the ideational frames of transition and Balkanism, which have become part of the hegemonic ‘common sense’. They are particularly important for the subject position of ‘civil society’, which limits the ability of its inhabitants to question Europeanization. I will then proceed to discuss the case of the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, which was openly aimed at harnessing the liberal civil society for integration. The formation of the project network followed the pattern established in the late 1990s when the Slovak government and NGOs exported their experiences from Slovak ‘electoral revolution’ to the anti-Milošević opposition and its ‘civil society’ allies. The project thus connected proEU elite networks in both countries, which extended across the porous frontiers between the central government, political parties and the NGO sphere. Though the project supported Serbian NGO workers and journalists to ‘transfer’ Slovak integration knowhow, their visits to Slovakia, ironically, led some of them to question the modernizing impact of integration. The analysis of interviews with the Slovak-Serbian fund grantees and other NGO workers will show how many argued that integration had so far brought Serbia little in the way of modernization, but nonetheless continued to call for a ‘genuine’ Europeanization. This kind of ‘constructive criticism’ further reinforced the hegemonic project. Nevertheless, a number of my interlocutors did question and reject its key assumptions. And yet such commentary was extremely unlikely to be voiced in the public sphere, where it might have challenged the hegemonic project from progressive and radical positions, and was instead confined to private and informal situations. To understand why, the fourth section will examine the EU’s place in the political economy of the liberal civil society. Advancing integration was believed to stimulate the departure of foreign donors

82 | Frontiers of Civil Society

from Serbia, which made NGOs increasingly dependent on EU funding. At the same time, the EU promoted the expansion of state–civil society ‘partnerships’, which can be seen as an effort to push the frontier with the state deeper into the territory of the liberal civil society. Importantly, these economic and political opportunities were largely accessible only to well-established organizations like BCIF, which by definition stood a better chance to shape public discourse about the EU than NGOs unlikely to get EU grants or cooperate with the government. Finally, integration and the associated reforms brought also career opportunities for individual NGO workers. Ultimately, then, the balance of ideological, discursive, political, social and material conditions was conducive to the active participation or at least passive consent of the liberal civil society to EU integration. Whether it acted as a comprador bourgeoisie or a ‘constructive critic’, it helped reproduce the hegemony of neoliberal transnationalization as the only imaginable path to modernity.

Europeanization as a Modernization Myth At the time of my fieldwork, the rhetoric of Serbian politicians, media and NGOs overflowed with references to ‘Europe’ equated with the EU and ‘Europeanization’ equated with EU integration.1 On Serbia’s ‘path to Europe’ ( put u Evropu),2 the daily subject was not just the mundane whens and hows of integration, but also how ‘European values’ – typically unspecified but clearly superior – were being, or failing to be, promoted, introduced, accepted and adopted. RTS, the state TV station, advertised itself before each main news show as the ‘public service of a European Serbia’, while the liberal Danas daily published the Blue Pages, an EU-funded supplement with the vertiginous subtitle ‘Serbia Next to Europe with Europe to Europe’. Obviously, there would be hardly any need for all of this if the Europeanness of Serbia could be taken for granted. It was meant to signal that it was just becoming or, more precisely, being made European. While integration had been a key foreign policy goal since 2000 (see Chapter 1), the narrative of European Serbia was particularly foregrounded before and after the victory of the ‘For a European Serbia’ coalition, led by the DP, in the May 2008 parliamentary elections. With billboards claiming that ‘Europe means jobs for 200,000 unemployed’ or ‘Europe means a safe future’, the coalition made integration the centrepiece of its agenda, in contrast to the anti-EU stance of its main contender, the Serbian Radical Party. After the interruption

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 83

of the Stabilization and Association Agreement talks in 2006–7 and the unrest over the Kosovo declaration of independence in February 2008, the elections were interpreted both at home and abroad as the victory of ‘pro-European’ and ‘pro-Western reformers’ who would return Serbia safely on course to liberal democracy and EU membership.3 The same applied to the presidential elections a few months earlier that had resulted in the re-election of Boris Tadić, DP leader and, by a general consensus, the true head of the government in 2008– 12, even if the highest office was formally that of prime minister. The Democrats’ signature catchphrase became the categorical claim that ‘there is no alternative to Europe’, which party figures repeated in the run-up to the elections and later. It has since become a staple of public discourse. For instance, a group of activists with links to the NGO sector who organized several protests against the slow integration process called itself the There Is No Alternative to Europe Movement, while the opposition leaders Vojislav Koštunica and Tomislav Nikolić felt compelled to jointly declare that ‘there is an alternative to Europe’, though they failed to clarify what it was (Milenković 2010). The government did not stop at rhetoric and pursued EU membership more energetically than its predecessors. During its incumbency, three major Serb war crime suspects were arrested and extradited to the ICTY, which had long been a key precondition for any progress in the integration process.4 In September 2008, the parliament ratified the Stabilization and Association Agreement and the Interim Agreement (IA) with the EU, signed half a year earlier. Serbia started to implement the IA unilaterally from the beginning of 2009, thus partially liberalizing its trade with the EU. In the close of the same year, the EU too started to implement the IA and abolished visas for Serbian nationals traveling to the Schengen Area. Serbia officially applied for membership in the same month. Two years later, the European Commission recommended that Serbia be granted the status of a ‘candidate’, which the European Council did in 2012. During this period, more than 800 new laws and other norms were adopted or amended in order to meet EU ‘recommendations’ and ‘harmonize’ the Serbian legal system with EU law (SEIO 2012b). Addressing the nation, the politicians typically emphasized, in the vague manner illustrated by the 2008 DP campaign, the economic benefits of integration supposedly in the common interest of the Serbian society – EU funds, jobs and foreign investments. Nevertheless, they often also identified it with a reform of the state and society as such. Policy-makers interpreted the process, to use a formulation I repeatedly heard at the government’s Office for Cooperation with

84 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Civil Society, as the ‘engine of reform’. Serbia 2020, a draft policy paper that sought to define developmental goals to be reached by 2020, was modelled after the Europe 2020 Strategy ‘so as to secure a complete co-ordination of socio-economic and political goals of the country with the process of acceding to the [EU]’ (GRS 2010b: 1). At a DP conference, President Tadić equated EU integration with a ‘project of the modernization of Serbia’.5 The ‘European Integration’ section of the parliament’s website read: The road to EU [sic] is seen as a road to a more modern society, a stable democracy with a developed economy, while political and economic requirements set by the European Union – since they coincide with preconditions for a successful political and economic transformation – are viewed as means instead of an end to development. (NARS n.d.)

In their approach to public policies, anthropologists stress that policies contain implicit or explicit articulations of models of society and are, in that sense, akin to ‘myths’ (Shore and Wright 1997: 7). This metaphor is useful precisely because of the double sense of the term ‘myth’. In the popular understanding, it is a false or factually inaccurate account of things that has nevertheless come to be believed, while anthropologists stress its social function of a cosmological blueprint that sets categories and meanings for the interpretation of experience (Ferguson 1999: 13–14). Following the first of these meanings, the policy of Europeanization was articulated as a unilinear movement towards the preconceived (‘European’) model of affluent, advanced and better-governed society, and was therefore what I call a modernization myth. However, matters were complicated by the fact that, as I will show, many of my research participants saw this myth as empirically false and yet ideally truthful, in line with the second approach. Part of the reason for this is related how it plays on, and hence perpetuates, deeply ingrained ideational frames. As explained more extensively in the Introduction and Chapter 1, the dominant representation of Serbia in the 2000s was one of a ‘transitional’ country in multiple overlapping senses – ‘postconflict’, ‘postauthoritarian’ and ‘postsocialist’. The narrative of Europeanization became firmly entangled with the scheme of transition, with which it shared a teleological and evolutionist orientation. Thus emerged the representation of Serbia’s ‘delayed’ or ‘unblocked transition’ as entailing, by the force of necessity, integration with ‘Europe’ and the mimesis of its institutional, legal and social models. While Serbia’s transitionality undoubtedly gave an additional boost and specific flavour to its EU integration/Europeanization, the equation of the lat-

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 85

ter with modernization was, in itself, nothing new. Even before the 1990s, it proved appealing in peripheral Southern European countries such as Greece and Italy (Featherstone 1998; Giuliani 1999). Similar framings, which some authors described as colonial, were more recently replicated in the ten postsocialist Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007. Here, the transition framing was coupled with the established ‘Orientalist discourse that assumes an essential difference between Europe and Eastern Europe, and frames difference from Western Europe as a distance from, and a lack of, Europeanness’ (Kuus 2004: 474; see also Böröcz 2001; Kuus 2007; Obad 2010; Petrović 2014). The dominant representation of these countries has been and continues to be, often even after their formal accession to the EU, one of diligent disciples – still requiring much tuition – of Western European norms. At the time of writing, the EU’s latest addition (Croatia in 2014) as well as its most likely next expansion is in the so-called ‘Western Balkans’. The dominant discourse on the Europeanization of this recent regional construct rehearses the familiar themes. In much academic writing, the EU is portrayed as acting benevolently as a ‘magnet and source of inspiration’ for these countries’ ‘efforts to build modern states and societies’ (Bechev 2006: 23; see also Anastasakis 2005). However, specific for this discourse is how it contrasts the Europeanization of this space to the previous stage of so-called ‘Balkanization’, referring to the violent and authoritarian nation-state building after the break-up of Yugoslavia (e.g. Fotev 2004; Jano 2008). This framing derives its apparent veracity from the longstanding and deeply entrenched discourse of Balkanism, which marks the former Ottoman territories in Europe as its Orient – backward, irrational and violent. As a rich literature documents, Balkanism has shaped the self-understanding of the Balkan peoples themselves, and the hierarchical dichotomy of Europe/Balkans has been reproduced on an ever-smaller scale between and within Balkan societies (Bakić-Hayden 1995; BakićHayden and Hayden 1992; Boškovic 2005; Todorova 2009). Serbia too has not escaped the influence of Balkanism (Živković 2011: 42–93). As the modern Serbian nation-state was forming and consolidating its independence in the nineteenth century, its position changed from one of a border province of the Ottoman Empire to the rural periphery of industrialized Europe. ‘Europe’ (meaning Western and Central Europe) served as the constant frame of reference against which Serbs calibrated their own (lack of) progress and as the model after which they sought to advance their laws, institutions, way of life and material and high culture (Daskalov 1997; Stojanović 2003, 2008;

86 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Stokes 1990: 25–26, 162–66). However, the habitus of self-scrutiny through the ‘European gaze’ clashed with the Romantic celebration of the Serbian authentic and unique way of being (van de Port 1998: 83–86). This conflicted relationship with the authority of ‘Europe’ returned to the fore with the resurgence of nationalism and neotraditionalism in the 1990s, and continues to inform the ways in which contemporary Serbians evaluate and relate to their own society (van de Port 1999; Volčič 2005). It became one of the organizing elements of the ideological and heavily simplifying dichotomy of ‘two Serbias’ (see Chapter 1), according to which the First Serbia looks up to Russia while the Other Serbia looks to ‘Europe’. Those identifying as the Other Serbia (a category that, as explained above, overlaps closely with ‘civil society’), as well as many foreign commentators, interpreted the wars and nationalism as the return of Balkan primitivism, thus Orientalizing their opponents and the Milošević regime.6 They discussed the events ‘as if they felt constantly under European scrutiny and had to justify their actions to Europe’ (van de Port 1998: 74) and expressed disappointment that ‘Europe’ did not intervene against Milošević (Jansen 2000: 402). Anthropologists working in Serbia and other post-Yugoslav countries documented how many people talked about their expectations of ‘normal’ life in terms of a ‘return to Europe’ and similar metaphors of collective movement. Jessica Greenberg (2007: 99) argued that the student activists she worked with in the early 2000s saw Serbia’s EU membership ‘as a mechanism to circulate the entire country into Europe through a collective relocation that promises normalcy . . . on a national scale’ (see also Greenberg 2010, 2011, 2014: 76–78). Stef Jansen (2009a, 2014b, 2015: 175–80) made similar observations in Serbia as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina and emphasized the importance of effective state ‘grids’ for the stability and predictable, futureoriented directionality of the ‘normal lives’ that his research participants desired. Indeed, an opinion poll in 2011 showed that the most common positive association that Serbian citizens had with the EU was related to such ideas of normal life: ‘more employment opportunities’ and ‘path to a better future for young people’ (SEIO 2012a). The dominant understanding of ‘civil society’ (and the Other Serbia) as a ‘pro-European’ force has remained stable despite the post2000 expansion and diversification of the NGO world that it referred to. Several factors contributed to this, including the aforementioned government discourse. As the case of the There is No Alternative to Europe Movement illustrates, the liberal civil society occasionally engaged in acts of outright veneration of the end-point, if not quite

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 87

the conduct, of the integration policy. Since 2000, the well-endowed NGO European Movement in Serbia (EMinS) and another NGO called the First European House Čukarica have been awarding an annual ‘Greatest European of the Year’ prize for ‘strenuous and successful work oriented to a faster and more comprehensive integration of our country to Europe’ (EMinS n.d.). A number of politicians, typically Democrats, received the award.7 The nationalist adversaries of the liberal civil society and the Other Serbia also helped reproduce the assumption that that these groups are inherently pro-EU. Slobodan Antonić (2007), for instance, accused these ‘Euro-Serbs’ of an uncritical admiration and unbridled submissiveness in relation to the EU combined with a disdain for ‘ordinary Serbs’, whom they considered primitive and uncivilized.8 While primarily targeting the Other Serbian elites and their allied Liberal Democratic Party, these authors occasionally did not hesitate to take the next step towards generalizing about the ‘globalism9 of our civil society’ (Lalić 2011) or ironically branding the ‘civilist (građanistički) NGO sector’ as one of the ‘self-declared “European forces”’(Antonić 2011). The next section examines a project based precisely on such assumptions about ‘civil society’.

The Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund Despite the title, the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund was actually a one-off10 project implemented in 2009–11 and worth about €100,000 (Pontis Foundation n.d.). The Pontis Foundation, one of the leading Slovak NGOs, developed the project in 2009 and successfully applied for most of the funding from the Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation (SlovakAid). It then approached the Centre for Democracy Foundation (CDF), the other of my two primary field sites, to act as the project partner tasked with administering the implementation in Serbia. The aim of the project was to: support at least 12 Serbian domestic experts, journalists and researchers from the younger generation (up to 35 years old) with the aim of rejuvenating and reviving the [nongovernmental] sector in its goal of disseminating arguments examining the benefits of EU membership for Serbia. (Pontis Foundation n.d., my emphasis)

A pro-EU bias and an assumption that Serbian NGOs share it were thus built into the project’s concept. The stated aim was to be achieved by supporting competitively chosen grantees to write case studies –

88 | Frontiers of Civil Society

either a policy paper or five magazine articles – on various aspects of Serbia’s integration, building on the relevant ‘experiences of Slovakia’. While the call for grant applications specified that the purpose was ‘research and analysis of the Slovak experience (positive and negative)’, it left no doubts that the ‘general goal of the project is Serbia’s progress toward the EU’ (CDF 2010). The project was based on an assumption that the desirability of EU integration was beyond question. As such, it exemplified the involvement of NGO/state networks, in this case transnational, in the building of the ideological hegemony of Europeanization. In January and August 2010, there were two calls for applications that the CDF published on its website and sent to people and organizations it deemed likely to apply. Each call defined four topics of expected outputs. Eligible to apply were Serbian citizens, NGOs, universities, research institutes and the media. In each case, the ‘main researcher’ had to be younger than thirty-five. NGOs were by far the most common kind of applicant and grantee in both calls (see Tables 2.1 and 2.2). About two-thirds of the applicants were male and Belgrade-based. Among the grantees, NGOs were most represented, and men and people from Belgrade again dominated. All except one grantee in each call (the same journalist Stevan Veljović of the economic weekly Ekonom:east) wrote policy papers. The grantees were chosen by an evaluation board with five members – one representative each of Pontis, the CDF, the Serbian NGO Table 2.1. Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund applicants Gender of main researcher

Belgrade/ non-Belgrade

Call

Eligible applications*

1

41

16 individuals 12 NGOs 4 universities/institutes 10 media**

26 male 16 female**

28 Belgrade 13 non-Belgrade

2

30

10 individuals 11 NGOs 3 universities/institutes 6 media

19 male 11 female

21 Belgrade 9 non-Belgrade

Type of applicant

* Fifty applications were received in the first call of which nine were ineligible for formal reasons (e.g. incomplete documentation or main researcher older than thirty-five). In the second call, all received applications were eligible. ** The total is forty-two, one more than the number of eligible applications.

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 89

Table 2.2. Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund grantees Call

Grantees

Type of grantee

Gender of main researcher

Belgrade/ non-Belgrade

1

6

1 individual 3 NGOs

4 male 2 female

4 Belgrade 2 non-Belgrade

5 male 2 female

7 Belgrade

1 university/institute 1 media 2

7

2 individuals 4 NGOs 1 media

International and Security Affairs Centre (see below), the Slovak foreign ministry and the SEIO. After the decision, one-day training sessions for the grantees were held in Belgrade. Pontis representatives covered topics such as EU integration, public outreach and policypaper writing. Grantees then had about three months to write their papers. In most cases, they travelled to Slovakia to interview people in various government bodies, research institutes and NGOs. Their English-language papers were published on the Pontis website and disseminated, through the media and grantees’ own social networks, to expert audiences in Serbia. The best grantees in each call were rewarded with a trip to EU institutions in Brussels. The project was concluded by a final conference in May 2011 in Belgrade, which was actually a special session of the Democratic Political Forum, the CDF debate series. The event was held in a conference room in the National Bank of Serbia and was attended mainly by various local and central government officials (including one minister) and NGO representatives, in addition to the project participants and several Slovak guests. The project was the most recent instantiation of more than a decade of Slovak support for regime change and ‘reform’ in Serbia. To understand the role of the liberal civil society in this relationship, the political struggles in the 1990s Slovakia must be brought into the picture. Under the semiauthoritarian rule of Vladimír Mečiar, Slovakia had been lagging behind its transitional neighbours in economic transformation as well as integration into the EU and NATO. A turnaround came after Mečiar’s defeat in the 1998 parliamentary elections that brought a pro-Western right-wing coalition into government. Slovakia’s ‘civil society’, here too largely equated with a liberal, foreign-funded NGO sector, played an important role in this

90 | Frontiers of Civil Society

shift. Working closely with the opposition, NGOs conducted a massive ‘pro-election’ campaign to mobilize people (especially youth) to vote ‘for change’ and developed mechanisms to ensure fair elections. This strategy, which combined the unification of a ‘democratic’ opposition with ‘civil society’ involvement and sometimes protests, was pioneered in 1996–97 in the Romanian and Bulgarian presidential elections and Serbian local elections, and has been since dubbed in political science the ‘electoral model of democratization’ or ‘electoral revolution’ (Arias-King 2007a; Bunce and Wolchik 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2011; Kuzio 2006). Within seven years from Slovakia, where it was first used in parliamentary elections, the model has been replicated in Croatia, Serbia, Moldova and the ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. The spread of the model was underpinned by, as the practitioners call it, ‘transfer of knowledge’ or ‘transfer of experiences’ – while Slovak activists trained Croatians and Serbians, the leaders of Otpor travelled to Georgia and Ukraine and so forth (Arias-King 2007a; Bunce and Wolchik 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2011; Kuzio 2006). This idea also informed the Slovak-Serbian project. The leaders of Serbian NGOs that organized the Izlaz 2000 (‘Exit 2000’) pro-election campaign, such as Nataša Vučković of the CDF and the late Miljenko Dereta, cofounder and long-time director of the influential NGO Civic Initiatives (CI), told me about their frequent contacts with Slovak activists and officials during the two years between the Slovak and Serbian ‘electoral revolutions’ (see also AriasKing 2007a; Bunce and Wolchik 2006a, 2006b, 2007, 2011; Kuzio 2006). While I do not wish to overstate their significance, these conferences, workshops and translations of reports on ‘Slovak experiences’ provided at the very least an inspiration and knowhow. Working closely with Slovak NGOs, the first post-Mečiar government of Prime Minister Mikuláš Dzurinda also got involved. The Slovak foreign ministry, jointly with the US-based East West Institute, launched the Bratislava Process in July 1999. This series of meetings in the Slovak capital, Strasbourg and Belgrade brought together Serbian opposition leaders, NGOs, unions, student organizations and independent media, thus mediating between them, multilateral institutions and international donors (Mathews 2001: 12–13; Minić and Dereta 2007: 89; Mojžita 2003: 112, 122–23, 144). Such mediation might have had an important financial aspect since, as already mentioned, the opposition was to a significant extent funded via NGOs. After Milošević’s ouster, Serbia became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Slovak official development assistance (ODA). Slovakia’s historically first ODA strategy for 2003–8 defined the then

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 91

State Union of Serbia and Montenegro as the only priority country (MFASR 2003b). The 2009–13 strategy reconfirmed Serbia as one of three priority countries (MFASR 2009b). Peter Michalko, director of the foreign ministry South-East European States Department, told me that Serbia was also one of the priority targets of the Centre for the Transfer of Experiences with Integration and Reforms, an ondemand mechanism of intergovernmental knowledge transfers that the ministry and SlovakAid launched in 2011. This focus was explained by ‘friendly ties’ between the two countries, their similar postcommunist transitions to ‘full democracy’, the Slovak minority in Vojvodina, and the recent history of Slovak humanitarian and NGO activities in Serbia (MFASR 2003a: 3). Slovakia took it upon itself to teach Serbia about ‘developing a market economy’, ‘reforming the public sector’ and, indeed, becoming an EU member (MFASR 2003a: 14–16). These efforts were to be coordinated with the EU and EU experts stationed in Belgrade (MFASR 2003a: 19). The 2009 National ODA Programme, the year in which Pontis received SlovakAid funding for the project, reiterated that transfers of experiences to Serbia involved a focus on EU integration (MFASR 2009a: 11).11 Slovakia’s aid for Serbia was thus clearly linked to its EU membership. The preoccupation with ‘transferring’ integration knowhow articulated its bid for international relevance. The historical, ethnic and linguistic ties and similarities evoked by Slovak policy documents (MFASR 2003a: 6) seemed to predispose Serbia as a particularly promising student of Slovak transitional lessons. With such mediating activities towards Serbia and other postsocialist states in the EU’s ‘immediate outside’ ( Jansen 2009a), Slovakia hoped to raise its profile with both the Union and these countries. The present case illustrates how social relationships forged between and within the two countries circa 2000 continued to be activated for such endeavours. The project network connected members of national pro-EU and pro-Western networks – people who often straddled or circulated between government and NGO positions and cooperated with like-minded individuals across both spheres. Pontis started as the Slovak branch of the US-based Foundation for Civil Society established by Wendy Luers, the wife of an American ambassador to Czechoslovakia in the 1980s.12 The branch became independent in 1997 and changed its name to Pontis four years later. In the Mečiar period, it distributed more than $3 million in US funding to Slovak NGOs. It was a member of the NGO coalition that coordinated the 1998 pro-election campaign. Its activist Marek Kapusta directed the campaign’s youth-oriented prong (Bunce and Wolchik

92 | Frontiers of Civil Society

2011: 68, 75, 362). In the aftermath of the Slovak ‘electoral revolution’, Pontis became engaged in transfers of experiences to Serbia. Kapusta travelled some dozen times to Serbia to train Otpor leaders (AriasKing 2007a: 44; Jennings 2009: 16–17). Pontis was also involved in the Bratislava Process (Vladár 2010: 56). As the Serbian NGO leaders told me, some members of the first post-Mečiar government in Slovakia were also actively involved in these activities, such as the foreign minister Eduard Kukan and the director of his cabinet Miroslav Lajčák, a diplomat and politician who served in a series of high-profile bilateral and multilateral roles in the ‘Western Balkans’. Pontis made Serbia a target country of its Democratization and Development Abroad programme, along with the likes of Belarus and Cuba. The projects in Serbia often focused on ‘transferring experiences’ with EU integration and were closely aligned with government policies; several were funded by SlovakAid, a branch of the foreign ministry.13 In 2003, the NGO even helped the government draft the strategy of ODA for Serbia (Pontis Foundation 2004: 13). But the relationship between Pontis and the government was apparently more than purely institutional. Precisely in 2003, Milan Ježovica, adviser to Prime Minister Dzurinda, was a member of the advisory committee for the NGO’s Democratization programme.14 In turn, the former Pontis programme director Milan Nič served in 2010–12 as an adviser to the state secretary at the foreign ministry who was then Ježovica (GLOBSEC n.d.). Nič’s appointment at the ministry coincided with the remarkable success of all seven Pontis applications for SlovakAid funding in 2011 (Kováč 2011). At that point, the government was again led by the Slovak Democratic and Christian Union–Democratic Party (SDKÚ-DS), the right-wing party that formed the backbone of the first two post-Mečiar governments in 1998–2006. And Mikuláš Dzurinda, the party leader and former prime minister, was serving as the foreign minister and personally appointed Ježovica, also a SDKÚ-DS member. The government-friendly attitude and partisan alignments of Pontis pervaded the project. Michalko, the foreign ministry official I interviewed, told me that he helped conceive the project. He also sat on the evaluation board. Ježovica and Nič attended the final conference in Belgrade. These links also dawned on me when I accompanied the journalist grantee Stevan Veljović and CDF and Pontis representatives on their trip to Brussels. Addressing our EU interlocutors, Lucia, the Pontis worker, repeatedly made statements like ‘Slovakia has a clear opinion about where Serbia should be heading which is why we established this [EU Enlargement] fund’. Her tendency to fuse the positions of Pontis and the government was perhaps understandable

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 93

in the light of her biography as she narrated it to me over drinks in a Brussels pub. After Slovakia’s ‘electoral revolution’, she, then a fresh university graduate, served in the Office of the Government and later in the parliament; both positions were EU-related. She nostalgically remembered the ‘enthusiasm and excitement’ of that period. After a nominally leftist government had been formed in 2006, she could not stand ‘all the scandals’, so she took maternity leave and then joined Pontis. In Brussels, Lucia organized meetings with two Slovaks that were also revealing of the ideological proximity and social links between Pontis and Slovak right-wing political elites, particularly those in the SDKÚ-DS. The first Slovak interlocutor was the aforementioned Eduard Kukan, an SDKÚ-DS member and one of the right-wing politicians whom a leaked cable of the US embassy in Bratislava identified as one of the ‘figures friendly with Pontis’.15 The other was a diplomat who Lucia knew from earlier. She complained to him that some Belarusian opposition activists supported by Pontis had liaised with Socialist members of the European Parliament without consulting them. Lucia knew why – ‘that wouldn’t be kosher with Pontis’. Finally, in a meeting with an official of the European Economic and Social Committee, she objected to his critical observation that Slovakia had opted for a neoliberal rather than the (alleged) ‘European’ social model by declaring that she is ‘personally happy about it’. Political considerations apparently also guided the search for the Serbian project partner. I described the intimate relationship between the CDF and the DP in the Introduction. Lucia demonstrated her awareness of this when she told one of our Brussels interlocutors somewhat imprecisely that the CDF was ‘an organization . . . let’s put it like this, it was a cradle for the Democratic Party’. However, the partner was originally supposed to be another NGO: the International and Security Affairs Centre (ISAC), which describes itself as an organization ‘promoting and serving the transformation of Serbia towards EU and Euro-Atlantic integration’ (ISAC n.d.). The Pontis contact was Milan Pajević, then the chairman of the ISAC international advisory board. His career is highly illustrative of the porous and mobile frontiers between the domains of ‘civil society’ and institutional politics in Serbia. In the 1990s, he cofounded the already mentioned European Movement in Serbia and served as its vice president. In 1999, he cofounded G17 Plus – the neoliberal think tank that wrote the agenda of the anti-Milošević opposition and later transformed into a successful political party. After the regime change, he became the foreign policy adviser to the federal deputy prime minister Mirol-

94 | Frontiers of Civil Society

jub Labus, who was also the president of G17 Plus. Pajević further ran on the G17 Plus candidate list in the 2003 elections and directed the G17 Institute, another NGO in the G17 family, until cofounding ISAC in 2006 (SEIO n.d. a, n.d. b).16 But ISAC, Lucia told me, was found to lack ‘administrative capacities’ for project implementation, which is why Pontis turned to the CDF and Pajević remained a member of the project’s evaluation board. All seemed set for a smooth ‘transfer of Slovak EU accession knowhow’ (Pontis Foundation n.d.). Yet the endeavour yielded somewhat ironic results. The grantees who made study trips to Slovakia (all but one in each call) typically returned with mixed impressions. Commenting on the condition of public buildings they visited, the professionalism of people they interviewed or the functioning of institutions they studied, they told me that they ‘expected more’. Some were surprised by all the complaints that their interlocutors hurled at them about a lack of funding, adequate rules and other preconditions for improvements. This led them to question the extent of progress that resulted from EU integration. In January 2011, I participated first-hand in the Slovak experience of two second-call grantees, Sonja Avlijaš and Stevan Veljović. I accompanied them to a series of meetings in Bratislava and arranged one meeting for Stevan near Trnava, my hometown. Sonja, economist and researcher at the Belgrade expert NGO Foundation for the Advancement of Economics, originally wanted to investigate intermunicipal cooperation in social service delivery. But she found that such cooperation was actually quite undeveloped and ended up writing about social services reform more broadly (Avlijas 2011). Stevan, the journalist, wrote a series of magazine articles about measures for reducing unregistered work. Sonja’s first call in Bratislava was at Socia, an NGO focusing on social policy and services. Its director and former director painted a rather bleak picture of reform achievements. For instance, the responsibility to fund some social services, such as elderly care, had been decentralized to local governments, but their budgets were often too small for adequate service provision, not to mention innovation. For political and financial reasons, municipalities with large old-age homes strove to maintain these institutions and resisted funding nonresidential care that would allow elderly people to live independently in their homes. Despite years of talk about the ‘deinstitutionalization’ and ‘diversification’ of social services, alternative services remained underdeveloped and NGOs served only about a fifth of clients.

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 95

Our second meeting was with Lýdia Brichtová, director of the Social Services Department at the social policy ministry. Brichtová continued the critique of decentralization that, as she argued, left many municipalities with insufficient funds for all the services for which they became responsible. Since the crisis had begun and municipal revenues had shrunk even further, the finance ministry had to step in to fund these services. Brichtová hoped that the criteria for distributing money to various levels of government would change. She mentioned a new law on social services that provided for an equal access of all (including nongovernmental) service providers to public finance, but was sceptical as to whether it could be fully implemented because of the general lack of funding. When Sonja asked her whether any EU resources could be used to fund social services, Brichtová told her that the only relevant EU programme was the Regional Operational Programme and that this money could be used only for ‘social infrastructure’. We went for lunch after leaving the ministry and were soon joined by Stevan. It transpired that the two had been in touch a few years earlier when Sonja wrote a column for Stevan’s magazine. After mentioning some common acquaintances, they started discussing impressions from their study trips. Sonja said that the state of social services reform in Slovakia was even worse than in Serbia, where deinstitutionalization had progressed further because it started sooner. The good thing about the project, in her opinion, was that one got to see how a country like Slovakia actually was not light years away from Serbia just because it was in the EU. She then addressed me: ‘Sorry but now I have to be a bit insolent – how did Pontis even come to think that Slovakia had some lessons to teach Serbia?’ Logically, she reasoned, the point of the project had to be to share ‘good experiences’, but it did not seem as if there were a lot of those. I suggested that EU membership might itself boost Slovaks’ self-confidence. Picking up on this, Stevan told us he had just seen an EU flag displayed at an elementary school. In Eastern Europe, he added, people seemed to be much prouder of their EU membership, even in Bulgaria, which was no better off than Serbia. Sonja concluded that all of this showed how EU enlargement was always very political, which was why Romania, Bulgaria and to some extent Slovakia were in, while Serbia was not. Switching semiconsciously into a defensive mode, I said that one thing that had actually worked in Slovakia was GDP growth. Sonja seemed not to be aware of this, but was convinced when Stevan listed all the transnationals with factories in Slovakia. However, Stevan con-

96 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tinued in a more critical vein, this model based on big foreign investments was already exhausted and it was time to do ‘something more creative’. This led to a discussion of the Serbian government’s lack of economic development strategy. In that context, Sonja mentioned that some Slovak experts were involved in the drafting of the new Serbian law on regional development, and Stevan commented ironically: ‘Slovakia which is the very model of regional development – wherever there is a factory in the field, the region is “developed”. . .’ However, the written project outputs tended to adopt positions that were more in line with the hegemonic narrative about Europeanization. Only two papers explicitly rejected the assumption that EU integration led to improvements in the studied fields, namely social services (Avlijas 2011) and customer protection (Peškir 2010). Stevan argued in his first batch of articles that EU integration merely provided a beneficial historical moment for the government to push through macroeconomic reforms that he considered useful (Veljović 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). One paper pointed to both the positive and detrimental impact of EU accession on meat processing in Slovakia (Stamenkovic and Otovic 2010). Most authors, however, treated the link between Slovakia’s accession and development as a background assumption or eschewed the issue altogether. At the final conference, several speakers, including some of the project participants, described Slovakia as the ‘model’ for Serbia.

Discussing Europeanization in the Liberal Civil Society A more ambiguous picture of the positioning of Serbian NGO workers vis-à-vis the narrative of Europeanization also emerged through some twenty-five interviews in which I included a battery of standardized questions about EU integration and its public mythology. When I asked the NGO workers about their general opinion on Serbia’s integration, a recurring motif in their replies was that scores of laws had been hastily adopted to ‘harmonize’ Serbian law with EU norms, but were not actually being implemented. Politicians adopted the laws because they wanted to please the EU and create an ‘illusion of reform’, as one NGO worker put it, not because they wanted citizens to benefit from better laws. The transposition from European to national legislation was described as ‘mechanical’ and ‘copy and paste’, without necessary adjustments to Serbian law and conditions. The establishment of ‘independent regulatory bodies’ (nezavisna regulatorna tela)17 was another frequently mentioned example of for-

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 97

malist quasi-reforms conducted for the Brussels audience. The EU recommended and welcomed the establishment of these institutions, but it also criticized their lack of resources and the insufficient follow-up to their recommendations and decisions.18 NGO workers told me time and again how these bodies had been established but had not been given adequate offices or even furniture for years, or how other institutions refused to cooperate with them. Some interviewees speculated that politicians had probably only agreed to set them up because they expected to be able to marginalize them. Another point over which there was a clear consensus was that integration was progressing too slowly. Given that the hegemonic narrative of Europeanization was as the ‘engine of reform’, this observation overlapped with the general discontent with the post-2000 reforms. Many interviewees thought that deep, systemic changes were needed to bring about a speedy transformation, but these were not the priority for political elites preoccupied with ‘daily politics’ (dnevna politika) in order to stay in power. Two NGO workers from a south Serbian town argued that the government was focusing on meeting EU criteria that were ‘marginal’ and ‘not a priority’, such as the harmonization of vehicle registration plates, instead of addressing the ‘main things’ like corruption. Also targeting the politicians’ orientation to ‘politicking’ (politikantstvo) was the disapproval of their frequent announcements of when Serbia should join the EU, described as ‘bidding with deadlines/years’. Since several such timeframes had already proven unrealistic, the interviewees argued, the practice was only making people frustrated and apathetic about the whole matter. It was also taking the need for reforms out of focus. Closely related to this was the claim that politicians were primarily using the accession as an ‘election slogan’, which was, as we saw, not an unfounded opinion. For NGO workers, this was closely tied with a set of broader issues with popular attitudes to integration: It’s an election topic with which people can be mobilized and yet another opportunity to sell them a better life. Masses then believe in that. People don’t realize at all that you first have to work on yourself and on the state so that you live better, and it’s again that story, like, ‘we’ll enter and it’ll be better right away’. (Slovak-Serbian fund grantee, EU funding consultant in his twenties, Belgrade)

As an NGO worker from a mid-sized western Serbian city put it, ‘an average citizen of Serbia, when you say “EU” or “European integration”, he gets an idea of himself driving a jeep, and nothing else’.

98 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Such a citizen was not aware of ‘more important aspects’, such as that ‘everyone cannot throw garbage wherever they please’. For my interlocutors, this kind of attitude devalued the truly significant benefits of integration, which they described with words like ‘order’ (red), ‘discipline’ or ‘system’. They argued that this was a chance for Serbia to ‘put itself to order’ (da se uredi), to become a ‘legal state’ and ‘orderly society’ (uređeno društvo) where ‘laws and rules are being respected’. Here was the ‘normalcy’ talk in a particular key – one calling for a more effective state, but coupling this with a more neoliberal norm of self-government and a critique of what a journalist dubbed ‘European values, Serbian-style’ (Lapčić 2011). Serbian society was backward, partly due to a lack of appropriate self-government, and the elites were unable – or unwilling – to lift it into modernity. What they did instead was to mimic reform, mirroring the insincere Europeanization of the masses. Many experts and public intellectuals, including figures associated with the Other Serbia, articulated similar positions (Mikuš 2013). Thus, while my interlocutors saw the myth of Europeanization as false for the time being, it continued to structure their expectations – they did not abandon a hope and striving for a ‘genuine’ Europeanization, which has been an attitude typical for the Serbian NGO sector throughout the 2000s (Kostovicova 2006: 30). For its success, they argued, both politicians and ‘people’ would need to undergo an inner, rather than just superficial, metamorphosis. As individuals, they would have to start thinking critically about their society and ‘working on themselves’. As a polity, Serbia would need to have and pursue its own ‘strategy’ of development – a point echoed by the grantees sobered up by their visits to Slovakia. This led my interlocutors to argue that EU accession was important for Serbia as a ‘means’ of modernization, not the ‘goal’ in itself. But it was, they believed, an indispensable means, given the insufficient domestic capacity for self-transformation. Even the interviewees who were otherwise critical of the EU or the slogan ‘Europe has no alternative’ thought that accession was the only viable goal of Serbia’s foreign policy. One of the very few interviewees who identified herself as Eurosceptic commented that Serbian politicians spent too much time on the ‘requirements of the EU’, but considering their (the politicians’) ‘quality’, it was perhaps only for better. Another interviewee applied a similar reasoning to Serbian citizens: I advocate the kind of stance that if we, every one of us, put our own backyards to order, houses, parks and the like, and that applies also to the state,

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 99

its enterprises, the whole system, we wouldn’t even need Europe. But unfortunately, we evidently aren’t capable of putting the situation in the society to order ourselves. That’s why Europe is more than necessary for us. (NGO worker in his twenties/thirties, mid-sized western Serbian city)

While my research participants underlined that individual and national agency was crucial if Serbia was to modernize, they also noted that such agency was lacking. It was better to have both politicians and fellow citizens under the watchful eye of the EU. And, as some of my interlocutors argued with a resigned optimism, even the laws adopted and institutions established ‘because of the EU’ would incrementally, ‘little by little’, make Serbia more modern. This type of argument clearly reinforced the hegemonic project and, as I argue below, legitimated the participation of the NGO class in the pro-EU bloc. However, a significant number of my interlocutors also voiced more radical critiques of EU integration. Many felt that the dominant discourse about integration obscured the issue of the costs that it would entail: In me, it produces a . . . frustration, an aggression, that someone is now telling me ‘yeah, it should be like that’, and why? ‘because it should be like that . . . it should because it should’. I mean, there’s no critical perspective, no distance, no higher-quality analysis, how much the EU accession costs us, how much we get from it, how many years must pass before we get something from it. . . (NGO worker in her thirties, Belgrade)

This woman likened the present situation to the NATO bombing of Serbia. Then, one could not be against the bombing and Milošević at the same time (Jansen 2000). She argued that the absence of a political party that would be ‘reform-oriented’, but ‘approaching reforms critically’ turned EU accession into yet another of such ‘false choices’ where one was forced to choose between ‘the lesser of two evils’. Other interviewees complained that ‘nothing is being explained’ to people. A former NGO worker-cum-civil servant told me that if I asked someone in the street why Serbia should enter the EU, they would answer ‘because we have to’. Some interviewees also took issue with the slogan ‘Europe has no alternative’ when I mentioned it. They found it ‘unthinking’, ‘too aggressive’ and bound to produce ‘revolt’ (bunt) even in people who otherwise supported integration. In sum, these people thought that the process was marred by a lack of public debate involving experts and the general public – in effect, a democratic deficit. Most radical critiques of the EU integration challenged its presentation as a panacea for the country’s problems, sometimes with

100 | Frontiers of Civil Society

a clearly articulated critique of persistent geographical inequalities and neoliberal policies associated with integration. I was struck by the large number of people who mentioned Bulgaria and Romania, two neighbouring countries, as examples of countries whose situation did not improve with accession: You say that some Romanians, some Bulgarians have entered the EU, you go there, people complain again, they’re unsatisfied, you go to Slovenia, you see it’s not all roses for them either, they’re unsatisfied too, in Bulgaria there were big strikes because of salaries and all the rest, so what did they get from it? Sure, good roads, strong economy or whatever [would be nice], but that’s not the same for each country in the EU. (Middle-aged female NGO worker, south Serbian town) I don’t know if people even have any illusions that something’s going to happen. Really, what you can hear in public transport is ‘we’re going to work for H&M like Bulgarians and Romanians, for €200 a month, we’re going to be happy’. I mean, when all the tax breaks for foreign investors will be implemented. . . (NGO worker in her thirties, Belgrade)

The novelties that some of my interlocutors noted as the effects of accession in Romania and Bulgaria included badly paid jobs created by foreign multinationals attracted by low taxation and cheap labour, and ‘the possibility that they all go to Germany to work’, as a young male NGO worker from southern Serbia put it. The subject position of ‘civil society’ apparently did not prevent some of those who inhabited it from questioning the hegemonic narrative of Europeanization. But the more radical critiques presented here were voiced in private situations: conversations with an anthropologist. The reason why one was unlikely to encounter them in the media or various public events was certainly at least partly due to the limitations imposed on such discursive spaces by the hegemonic narratives already discussed. Nevertheless, to fully appreciate this public invisibility of liberal and Eurosceptic voices, it seems important to also examine the doing, not just the knowing and talking.

EU Integration and the Political Economy of the Liberal Civil Society In 2005–13, the share of EU funding in overall ODA flows to Serbia grew from 15 per cent to 61 per cent (OECD n.d.).19 This was a combined result of generally growing EU funding as well as diminishing

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 101

total ODA, though there were striking year-on-year oscillations in both. In the same period, the EU has also become one of the biggest, if not the single biggest, of all multilateral, bilateral and private donors supporting ‘civil society’.20 Organizations could apply for EU funding either individually or as members of national and transnational networks. The grants were large compared to those offered by other donors.21 The EU’s language of ‘cross-sectoral partnerships’ and its explicit demands that state bodies institutionalize their cooperation with ‘civil society’, which I discuss in Chapter 4, helped open up more interstitial spaces in which NGOs could participate in policymaking and execution of state functions. This, in turn, has likely increased their bureaucratic power and access to material resources, at least in some cases. Nevertheless, the EU’s growing dominance on the donor scene was a mixed blessing. A general concern was that the rapprochement and eventual accession to the EU would give an additional impetus to the departure of foreign donors who would conclude that NGOs in an EU member state did not need their funding. In fact, as I discuss more closely in Chapter 6, this process was generally believed to have already been under way by the early 2010s and was expected to soon accelerate. To make things worse, the EU would not really fill the resulting gap. It was considered extremely difficult to succeed in the funding schemes for which NGOs were eligible, sometimes in competition with other types of applicants such as companies or municipalities. Minimum grants were quite big, conditioned by a large share of cofunding from other sources and subject to demanding administration. This strongly favoured established, large and rich organizations.22 As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, the EU did not allow regranting, which might have partially ameliorated this situation. People also complained that most EU funding was captured by private consultancies23 and that transnational NGO networks were usually led by large EU-based organizations, while Serbian organizations were only junior partners. Pointing to the experiences of neighbouring new member states like Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, NGO workers lamented in various meetings I attended that ‘the EU has killed the sector’ there – all the money went for state-building rather that civil society building and only a handful of strongest organizations ‘survived’. In one case, a female NGO worker claimed that a single women’s NGO remained in Hungary after its accession to the EU, and the result was that the government restricted access to abortions.24 These concerns led to demands that the state provide the cofunding needed to get EU grants, which

102 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society has indeed started to do in 2012. The donor flight would certainly make state funding even more important, but there were reasons to expect that it would also not be equally accessible to various NGOs. Informal and partisan relationships remained important for access. At the same time, the system of funding was being reformed according to the principle of ‘efficiency’, which introduced new kinds of inequalities (Part III). Related to that, while the EU-supported agenda of ‘partnerships’ promised more leverage for NGOs vis-à-vis the state, the examples of such processes in Chapter 5 suggest that in some cases only a restricted circle of organizations and individuals was able to benefit. Finally, the attempts to develop fundraising from citizens and businesses – sources independent of the state and the EU – were very much in the beginning and only seemed a realistic option for certain kinds of organizations and initiatives (Chapter 7). On the one hand, then, the EU’s ascent to dominance on the donor scene was associated with an overall drop in available funding. On the other, it was likely to deepen the already existing inequalities between NGOs and introduce new ones. Such inequalities resulted from their varying ‘capacities’ (in a managerial sense) that privileged some organizations and impeded others in their ability to access EUrelated resources. This ability was also conditioned by the organizations’ conformity with the EU’s instrumental approach to ‘civil society’ as service providers and suppliers of policy-relevant information (Chapter 5). Indeed, strongly represented among NGO projects funded by the EU delegation to Serbia in 2003–11 were: projects on various ‘European’ themes (with titles such as ‘Communicating European Security Policies’ or ‘Implementation of EU Values, Policies and Standards’); well-established and professionalized NGOs; and expressly pro-EU organizations such as the aforementioned EMinS (DEURS 2011). Indeed, EMinS declares EU accession to be its key objective and is a member of the European Movement International, a pro-EU lobbying organization based in Brussels. A number of EMinS figures were also politicians or government officials. For example, Tanja Mi������������������������������������������������� ščević, EMinS vice president,�������������������� previously also associated with G17 Plus, has served as the government’s chief EU negotiator since 2013. Finally, a number of NGOs with publicly known links to the so-called ‘pro-European’ political parties were successful in the EU delegation’s competitions, for example, the CDF, the CI, the Belgrade Fund for Political Excellence or the MilenijuM Centre for Civil Society Development.

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 103

The final thing to mention is that the quickening pace of EU-driven reforms provided career opportunities for NGO workers who tended to have professional skills and knowledge in areas like project management, EU funding and integration-related reforms. Professional biographies such as those listed in the Appendix of this chapter are part of the broader pattern of ‘boundary crossing’ identified in Chapter 1. Sofija, Uroš and Đorđe were all highly educated, in their thirties, inhabitants of major cities, anglophone and cosmopolitan in their outlook. In the 1990s, their formative period, Sofija and Đorđe were involved in antiregime NGOs and movements – Sofija in an independent student organization and Đorđe in an NGO he described as ‘the predecessor of Otpor’ as well as in G17 Plus. All three started their careers in NGOs (Sofija and Đorđe even cofounded some) and later crossed over to public administration. Through their education and NGO activities, Uroš and Đorđe acquired expertise in EU funding that they used in their present state jobs; Uroš even started a project consultancy. The EU played a more marginal role in Sofija’s career. She briefly worked for the European Students’ Union in Brussels, which represents the interests of students towards the EU and other organizations. Upon her return to Serbia, she cofounded an NGO in which she developed her profile of an education policy expert and got into the position of being offered a project job at the education ministry. All three were highly critical of civil servants in a manner that echoed the widespread discourse about ‘particratic’ and clientelistic state capture (Chapter 1). Sofija and Uroš commented on their incompetence, laziness and preoccupation with office politics. Đorđe mentioned the politicization of public administration. In contrast, they presented themselves as ‘technocrats’: efficient, work-focused, self-managing and flexible experts ready to work extra and unusual hours. Uroš in particular felt that his skills and style of work stood out in the local government where he worked. All of this was illustrative of broader patterns in the liberal civil society. In response to my direct question, most NGO workers whom I interviewed told me that they would consider offers of state jobs. However, many said they could hardly imagine that ‘now’, ‘for this kind of state’ that was full of incompetent and uneducated party nominees. They perceived that many of these people enjoyed excessive and undeserved privileges, especially job certainty, very light workloads and easy promotion based on clientelism. Quite in opposition to this stereotype, they understood themselves as a new kind of worker: diligent, competent and competitive experts relying on their knowledge and skills rather

104 | Frontiers of Civil Society

than political links, and prepared to accept flexible (project-based or fixed-term) forms of employment. More directly relevant to the present argument is the place of the EU in these three biographies. What they suggest is that the various interrelated tendencies discussed in this chapter, such as the growing availability of EU funding, the departure of donors from Serbia and the broadening scope of integration-related reforms, make the EU increasingly central to the livelihoods of a growing number of (former) NGO workers. This represents yet another constraint on their critical autonomy in relation to EU integration. However, it is important to recognize that concrete outcomes may also reflect individual values and priorities. For instance, Đorđe came to dream about leaving Serbia and working in Brussels, which he described as one of his favourite cities, ‘exceptionally rich’ and ‘open’. Sofija’s was a different case: she had been advancing through her state job to the level of ‘Brussels’ and international consultancy, but she was clearly not impressed and preferred to return to the NGO sector, which she considered more meaningful and fulfilling.

Conclusion For Gramsci, civil society was the part of an extended state where consent with hegemony was organized by permitting subaltern groups to express their grievances and aspirations in a ‘reformist’ manner that did not threaten the status quo. However, he also conceived of it as a space of potential revolution: the emergence and spread of alternative consciousness and the formation of counterhegemonic institutions (Buttigieg 1995). In this chapter, I argued that the relationship of the Serbian NGO sector to the hegemonic project of European integration was fraught with tensions that reflect this double-faced nature of civil society. In private and informal situations, its members articulated critical and diverse views that strained the ideological straitjacket of the native notion of ‘civil society’. However, the hegemonic narratives about ‘Europe’ and transition, as well as the political identity and political economy of the NGO sector, imposed ideological, social and material limits on such radical critiques in public. Instead of initiating critical analyses and discussions of the economic, political and social consequences of the forms of restructuring that EU integration requires of candidate and member countries, these organizations and people were more likely to reproduce familiar symbolic geographies and conventional claims about the benefits of accession.

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 105

The ‘constructive criticism’ of integration that they typically voiced actually called for its deepening (‘genuine Europeanization’) or entailed pragmatic demands (such as for the cofunding of EU projects) that the state seemed willing to accommodate. Moreover, the class positions of NGO workers and the opportunities and constraints presented by EU integration led many of them to actively participate in the hegemonic project: either as an increasingly instrumentalized and EU-dependent ‘civil society’ or as a new, flexible and nomadic kind of labour force working on integration-driven agendas. The pro-EU alliance of political and state elites and the liberal civil society as well as the ideological hegemony of the narrative of Europeanization were thus maintained. In the next chapter, I turn to the other side of the same coin: the efforts of what has been called an ‘uncivil society’ of nationalist and populist groups and movements to articulate a counterhegemonic project as a direct negation of EU integration.

Appendix: EU Integration and Professional Biographies between the State and ‘Civil Society’ Sofija, in her thirties, mid-tier project manager in a large Belgrade NGO. Studied international relations. Active in an independent student organization at her university in the late 1990s. After 2000, worked briefly in a large NGO and became a high-level officer for international relationships in a national student union. Spent a year in Brussels working for the European Students’ Union. Cofounded an NGO specializing in education policy. Worked as a consultant in the Ministry of Education on a World Bank-funded project. Found there were two kinds of people in the Ministry: stupid and lazy ones and very ambitious ones who intrigued to advance their careers. Was climbing up the ladder, going to ‘meetings in Brussels’, but ‘knew it was shit’, so joined her present NGO. Used to working independently and focuses on being efficient. Checks several UK news websites daily. Considering going abroad again to work or do a Ph.D, but it gets harder with the passing years. Uroš, in his thirties, project coordinator in the administration of X, a municipality in the city of Q. Still doing a degree in economics. Used to write and manage projects (especially EU ones), in a large NGO in Q. Founded a consultancy with his brother that provided the same services for NGOs, local governments and businesses. Then a friend recommended him to some officials of the X municipality who

106 | Frontiers of Civil Society

needed help with a project proposal. Has been working for them ever since. Municipalities engage young NGO workers as they lack capacities for EU projects. His team in the municipality is quite ‘flexible’, but often held back by the ‘inert structures’ and rigid bureaucratic rules of the Q city government. Works as he used to before – plans his schedule, stays overnight in the office if necessary and ‘has results’ without somebody telling him what to do. Many civil servants in Q don’t do anything useful, they just come to sit in their air-conditioned offices, drink coffee and use the internet. Đorđe, in his thirties, EU funds coordinator in a reform-oriented government body that implements integration-driven policies. Father worked abroad as a diplomat. Studied law, specializing in EU law. In the 1990s, cofounded an NGO that was ‘the predecessor of Otpor’. Attended courses on civil society and EU integration in the Belgrade Open School, the meeting place of ‘politicians, professors, the intellectual elite which worked on overthrowing Milošević’. Here was offered an ‘engagement’ with G17 Plus. In the early 2000s, held multiple jobs as a journalist covering EU issues, including in an integration-focused NGO. In the second half of the decade, worked in a ministry, again focusing on integration. Critical of the excessive partisan influence on public administration. Believes integration can modernize Serbia, but so far it has been too slow. Would like to feel like an ‘equal citizen’ of the EU and ‘influence the building of Europe, not just Serbia’.

Notes 1. See also Kostovicova 2004: 24; Petrović 2014: 3. 2. This and similar metaphors crop up in discourses on integration elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia and even in EU member states ( Jansen 2015: 175–80; Petrović 2015: 110). 3. See, for example, Pond 2009; ‘Pro-EU Forces Win in Serbia’ 2008; ‘Serbian Reformers Claim Victory’ 2008. 4. It is worth noting that, despite the EU critiques, the previous government of Prime Minister Koštunica also extradited a number of Serb war crime suspects to The Hague as part of its ‘voluntary surrender’ policy. However, these individuals were seen as less important than the suspects arrested and extradited later. 5. See ‘Odustajanje od EU bila bi katastrofa’ 2011. 6. Internationally, Serbs tend to be seen as particularly responsible and even ‘collectively guilty’ for the Yugoslav wars (Clark 2008). As a result, they ended up being more ‘Balkanized’ than the other belligerents.

‘Europeanization’ and the Liberal Civil Society | 107

7. EMinS pulled out of the project in 2008, explaining that it was impossible to agree with the First European House on ‘clear rules, procedures and structure of organs that choose the awardees’ (EMinS 2008). However, the other organization continued to award the prizes, including to a number of (mostly Democrat) ministers. 8. See also Kalik 2008; Radojičić 2006. 9. The original uses the word mundijalizam (a more common form is mondijalizam), which is a pejorative term (Klajn 2001: 103). The ideology of ‘civil society’ was being described as mondijalizam already in the 1990s (Kostovicova 2006: 28). 10. However, Pontis has subsequently used the same model for its scaled-up SlovakBalkan Public Policy Fund project (with two phases in 2011–12 and 2013–14), which targeted the entire ‘Western Balkans’ except Croatia. 11. In the indicative ODA budget for that year, Serbia received by far the biggest allocation of all priority countries – €1.6 million out of the €7.56 million total. 12. There was also a Czech office that later grew into the Via Foundation (see Chapter 6). 13. See Pontis Foundation 2005: 38, 2006: 17, 2007: 12, 2009: 28. 14. See Pontis Foundation 2004: 14, 2005: 47. 15. See ‘Milinkevich Impresses in Bratislava’ n.d. 16. Pajević’s retreat to ‘civil society’ ended in August 2012 when the incoming government appointed him as the director of the European Integration Office. Suzana Grubješić, another G17 Plus member, became deputy prime minister for European integration. The former Slovak prime minister and foreign minister Dzurinda became her adviser. 17. My research participants typically used the terms to denote five institutions established after 2004: the Ombudsman, the Commissioner for Free Access to Public Information and for Data Protection, the State Audit Institution, the Anticorruption Agency and the Equality Protection Commissioner. 18. See European Commission 2009: 9–10, 2010: 8–9, 2011: 15–16. 19. In 2001–11, the EU allocated €3.2 billion of soft loans, €3.2 billion of nonrefundable grants and some humanitarian aid to Serbia, and thus became its largest donor (Ćurković and Mijačić 2012: 2). The government expected the EU to provide 83 per cent of ODA in 2011–13 (GRS 2011a: Annex IV). 20. In 2010 alone, for instance, the EU disbursed c. €3.2 million to Serbian NGOs, plus additional funds to NGO participating in ‘regional thematic networks’ (BCSDN 2012). 21. The grants typically ranged from €50,000 to €150,000, but could be up to €500,000. Transnational NGO networks could receive from €500,000 to €800,000. 22. Unequal accessibility of EU funding to various kinds of NGOs was also documented in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Fagan 2006), Poland (Sudbery 2010: 151) and across ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ (Carmin 2010; Kutter and Trappmann 2010: 60–61). 23. I am unable to verify such assessments because I am unaware of a breakdown of EU assistance to Serbia according to the type of recipient. 24. Even sympathetic commentators found that EU-centred attempts to empower ‘civil society’ to shape public policy in ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ achieved mixed results (Börzel 2010; Kutter and Trappmann 2010; on Poland, see Gąsior-Niemec 2007, 2010).

– Chapter 3 –

THE COUNTERHEGEMONIC PROJECT OF THE NATIONALIST CIVIL SOCIETY

_ By the early 2010s, Serbian nationalist organizations and movements had achieved considerable visibility through various political practices, media appearances and a proliferation of posters, stickers and graffiti on the streets of Serbian cities. Yet they remained extremely controversial: while their proponents described them as ‘patriotic’, ‘national’ or ‘popular’, their opponents, with the liberal civil society at the helm, called them ‘right-wing’, ‘extremist’, ‘fascist’ or ‘clerofascist’.1 This chapter explores the spectrum of their efforts to build a broad popular movement for an alternative project of ethnonational self-sufficiency and retraditionalization. It highlights their struggles against the Belgrade Pride Parade, which were a direct challenge to European integration with which the Pride Parade was entangled and the tactical alliance of state and liberal civil society actors created around it. The nationalists seized on the Pride Parade as a symbolically powerful and socially legitimate platform to launch their populist narrative about the suffering of the Serbian ‘people/nation’ (narod)2 under the ‘transition’. While the anti-Pride Parade mobilizations involved elements of a frontal attack on state sovereignty, the nationalists simultaneously pursued less confrontational and abrupt tactics of war of position, such as promoting alternative hegemonic narratives or becoming actors of institutional politics. Anthropologists related the strengthening of ethnic and religious neonationalism in Western Europe to identitarian fears and social insecurity linked to immigration, precarious employment and other transformations induced by ‘globalization’ (Gingrich and Banks 2006; Holmes 2000). More recently, Don Kalb (2011) challenged the focus on – 108 –

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 109

political elites and immigration in this literature, and the dominance of explanations based on culture and identity in the broader research on neonationalism. He called for a perspective that would anchor these ideologies and movements more firmly in class relations. The rise of what he reframed as nationalist populism announces a ‘return of the repressed’ – the dispossession and disenfranchisement of the working classes by the twin processes of neoliberal globalization and de-democratization of governance, which denies them the possibility of articulating their interests in the language of class. Kalb further argued that nationalist populism in Eastern Europe deserves much more attention in the framework of a pan-European debate since it is shaped by the same structural processes as its Western European counterpart. And because it cannot be very well explained by the presence of immigrant ‘ethnic others’, it can also help expose the class basis of nationalist populism more clearly (Kalb 2011: 16–20; see also Kalb 2009a, 2009b; Ost 2005). The markedly xenophobic and racist response to the ‘immigration crisis’ in East-Central Europe has since problematized this last point, but at least at the time of my research, ethnic minorities have not been the Serbian nationalists’ main focus and immigrants not at all. As I argued in Chapter 1, peripheral integration into the global political economy has been central to the post-Milošević hegemonic project. The resulting neoliberal restructuring has entrenched persistently high unemployment, the precarization of work and soaring social inequalities. The dependent mode of transnationalization has intensified the impact of the global crisis by making Serbia particularly vulnerable to global economic conditions. In this context, Kalb’s analysis is obviously useful for thinking through how the nationalists embedded their critiques of transition in attacks on symbols of transnational integration such as the Pride Parade, which they framed as a threat to the freedom and the very spiritual essence of the Serbian nation. Their often fantastic-sounding claims about bizarre elite depravities, omnipotent conspiracies and the ‘New World Order’, with typical anti-Semitic undertones, illustrate vividly the anxiety and paranoia welling from the crises of welfare and popular sovereignty (Kalb 2009a, 2011: 13–14). Yet following Kalb’s (2011: 12) own insistence that particular populist movements are to be seen as responses not to global processes directly, but to their national and local mediations, this analysis must be qualified to account for the specificities of the Serbian case. The upsurge of nationalist populism in the late 1980s was a paradigmatic case of an ethnic reframing of social discontent, itself related to the

110 | Frontiers of Civil Society

comparatively early Yugoslavia’s reperipheralization. But it has also been an overture to a period of elite-led ethnonationalist modes of state-building and legitimation. The then emerging nationalist organizations and movements criticized the Milošević regime for its inconsistency on nationalist principles, but at the same time they could not escape an ideological proximity to its state project. To a significant degree, then, these actors relate to global processes through the still not entirely finished fragmentation of Yugoslavia and its ongoing impact on the Serbian state – its material forms and its ongoing social construction in relation to abstract and historical models, narratives and experiences of the state. The prolonged and pervasive transnational interventions, aimed at governing the ‘Western Balkans’ as an enduring, if not permanent European periphery, intersect with the social dislocations of transition to breed an acute sense of threatened, vulnerable stateness and geopolitical subalternity. In the face of this, the nationalists put forward visions of Serbia as a fully sovereign nation-state, in a broad sense that includes political and economic independence as well as cultural autonomy in the guise of retraditionalization. Another important specificity of the Serbian nationalist populists stems from the particularly socially regressive outcomes of Serbia’s transition, which brought protracted impoverishment and insecurity not only to the working classes but also to many (formerly) middleclass people. Theodora Vetta (2011: 42, 54) noted that it was often middle-class engineers, administrators and highly skilled workers who supported the Serbian Radical Party, the ideological soulmate and sometimes ally of the nationalist organizations, in the Vojvodinian town of Kikinda. Similarly, I found that these organizations themselves often drew their membership and articulated the interests of the urban middle classes. In addition, other kinds of social distinctions intersecting with class, in particular those of gender and generation, as well as specific forms of affect, such as anger and fear, also seem important for an understanding of the anatomy of their constituencies. Building on these observations and an analysis of the nationalists’ practices in a close relation to the post-Milošević hegemonic project, I will conclude by addressing a question typically not asked by the literature on the rise of populist nationalists – why they have so far failed to assemble a new power bloc, despite their potentially misleading public visibility. I will also draw parallels with the ways in which anthropologists challenged the monocausal public and media narratives about the social foundations of the two major recent episodes of nationalist populism: Brexit and Trump’s victory.

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 111

From ‘Uncivil Society’ to a Plurality of Civil Societies Nationalist organizations could be hardly less compatible with the dominant native notion of civil society in Serbia, which foregrounds NGOs and movements promoting liberalism, cosmopolitanism and antinationalism, and as such have been excluded from this bracket. Nor do they show much interest in being included – their self-presentation is one of authentic popular movements, which they contrast with liberal NGOs stereotyped as elitist and ‘anti-Serbian’. Instead of ‘civil society’, nationalists sometimes describe themselves collectively as a ‘patriotic bloc’. A recognition of the phenomenon of illiberal NGOs and movements in anthropology and other disciplines contributed to an understanding that value-based definitions of civil society are empirically inadequate (Chambers and Kopstein 2001; Haddad 2006, 2007; Hansen 1999; Kopecký and Mudde 2003; Rahman 2002). The concept of ‘uncivil society’ has been used for organizations and movements that promote ‘nondemocratic’ and ‘extremist’ ideas, advocate the use of violence or lack the spirit of ‘civility’ and ‘tolerance’. The usual interpretation of these attributes suggests that uncivil society is another normative label defined in relation to liberalism as a universal moral standard. It also ignores the fact that actual practices within both ‘civil’ and ‘uncivil’ society are highly diverse, potentially even in a single organization in various stages of its evolution. Even if we adopted a relation to liberal values as the guiding criterion, it is not clear that we should indiscriminately demonize all nationalist organizations while assuming that all liberal organizations are benevolent (Kopecký 2003: 12). Nevertheless, there is still the social fact of an emic distinction between nationalist and liberal organizations that both parties accept, although they construct and valorize it in different and self-serving ways. The relational concept of civil society outlined in the Introduction can account for this difference without accepting its value-laden constructions. From this perspective, nationalist groups represent one of the plurality of ‘civil societies’ – practices and representations that all constitute the frontiers of the state and society, and mediate cultural and ideological hegemony, but do so in different and potentially antagonistic ways. I will substantiate this point by first attending to the similarities of the practices and organizational forms of nationalist and liberal NGOs, and then discussing the differences between their political projects. Already a decade ago, Denisa Kostovicova (2006: 30) observed that the Serbian ‘illiberal civil society’ emulated the practices of the

112 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘liberal civil society’. My own findings corroborate this. To begin with, many nationalist groups registered with state authorities as associations of citizens, just like most NGOs. Some have not registered and remained ‘informal’, but still possessed, at least nominally, decision-making structures typical of NGOs, such as management boards (upravni odbor) and the like. Although many of these groups designated themselves as ‘movements’ in their names, their representatives often referred to them as ‘associations’ or ‘organizations’ in public speeches and the interviews they gave me, although never as ‘NGOs’. I interviewed high-ranking members of the 1389 Serbian National Movement, the Dveri (‘Doors of the Iconostasis’) Serbian Assembly, the Naši (‘Ours’) Serbian National Movement, the Nomokanon (‘Nomocanon’) Association of the Students of the Faculty of Law and the Obraz (‘Honour’) Fatherland Movement. I hereinafter refer to these organizations, in keeping with the convention in Serbia, by the unique part of their names, e.g. Dveri. Like their liberal counterparts, all major nationalist organizations regularly updated their websites and many ran email newsletters and busy Facebook accounts. They used these channels to advertise activities, present political agendas and comment on current issues. They organized public lectures and discussions (tribine), demonstrations and more recently even ‘walks’, a genre of protest marches through central urban spaces originally associated with the anti-Milošević opposition (Jansen 2001: 39–40). A lot of effort was spent on ‘campaigns’, consisting of putting up posters and stickers with political messages and the organizations’ logos and names (also spread through graffiti, badges and apparel). This mirrors the observance of visual identity rules by liberal NGOs as well as the protest strategies of Otpor (Aulich 2011). The interviewed nationalists claimed that their main source of funding was donations from their activists and sympathizers. The groups invited their supporters through newsletters and website banners to send donations to their accounts. The diaspora was also targeted. For example, Dveri worked with the Serbian Orthodox Church eparchies3 in Western countries to organize visits to Serbian communities, with fundraising being one of the goals. Naši and 1389 sold apparel with their logos and other ‘patriotic’ motifs, while Dveri published books and an occasional magazine. Finally, these groups resembled NGOs rather than ‘movements’ (which they claimed to be), in that the core groups of activists tended to be relatively small, as was obvious from the modest turnout at the meetings that I attended. In interviews and meetings, the leaders

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 113

complained that often only a fraction of Facebook attendees actually came to an event. Large crowds were more likely to attend protests that addressed topical issues from similar ideological positions, but many participants in such protests did not consider themselves members or supporters of any particular nationalist organization. However, there were also many ways in which nationalist groups significantly differed, in an ideal-typical sense, from liberal NGOs. Their work was much more openly political: they did politics by means of protesting, organizing talks and spreading what they themselves called ‘propaganda’ through posters, stickers, graffiti, banners, fanzines, magazines and the internet. Because they typically did not implement projects like NGOs (and obviously also because of their politics), they did not receive funding from foreign donors. The nationalists I interviewed claimed to work in their organizations voluntarily, unlike the employees of NGOs, who usually worked for salaries or honoraria. Apart from these pragmatic and formal similarities, the nationalist civil society shared with the liberal civil society a preoccupation with articulating and promoting particular visions of a legitimate social order and state. This had already been apparent in the Milošević era. While the few authors who wrote on these organizations mostly dated their appearance to the post-2000 period (Byford 2002; Kostovicova 2006; cf. Bieber 2003a), it actually began in earnest in the late 1990s. For example, as I discovered through archival research, in 1999 the clerofascist magazine Nova Iskra (New Spark) announced the establishment of Dveri, another magazine of a similar orientation that would later grow into the organization Dveri. In the same Nova Iskra issue, one of the future leaders of Dveri, already involved at this stage, interpreted the then pending NATO bombing as a punishment for the sins of the Serb nation: [A] multi-party, anational, atheist, profiteer company – the state. Serbia [that is] a mixture of anational citizens, the coat of arms and the anthem are not Serb, the national dynasty is abroad, the Church spurned by the state, the school without religious education, the army Yugoslav, the University alien, the Academy of Sciences Communist, the Radio Television of Serbia – a lie, the economy – a lie, the opposition – a lie, politics – politicking, parties – business organizations, souls divided, hearts ambivalent, characters undetermined, lives without Orthodoxy… (Obradović 1999: 20)

While the liberal civil society saw the Milošević regime as undemocratic, rabidly nationalist and traditionalist, those in the emerging nationalist groups took issue with its insincere commitment to the

114 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Serb cause, its Communist pedigree and its cold relationship to the Serbian Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy in general. Nevertheless, the authors cited above are right in that the expansion of the nationalist civil society occurred mostly after 2000. This points to Milošević’s successful use of nationalist policies and rhetoric to demobilize opposition, a strategy that was only compromised in the latter half of the 1990s as his pragmatic approach to nationalism became increasingly obvious. But it might also suggest that the reservations that the nationalists had at the time were almost trivial compared to how they would experience, and oppose, the post-2000 transformations. In their view, the Belgrade Pride Parade has become one of the major symbols of the latter and a focus of much of their public activity.

The Pride Parade and Struggles over Europeanization Ever since the first attempt to hold the Pride Parade in 2001, it has been a major site of struggles over public space and the post-Milošević political and social transformations. Nationalist organizations played a leading role in these struggles. Members of at least one of them, the Obraz Fatherland Movement, including its long-time leader Mladen Obradović, were in the thousand-strong crowd of young men who attacked the participants in the 2001 Pride Parade.4 The next two attempts to organize a Pride Parade (in 2004 and 2009) were met with nationalist threats and were ultimately banned by the interior ministry due to security concerns. The 2010 Pride Parade, organized by a group of LGBT NGOs, was the first to actually be held since 2001, this time with massive security backing from the state. Its official slogan, ‘Let’s Walk Together’ (Da šetamo zajedno), could be read as a subtle reference to the protest ‘walks’ (šetnje) of the anti-Milošević opposition. In the context of the Pride Parade, walking through downtown Belgrade expressed a claim to an open and legitimate presence of LGBT people in public space. Nationalists obviously picked up on this message, as they focused their efforts on preventing the Pride Parade, but not the series of indoor events that preceded every Pride Parade from 2010 onwards.5 Before the Pride Parade, they repeated for the media, as if making a prophecy, that ‘there won’t be a gay parade’. While not directly calling for violence, they certainly implied it by posters reading ‘We’re expecting you!’ and depicting a rowdy crowd waving Obraz flags, which appeared in downtown Belgrade. Other organizations had their own anti-Pride Parade ‘campaigns’ limited to posting stickers. Numerous anonymous graffiti read ‘Blood will

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 115

pour on the streets / There won’t be a gay parade’, ‘Death to faggots’ or ‘Stop the Parade’. As I described elsewhere (Mikuš 2011, 2015b: 18), the day of the Pride Parade itself was marked by one of the biggest riots in Belgrade in the past ten years. An estimated 6,000 young men fought the police, leaving a large number wounded, and destroyed private and public property. About 250 rioters were detained, but almost all were soon released without charge. A few were given the smallest possible legal penalties, but even these were mostly overturned (HCHRS 2011: 449–52). In 2011, Mladen Obradović and three other Obraz leaders were found guilty of planning and coordinating the riots, and ten more people, including Obraz members, of taking part. (An appeals court overturned this ruling too.) In the media, the nationalists blamed the violence on the ‘regime’,6 the organizers and the attendees who ‘provoked’ the righteous anger of patriotic youths. In interviews I conducted with them, as well as in their online statements and public appearances,7 they invariably denied that any of their members had ever committed a crime and claimed that all the arrests, lawsuits and rulings against them were ‘illegal’, ‘unjust’ and acts of ‘political persecution’. Little of the evidence used in the trial with Obraz members became public and the rioters neither wore symbols of nationalist groups nor were so identified in the media, with the exception of Obraz. However, in a public meeting of several nationalist organizations that I attended in Belgrade in November 2011, Mladen Obradović of Obraz and Ivan Ivanović, the leader of Naši, implied that their own and other unspecified nationalist organizations participated in the riots, and Ivanović even argued that this made them truly ‘patriotic organizations’ (Mikuš 2015b: 19–20). The stakes of the nationalist involvement in the violent resistance to the 2010 Pride Parade were, on one level, a response to the discourse of the government and the organizers that forged a strong link between the Pride Parade and the hegemonic narrative of Europeanization (Bilić 2016a, 2016b; Mikuš 2011). When I interviewed the organizers, they hinted that this coupling enabled them to form a pragmatic political alliance with the government, which was keen to demonstrate its commitment to EU integration. That the Pride Parade promoted Serbia’s acceptance of ‘European values’ was reiterated in the media, speeches at the event (mostly by representatives of EU institutions) and the subsequent European Commission report and European Parliament resolution, both of which expressed satisfaction over the state’s patronage of the event. The multicultural discourse

116 | Frontiers of Civil Society

about the recognition of diversity and the liberal discourse of individual freedom and equality also framed the event. The Pride Parade thus helped buttress the narrative about a liberalizing and Europeanizing state.8 For the nationalists, this association was a major reason to oppose the Pride Parade and was something that enabled them to present this opposition as resistance to Serbia’s integration to the EU and even NATO. In a public debate, members of the short-lived Naši 1389 Serbian National Movement9 described legal sanctions against their comrades due to their anti-Pride Parade activities as ‘the regime’s attempt to break the last resistance to the Euro-Atlantic integration of Serbia’ (SNP 1389 2011b). The defence lawyers in the trial of the Obraz members claimed that ‘this Orthodox youth will fall victim to Serbia’s entry to the EU’ (AC 2011). The nationalists thus framed the EU-driven Pride Parade as an assault on Serbia’s sovereignty that they took to defend. This reflected their more general conviction that the ‘regime’ was in fact a ‘puppet government’, an ‘occupation government’ or simply a party of ‘betrayers’. They accused it of extraditing Ratko Mladić10 and other ‘Serbian heroes’ to the ICTY, ‘betraying Kosovo’ by negotiating and normalizing relations with the Kosovo government, and allowing foreigners to enter all state institutions and decide about everything. In their view, the regime presided over an ongoing ‘shredding’ (parčanje) of Serbia’s territory by tolerating the autonomy of Vojvodina and the movements for a future autonomy of Sandžak and the Preševo Valley (regions inhabited by Muslims and Albanians, respectively), which they believed would ultimately result in internationally sanctioned secessions of these areas too. By resisting this state of geopolitical subalternity, which they variously described as ‘occupation’, ‘colonization’ or ‘national humiliation’ (nacionalno poniženje), the nationalists were fighting for freedom equated with collective ethnonational sovereignty. Against the Pride’s narrative of Europeanization and liberalization, the nationalists laid emphasis on the primary role of Orthodox Christianity and the Serbian Orthodox Church in the governance of society. Using quasi clerical discourse, they described the Pride as a ‘sinful’, ‘shameful’ and ‘satanic’ attack on the Orthodox values of the ‘vast majority’ of Serbs and a negation of the will of the Church, which was happy to support such claims. On the eve of the 2010 Pride Parade, Metropolitan Amfilohije Radović, one of the highest Church dignitaries, described it as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and ‘violent propaganda’. The Holy Synod, the executive body of the Church, released another statement hours later in which it called for nonvio-

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 117

lence, while again condemning those who ‘threaten public morality’ and publicly express their sexual orientation that should remain private.11 On the day of the Pride Parade, priests wearing black cassocks and carrying crosses led groups of rioters and used their special status to get through police cordons. Some rioters also carried Orthodox icons and crosses and sang religious songs. Churches served as rallying points from which they launched their attacks on the police and where they hid to avoid arrest. The nationalists’ opinions about the proper place for nonheteronormative practices were also in line with the position of the Church, and again reveal how the Pride Parade controversy took the form of a struggle over public space. In interviews, the nationalists claimed that they ‘had nothing against’ such practices in private or ‘within four walls’ (u četiri zida), except that they were sinful. Vladan Glišić, then a member of the Dveri leadership, even told me that Dveri would support legislation banning employment-related discrimination against LGBT persons and claimed erroneously that Russia gave them such rights while banning their ‘propaganda’. What Dveri supposedly opposed was ‘homosexualism’, its own idea of what the Pride Parade was about – public shows of homosexuality and a conspiracy to destroy the traditional family by imposing a gay ‘ideology’. Through these arguments and practices geared towards taking control over public space, the nationalists invoked and performed a secular authority of the national church, and through it a broader vision of a strongly centralized and politically and culturally autonomous ethnonational state. Such ideas are part of a long historical thread in Serbia, only relatively briefly punctuated by the ascendancy of socialism. Since achieving autocephaly (ecclesiastical independence) in 1219, the Serbian Orthodox Church has been closely intertwined with the Serbian royal dynasties, whose members doubled as the highest church dignitaries and major national saints. This reflected the Orthodox Christian principle of ‘symphony’, evoked under that name by some of the nationalists I interviewed, according to which the church and the temporal power ‘should work together for the common good’ (Ghodsee 2009: 228). After the Ottoman conquest of Serbia in 1459, the Church took over some functions of the former Serbian state. And soon after Serbia gained de facto independence in 1817, it was legally defined as the state church subordinated to the government (Pavlovich 1989). Its repression in socialist Yugoslavia, which was milder than religious repression in the Soviet bloc, began to erode at the time of the Serbian national ‘awakening’ in the 1980s. Socialist secularization was overturned by two decades of dra-

118 | Frontiers of Civil Society

matic resurgence of religiosity and a rapprochement of the Church and the state, particularly since 2000 (Blagojević 2006; Drezgić 2010; Perica 2006; Vukomanović 2005). However, according to its Constitution and laws, Serbia is a secular state where all churches and religious communities are independent of the state and equal before law. The nationalists often contested such arrangements as debasing the Church. (Whether they translated into actual practice is another matter – the liberal part of the public was convinced that the Church enjoyed influence over and support from the state far beyond the formal frameworks.) The nationalists’ appeals and attempts to enact a secular authority of the Church were one of the building blocks of their alternative state project. Faced with the DP-led government that has put state facilities to the service of holding the Pride Parade in order to make headway in the progress towards EU integration, the nationalists responded by articulating a radically different vision of an ideal state and attempting to actualize it through practice. This was evident from the way in which they justified their own patently antistate actions such as attacks on the police. At the same meeting in which he celebrated the 2010 riots as ‘patriotic’, Ivan Ivanović of Naši said: None of us here or in any other patriotic organization advocates going to fight against the regime like some anarchists or I don’t know what. We simply fight for our state, we fight for all the holy Serbs who lived before us and we fight for all the Serbs who will come, for our future, our children. That is our responsibility before God.

Ivanović thus redefined battling the ‘regime’ as fighting for ‘our state’. Following this logic, the nationalists interpreted the Pride Parade itself as inimical and incompatible with the ‘real’ Serbian stateness. In their rants against the Pride Parade, they would often mention the banner reading ‘Death to the State’ that I had also seen held up by an anarchist group at the 2010 Pride Parade. A member of Nomokanon and a law graduate told me in an interview that the banner constituted ‘an attempt to violate and overthrow the constitutional order of the state of Serbia’ and referred to the relevant legal provisions. Ivan Ivanović with some other nationalists even compiled ‘evidence’ of the ‘unconstitutional’ and ‘illegal’ nature of the 2010 Pride Parade itself in a document named after the anthem of Serbia – God of Justice (ECSD and SNP 1389 2010). In an article opposing the 2011 Pride Parade, Naši (2011) repeated that the former was ‘unequivocally subject to a strict ban according to the constitution and multiple laws of the Republic of Serbia’ that protected ‘morals’.

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 119

If the nationalists did not perceive the contradiction between these hyperstatist claims, on the one hand, and their own attacks on the police and thereby on the factual sovereignty of the state, on the other, the reason must be sought in their disarticulation of the ‘state’ into its actuality and ideality. Their frontal attacks on the actual state sat side by side with their reverence for its ideal vision. To delve deeper into this, I now turn to the nationalists’ practices on the occasion of the celebrations of the Statehood Day.

Contestations over Stateness The First Serbian Uprising against the declining Ottoman domination began on the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple (Sretenje) in 1804. It was an overture to wars of independence known as the Serbian Revolution (1804–17), which resulted in the emergence of a modern Serbian state. It was again on Sretenje that the 1835 Constitution of the Principality of Serbia was adopted. Today, Sretenje, which falls on 15 February in the modern Gregorian calendar, is not only a church holiday. It was made a ‘state holiday’ (državni praznik) called Serbia Statehood Day in 2001, and President Boris Tadić issued a degree in 2006 that also declared it the Serbian Army Day. This bundling of religious and secular holidays expresses starkly the symbolic association of Serbian state formation with Serbian Orthodoxy as well as the military, which was another critical actor in the consolidation and expansion of modern Serbia. Indicating that the multiplication of holidays was intentional, President Tadić (2011) wrote that ‘the proclamation of 15 February the Statehood Day and the Serbian Army Day renews the deepest historical and traditional link between the founding and building of our state and its army’. The 2011 celebrations, as has been customary in recent years, took place at the site commemorating the First Serbian Uprising in Orašac, a village 70 kilometres south of Belgrade where the rebellion broke out. In the morning of the grim winter day, Bishop Jovan of Šumadija, who heads the eparchy in which Orašac is located, served a mass in the nearby church. Flags of Kraljevina Srbija (‘The Kingdom of Serbia’), a civic association sponsored by the pretender to the throne Aleksandar II Karađorđević and advocating a return to parliamentary monarchy, could be seen in the churchyard. After the mass, a mixed procession of church and lay dignitaries set out to the commemorative site of Marićević’s Trench, which forms a natural amphitheatre with a stage at the bottom. Their route to the trench

120 | Frontiers of Civil Society

passed between two lines of men facing each other, thus forming a corridor. Most were wearing uniforms reminiscent of the black or sometimes green uniforms of the World War II Chetniks (četnici) – the Serb monarchist forces that mostly collaborated with the occupying Axis powers against the Communist Partisans. The uniformed men held Chetnik flags with white skull and crossbones against a black background, reading ‘For King and Fatherland; Freedom or Death’, as well as the flags of a contemporary Chetnik group called Ravna Gora Movement. Many other men in the crowd were wearing full or partial uniforms; apart from the Chetnik ones, a few older men sported traditional peasant-style uniforms (see Figure 3.1). After the procession reached the site surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, a special commemorative service (pomen) was served for Đorđe Petrović Karađorđe, the leader of the First Uprising and the founder of the royal house of Karađorđević. Notables including the pretender, national and local government officials and an army delegation then laid laurel wreaths at the monument. The minister of religion and a delegation of the defence ministry – institutions in charge of religion and the military – represented the government. The municipality head and the pretender gave speeches, followed by a short ‘patriotic poetry’ award ceremony and some poetry reading. The performances of a local folk music group and a female singer

Figure 3.1. The corridor of Chetniks, Orašac, February 2011. Photo by the author.

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 121

who sang ‘Arise, Serbia’, a well-known song about the First Uprising, concluded the event. With its appearance, paraphernalia and verbal and nonverbal reactions, the audience made its own dialogic contribution that alternated between subverting and magnifying aspects of the official programme. Judging by the banners, there were most of the major nationalist organizations, with the notable exception of Dveri. A relatively small and peaceful group of Obraz supporters stood on one side of the entrance to the commemorative site. A much larger and rowdier crowd of Naši 1389 members, standing next to the Chetniks and Kraljevina Srbija supporters, occupied the other side of the entrance. In this part of the crowd, the nineteenth-century flag of imperial Russia could be seen, as well as contemporary Serbia flags and two Naši 1389 banners opposing EU integration. The policemen formed a cordon on both sides of the passage, presumably to protect the dignitaries; however, some struck up apparently friendly conversations with the nationalists. Even before the procession started to descend to the trench, the nationalists chanted, hooligan-style, the names of Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić, prominent Serb war criminals. When the government officials laid the wreaths and the municipality head spoke, they responded with booing and shouting ‘Uprising!’ They also addressed President Tadić (not in attendance) by chanting: ‘Save Serbia and kill yourself, Boris.’ On the other hand, they responded to the pretender’s presence and speech by calling ‘We have a king!’ They enthusiastically joined the bishop in singing prayers, and at the sound of the bells and the sight of the passing Church dignitaries nearly everyone crossed themselves the Orthodox way. Importantly, while the symbolic entangling of stateness, Orthodoxy and militarism was intended by the nationalists as well the government that organized the commemoration and declared the aforementioned holidays, their takes on the same theme were quite different. While the female host carefully and repeatedly stressed that the event celebrated the Republic of Serbia’s Statehood Day, the nationalists foregrounded monarchist symbols and slogans. They welcomed the pretender as a ‘king’ while treating the representatives of the national and local government with open hostility. By responding to them with calls for an uprising, the crowd conjured up an image of popular resistance to the ‘regime’ mapped onto the historic rebellion against the Ottomans, thus denoting the government as a foreign, occupying entity. They further introduced the Chetnik iconography that actually bears no historical relation to the First Uprising. All in

122 | Frontiers of Civil Society

all, they used the Orašac celebrations as a mass-mediated opportunity to subvert the official representations of the state and present their own vision based on an alternative right-wing genealogy of Serbia’s stateness – ethnonationalist, anticommunist, monarchist and neotraditionalist. This has become somewhat of a routine, as 2011 was neither the first nor the last year in which they have done so. The nationalists’ visions of an Orthodox and monarchic Serbia addressed the country’s current issues within the framework of cyclical temporality, which is typical for nationalist thought and its lifecycle metaphors of birth, growth, decay and death of the nation (Verdery 1999: 115–27). This temporal ideology preoccupied with the glorious past stands in a stark contrast to the linear, future-oriented temporality of the liberal civil society and the ‘reformist’ post-Milošević state. As we saw, the nationalists fear the decay and potential death of the ethnonation in the guise of the ‘occupation’. To regain full ethnonational sovereignty, they call for a rebirth of the spirit of medieval and early modern Serbia, and often quite literally demand the restoration of monarchy and even (in the case of the particularly reactionary Obraz) the feudal ‘estates society’. They imagine the past states as inherently harmonious, prosperous, holy and sovereign polities of the ethnonation, ruled by native Serbian dynasties. The autocephalous church plays a key role in this myth, as it accompanied the nation through most of its lifecycle. In this frame, then, ethnonational rebirth presumes a return of the Serbian church and dynasty, in their ‘symphonic’ bond, to their former prominence. Interestingly, the government did not entirely reject the monarchist idea either. It invited the pretender, titled as ‘HRM heir to the throne’ in the official programme, and allowed an open promotion of the royalist movement he sponsored. Beyond the celebrations proper, it has allowed the Karađorđević family to reside in the former royal palace since 2001 while refusing to return its former property or grant it any formal role. Similarly to the re-adoption of the state symbols of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Kingdom of Serbia in 2006, these ambivalent policies towards the dynastic family reveal the incomplete and ambiguous identity of the Serbian state. While constitutionally a republic, its quest for an authentic Serbianness leads it to hark back to its monarchic past, as opposed to republicanism associated with the failed Yugoslav project. The Orašac commemoration further reserved an elevated place for the Church dignitaries, again in line with the rapprochement between the Church and the state after 2000. At a general level, the government had cemented the symbolic associations between Serbia’s state-

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 123

ness, Orthodoxy and militarism by declaring the bundle of holidays and offering appropriate rhetoric. What is more, the state tolerated and to some extent even integrated (the Chetnik corridor) the messages and symbols of the nationalists into one whole with its own ritual, thus effectively allowing them to use the event for their own purposes. This reflects a broader ambiguity in the state’s treatment of these organizations and movements. For example, after the cancellation of the 2009 Pride Parade, the Public Prosecution Office requested that the Constitutional Court ban Obraz, the 1389 Movement and Nacionalni stroj (‘National Formation’), citing their anti–Pride Parade threats as one of the reasons. In 2011, the prosecution office issued a new request for a ban on the 1389 Movement, the 1389 Serbian National Movement and the Naši Serbian National Movement. The Constitutional Court banned Obraz and Nacionalni stroj, an openly neo-Nazi group, but refused to ban the remaining organizations. As we saw, the prosecution of the participants in the 2010 riots, including Obraz members, was highly selective, at a legally prescribed minimum and ultimately mostly overturned by the appeals courts. This belied the harsh rhetoric of government officials in the aftermath of the Pride Parade. For instance, the state secretary at the justice ministry promised a ‘severe response of the state’, while President Tadić noted that the assault on police officers constituted an attack on the state, which was ready to bring the rioters to justice.12 The most likely explanation is that the government, aware of the prevalence of discriminatory attitudes to LGBT persons (Mikuš 2015b: 23), feared that excessively heavyhanded persecution might make it seem overzealously pro-LGBT and raise the nationalists’ public profile. Ideological and social links between the former and some relevant state agencies, such as the police or the judiciary, cannot be excluded either. In addition to this mixture of mostly declaratory repression and de facto tolerance of the nationalists, the post-Milošević political elites – even staunch ‘pro-Europeans’ like Tadić – continued to use nationalist narratives and policies selectively to flank and legitimate the hegemonic project of transnational integration. For example, the DP’s strongly pro-EU election campaign in 2008 featured the slogan ‘Europe as Well as Kosovo’ (i Evropa i Kosovo), promising to pursue EU integration while maintaining the (largely virtual) sovereignty over Kosovo, the two goals being typically seen as incompatible. In this context, the apparently counterhegemonic project of the nationalists was at least partly subhegemonic: complementary rather than directly opposed to hegemony. Yet their claim to revolutionary status had another foundation

124 | Frontiers of Civil Society

on top of their supposedly ‘antiregime’ ideology – namely, their populist self-fashioning as direct representatives of the Serbian people/ nation. I will now examine more closely these discursive strategies and their contradictions.

The Promises and Limits of Neotraditionalist Populism The way in which the nationalists justified their anti–Pride Parade campaigning was a typical example of their pretensions to acting on behalf of the people and indeed as its organic part. In an interview for a nationalist magazine, the Obraz leader Mladen Obradović claimed that ‘there wasn’t an ordinary man who would support that the [2009] Parade is held. Obraz has only expressed in a clear and direct way what the nation thinks’ (Zarković 2010). We have already seen that the nationalists claimed to speak on behalf of the nation’s majoritarian religiousness; however, that was not the only argument they made. On the eve of the 2010 Pride Parade, Dveri told the media that: ‘Instead of the problem of white plague [demographic decline] and whether there is bread and milk,13 our state is concerned with problems of one aggressive minority group’ (Nedeljković 2010). The nationalists presented the Pride Parade as a ‘regime’ agenda serving the particularistic and hence illegitimate interests of a tiny but ‘aggressive’ LGBT minority privileged by foreign powers (Greenberg 2006; Mikuš 2011). They contrasted this, in a zero-sum manner, with the legitimate, universal needs of the ‘nation’, such as employment, social justice and biological survival and reproduction. This was a typically populist strategy of exploiting pre-existing resentments and constructing a simplistic, morally charged dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them’ (Comaroff 2011). At the time of my fieldwork, the economic crisis amplified the ‘transitional’ failure – more than 400,000 people lost their jobs in 2008–10 and the already high unemployment rate soared (SORS n.d.). The 2011 census confirmed what had been already assumed – Serbia (without Kosovo) had lost almost 5 per cent of its population since 2001 (SORS 2011). Large rural areas and most provincial towns faced depopulation as people left for the largest cities or abroad in search of subsistence. These trends were generally considered alarming, but the nationalists especially were fearmongering that Serbs were threatened with extinction. They attributed this apocalyptic situation to the ‘regime’ looting and destroying the economy with a vicious disregard for the people. Framed in this manner, the Pride Parade went far beyond the issue of LGBT rights.

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 125

Through resisting it, and being subsequently supposedly victimized, the nationalists aligned themselves with the innocent ethnonational masses against the corrupt ‘anational’ elites and their colonial masters. In interviews, the nationalist leaders would tell me that they ‘were taught that the interest of the community is above the interest of individuals’, which is why they joined their respective organizations that variously designated themselves as ‘National Movement’, ‘Fatherland Movement’ or ‘Movement for Serbia’. The nation that they mythologized was first and foremost Serb in that its properties were natural for Serbs, as their assumed long-term continuity proved. Sharing this essence, the nation was ‘united’ and ‘harmonious’. Although the nationalists acknowledged the existence of ‘divisions’ (podele), they constructed them so as to fit the myth. They presented the ‘regime’ elites and liberal public figures, including the best-known ‘civil society’ leaders, as ‘anti-Serbs’ or ‘Serb haters’ self-excluded from the nation by their actions. Other than that, divisions were relatively recent aberrations imported from ‘the West’ or ‘Europe’. This was reflected in the way that Mladen Obradović of Obraz, speaking at the aforementioned November 2011 meeting of nationalist organizations, warned against looking for ‘human, earthly’ solutions, especially ‘ideologies’, for Serbia’s problems: [T]hat way, we will keep going around in the same vicious circle in which the Serbian nation, unfortunately, finds itself since almost a century and a half ago [when] two evils had been imported to this space – one evil, that’s sects, and the other, that’s parties.

In that period of emancipation from the Ottoman domination, Obradović continued, Serbs made a major historical mistake – instead of turning to Russia, they turned to the West and thus ‘divisions’ reached Serbia: Why did the Serbian nation in all its glorious and holy history, until most recent times, not know social unrests, peasant rebellions, worker uprisings and so on? We never had that, especially not in the time of the holy Nemanjić.14 Why? Because the whole state and society was imbued with that which is the holiest, the most important – the Orthodox belief.

The solution was for all Serbs, and especially all nationalists, to ‘gather around a single idea’, namely Saint-Savaism (svetosavlje). Obradović concluded with quotes from the work of Bishop (and, since 2003, Saint) Nikolaj Velimirović, one of the godfathers of Saint-Savaism. Speaking next, Ivan Ivanović of Naši reiterated: ‘There aren’t

126 | Frontiers of Civil Society

any ideologies for the Serb, as Mladen said, the only ideology at this point is Orthodoxy and Saint-Savaism.’ The nationalists in general proclaimed Saint-Savaism or ‘SaintSavaist nationalism’ as their most important or even only ideology. This fuzzy blend of messianism and anti-Western Slavophile nationalism was formulated in the interwar period by Church-affiliated nationalist intellectuals, who stressed the importance of Serbian Orthodoxy and the Church for the Serbian national being (Falina 2007). As such, Saint-Savaism resonates with vernacular ideas about Orthodoxy. Most Serbs who declare themselves Orthodox (the vast majority of the population) understand Orthodoxy primarily as a ‘political religion’ that sacralizes the Serbian nation, rather than something necessitating an intense personal relationship with God or frequent public displays of piety (Ilić 2009; Malešević 2006; see also Ghodsee 2009 on Bulgaria). This is why ‘sects’ and ‘ideologies’ threaten the unity and welfare of the nation. As Obradović’s comments imply, the nationalists invoked this amalgam of religion and nationalism as the solution for all kinds of problems, including social ones. Since they constructed the nation as inherently internally solidary, such issues would wane once it reclaims its complete political sovereignty and cultural and economic autonomy. EU integration and transnationalization more broadly were ‘colonization’ that was destructive not only for the sovereign state and identity of the Serbian nation but also for its welfare. Vladan Glišić of Dveri explained their ‘Saint-Savaist approach’ to me in the following manner: [T]o be Christian in the Serbian nation [today] means to take care of a nation which is disempowered . . . socially humiliated . . . nationally ruined and defeated and subjugated and enslaved, and when you put it all like this, then to be Christian today and to be socially active means to fight for national freedom and social justice in Serbia.

The nationalists argued that poverty and inequality in Serbia had never been so great and shameful as today, and emphasized that social justice was one of their main priorities. In an interview he gave me, Igor Marinković, one of the leaders of Naši, even cited their concern with social justice as the reason why they could be just as well considered ‘leftist’ and certainly ‘not a classic right-wing organization’. However, one would struggle to find much leftism in the nationalists’ programmes. Class almost never features in their discourse, unless they talk about the ‘political’ or ‘ruling class’. Social inequalities and struggles are reduced to the populist dichotomy and

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 127

collective subjugation of the Serb nation by the anti-Serb elites and colonizers. Once the nation is liberated, the interests of capitalists and workers, men and women, parents and children, and LGBT people and homophobes will all be effortlessly reconciled. Inequalities will not disappear – they will be normalized by an organicist social order in which everybody knows their rightful place. The nationalists did not see any contradiction between the supposed social justice of the ideal (medieval and early modern) Serbia and its pervasive inequalities, to which they would give a positive twist by styling them as the ‘spiritual vertical of God in heaven, king in the state, and [male] master (domaćin) in the house’. The Saint-Savaist version of populism justified and indeed necessitated patriarchal, clerical and even feudal forms of domination intrinsic to one’s position within the holistic order of the nation. In contrast, the individualized inequalities and particularistic ‘rights’ (minority, women’s, LGBT and so on) emerging in the liberalizing Serbia were seen as threatening that order. The nationalists constructed ‘family’ and ‘family values’ as the natural cornerstones of solidarity and social justice within the nation. They evoked family, with epithets like ‘numerous’ and ‘patriarchal’, as the prerequisite of the nation’s biological survival. They vowed to make family the primary welfare beneficiary, in contrast with its woeful neglect by the ‘regime’. Although the nationalists claimed not to oppose the involvement of women in public life, they had no doubts that their natural purpose and wish in life was to be a ‘family woman’ (porodična žena). Dveri, who transformed from an association of citizens into a party in 2011, consistently styled themselves as a ‘family’ and ‘movement of family people’ rather than a party. Their relatively elaborate 2012 election programme did not include a section on social policy, but it talked at length about ‘family policy’ (Dveri n.d.). The nationalists also implied the primordial idea of the nation as a family (Verdery 1996: 63). They would address audiences at their meetings and protests, as well as the readers of their texts, as ‘brothers and sisters’, often preceded by the rather archaic greeting ‘God help you’ (pomaže Bog), to which the audience would ritually respond ‘God help you as well’ (Bog ti pomogao). Ivan Ivanović’s above claims that the nationalists were fighting for ‘all the holy Serbs who lived before us’ as well as ‘our children’ were but one of many instances when the nationalists constructed their own actions as guided by feelings of religious duty towards their ‘ancestors’ and ‘children’. Kinship served as a model for past- and future-oriented responsibility and solidarity that collectively and metaphysically obliged Serb

128 | Frontiers of Civil Society

contemporaries in relation to their ancestors, including very distant ones, and descendants. While the nationalists claimed to represent the interests of the ethnonational popular masses, the particular neotraditionalist mode in which they did so has limited the reach of their populist strategy. In particular, their emphasis on family was most likely to express and appeal to the interests of people with a certain combination of personal aspirations and positions in the lifecycle. More specifically, it was bound to appeal to the many young and productive-age people frustrated by their inability to start a family, or those who already had done but struggled to make ends meet. Conversely, it had little to offer the elderly or those younger people for whom having a nuclear heteronormative family was not the (main) aspiration. Young Serbians are particularly affected by unemployment and many live with and are otherwise dependent on their parents. The exhortations of a ‘patriarchal’ family especially addressed the young men whose breadwinner self-image clashed with their impoverishment. There were signs that the nationalists consciously articulated and channelled their anger. For instance, Serbian Action, a lesser-known organization, posted stickers with the following text throughout Belgrade in 2011: ‘Youth without hope / Work’s waiting / And the regime walks faggots through Belgrade / Now that’s been enough!’ It was believed that many of the 2010 rioters were recruited from ‘extremist’ football hooligan groups. These have been described in the media as little armies that are available for hire for all kinds of criminal activities – racketeering, drug dealing and supposedly also riots useful for somebody’s interests – and serve as alternative means of subsistence for unemployed male youth. While there is no conclusive evidence that I know of as to their motivations and mode of recruitment, the footage of the 2010 riots does show young men (often teenagers), some of whom look perhaps like hooligans in their tracksuit bottoms, hoodies and face masks or bandanas. However, most could just as well pass for average young guys in casual clothes. It is also worth mentioning that the leaders of nationalist organizations were themselves mostly younger and highly educated middle-class urbanites – university students and professors, journalists, lawyers, teachers, professors, entrepreneurs and IT specialists. Men clearly dominated, though some women were visible in nearly all organizations and a few enjoyed positions of influence.15 Some of the organizations had been established and/or drew members and organizational support from institutions of higher education, especially the Faculties of Law (Nomokanon), Mechanical Engineering and

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 129

Philology (Dveri) and Philosophy and Theology (Obraz) of the University of Belgrade. This suggests that Kalb’s (2011) argument about working-class dispossession as the driving force behind nationalist populism might require some qualifying in the Serbian case. In the next section, I develop this argument further by looking at the case of Dveri, the nationalist NGO that has been most successful in entering institutionalist politics.

From an Elitist NGO to a Populist Party: The Case of Dveri A week before the 2009 Pride Parade was supposed to be held, Dveri organized the first of a series of events called ‘Family Walk’. In addition to its role in the Pride Parade–related struggles over public space, it was pivotal to a crucial phase in Dveri’s own development as an organization. The Dveri Serbian Assembly was established in 1999 by a group of students of the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade. Its initial activities included publishing a fanzine and later magazine Dveri srpske (Serbian Doors of the Iconostasis) and organizing ‘debates’, mostly at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering in Belgrade. Throughout the 2000s, it also relied on a close relationship with the Serbian Orthodox Church. While high Church dignitaries spoke at its events, prominent Dveri members worked in the editorial team of Pravoslavlje (Orthodoxy), the official magazine of the Patriarchate, until late 2010 or early 2011. Dveri also teamed up with Church-affiliated youth groups to organize several ‘assemblies of Orthodox youth’. A major shift came in February 2011 when Dveri officially revealed ambitions to ‘enter politics’. In hindsight, then, the two Family Walks in 2009 and 2010 can be seen as the beginning of Dveri’s transformation from a civic association targeting conservative and Church elites to an up-and-coming populist party. The 2010 Family Walk, held a month before the Pride Parade, replicated to a large extent the model pioneered a year earlier. The media estimated turnout at between a few hundred and 2,000, and Dveri at 15,000. On that Saturday afternoon, the plaza near the centrally located Faculty of Philosophy was filled with men and women of all ages and social backgrounds, including many children with colourful balloons. They listened to Serbian and Yugoslav rock as well as Beogradski sindikat, a hip-hop band known for strong-worded political and social commentary. Many Serbian flags and several banners provided by Dveri were on display, reading ‘We Defend the Family’, ‘The Movement for the Family’ and ‘Life Is on Our Side’. A large ban-

130 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ner hanging above the improvised podium assured the audience that ‘We Are Not a Party, We Are a Family’. Srđan Nogo, member of the Dveri management board, welcomed everyone at ‘a family protest in the defence of the family and for the cancellation of the Gay Parade’. He yelled that nobody asked ‘us’ whether we agreed to pay the costs of ‘this shameful event’ that is against the constitution, public morals and the opinion of the ‘majoritarian Serbia’ and the Church. Miroslav Parović then argued that the antifamily ‘system’ was to blame for the disgraceful Pride Parade as well as unemployment, the bad state of the economy, privatization and food shortages. The audience booed, shouted and whistled in support of his points, and some chanted ‘kill, kill the faggot’ and ‘the faggot won’t walk through the city’. After two more addresses, Vladan Glišić, who would become Dveri’s candidate for president in 2012, concluded in his priestly diction: Brothers and sisters, we are the majority of Serbia. We don’t need violence, we are strong and there is the quiet decisiveness of this nation behind us that represents a strong river, a river that will change Serbia. We are not a party, we are a family!

The crowd then marched by the national parliament and the state TV headquarters, covering a much larger section of the city centre than the hermetically sealed Pride Parade a month later. People chanted the same invitations for President Tadić to kill himself as in Orašac, and the refrain of a rap song about the police: ‘You are the regime’s servants / You defend the rich / Beat the people for peanuts / Protect thieves’, with some singing ‘faggots’ instead of ‘thieves’. Despite the radical rhetoric, Family Walks were events approved and policed by the state. Under Serbian law, ‘public assemblies’ (javni skupovi) are subject to the authorization of the interior ministry, which does not shy from using its prerogative to ban protests for ‘security reasons’. Unlike the Pride Parade rioters who directly challenged state sovereignty, Dveri actually reaffirmed it by making verbal appeals to the state and respecting its final say. In 2011, it added a petition against the Pride Parade as another institutional tactic, as well as a joint statement with the police trade union that advised ‘all citizens who wish to oppose the Gay Parade to do so in a peaceful and nonviolent manner and avoid any clashes with the police’ (Dveri 2011b). As a sign that Dveri succeeded in positioning itself as a nonviolent (and hence more or less ‘civil’) opposition to the Pride Parade, influential liberal media such as the B92 TV and the NIN weekly invited Glišić to discuss the subject with LGBT activists and major politicians.

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 131

It is worth noting that Dveri, unlike most other nationalist organizations, never faced legal sanctions. On the contrary, and again exceptionally in this category, in 2008–9 it received project funding totalling more than €10,000 from two ministries of the same ‘regime’ that it so vehemently criticized (CDNS n.d.).16 It also received about €50,000 from the state-owned Kolubara coal mine in 2008, a fact that surfaced in the context of the scandalous revelations of largescale looting in the company under a government-appointed management.17 Finally, it received funding from the cities of Čačak and Vranje and the municipalities of Knjaževac and Voždovac.18 Party politics were not absolutely new to it either – Glišić, at the time of my fieldwork a deputy public prosecutor of a Belgrade municipality, had served as the vice president of the local organization of the Democratic Party of Serbia in Aranđelovac until the early 2000s. In the spring of 2012, Dveri held Family Walks in about ten Serbian cities as part of its first election campaign. ‘Family’ was its main buzzword. Dveri pledged to help young families and thereby ensure the nation’s biological survival while continuing to frame itself and its supporters as ‘one family’. In its Letters to the Voters, it pledged to ‘speak in the name of small and medium entrepreneurs, family companies, household production, the village, agriculture and all socially threatened categories’ (Dveri 2012). Its Economic Manifesto presented a mercantilist and protectionist vision of national capitalism that avoided, in line with the assumption of a united nation, any mention of labour unions, worker rights or even workers themselves (Dveri 2011a). In the May 2012 general elections, Dveri achieved a respectable result for a newcomer – it narrowly missed the 5 per cent threshold for entering the national parliament and secured seats in twelve city and municipal assemblies. The characteristics of these municipalities suggest an urban electorate with a potentially overrepresented petty entrepreneurial class. Dveri captured more than 15 per cent of votes in Čačak, the fifth-largest Serbian city known for a local economy with a relatively high concentration of family-owned small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) (Grozdanić and Radović-Marković 2015: 277). In addition, one of the founders of Dveri (and since 2015 its president) Boško Obradović comes from here. Dveri further passed the census in one Belgrade municipality, Novi Sad (the second-largest city), two municipalities in Niš (the third-largest) and in Arilje, another town with many SMEs, especially in agriculture (export-oriented berry growing) and textiles. However, Dveri failed to pass the census in the biggest industrial centres, such as Kraguje-

132 | Frontiers of Civil Society

vac, Bor, Pančevo, Šabac or Smederevo. It thus seems likely that it mobilized, alongside fractions of metropolitan middle classes and those young and productive-age individuals attracted by its discourse on family, demography and inequality, the many small private entrepreneurs hit by the economic decline. This was largely confirmed by the 2016 elections. According to data that I compiled from various public sources (no comprehensive report is available), Dveri entered twenty-four city or municipal assemblies, in six cases on its own and in eighteen cases in a coalition with the Democratic Party of Serbia. It again had a particularly strong showing in Čačak and passed the threshold in seven Belgrade municipalities, the city of Niš and two Niš municipalities, but also in the big metallurgic hub of Smederevo and a significant number of peripheral and undeveloped municipalities, which suggests a potential broadening of its constituency. It also succeeded in entering into the national parliament this time, although in a coalition with the Democratic Party of Serbia (which complicates comparison with the 2012 results) and only by a small margin. While it ran as a ‘group of citizens’ rather than as a party in 2012, which is cheaper and easier, three years later it also formally became a political party, though it still prefers to describe itself as a ‘movement’. Dveri’s reinvention as a party subverted the ideal of a patriotic bloc of nationalist organizations united with one another and their nation against the elites. At the time of my fieldwork, the nationalists generally deplored the fragmentation of the patriotic bloc and one of their meetings that I attended was devoted to precisely this problem and a possibility of unification (resulting, tellingly, in no concrete proposals). However, Dveri tended to be singled out as the most flagrant case of this lack of unity. Igor Marinković of Naši told me that Dveri joined his own and some other groups in organizing a ‘joint rally’ on the day of the 2010 Pride Parade – a rally that, presumably, ended by joining the riots. Preparations were well advanced when Dveri suddenly backed out and simply announced that it preferred holding its own Family Walk again. Relationships grew much colder afterwards, but Marinković claimed not to be surprised. Dveri had always acted as ‘an elite, very smart [and] educated’, but was ‘afraid to support us in street happenings’, and soon after the incident it would publicize its entry into politics. Criticisms about Dveri were also voiced in the meeting on unification where Dveri was notably absent. The quoted definition of patriotic organizations by Ivan Ivanović, leader of Naši, was clearly meant to exclude Dveri on the grounds of not joining the riots. Some nationalists, such as Miša Vacić of 1389, publicly accused

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 133

Dveri of being sponsored by the ‘regime’. Questions were asked about how it funded its campaigns. Dveri might seem a special case, different from other nationalist organizations, but if there is a difference, it is one of degree rather than kind. Other organizations have also aspired to a place in party politics, but with much less success. For instance, 1389 ran as a ‘group of citizens’ in the 2012 local elections in Novi Beograd, but received only about 2 per cent of the vote. Members of Naši were more successful on the candidates’ list of the Democratic Party of Serbia in Mladenovac. In addition, Ivan Ivanović represented the New Serbia party in Aranđelovac in 2010–14. Igor Marinković commented on this in a strikingly casual manner when I interviewed him: ‘So we passed the threshold in elections.’ However, while these radicals-cum-politicians presented their double game as perfectly normal and maintained that they were the moral and political anathema of other actors of party politics, this did not shield them from critiques from their nationalist competitors. Accusations of even worse forms of co-optation than those already publicly known were easy to find in internet discussions or hear from rivals. The dive into party politics undermined the nationalists’ populist credibility. The entry into institutional electoral competition for state power, often in alliances with established parties, contributed to a normalization of the liberalizing state as something that can and indeed should be transformed by its own rules of the game. While the nationalists continued to articulate their alternative visions of the state, these now actually reinforced the ultimate authority of the state that is strong enough to tolerate – and even incorporate, by guiding them into legal and institutionalized channels – radical challenges to itself.

Conclusion The analysis of Serbian nationalist organizations in the early 2010s presented in this chapter accords with the departure in some recent anthropological studies from the narrow focus on identity, racism and cultural differences in much research and commentary on resurgent nationalist populism. Instead, this scholarship foregrounds the less obvious ways in which nationalist populists seek to politicize, often by tapping into various temporalities and forms of affect, the deepening, complexly intersecting and variously (un-)articulated social inequalities in neoliberal electoral democracies. For example, re-

134 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ferring to her work on a council estate in south-east England, Insa Koch (2017) argued that the dominant account of Brexit, operating with the idea of identity-based ‘culture wars’ of progressive liberals against reactionary conservatives, fails to capture its deeper roots in the experiences of neoliberalization and hollowing out of democracy. Ana Balthazar (2017: 224), who has worked with a mainly retiree population in a seaside town also in south-east England, has placed emphasis on ‘multiple forms of nostalgia, connected to diverse engagements with the past, nation, and the working classes’. Several authors have built on their and/or others’ ethnographic studies to challenge the simplistic media narratives about Trump’s victory in the United States that either rehearsed the familiar identitarian framework or put all the blame on a ‘white working class’, crudely defined as whites without college education (Gusterson 2017; Sampson 2016; Walley 2017). Instead, they pointed to the involvement of other, in particular petit bourgeois classes in Trump’s electoral coalition, as well as the importance of geographically highly uneven ways in which class intersects with race and gender. This chapter has similarly shown how the politics of Serbian nationalist populists would seem to lend itself to the usual analysis of such movements as concerned with issues of identity and cultural difference in a liberal democratic polity. While their immediate concern was sexuality rather than immigration, race or Islam targeted by most of their counterparts in Europe and North America, the Serbian organizations too have largely framed this as a matter of an authentic identity being threatened by globalization and made extensive use of neotraditionalist and ethnonationalist frameworks. And yet, their mobilizations against the Belgrade Pride Parade ultimately served as a platform for responding to a much broader set of issues that LGBT rights politics connoted – Serbia’s troubled stateness, its geopolitical position, and frustrations and fears over individual and collective wellbeing in the setting of ‘transitional’ dispossession. Another similarity with the aforementioned anthropological analyses of nationalist populism elsewhere is my questioning of the argument that the support for such movements is chiefly working class. While the rhetoric of the Serbian nationalists obviously did deal with the issues of inequality and disposession and connected these to the ‘transition’, it implicitly and often explicitly sought to address other social groups along with (former) workers, such as middle-class professionals and petty capitalists. These groups were well represented among the leading activists of these organizations and also, on a tentative assessment of the limited available data, among their voters once they en-

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 135

tered party politics. In addition, much of their politics was articulated along gender and generational rather than class lines, such as when they addressed the frustrations of young men struggling to measure up to patriarchal norms. They often framed their agendas, for example, with the complex of ideas about demographic reproduction, thus addressing the presumed anxieties of the Serb nation constructed in a characteristic nationalist populist manner as ethnic Serbs from (nearly) all walks of life united against a minuscule but all-powerful ‘anational’ elite and various minorities that it allegedly privileged. So far, however, the Serbian nationalists have failed to build a social and political power bloc in support of their project comparable to the coalitions formed around Brexit and Trump’s victory. They did achieve some victories: the government banned the Pride Parades scheduled to be held in 2011, 2012 and 2013 (although these decisions should most of all be credited to the interests of the ruling political elites), and Dveri has become an established political party. However, even it enjoys only a modest and fragile level of popular support, while the clout of all the other organizations beyond a few episodes of successful mass mobilization appears even more limited. I have suggested several reasons as to why this is the case. The narrative of the nationalists, despite their efforts to the contrary, seems to have resonated so far rather with the interests of particular groups than with a ‘common interest’ of a sufficiently inclusive cross-section of the Serbian society. The appeal of their neotraditionalist ideology has also been tainted by its association with Milošević’s failed nationalist project as well as its direct negation of the narrative of Europeanization that had been broadly accepted as the only realistic developmental alternative – that is, as part of the common sense. More recently, as I will discuss in the Conclusions, the Serbian Progressive Party, an increasingly dominant political force since 2012, has successfully appropriated populist rhetoric and policies in a manner that supports its own ascendancy, thus squeezing out nationalist organizations and movements from that part of the political space. Yet there have also been some countervailing recent tendencies: perhaps most importantly, the two major nationalist parties, the Democratic Party of Serbia and the Serbian Radical Party, re-entered the parliament alongside Dveri after having dropped out previously. The Radicals, reinvigorated by the return of their long-term leader Vojislav Šešelj from his imprisonment in The Hague, are now the third-strongest party. After a period of near-complete marginalization, then, political forces opposing neoliberal globalization are back on the stage. If the social dislocations of ‘transition’ continue to persist, one cannot

136 | Frontiers of Civil Society

exclude a possibility that nationalist populism will become the basis of a new hegemonic project in the future.

Notes Parts of the material in this chapter were published in the book chapter ‘“Faggots Won’t Walk through the City”: Religious Nationalism and LGBT Pride Parades in Serbia’, in S. Sremac and R. R. Ganzevoort (eds), 2015, Gods, Gays, and Governments: Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe. Leiden: Brill, pp. 15–32. 1. By opting to describe these organizations collectively as ‘nationalist’, I do not seek to deny that they are right-wing. However, I am uneasy with using the left/right distinction as is conventional in Serbian public discourse and much relevant scholarship; that is, downplaying its relationship to social and economic egalitarianism, while overemphasizing the dichotomies of collectivism/individualism and liberalism/conservatism. As for the categories ‘fascist’ and ‘clerofascist’, they are correct in many but not all cases. 2. As if to facilitate the fusion of nationalism and populism at the semantic level, narod may denote (ethnic) ‘nation’ as well as ‘the people’ or ‘folk’. The rarer nacija connotes an ethnic nation more strongly, but the adjective nacionalni is often used in the sense of ‘popular’ or ‘people’s’. 3. In the Eastern churches, an eparchy (eparhija) is a territorial diocese governed by a bishop. 4. See Gligorijević 2010; ‘Razbijanje Gay parade’ 2001. 5. The interior ministry banned the Pride Parades that were planned to be held in 2011– 13. The state resumed to backing each annual Pride Parade from 2014 onwards, accompanied by little direct resistance, but with extensive security measures. 6. The nationalists mostly directed their critiques of everything that was wrong with Serbia at the ‘regime’ (režim) or ‘government’ (vlada, vlast) rather than the ‘state’ (država). However, they tended to collapse such distinctions by portraying all governments since 2000 as one ‘regime’ that had fully captured the state. 7. See, for example, Naši 2010; SNP 1389 2011a, 2011b. 8. EU integration rhetoric also accompanied the next Pride Parade to be held – the one in 2014. 9. 1389 and Naši, two previously independent organizations, merged in August 2010. However, the 1389 Naši Serbian National Movement was dissolved already in June 2011 and the two organizations re-emerged under their original names. 10. Mladić was the commander of the Bosnian Serb army during the 1992–95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. One of the key war-crime suspects wanted by the ICTY, he remained at large until May 2011, when he was arrested in Serbia and extradited to the ICTY. 11. See ‘Crkva dala vetar u leđa protivnicima gej parade’ 2010. 12. See ‘Država najavila odgovor na nasilje’ 2010. 13. This refers to food shortages that were nevertheless episodic, localized and limited to very few foodstuffs at the time of my fieldwork. 14. The House of Nemanjić ruled medieval Serbia in its period of expansion (1166–1371). It is known as a ‘saint-bearing lineage’ (svetorodna loza) because many of its members were canonized. Saint Sava, son of the founder of the dynasty Stefan Nemanja, was

The Counterhegemonic Project of the Nationalist Civil Society | 137

15.

16.

17. 18.

consecrated in 1219 as the first Archbishop of the Serbian Orthodox Church, which by this deed has achieved autocephaly. The Nemanjić thus epitomize the symphony of the church and the state. This was in a sharp contrast to liberal NGOs, where women were well represented in top management positions; many of the NGO leaders best known to the public (though often seen as controversial) were female (see Chapter 6). I am not aware of any evidence that any other of the organizations mentioned in this chapter would receive state project funding. However, the state funds some war veterans associations, some of which maintain ideological and social links with nationalist organizations. See ‘Kolubara – prevara veka: Transkript treće epizode’ 2011. See ‘Nasilje uz blagoslov: Transkript prve epizode’ 2010.

PART III Neoliberalization at the State–Civil Society Frontier

– Chapter 4 –

THE RISE OF ‘PARTNERSHIPS’ AND THE POLITICS OF TRANSPARENCY

_ In May 2011, I spent a day at the Conference on Partnerships in Belgrade, the very first event in Serbia concerned with ‘cross-sector partnerships’ understood as more or less durable cooperative relations between ‘sectors’ that the agenda identified as ‘public sector’, ‘civil society’ and ‘private sector’. The conference was held in the Palace of Serbia, a vast modernist building better known as SIV – the abbreviation for the Yugoslav Federal Executive Council for which it was built in the 1950s. It was organized jointly by BCIF, which took care of most practicalities, the EU Technical Assistance for Civil Society Organizations, which provided funding, and the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society (hereinafter ‘the Office’), a government body that had only started to work five months earlier. Its involvement with the conference and the representative halls of SIV as the venue signalled the government’s interest in the partnership agenda. Adriano Martins, deputy head of the EU delegation to Serbia, noted in his keynote speech that one of the objectives of EU funding for Serbian ‘civil society organizations’ (CSOs) was to involve them in democratic decision-making. He explained this with the assertion that a strengthening of partnerships between the state, CSOs and other actors was essential for Serbia’s EU integration. This discursive coupling of partnerships and integration continued through the first panel discussion on the definition and possibilities of developing partnerships. Ognjen Mirić, deputy director of the Serbian European Integration Office (SEIO) for EU funding coordination, insisted that partnerships established for the purposes of drawing EU funding had to be based on a ‘formal mechanism of cooperation’ rather than – 141 –

142 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘personal links’. He described how the SEIO had developed precisely this kind of formal mechanism of consultations on the planning of EU funding for Serbia. Ivana Ćirković, the Office director, echoed his arguments; she remarked that there was still a lack of knowledge and will to build ‘systematic, formal partnerships’, and stressed the importance of transparent public funding for CSOs – one based on ‘clear criteria’ for approving grants. This chapter analyses the rise of partnerships as one aspect of the post-Milošević hegemonic project that has directly concerned ‘civil society’. As we have seen in Chapter 1, more inclusive definitions of the concept could be increasingly encountered in Serbian NGO and policy contexts by the early 2010s, but its domesticized meaning restricted to the postsocialist generation of professionalized NGOs has nevertheless remained dominant in practice. This was also largely true of the partnerships of ‘civil society’ with the state, which have in practice mostly translated into the involvement of NGOs in statal processes such as policy-making, law-making or public service provision. However, the rise of partnerships occurred not in a vacuum, but in a context replete with pre-existing and often rather competitive or antagonistic relations of state and civil society actors, broadly understood. This part of the book therefore examines the partnerships agenda as a set of purposeful but contested efforts to transform what I have conceptualized as the frontier of the state and civil society – their mobile and permeable socially constructed boundary. These ‘reforms’ can be identified at two nesting levels: first, those seeking to expand cooperative and integrative relations at the frontier (‘partnerships’); and, second, those aimed at establishing a particular regime of the regulation of these relations (‘transparency’, quasi-marketization). This chapter makes four specific arguments that develop these key findings. First, the agenda of partnerships was both discursively and materially embedded in the hegemonic project of EU integration. The establishment and initial functioning of the Office, an institution closely preoccupied with partnerships, was to a great extent driven and supported by the EU and other foreign actors. Partnerships were thus related, if not necessarily limited, to a transnational reform of the Serbian state. I grasp this as a ‘projectification’ of the state that generates specific kinds of state organizations that are closely integrated with other state apparatuses, but organize much of their functioning in terms of ‘projects’. They tend to adopt practices previously associated with NGOs in the Serbian context, which seems linked to their tendency to draw workforce from the liberal civil society.

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 143

Second, apart from EU integration, two further reasons were evoked for the desirability of partnerships: democratization, since CSOs supposedly represent the interests of citizens vis-à-vis the state, and a more cost-efficient delivery of state functions, since CSOs allegedly do better for less. Building on the latter justification, I will analyse partnerships as part of the neoliberal critique and optimization of government in Serbia that was gaining traction in the crisis context of the late 2000s and early 2010s. This will further anchor my overarching argument that there was an essentially reinforcing and supportive interrelationship between transnational/EU integration and neoliberalization as the two dominant tendencies of the post-2000 hegemonic project. Third, the concern with cost-efficiency also guided the reforms aimed at instilling specifically ‘formalized’ and ‘transparent’ partnerships. Governmental technologies such as competitive public tendering, programme budgeting and financial monitoring were being promoted and introduced as ways of making transfers of state functions and resources to NGOs more transparent and hence fairer as well as more cost-efficient. The particular ways in which the actors advocating for these reforms used public procurement as a model to critique and reform pre-existing practices can be traced back to the economics of regulation, a school of neoliberal economic thought. Finally, political agendas that had nothing to do with neoliberalism also drove the advocacy for these reforms by a network of NGOs. More specifically, they expected these reforms to improve NGOs’ access to public funds, for which up to that point they had had to compete with other kinds of organizations and networks. The emphasis on transparency focused attention on technical issues, thereby partly obscuring the underlying political agendas, and was articulated in a manner that favoured the reform advocates while delegitimizing their competitors. To show this, I trace several interrelated legal reforms that were meant to make the state funding of NGOs efficient and transparent. These reforms were themselves partnerships in which the state partially delegated law-making to a group of NGOs supported by foreign donors. Paradoxically, though, the NGOs, as well as the involved donors and state bodies, themselves failed to meet the criteria of formalization and transparency. NGO participation in these reforms and the partnerships agenda in general was dominated by a relatively closed network of actors recruited in an informal and personalistic manner. These findings highlight disjunctions between the stated aims and actual effects of the reforms as well as some issues that are inherent to the neoliberal rationalities of government.

144 | Frontiers of Civil Society

The Projectification of the State The process of the conceiving and founding of the Office, which is summarized in Table 4.1, is an important and revealing chapter in the history of the partnerships agenda. In an interview, Ivana Ćirković, who served as the first director of the Office in 2011–15, told me that the first steps towards establishing an institutional mechanism of the cooperation of the state and civil society were taken by her previous employer, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point (hereinafter ‘the Focal Point’). The government established the Focal Point in 2004 to implement the Poverty Reduction Strategy (hereinafter ‘the Strategy’), which it had adopted as a condition of access to the World Bank credits. When its implementation ended in 2009, the Focal Point was reorganized and renamed as the Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit (hereinafter ‘the Unit’) whose mandate still encompassed ‘poverty reduction’ while adding the EU agenda of ‘social inclusion’. Institutionally, the Focal Point and later the Unit were a team within the cabinet of the deputy prime minister in charge of European integration. The first steps towards the establishment of the Office occurred when the Focal Point launched the Civil Society Focal Points (CSFP) in 2007. This was a programme aimed at involving ‘civil society’ in the implementation of the Strategy. Seven NGOs were chosen in a public tender process as the ‘civil society focal points’, each of which represented one of the ‘vulnerable groups’ targeted by the Strategy. They networked with other NGOs to form ‘CSO clusters’ for the respective vulnerable groups and mediated between the clusters and the government. One of Ćirković’s responsibilities was communicating with the focal points. In two of her public presentations that I attended, she acknowledged these NGOs as crucial for the founding of the Office. In 2008, the CSFPs had started lobbying Božidar Đelić, Table 4.1. The process of the founding of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society Year Steps in the process

Context

2003

Oct: government adopts the Poverty Reduction Strategy

2004

Sep: government establishes the Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 145

Year Steps in the process

Context

2006 Jan/Feb: Ivana Ćirković joins the Focal Point as coordinator for social policy and vulnerable social groups; she becomes deputy team manager later Oct: Focal Point and external consultants complete a report, which recommends including CSOs in the implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy 2007 Mar: Focal Point launches the Civil Society Focal Points (CSFP) programme; Ćirković is engaged on the programme

May: Božidar Đelić becomes deputy prime minister for European integration

Apr: CSFP organizations chosen 2008 Mar: CSFP organizations hold a meeting with Đelić and present a document calling for an office of the government for cooperation with civil society Late 2008: Focal Point engages consultants Golubović and Anđelković to draft a report ‘on institutional mechanisms of cooperation of the government and civil society’ 2009 Apr: consultants finalize the report, which recommends an office of the government as the most suitable model of state–civil society cooperation for Serbia Jul: the National Assembly adopts the Law on Associations; pressure on the government, especially from the Unit and Đelić, to establish the Office intensifies

2010 Apr: government adopts the Bylaw on the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society Nov: European Commission issues Serbia 2010 Progress Report criticizing that the Office is ‘still not operational’ Dec: government adopts an action plan (GRS 2010a: 11), which lists appointing a director of the Office as a priority 2011 Jan: Ćirković is appointed as director Based on interviews and internet resources

Mar: the implementation of the Poverty Reduction Strategy ends Jul: Focal Point is transformed into the Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit within the cabinet of deputy prime minister for European integration

146 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the deputy prime minister for European integration, for the establishment of a government office for cooperation with civil society (CSFP 2008). Ćirković told me in an interview that the Focal Point and Đelić took the initiative, but support was also forthcoming from Milan Marković, the minister of state administration and local self-government, and Milica Delević, the SEIO director. Later that year, the Focal Point commissioned an expert report that recommended an office of the government (kancelarija) as the most suitable model for this kind of institution in Serbia (Golubović and Anđelković 2009). According to Ćirković, after the parliament had passed the 2009 Law on Association, which provided long-awaited preconditions for the formalization of partnerships (see below), the government found itself under ‘big pressure’ to establish the office, especially from the Unit and Đelić. A worker of the Unit whom I interviewed told me that the Unit had prepared the entire documentation for the adoption of the April 2010 bylaw1 that established the Office. The government then took another nine months to appoint a director, which my NGO research participants interpreted as a sign of its insincere commitment to the agenda. Ćirković thought the appointment was made ‘rather under a pressure’ from the EU, which criticized the fact that the Office was ‘still not operational’ in an annual progress report released in late 2010 (European Commission 2010: 14). The government’s response was swift: Ćirković was appointed in January 2011 and the Office became ‘operational’. Incidentally or not, it was given rooms in the same hallway of SIV as the Unit. For 2011, the government allocated to the Office what Ćirković described as a ‘minimal budget’ of 4 million dinars (c. €38,000 at the time), of which more than a half was needed for her own legally prescribed salary. Little was left for hiring more workers or for activities that the Office might wish to fund. When I suggested a comparison with the ‘independent regulatory bodies’, which the government had established but subsequently kept under-resourced (see Chapter 2), Ćirković agreed and commented: [T]hese are new authorities in the system that the government still doesn’t recognize. I wouldn’t think it doesn’t want to, but they come from the outside, the system cannot produce them because for that awareness is necessary . . . and that comes foremost [in the form of] reminders from the outside (podsećanje od spolja).

The ‘reminders from the outside’ presumably referred to the critiques that the EU and other foreign actors made of the government’s treatment of such new bodies. In the case of the Office, however, the

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 147

role of the ‘outside’ went well beyond raising awareness. The UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) almost doubled the Office’s meagre initial budget with £35,000 of ten-month project funding (OCCS 2011: 13). Ćirković told me that she expected more foreign funding in the future – the Office had prepared a project proposal for bilateral support in 2012–13 and was waiting for an interested donor. Ćirković also expected that the Office would start receiving the EU’s Instrument for Pre-accession Assistance funding from 2013, which actually happened in late 2012 (OCCS 2014: 16–17). As of 2011, negotiations with the British embassy about future funding from the FCO were expected (OCCS 2011: 13), but this does not seem to have materialized. The Focal Point and the Unit, for their part, were established to implement World Bank and EU policies, and as such were also funded by foreign actors. The Focal Point was financed by the World Bank and the UK Department for International Development (DfID), which also funded the CSFP programme. After it was converted into the Unit, the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the Norwegian foreign ministry took over; DfID continued to chip in with smaller grants until it closed its Serbian mission in early 2011. The interviewed Unit worker described the entire Unit to me as a ‘project’ and explained that he and his colleagues were not ‘civil servants’, but workers engaged ‘for the project’ and paid by the donors. A woman who came to the Unit from BCIF and introduced me to Ivana Ćirković told me that the ‘system of work’ on her new job was similar to that in the nongovernmental sector. All her colleagues came from there, continued to work on the same issues and involved NGOs in everything they did, she said. Days after she had started working in the Unit, the deputy prime minister Đelić even came to their office and greeted them with ‘hey, NGO crowd’. The lobbying for, founding and early development of the Office was thus part of the Europeanization of the Serbian state – its transformation driven by transnational (especially EU) integration and international aid. Multilateral and bilateral organizations contributed political incentives, financial support and policy concepts to this process. Revealingly, the key domestic actors were Đelić (the top government official for EU integration), the Unit within his cabinet and the SEIO. Serbian state elites in charge of EU integration apparently did not need further ‘reminders from the outside’ to embrace the institutionalization of state–‘civil society’ cooperation as its part. The EU itself wove the expectation that Serbia develop such an institutional mechanism into the integration process. The European

148 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Economic and Social Committee released an opinion in which it invited the Serbian authorities to amend legislation relevant for ‘civil society’, establish a ‘systematic dialogue’ with CSOs, and support their development and sustainability (EESC 2008: 2). The Commission’s 2009 progress report stated that ‘cooperation remains mainly ad hoc and selective’ (European Commission 2009: 15), while the next year’s report criticized the limbo after the founding of the Office. The Office, for its part, put the EU’s Europe for Citizens programme on its agenda from the start and soon established its EU integration section. Ivana Ćirković expressed hopes in various public events that the Serbian government would adopt the EU definition of civil society, which, similarly to the USAID concept discussed in Chapter 1, includes churches, labour unions and various other kinds of organizations in addition to NGOs. Beyond its support for the Office, the EU has also stimulated the development of state–civil society partnerships. Its Serbian delegation made ‘partnership building’ one of the objectives of its NGO grants and provided indirect incentives by including ‘local ownership’ and ‘sustainability’ among the evaluation criteria for grant awards. The kind of state transformation that the Office epitomized could be described as ‘projectification’. One of the meanings in which this term has been used in organization studies and project management is an ‘increasing reliance on temporary organisations, typically projects, in order to enhance action and strategic effort’ (Godenhjelm, Lundin and Sjöblom 2015: 328). While this definition imputes a rational and politically neutral intent to public sector projectification, the cited authors also recognize that this process has been driven by the essentially ideological discourse of ‘new public management’, which has associated ‘the project’ with nonbureaucratic innovation, flexibility and efficiency, and thereby turned it into an ‘enforced symbol for strategic change’ (Godenhjelm, Lundin and Sjöblom 2015: 332). They also note that the EU has adopted and promoted projectification as a central method of the coordination of public policy implementation in the member states (Godenhjelm, Lundin and Sjöblom 2015: 333–34). Here, projectification is related to the orientation of the Serbian state to the funding and policy agendas of international and supranational organizations more broadly. This has led the Office and especially the Unit to adopt a set of practices that had been, in the Serbian context, previously associated with NGOs. They implemented projects with a definite duration and funded by foreign agencies (to the extent that the workers saw the entire Unit as such a temporary project), wrote financial and narrative reports for the donors, and developed project

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 149

proposals to secure future funding. While we saw in the Introduction that scholarly literature recognized the global trend towards transferring state functions to NGOs, what it overlooked is the possibility that states on the receiving end of the international aid system also become partially projectified in the sense of adopting some NGO-like forms and techniques of work. At the same time, however, it must be recognized that they remain nation-state apparatuses in some fundamental respects. As we saw, Serbian decision-makers were indispensable in pushing the process of establishing the Office forward, and the decision on its specific institutional form followed recommendations made by Serbian experts in a government-commissioned report. According to its establishing bylaw, the Office was constituted as an ‘agency of the Government’ (služba Vlade) and hence its integral part. The government appointed the director on a recommendation of its own general secretary to whom the director reported. Ćirković’s background and understanding of her mission matched this institutional setup. My NGO informants emphasized that she was a good person for the job because she used to work in ‘civil society’. Some also claimed that she was appointed because leading NGOs had lobbied for it. However, Ćirković herself told me that what probably stood mostly strongly in her favour was that she had been previously working in public administration for almost seven years, mostly in leading positions. Only somewhat later in the interview did she add that what also qualified her was her earlier work in various NGOs. Her career indeed made her equally well versed in statal and ‘civil society’ styles of talking, and familiar with the policies and everyday politics of the government, as well as those of the NGO scene. She was born in the early 1970s in Belgrade, where she finished her first degree in molecular biology and physiology, a field in which she never worked. In the 1990s and 2000s, she mostly lived in the United States, but also worked for a Dutch war correspondent in former Yugoslavia and volunteered in the Middle East, South-East Asia and Europe. She returned to Serbia in 2003, completed her second degree in women’s studies and became the head of the youth policy department in the education ministry in 2004. When she joined the Focal Point in 2006, the advisors of the deputy prime minister demanded that there would be, in her own words, ‘someone from the system’2 as a ‘link’ between the government and the Focal Point. Ćirković was the first civil servant to join the Focal Point; everyone else had an NGO background. After the Focal Point had become the Unit, she stayed in the team until she accepted the appointment as the director of the Office.

150 | Frontiers of Civil Society

The projectified nature of the Office also seemed to influence the professional background of the staff. Out of the nine workers at the end of my fieldwork, all of whom were women, seven were previously employed in the public sector – in various ministries, the SEIO or in one case as a deputy city ombudsman. Nevertheless, four of these seven (including Ćirković) had had NGO jobs earlier and two had been working on EU agendas. Out of the remaining two, one person came directly from an NGO and another from the private sector. As this shows, bodies like the Office were frequent destinations for individuals coming to the public sector from the liberal civil society, but many of these people had already spent some time in other state institutions and tended to change jobs frequently. The relative youth of the workers also suggested that this was a reform-oriented body. Only one person was in her fifties, two (including Ćirković) were in their early forties and the rest were in their thirties or even twenties. Ćirković made it clear in various public and semipublic meetings that she considered it crucial that the government ‘recognize’ the Office and take it seriously. Soon there were signs that the Office was starting to enjoy such recognition. While not happy with the initial ‘minimal budget’ when I interviewed her, Ćirković emphasized that the Office actually ‘finds big support in the system’. The finance ministry had just given the Office a positive opinion on its Internal Organization and Job Positions Classification Bylaw, which was a legal precondition for hiring more people. The bylaw was passed at the end of 2011, but did not guarantee that the Office would be able to employ all the fifteen envisaged workers. It was well known that the government often did not give new institutions enough money to hire the entire approved staff. It was therefore all the more important that the budget revision adopted in October 2011 more than tripled that year’s budget to almost 13.5 million dinars, enough to employ all the planned staff. More good news soon followed. In November, the finance ministry gave the Office a 34 million limit for planning the next year’s budget, of which it made full use and was ultimately allocated even more. In sum, the Office (and the Unit) might be described as a specific, projectified kind of state organization. It was a government body, but was set up on an initiative of foreign actors and with their support organized in the form of projects; as such, it performed state functions, but often in ways reminiscent of an NGO. This is not surprising for an institution charged with reforming the relationship of the state and civil society, to which I turn next.

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 151

Neoliberalizing (through) the Frontier The Conference on Partnerships revealed how the discourse on state– civil society partnerships stressed the need for their ‘formalization’. This section will examine more closely why this was seen as important and how it was to be achieved. However, I will first address a more basic question that the speakers at the conference did not touch upon, suggesting that it was a matter of common knowledge – namely, why partnerships were seen as desirable at all. The Strategic Framework of the Office for 2011–14 is a good place to start from as it defines the official government policy towards ‘civil society’. It lists three reasons for the interest in establishing an ‘institutional mechanism of cooperation’ and ‘constant dialogue and partnership’ with civil society. The first is the ‘important role of CSOs in modern democracies’. In such polities, it is argued, CSOs enable citizens to ‘articulate, defend and advocate their legitimate interests in public and political life’ and in so doing contribute to the exercise of ‘participative democracy’. References are made to the relevant provisions of the Treaty of Lisbon and other EU documents. This is followed by a claim that civil society is particularly important in the new ‘Central European’ EU member states where it ‘preserved the memories of the “interrupted history” and its democratic values’ under communism (OCCS 2011: 4). The curious ideas of ‘interrupted history’ and ‘democratic values’ of the region’s mostly authoritarian interwar regimes need not detain us here. Suffice it to note that civil society is defined in a manner with elements of classical liberalism as well as pluralism (it allows citizens to have their interests represented and ‘defended’, presumably against the ever-encroaching state), in harmony with EU discourse and in reference to the conventional ‘Central European’ myth of origin. The explanation of the second reason – tellingly entitled Reducing the Burden on the State Apparatus and Strengthening Intersectoral Cooperation – deserves to be quoted more extensively: Limited financial and human resources available to the state, as well as the increased and ever more complex social needs, necessitate the democratization of the providers of social and other services that had traditionally fell under the constitutional competence of the Government. Across Europe, the volume of social services provided by CSOs is constantly growing. Today, there is hardly a field of social action in which CSOs do not play a prominent role in formulating and implementing public policies [fourteen examples of such fields follow] – hence the interest of the Government to establish a partner-like relationship with civil society. (OCCS 2011: 4)

152 | Frontiers of Civil Society

The language is veiled, but the message is clear. The state’s resources are ‘limited’ and increasingly strained by the society’s growing needs – rather than, say, corporate demands for subsidies and tax breaks. This ‘burden’ can be reduced through a partial outsourcing of state functions to ‘civil society’. This is represented as a natural, inevitable process occurring ‘across Europe’. Anticipating that the reader might still believe that it is the government that remains responsible for public services, the text informs her that this was only ‘traditionally’ the case. The 2009 report that recommended the establishment of the Office articulates this idea more explicitly when it identifies a ‘cheaper and better-quality social protection system’ as one of the expected benefits of state–civil society partnerships (Golubović and Anđelković 2009: 3). Large chunks of this report have been incorporated into the Strategic Framework, but with some interesting changes – in the place where the Strategic Framework talks about the ‘democratization’ of public services, the report refers less euphemistically to their ‘privatization’ (though in quotation marks). A final thing to point out is that partnering with CSOs in the context of EU integration, as the third motif that the Strategic Framework predictably mentions, is also found to have an ‘economico-institutional aspect’ – ‘strengthening capacities for an optimal usage of available EU funds’ (OCCS 2011: 5). While the document denotes its subject with the terms ‘civil society’ and ‘CSOs’, in keeping with the language used at the Conference on Partnerships and other Office documents, its emphasis on their roles as providers and EU funding mediators suggests that what it really means in the Serbian context can only be NGOs. It is also important to note that these justifications for delegating state functions to ‘civil society’ were formulated at the time of the economic and fiscal crisis and calls for a downsizing of the state. As I discussed in general terms in the Introduction, the argument that NGOs are more flexible, innovative and cost-efficient than state bureaucracies has become nothing short of a truism in some quarters in development and public policy (Clarke 2004a: 121; Fisher 1997: 444; Mercer 2002: 18; Miorelli 2008: 95–96, 115–16). It is easy to see why. Like private businesses, NGOs can be contracted for ‘projects’. The state rents their labour force only for the precise duration of a project, otherwise leaving it up to them to secure other sources of funding. Allocations for remuneration in tight project budgets are often small and do not include social and health insurance contributions. Even better, many NGOs specialize in mobilizing volunteers. (Revealingly, one of the few events that the Office co-organized in its first year of existence, together with two ministries, some CSOs and UNICEF, was a ‘na-

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 153

tional conference’ designed to ‘raise awareness’ about the importance of volunteering. It was a high-profile event with a keynote speech by President Tadić.) These characteristics, then, make NGOs a cheap on-demand labour reserve, in contrast to permanently employed civil servants who must be paid their legally guaranteed salaries and insurance contributions at all times. The idea of partnerships was thus informed by what Foucault (2007: 29–54, 2008: 317–24) conceptualized as neoliberal governmentality. As we saw in the Introduction, he defined liberalism in general as a critique of ‘too much government’ and a method of its optimization according to the ‘rule of maximum economy’, which in practice relies on extending and intensifying the operation of market mechanisms. According to Foucault, the major difference between classical liberalism and postwar neoliberalism resided in their relationship to the state, which stemmed from the historically specific institutional contexts of their emergence: nineteenth-century minimal laissez-faire states as opposed to twentieth-century welfare states. In simplified terms, Foucault argued that these contexts have led classical liberalism to pursue ‘maximum economy’ by promoting a maintenance of the minimal state and neoliberalism by active state interventions and remaking of the state in the image of the market. The delegation and outsourcing of state functions to various nonstate actors has been identified as part and parcel of the neoliberal remaking of the state (Clarke 2004a: 91, 116–20; Rhodes 1996; Wedel 2009: 32–33). Since the 1980s, NGOs have been increasingly on the receiving end of such reforms, often couched in the language of ‘partnerships’, in a wide variety of contexts (Alcock and Scott 2002; Carmody 2007; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Hemment 2009, 2012; Lewis 1998; Mitchell 2011; Shore 2006). Neoliberal restructuring generally redraws and blurs the boundaries of the public realm and contributes to the parallel processes of ‘de-statisation of government’ and ‘de-governmentalisation of the state’ (Rose 1996a: 56). This typically involves privatization in the sense of a transfer of resources and competencies from the public sector to the private sector where exchanges are coordinated by the market. The neoliberal doctrines of ‘new public management’ and ‘good governance’ framed this as a shift from a state monopoly to market competition that would inevitably increase cost-efficiency. The nongovernmental sector occupies a somewhat ambivalent position in this scheme of things – it is not part of the state or the public sector, but it differs from the market in that it is nonprofit and generally ‘expected to behave in a more “business-like” fashion in the contract culture’ (Clarke 2004b: 32).

154 | Frontiers of Civil Society

In Serbia, this did not remain at the level of ‘expectations’. Rather, techniques were being proposed to make NGOs behave efficiently. While the calls for ‘formalized’ partnerships at the conference were rather general, they were phrased in more concrete terms in a consultative meeting of the Office with a group of about thirty NGOs in September 2011. I only knew a few people personally, but the NGOs represented were mostly well known and influential. With a single exception, they were all NGOs in the dominant native understanding of the term. Ivana Ćirković began by noting that instead of issuing an ‘open kind of invitation’ to the meeting, ‘we chose organizations that we previously worked with, that is I did, and we tried to cover various sectors and get a degree of regional coverage’. She then presented the mandate and planned activities of the Office, emphasizing that this would include drafting annual reports on public funding for civil society. The subject came up repeatedly in the discussion that followed. The first NGO representative to speak said that the Office was going to need ‘credibility’ in relation to ministries and local governments in order to pursue its aim of ‘financial supervision’ of government grants for NGOs. Somewhat later, a BCIF representative said that the Office should focus on establishing ‘mechanisms’ and ‘rules’, especially for the ‘line item 481’ (see below). He also suggested that a communication channel be established, perhaps in cooperation with other relevant institutions such as ‘audit bodies’, so that NGOs could report any issues with public funding. Ćirković and the NGO workers clearly agreed that reforms of public funding for ‘civil society’ should be one of the top priorities for the Office, as was also recognized in its Strategic Framework (OCCS 2011: 6–9) and other policy documents (GRS 2011a: 50). This was preceded by sustained NGO critiques of existing practices, supported by recurring references to insufficiently ‘transparent’ and formalized cooperation with ‘civil society organizations’ in EU documents (European Commission 2010: 15; EESC 2008: 1–2). To understand the issue, a few words must be said about how the funding system worked at the time of my fieldwork. The budgetary procedures of all users of public budgets, in this context mainly ministries and local governments, followed a standardized classification system called the Budget System Chart of Accounts. NGO grants corresponded to the ‘Group 481000 – Grants for nongovernmental organizations’, known informally as the ‘line item 481’ (linija 481). Table 4.2 shows that budget users treated these grants as a kind of ‘current expenditures’ that they were free to award to a very broad range of ‘nongovernmental organizations’. Curiously, this category was not mentioned anywhere else in Serbian

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 155

Table 4.2. The budget line item 481 Class (klasa) level Class 400000 – Current expenditures Category (kategorija) level Category 480000 – Other expenditures Group (grupa) level Group 481000 – Grants for nongovernmental organizations Synthetic account (sintetički konto) 481100 – Grants for nonprofit organizations serving households – contains analytic accounts where there are recorded: grants for nonprofit organizations serving households, grants in kind for nonprofit organizations that provide services to households, and grants for the Red Cross of Serbia Synthetic account 481900 – Grants for other nonprofit institutions – contains analytic accounts where there are recorded: grants for sports youth organizations, grants for ethnic communities and minorities, grants for religious communities, grants for other associations of citizens and political parties, grants for chambers of commerce, grants for private and alternative schools, and grants for other nonprofit institutions Based on the Standard Classification Framework and Budget System Chart of Accounts Bylaw

law.3 The classification system included churches, sports associations and political parties among nongovernmental organizations, which they were patently not in the dominant understanding. Furthermore, the inclusion of ‘grants for other nonprofit institutions’ made it possible to award grants to an even broader category of nonprofit bodies that were not nongovernmental in either the colloquial or the legal sense, such as state schools or libraries that were being regularly funded from other line items. This system had two other crucial consequences. First, in budgets drafted for the following year, the line item 481 only showed ‘appropriations’ – amounts of money allocated to budget users – which the users could distribute to all ‘nongovernmental organizations’. One had to wait until the end of the given year, when the ‘budget execution report’ was published, to find out how much money had actually been awarded to any particular organization or kind of organization. Second, item 481 appropriations could be disbursed in grants

156 | Frontiers of Civil Society

to various kinds of organizations whose public funding was subject to different regimes of regulation. In the case of associations of citizens, which is the legal category encompassing most NGOs in the dominant understanding, the 2009 Law on Associations prescribed that grants were to be awarded on the basis of a ‘public tender process’ (javni konkurs) and that beneficiary associations were to publish an annual report on their work, revenue and expenditure. However, laws regulating funding for sports associations, political parties and churches obliged them neither to tender nor, in many cases, to provide financial reports. One could thus argue, as the critics indeed did, that such organizations enjoyed an unfair advantage over NGOs in accessing item 481 funds. Just before and during my fieldwork, these practices have become the subject of sharp critique from a group of NGOs, the echoes of which could be heard at the consultative meeting. Their informal leader, the Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector (CDNS), had teamed up with Transparency Serbia to monitor the usage of the line item 481 in 2007–10. Further, backed by an NGO ‘watchdog coalition’, it advocated a ‘greater transparency of the awarding and spending’ of item 481 funds and for ‘equal conditions of access’, meaning on the basis of mandatory public tendering (CDNS 2011a: 7). These organizations addressed repeated formal demands to the finance minister that the item 481 be only used for organizations regulated by the Law on Associations and accordingly renamed as ‘grants for associations of citizens’. All the other kinds of organizations currently funded from the item 481 were to receive either one common item or separate items of their own (CDNS 2011b: 49–54). The authors argued that the current classification system ‘reduce[d] the possibility for citizens to understand how taxpayers’ money [was] spent and to influence [budgets] through their elected representatives’ (CDNS 2011b: 53). Knowing beforehand how much money was allotted to the various groups of organizations would allow NGOs to ‘assess their options on time and prepare sustainable projects’ (CDNS 2011b: 10). The report on item 481 grants awarded by central and local state bodies in 2007–10 concluded that it was often unknown how and for what institutions awarded grants, that there was no supervision of spending and that even if tendering was organized, the criteria, the selected grantees and the sums awarded were not published (CDNS 2011b: 6–7). Further, NGOs received less than 30 per cent of item 481 grants in each of the covered years, whereas sports associations, churches and political parties combined received 62–81 per cent (CDNS 2011b: 14–33). That associations of citizens had to compete

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 157

for the same funds with these other organizations was likened to an ‘Orwellian situation where “we are all equal but some are a bit more equal”’ (CDNS 2011a: 24). These findings and arguments were well known among NGO workers and shaped their thinking about the funding system. Although the CDNS was not necessarily mentioned as the source, these points of criticism came up time and again in interviews and office and seminar room conversations. My research participants repeated that the Serbian Orthodox Church and sports associations were receiving way too much money at their expense and that state institutions often awarded grants without clear and public criteria and insight into how the money was spent. My interlocutors expressed moral outrage over having to tender for grants and account for ‘every dinar’ spent while the Church and sports clubs were exempt from these requirements. They sometimes went further than the CDNS in naming the reasons for the status quo. For instance, they would mention local politicians doubling as officials of football clubs that received most of the municipal ‘NGO’ funding. Along with the public financing of the ‘party NGOs’, such practices were considered to result from state capture and ‘particracy’. The CDNS enjoyed close relationships with the state institutions involved with the partnerships agenda. The Focal Point chose it as the managing body of its CSFP programme. The Office invited CDNS representatives to three out of four events to which it lent its name in 2011. At a high-profile event that the Office co-organized in the parliament, the NGO’s director Jasna Filipović got an opportunity to reiterate the main findings and arguments of the quoted publications in her keynote speech. As this suggests, Ćirković, despite her declared preference for the inclusive EU concept of civil society, concurred with the particular NGO perspective on a problem that concerned a much broader set of actors. She told me that an important part of the mandate of the Office was to ‘enable mechanisms for transparent funding’: [S]ince we don’t have a programme budget, meaning we don’t have functions one can read but rather groups of appropriations within which anything goes, it is being noted that that the money allocated for the appropriation 481, that is grants for nongovernmental organizations, is also used for grants for religious communities, sports associations . . . various CSOs and coalitions demand a diversification of the item 481. We’ll see whether that can be achieved before we get a programme budget.

Ćirković added that ‘diversification’ – the kind of changes that the CDNS demanded – would ‘make visible’ who exactly gets money.

158 | Frontiers of Civil Society

There were also signs that programme budgeting could be introduced by 2015, but that was ‘definitely a political decision’. How, then, has ‘diversification’ come to be seen as conducive to greater efficiency? In the early 2010s, most state bodies operated a ‘line-item budget’, which the literature on public budgeting, a field of public administration, considers to be inferior to programme budgeting. The line-item budget only lists ‘inputs’ (in principle, expenditures) without linking them to either ‘outputs’ (measurable deliverables) or ‘outcomes’ (changes in the real world affected by outputs). That is why within line-item appropriations ‘anything goes’ – officials have ample discretion in how they spend the money. In contrast, programme budgeting starts ideally by planning outputs, after which a choice is made between alternative programmes according to their relative efficiency in delivering the outputs. Instruments such as cost-benefit analysis and performance monitoring are also used to enhance government efficiency (Kluvers 2001; Rose 2003; Shah 2007; van Nispen and Posseth 2009). Ćirković and the NGO critics called for a programme budget, but perceived that the decision was entirely up to the highest echelons of the government. In the meantime, they advocated for the less ambitious ‘diversification’ as a step towards programme budgeting. Ćirković further referred to the principle of fair, meritocratic competition – the priority should be to ‘make the budget such that all have access to it, or at least as many as possible, so that they competitively compete (kompetitivno se takmiče) for the budget funds’. She illustrated this by the efforts to transform the funding of NGOs providing social services whose purpose was that ‘it will be a market’ (see Chapter 5). The Office and the involved NGOs therefore had a common agenda regarding the line item 481. First, they argued for more ‘transparency’ – institutions should publish information about available funding and tendering criteria and results, while beneficiary organizations should issue programme and financial reports. Second, they demanded more efficiency – access to funding should be based on meritocratic ‘competition’, ‘equal’, like in the ‘market’. As a means to achieve these aims, the actors mentioned ‘formal and clear rules and procedures’ in general and public tendering, financial reporting and the item 481 diversification in particular. In the longer term and at the national level, they hoped that programme budgeting would be introduced. The recurrent references to competition and market suggest that these reform proposals were guided by the same basic norm of costefficiency as the agenda of partnerships in general. Anthropologists

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 159

argued that the fashionable concept of transparency is closely related to the neoliberal models of governance (Garsten and Lindh de Montoya 2008; Hetherington 2011). The Serbian reform proposals appear to have been shaped by the basic insights of the economics of regulation, which Collier (2011: 218–24) identified as one of the ‘minor traditions of neoliberal thought’ influencing reforms in post-Soviet Russia. This tradition, which originated in the work of George Stigler and other Chicago School economists, shaped thinking about government regulation of industries as well as government procurement – which, as we have seen, was the principal model for these Serbian reforms. One of the central preoccupations of contemporary procurement theories is the cost-efficiency of procurement, which they argue is frequently constrained by ‘information asymmetries’ coupled with ‘moral hazard’ (Bajari and Tadelis 2001; Laffont and Tirole 1993). In plain language, these are situations when the procurement agency knows less about the cost and quality of a firm’s products than the firm itself, or when taxpayers know less about the procurement process than the procurement officials who should act in their best interests. This may result in the selection of offers that do not provide the best quality and/or best cost. The procurement literature generally finds the solution in tendering in which all competent firms are free to participate, thus maximizing competition, and whose criteria, participants and outcomes are all public, thus maximizing transparency. Apart from the economics of regulation, this literature draws heavily on game theory and principal–agent theory, which share with neoliberal economics the basic assumption of rational, utility-maximizing actors. The procurement literature is therefore based on a characteristically neoclassical theory of efficient institutions, complete with methodological individualism and the assumption of instrumental rationality (Lo 2012: 37–57; Zimbauer 2001). This basic conceptual framework structured the critiques of the existing funding practices. The state and civil society were disaggregated into individuals construed as calculative actors who, under given conditions and incentives, choose to act rationally so as to maximize their own utility. For instance, a grantee organization’s manager who is exempt from reporting will spend grants in ways that are best for him or his organization. An unsupervised official will approve grants based on bribes or other personal gains, not public interest. Here the neoliberal critique of ‘too much government’ assumed the form of ‘too much discretion’, which it proposed to restrain by ‘formal’, ‘clear’ and ‘transparent’ procedures and rules that would incentivize the actors to behave efficiently. These technologies were in-

160 | Frontiers of Civil Society

stances of the ‘institutionalization of calculative choice’ (Collier 2005: 12–13) of the particular kind that seeks to make subjects behave efficiently by limiting that choice. If the manager must provide financial reports, so the reasoning goes, he will spend the grant as agreed to keep access to future funding, and if the official must organize open and transparent public tendering, she will choose the best and most cost-efficient projects to avoid sanctions. I am not arguing that those who called for and participated in these reforms spent their days reading classics in the economics of regulation. That does not seem to have been necessary. With the continued domination of neoliberal and neoclassical theories in economic analyses and policy recommendations churned out by experts and think tanks as well as in ‘grey sciences’ such as public budgeting and public procurement, their basic assumptions about causes and cures for problematic human behaviour become hegemonic in the sense of the word particularly true to its use by Gramsci – they become part of common knowledge and ‘common sense’. This may be one of the factors explaining the broad and uncritical support for the reform agenda. However, it is also important to recognize that the support for these reforms was at least partly driven by political and ideological motives that had nothing to do with neoliberalism. I noted the frequent references to the Serbian Orthodox Church as taking too much of the funding pie. In the liberal civil society, there was little sympathy for this institution associated with nationalist and illiberal politics. This alone would win its support for reforms promising to curtail donations to the Church, especially as these cut into funding potentially available for NGOs. Apart from the Church, the reform advocates were also keen to minimize competition for item 481 funds from other kinds of organizations, such as sports associations, which they excluded from the category of real NGOs and accused of securing funding through illegitimate ‘particratic’ links. In contrast, NGOs sought to base their own access to state resources on technocratic and meritocratic criteria that they themselves defined. In the case of the reforms of the line item 481, these included especially the capacity to write professional project proposals and financial reports. Probably not incidentally, this is a skill that is much more likely to be found in NGOs than the other item 481 beneficiaries. Anthropologists highlighted the paradoxes that accompany the current proliferation of ‘transparency’ discourses and practices. As Sanders and West (2003: 16) noted, when an operation of power is described as transparent, the assumption is that power has a surface

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 161

that can be seen through and an interior that can be seen. However, this inevitably provokes the question as to whether this surface can ever be rendered completely transparent. Another critique of transparency projects asks not what they leave unseen but what they make invisible. Mathijs Pelkmans (2009: 426–27) showed how Christian proselytizers in Kyrgyzstan held high the ideal of ‘transparency’ to direct attention to procedural and organizational details while obscuring their own instrumental strategies. In the present case, the actors similarly stressed transparency and efficiency as the rationalinstrumental benefits of apparently value-free procedures and criteria, which helped conceal or at least downplay the fundamentally political significance of the reforms. This meaning of the introduction of neoliberal governmentality thus only becomes clear when one relates it to the struggles over the resources of the post-Milošević state between the liberal and nationalist civil societies and technocratic and particratic networks. Another crucial argument that Pelkmans (2009: 439) makes is that that the ‘transparency lens’ tends to be selectively applied and, as a result, favours certain actors over others. The emphasis on public tendering and financial monitoring as the criteria of transparency is a good example, since they favoured those who proposed them. I will now proceed to examine legal reforms concerned precisely with transparent and efficient state–civil society relations to present further evidence for this point. The actors dominating these processes themselves failed to abide by these criteria while they went about instituting them as mandatory for others.

Frontier Masters in Action The Office organized or co-organized four events in 2011, most of which I have already mentioned in this chapter. As I attended them, I could not help but notice that inviting representatives of certain NGOs seemed to be a matter of course. Among others, the EminS (see Chapter 2), the CDNS, BCIF and the CI were nearly always there.4 In this section, I describe several interrelated legal reforms in which the latter three organizations and the Budapest-based European Centre for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL) played a prominent role. I argue that they were part of a group of the ‘masters of the frontier’ – NGOs and individuals with privileged access and influence over the reforms at the state–civil society frontier, of which the routine invitations were but one symptom. Of course, their ‘masterdom’ was seriously lim-

162 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ited – it did not easily extend from the formulation of official policies on ‘civil society’ to an effective control over the ways in which state institutions distributed material resources to what the budget system defined as ‘nongovernmental organizations’. Before 2009, associations of citizens used to be regulated by two laws from 1982 and 1990. NGOs started to lobby for a more contemporary Law on Associations soon after the regime change in 2000. Discussions on draft laws were repeatedly interrupted by changes of the government, after which they started anew with a fresh draft. There were three such cycles of activity: in 2000–4, 2004–7 and 2007–9 (see Table 4.3). Since this was a long and complicated process comTable 4.3. The drafting and adoption of the Law on Associations Year Steps in the process

Context

2000 Dec: ‘expert team’ formed by the Forum of Yugoslav NGOs (Dejan Janča, Dejan Šehović, Čedomir Radojković and Živka Vasilevska) prepares the first draft

Oct: regime change

2001 Nov: ‘NGO working group’ criticizes the draft written by the Ministry of Justice and Local Self-Government at a meeting with the Ministry

Jan: Đinđić government formed

13 Dec: government adopts the draft anyway and forwards it to the Assembly of Serbia for adoption 15–18 Dec: the CI organizes conference where NGOs and the Council of Europe (CoE) criticize the draft; the Ministry is forced to restart consultations with the NGO working group and CoE experts End Dec: ‘expanded working group’ meets; the CI starts mediating between the Ministry, the working group and the CoE 2002 Jan: working group meets with CoE experts and ‘consultant’ Golubović; government accepts recommendations and sends a new draft to the Assembly 2003 (FENS is formed and gets involved; the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government takes charge) June: FENS urges the Assembly to adopt the law Aug: FENS discusses the law with the new Prime Minister Živković

Feb: FRY reconstituted as the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro Feb: FENS formed Mar: Prime Minister Đinđić assassinated Dec: early elections held

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 163

Year Steps in the process

Context

2004 (Second cycle of drafting begins; the OSCE Mission gets involved)

Mar: first Koštunica government formed

Nov: OSCE Mission and the Ministry organize a roundtable; NGO attendees (unknown) reject the presented version; the Ministry promises to draft a new one 2005 Spring: Ministry finishes a new draft; ‘NGO working group’ (Vasilevska, Dereta, Golubović and Dejan Milenković) meets and welcomes the draft Apr: working group meets with the Ministry to discuss the draft Nov: roundtable about the law, organized by the OSCE, the Ministry, the CoE office in Belgrade and the working group, is held 2006 Mar: the CI organizes a roundtable at which the draft previously agreed with the Ministry is presented

June: State Union dissolved

Summer: state secretary at the Ministry presents the draft to the Poverty Reduction Committee of the Assembly 2007 (Third cycle of drafting begins; the USAID/ISC stars supporting the CI and the ECNL to work with the Ministry) Jul: OSCE, the Ministry and the working group hold another roundtable chaired by Dereta and with highest government officials in attendance

Jan: early elections held

May: second Koštunica government formed

Sep: European Integration Committee of the Assembly discusses a draft prepared by the Ministry, the CI and the ECNL Oct: government adopts the draft and sends it to the Assembly for adoption 2008 Jul: new government adopts the same draft and sends it to the Assembly

Mar: government falls

Nov: the draft is put on the Assembly’s agenda

May: early elections

Dec: government withdraws the draft from the Assembly’s agenda

Jul: Cvetković government formed

2009 Jun: the draft returned on the Assembly’s agenda Jul: Assembly adopts the Law on Associations Based on interviews, the Mreža bulletin and internet resources

164 | Frontiers of Civil Society

pleted before my fieldwork, reconstructing it required combining interview data with information published in various institutional documents (reports, analyses, recommendations) and the civil society bulletin Mreža (Network). The general finding was that while ministries in charge of this agenda, foreign donors who provided support and drafts of the law were constantly changing, certain organizations and individuals who got involved in the process early on stuck with it to the end. Moreover, the same organizations and individuals dominated other processes at the state–civil society frontier. While an NGO ‘expert group’ had already prepared a draft in late 2000, a year later the government attempted to pass its own draft that NGO representatives criticized. The CI, with the backing of the Council of Europe, played a key role in getting the justice ministry to restart the drafting process, this time together with an ‘NGO working group’ whose composition at this particular stage is unknown. In February 2003, the biggest network of Serbian NGOs called the Federation of Nongovernmental Organizations (FENS) was formed at an annual conference of the CI, which became its de facto secretariat. The late Miljenko Dereta, one of the founders and long-time Executive Director of the CI, served as a co-chairman of the FENS from the beginning until October 2009. Since the FENS defined the law as its priority, the CI continued to be involved in the process both directly and through its leadership in the FENS. After a new government had been formed in March 2004, the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government took over this agenda and the Serbian mission of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) funded a series of roundtables in 2004–7. At the first roundtable in November 2004, the ministry presented a draft that unspecified NGO attendees again rejected as unacceptable (Civic Initiatives 2004). The ministry unveiled another draft in the spring of 2005, which the ‘NGO working group’ found much improved (Dereta 2005). Members of the working at this point were Živka Vasilevska, Dragan Golubović, Miljenko Dereta and Dejan Milenković. Vasilevska, who directed the CDNS before Jasna Filipović, had already been in the first expert group in 2000. Golubović, a university professor and legal expert employed by the ECNL, had been engaged as a ‘consultant’ advising the NGO working group by January 2002 at the latest. Vasilevska, Golubović and Dereta were still being publicly presented as members of the working group in 2007 when the final draft was written (Civic Initiatives 2007; NSDFAPV 2007). These three individuals were therefore closely involved in the drafting of the law from the early stages to the end.

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 165

More meetings followed in 2005–7 (see Table 4.3), but only after the early elections in 2007 did the new government approve the draft and send it to the parliament for final adoption. This was preceded by a crucial shift – USAID started to fund the process through its $27.5 million Civil Society Advocacy Initiative. The programme was implemented in 2007–13 by the Serbian branch of the US Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC) and its four ‘implementing partners’, three of whom were frontier masters – BCIF, the CI and the ECNL. The programme, framed by a discourse about the democratization of decision-making through civil society participation, supported the implementing partners to participate in these legal reforms (ISC n.d.). Tanja Bjelanović, BCIF programme director, told me that there were ‘three things which went in a pack’. First, the CI focused on the Law on Associations ‘because that somehow falls in the nature of their work’. Second, BCIF as a leading foundation focused on the Law on Endowments and Foundations. And, finally, the two organizations drafted some tax-law amendments together, which I discuss in Chapter 6. According to Bjelanović, Golubović was the ‘expert who practically did all these things for us’. The British embassy and the Open Society Foundation provided additional funding (Civic Initiatives 2008, 2009b). Bjelanović believed that the foreign funding mattered because ‘a group of experts and organizations came forward and offered to cover all expenses and do the job’ for the government. She claimed that the biggest expenses were for the legal expertise and public debates. However, the process stalled again when the Koštunica government collapsed in 2008, necessitating early elections. The new government then re-adopted the same draft and sent it to the parliament, which finally passed it in 2009. Among other novelties, the law liberalized the founding of associations, allowed them to make profits (under certain conditions), and introduced the requirements of public tendering and financial reporting to the system of public funding for associations of citizens (Civic Initiatives 2009c). Nevertheless, provisions of Serbian laws often cannot be implemented until bylaws specify the details of their implementation. This was the case with Article 38 of the Law on Associations that regulates NGO funding. In late 2010, the Ministry of State Administration and Local Self-Government established another working group to draft a norm known informally as the Budget Funding for Associations Bylaw (Velat 2012). Days after the government adopted the bylaw in early 2012, the following members of the working group presented it at a press conference: Ivana Ćirković, Dragan Golubović, Dubravka

166 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Velat of the CI, and the assistant minister Jasmina Benmansur.5 Velat, the wife of Miljenko Dereta, took over his leadership of the CI in March 2012 when he accepted the offer to run for a seat in the parliament.6 She mentioned that the CI was the only NGO represented in the working group: I couldn’t say I represent[ed] the whole civil society because it would be wrong, I haven’t been chosen or delegated or appointed in that manner, but I thought that the results of debates gave me enough legitimacy to represent the interests which were for the benefit of the sector.

Velat further noted that there were no public debates because that is not a legal requirement for bylaws, unlike for laws. Jasmina Benmansur specified that the working group included representatives of the Office (Ivana Ćirković), the ministries that fund NGOs, and the CI that also ‘involved other independent experts . . . I mean Professor Golubović’. Clearly, then, the relationships that crystallized during the long work on the Law on Associations also influenced the drafting of the bylaw. Some of the same individuals and organizations further participated in the writing of the Law on Endowments and Foundations. The need for a new law was again justified by the fact that the law in force dated from 1989. However, Tanja Bjelanović told me that what specifically bothered BCIF was that the old law did not require foundations to ‘publish [their] work’. Such a lack of ‘transparency’ made embezzlement easier and harmed the public image of all foundations, she said. According to her, lobbying for this law was first initiated by the NGO Centre for the Advancement of Legal Studies (CALS), but then it stalled. When BCIF got involved in 2007, a new working group was formed that included Golubović, Vasilevska, representatives of BCIF, the CDF (also formally a ‘foundation’), the CALS, the culture ministry, one Belgrade municipality and a women’s NGO. There was also a broader committee, composed of the members of the working group and representatives of a few more state institutions, foundations and NGOs, including the CI. However, the working group met sixteen times, whereas the committee only met twice. The final draft was based on a document that the committee accepted in 2008 and incorporated comments collected in about five public debates in 2008–9 (Čulić, Trifunović and Golubović 2011: 5). The new law, adopted in 2010, obliged foundations to publish an annual ‘report on work’ and submit an annual financial report to the Serbian Business Registers Agency, thus (allegedly) increasing ‘transparency’. It also shifted the right to register foundations from the culture ministry to the Agency,

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 167

a change that was seen as a liberalization of the registration process on the assumption that the ministry might have been employing political or ideological criteria. As this shows, a relatively small and stable network of NGOs and NGO-affiliated individuals exerted a decisive level of influence over this set of legal reforms. In addition, they enjoyed especially good access to state institutions for the state–civil society cooperation (the ‘partnerships’ agenda). As already mentioned, BCIF, the CI and the CDNS were invited to nearly every event under the auspices of the Office in its first year of existence, and the Conference of Partnerships was jointly organized by the Office and BCIF. This relationship had some precedents – Ivana Ćirković has been sitting on one of BCIF’s grant-awarding boards since 2008 (BCIF 2009: 34, 2010: 31, 2011: 33), while BCIF acted as a ‘consultant’ in a 2008–9 project of the Focal Point (PRSIFP 2008, 2009). The CI, for its part, was one of the Focal Points organizations. In 2011, there were abundant signs that the NGO enjoyed a very high standing with the Office. Apart from inviting it to all the Office events that year, Ćirković chose it as a partner for organizing the conference on volunteering, invited Dereta to give a keynote speech at the meeting in the parliament and the Conference on Partnerships, and supported the NGO’s survey of the Serbian NGO sector with a smaller amount of the FCO money. Ćirković, who spoke at public presentations of the survey results in late 2011, told me in an interview that the CI invited the Office to cooperate in this ‘baseline study’, which she considered very important for the government. In turn, a worker at the CI told me that the NGO pushed for Ćirković to become the head of the Office. As for Dragan Golubović, he and Ćirković must have known each other since 2008 at the latest, when the Focal Point engaged him to write the report on the suitable model of state–civil society cooperation. He presented the report in two public debates in late 2008 while Ćirković spoke about the CSFP. The debates were part of a British embassy-funded project implemented by the CI; Dereta was also in attendance. The same project provided the additional funding for the working groups that drafted the Law on Associations and the Law on Endowments. Its title – Creating a Stimulating Environment for the Development of Civil Society – was identical to the name of the event that the Office co-organized in the parliament in 2011 (Civic Initiatives 2009b). In October 2011, the government’s Human Resource Management Unit hired Golubović to give a one-day training course in SIV on ‘The Mechanisms of CSO Participation in the Process of

168 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Public Policy Development and Implementation’ to a group of civil servants, including some employees of the Office. The Human Resource Management Unit, ‘in cooperation’ with the Office, engaged Golubović to give two similar training courses in 2012 (OCCS n.d.). On several occasions, I heard NGO workers criticize the cosy relationships between state institutions and some of these organizations and individuals. The CI and Miljenko Dereta were especially targeted.7 A leader of a large NGO in south Serbia told me in an interview that the CI could do just the same thing as BCIF, that is, support small NGOs and help them develop. But that is not in their interests, since they can ‘earn more money’ by ‘building an expert profile’. They are increasingly less a ‘resource centre’ and more an ‘interest group’ oriented to influencing public policy. That is also the case of the CDNS, he continued – ‘development of civil society’ is in their name, but probably not in their interests. On another occasion, as I was speaking on the phone with Virđinija Marina Guzina, an NGO leader from Vojvodina (Chapter 7), I mentioned a new NGO initiative that involved a minister thought to be especially corrupt and gave him a chance to present himself to the media in a positive light. Virđinija said that everyone in ‘civil society’ is ‘doing it like that’ now and Dereta had been rightly accused by the tabloid-style internet magazine E-novine of that kind of collusion with political elites. She knows him and that ‘he’s all about politics’ now, she claimed. Months later, Dereta indeed ran in the elections and entered the parliament, although he had been previously officially active only in the NGO sector.

Conclusion Chapter 2 discussed the growing rapprochement between the postMilošević state and the liberal civil society in the context of EU integration, and argued that these two processes were mutually supportive. This chapter has zoomed in more closely on the process of rapprochement itself as an object of purposeful reforms. The concerns with expanding the partnerships of the state and civil society, which in practice continued to denote mainly the liberal NGO sector, and rendering them competitive and transparent can be understood as efforts to reconstitute the state–civil society frontier in a manner that makes it consistent with the wider logic of ‘transition’. In addition to the processes of state transformation driven and supported by the EU and other foreign governance actors, I showed that they were also embedded in the intensifying neoliberal critique and remaking

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 169

of the state. Drawing these links enabled me to start examining the involvement of ‘civil society’ in neoliberalization as the second main tendency of the post-Milošević hegemonic project, while keeping in the frame its entanglement with transnational integration. My analysis of these reforms was double-pronged. Rather than reject their neoliberalism out of hand, I took it seriously and used it to assess the actual practices conducted in its name. But I also went beyond the neoliberal norms to identify other ideological and political agendas that drove the reforms. Building on the first mode of critique, it became clear that the reforms were characterized by disjunctions between their stated aims and actual outcomes. The efforts to expand cooperative relations at the frontier (‘partnerships’), which entailed the delegation of some state functions to NGOs, had a whole array of stated objectives – competition and cost-efficiency, but also improved service provision and more democratic, participative and accountable decision-making. However, in the described cases of the delegation of the core state function of law-making, the objective of enhanced participation and representativeness was called into question as a relatively small group of NGOs and individuals continued to dominate the processes over a number of years. While they implicitly represented the interests of the NGO sector, there had been no sector-wide process of delegation and relatively little in the way of public consultations that would allow them to claim representativness in the strong sense of the term.8 Some public participation in the drafting of the laws was secured by the roundtables and public debates, but it seemed to have been limited to commenting on documents drafted and possibly revised by the working group. In the case of the bylaw, there were no public meetings at all. Another related issue is the fact that these ‘partnerships’ largely rested on foreign funding. This might have been efficient in terms of saving public expenditure, but international donors tend to change their priorities and target countries, which often prevents the longterm sustainability of policies. Moreover, civil servants and their NGO ‘partners’ may become accountable not only to the citizens, as democratic decision-making presumes, but also to the donors with their own political agendas. This threat of a comprador-style dedemocratization is even greater if the donor is directly affiliated to another state, as was the case with USAID, the FCO or the British embassy, or to a supranational state-like entity such as the EU. The enrolment of state/NGO networks in donor-shaped agendas under the aegis of partnerships thus emerges as yet another instrument through which the hegemony of transnationalization and neoliberalization was reproduced.

170 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Similarly, the reforms of the regulation of the frontier, which aimed to replace the pre-existing informal and clientelistic relationships with rule-driven, transparent and market-like processes, were meant to further deepen the efficiency of governance through partnerships and create a stronger, more sustainable NGO sector. However, the actors introducing the new regime were themselves recruited in an informal, personalistic and hence, to echo their own discourse, ‘nontransparent’ and ‘noncompetitive’ manner. There has been no tendering or any other public and competitive process of selection. This lack of transparency and formalization also seeped into the early activities of the Office, which were influenced by pre-existing relationships, including such important decisions as who gets to attend a strategic planning session. In effect, the frontier masters succeeded in creating and dominating relatively durable political arenas at the interstices of the state and civil society. While the interactions of state institutions with the general NGO sector as well as religious communities and sports associations were increasingly subjected to audit discipline, the cliquish relationships of the small coterie of actors dominating national civil society policy-making slipped under the radar. The foreign donors who funded these projects in the name of transparency also proved far from transparent in their own operations. They did not organize public tender processes and published only the most general information about the projects. One may thus merely speculate about the cumulative compensations that particular participants received for their work. One is reminded of Joseph Hanlon’s (2004) provocative suggestion that it is actually development donors who often promote ‘corruption’. However, this is not exactly what I wanted to argue, especially because of the particular legal content of the term that does not seem relevant in the present case. Rather, I wished to highlight how the appeals to ostensibly ideologically neutral values helped obscure the underlying political and instrumental agendas and the gaps between the actual effects and stated aims of the reforms. This analysis also served as an overture to the critique of the neoliberal rationality of many Serbian reforms, which I develop further in the forthcoming chapters. What such projects unfailingly promise to introduce is open and equal competition, and hence an efficient allocation of resources. However, neoliberal restructuring never occurs in a political, economic and social vacuum, but in a setting where resources and power positions are already unequally distributed. It is therefore by definition convenient for those who start from more advantageous positions (Büscher 2010: 49). It is always put into prac-

The Rise of ‘Partnerships’ and the Politics of Transparency | 171

tice by particular actors with the power to define the terms of competition, for instance, by axiomatically devaluing and delegitimizing competing actors and the resources they possess (Pelkmans 2009). In the present case, there is seemingly no reason to object to reforms whose stated intention was to channel government grants to those nonstate actors who can perform public functions well and at a good price. What made them problematic was the systematic privileging of actors who started from already privileged positions not only in terms of human resources, budgets and reputation, but also social and political relationships. In addition to limiting democratic participation, the practices of the frontier masters also called into question the stated objective of civil society development. Even if we should accept the narrow and problematic understanding of this goal as the building of an NGO sector, it is clear that the result was a widening rather than narrowing of the pre-existing gaps between the policy clout of a select few NGOs and all other organizations. As the next chapter will show, the contested and ambiguous neoliberalization of the state–civil society frontier appears even more troubled when one looks at its impact on other kinds of civil society actors who may struggle to satisfy the new criteria of efficiency and transparency.

Notes Parts of the material in this chapter were published in the article ‘Informal Networks and Interstitial Arenas of Power in the Making of Civil Society Law in Serbia’, Sociologija 57(4): 571–92. Courtesy of Sociologija: Journal for Sociology, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology, ISSN 0038-0318. 1. Bylaw on the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society. 2. Ćirković often referred to the government or public administration as ‘the system’. 3. The law knows only ‘associations of citizens’, ‘foundations’ and ‘endowments’. 4. This list is not exhaustive; for instance, the CSFP organizations also kept being invited. 5. See ‘Predstavljanje Uredbe kojom će biti regulisano Finansiranje udruženja iz budžeta Republike Srbije’ 2012. 6. Dereta became an MP in May 2012. 7. That I did not get to hear similar critiques of BCIF could of course be due to my close involvement with the organization, of which most of my NGO interlocutors were aware. 8. It is possible that there was a highly implicit notion of representation at work here. This could have been based on the fact that the frontier masters tended to be relatively big and rich organizations, and hence seen as fit for the job (BCIF, the CI) and/or ones with relevant expertise (the ECNL, Golubović). Another conceivable basis for such a form of representation might be an absence of opposition to their control over the discussed processes. Yet this latter argument is weakened somewhat by the informal criticisms of the privileged positions of the frontier masters.

– Chapter 5 –

WELFARE RESTRUCTURING AND ‘TRADITIONAL’ ORGANIZATIONS OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

_ In December 2011, I drove to the busy highway tollgate in Sirig, a few kilometres north of Novi Sad, the capital of the Vojvodina province (see Figure 0.1), after learning from the media that a protest committee of persons with disabilities intended to block Serbia’s only north–south highway here and in central Serbia.1 The reason was the government’s apparent unwillingness to increase the cash welfare benefit known colloquially as ‘another person’s care’ (tuđa nega),2 first introduced in the 1950s. The current law gives the right to this assistance to those who ‘require another person’s assistance and care to satisfy their basic life needs’, such as nutrition or personal hygiene.3 Due to these strict and rigidly implemented criteria, only 50,000 individuals received the benefit in 2011 (GRS 2014: 168), less than a tenth of the people with disabilities identified in the same year’s census (SORS 2013: 24). In addition, even the ‘increased’ monthly transfer, accessible solely to those with a ‘100 percent bodily impairment’ or multiple and severe disabilities of specific types,4 then amounted to only about 22,000 dinars (ca. €220). People with all other types and extents of disability were entitled to about a third of that amount. The representatives of persons with disabilities had originally demanded an equalization of the ‘increased’ benefit with the national average income of some 39,000 dinars. The social policy minister suggested a compromise sum of 27,000 dinars and this demand was indeed submitted to the finance ministry. However, there was no response whatsoever. The roadblock followed two protests held in September 2011 at the seat of the government in Belgrade. – 172 –

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 173

I arrived a quarter-hour before the start of the protest, which was set symbolically at five to noon. The protesters (mostly wheelchair users), the police and the media were already gathering in two lanes closed for traffic. Vehicles with protest participants continued to arrive. There were some private cars, but most were specially adapted vans of associations of people with paraplegia, quadriplegia or muscular dystrophy. I listened to a woman in a wheelchair, who later told me she was a member of a Novi Sad association, as she complained bitterly to the journalists of the Vojvodina state TV station: Last year they scrapped our [right to] wheelchairs in which we can go out to the city, they slashed our [right to] nappies by half . . .Tell me who can survive on [€150]. We’re being humiliated as never, our basic rights are being scrapped, the right to survive itself.

About fifty protesters eventually assembled, including some people with walking sticks or without visible impairments, presumably relatives, friends or workers of the associations. After exchanging greetings and casual conversation, they moved over to the tollgate and attempted to block the lanes still open for traffic. However, the police formed a cordon to stop them (see Figure 5.1). There were some verbal skirmishes and half-hearted attempts to break through, but it was clear that nobody desired actual physical confrontation. Stevan Lukovnjak, president of both the protest committee and the Vojvodina Paraplegia and Quadriplegia Union, then addressed the crowd. An older man without a visible impairment, Lukovnjak said that there were rumours that the demand letter ‘got stuck in the drawer’ of the state secretary at the finance ministry. He noted that some would probably fall sick due to the cold weather, but it was important to keep going. Their next action, he suggested, ought to be attempting to break into the finance ministry. The protesters called on the state to expand or at least maintain what they saw as an inadequate provision of long-established cash and in-kind welfare benefits to satisfy their needs for maintenance, care, technical devices and medical supplies. This was clearly expressed by the printouts that they used as impromptu banners: ‘If you haven’t got anything new to offer us, don’t take away what we used to have.’ It was mostly the kind of organizations behind this protest that tended to make such demands after 2000. In more formal registers, they were usually denoted neutrally as ‘associations of persons with disability’ (udruženja osoba sa invaliditetom). Casual terms revealed more about their social and political status. Both members and nonmembers rarely, if ever, described these groups as ‘NGOs’ or

174 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Figure 5.1. Disabled protesters talking with the police. Photo by the author.

‘civil society organizations’, even though they were in the same legal category of associations of citizens with most organizations thus described.5 They were instead put into an informal category of their own – that of so-called ‘traditional organizations’ of persons with disabilities. These were stereotyped as lagging behind or even downright incompatible with the ongoing welfare reforms, with the 2011 protests being quoted as one piece of evidence. ‘Traditional’ was a pejorative label used by nonmembers, mainly workers of state institutions and NGOs, while members would usually talk simply about their ‘associations’ or ‘organizations’ and generally appeared not to be aware of being so branded. Nevertheless, through collective practices such as the 2011 protests, the organizations clearly constituted themselves as self-conscious political actors rather than just an externally marked category. This chapter will show that ‘traditional’ organizations were a distinct force within Serbian civil society – a subject position from which some people with impairments and those close to them sought to contest as well as adapt to the hegemonic project of state and social transformation. This ‘post-Yugoslav’ civil society, as it might be termed considering its roots, articulated and pursued its own coun-

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 175

terhegemonic and subhegemonic projects, even if in a generally less visible or confrontational manner than its liberal and nationalist counterparts. The models of the state and its relations with society that these organizations articulated and enacted were to some extent related to their origin in socialist Yugoslavia and changing fortunes during the postsocialist transformation. The associations used to be relatively well integrated into the socialist sociopolitical and welfare systems, in which they were given a limited but from their perspective all-important redistributive role. They were subsequently marginalized and degraded rather than transformed under Milošević, and many fell victim to abuses on the part of their managers. Finally, after the regime change, they became targets of critiques and interventions embedded in the neoliberal reforms at the state–civil society frontier discussed in the previous chapter. The rest of this chapter develops the analysis of these reforms and makes the following arguments about their unfolding in the context of relationships between ‘traditional’ organizations, the state and the liberal civil society. First, the reforms seeking to instil cooperative relations at the frontier (‘partnerships’) extended to efforts to involve ‘traditional’ organizations in the performance of state functions, especially the provision of social services. As noted in the previous chapter, the transfer of welfare functions to various nonstate actors was one of the stated objectives of the partnerships agenda in Serbia, in line with the neoliberal logic of (welfare) state transformation. Yet this transfer had to face two sets of problems: those of the governance of such multisectoral and decentralized systems of social service provision in general, and those linked to the real or perceived legacies of ‘traditional’ organizations in particular. Building on this point, the second argument concerns the reforms of the regulation of the frontier (‘transparency’). In this particular context, they aimed at reinventing the central state as the regulator and supervisor of the dispersed welfare system under construction. In such systems, governance instruments such as audit and performance evaluation techniques tend to grow in importance (Clarke 2004a: 106–46). In the case of ‘traditional’ associations, there were concerns that the existing system of their public funding was lacking in efficiency and transparency. Efforts were therefore being made to bring this funding into line with a so-called ‘project system’, which introduced elements of audit and was seen as a superior technique of planning, funding, delivering and evaluating social services. Third, the chapter documents another instantiation of the strategy identified in the previous chapter – invoking the apparently value-

176 | Frontiers of Civil Society

neutral and universal norms of efficiency and transparency in order to advance political and ideological agendas that benefited some at the expense of others. Here, a group of NGOs joined state bodies in the critique of the practices of ‘traditional’ associations as insufficiently efficient and transparent. Prominent among them were what I call ‘disability NGOs’. As their leaders proudly emphasized, these were ‘cross-disability’ (and hence progressive) organizations, unlike ‘traditional’ associations constituted as separate according to medical diagnoses. While the latter had broad memberships of people with disabilities from all social strata, the NGOs were small collectives of professionals with as well as without disabilities. In addition, there were also NGOs that worked on disability issues more or less prominently alongside other issues; these usually had no workers with disabilities. Both kinds of NGOs were experienced in raising funds from foreign donors and ‘implementing projects’. They accused ‘traditional’ groups of wasting public funds, lagging behind the current professional standards and policy approaches to disability, and being generally unable to become modern service providers. As we will see, the government’s new policy towards people with disabilities was organized around internationally sanctioned concepts of equal rights, antidiscrimination and participation. However, these have, on one level, become a legitimating ideology of an emergent workfare regime that variously persuaded, supported and pushed people with disabilities to become economically ‘independent’ by participating in wage labour. In the context of this discursive coupling, the NGOs were able to criticize the demands of ‘traditional’ associations as oriented to the preservation of welfare ‘dependence’ and segregation, and hence, in effect, hostile to equal rights. One of the outcomes of these various critiques of the associations was to improve the NGOs’ relative position in the competition for resources and policy influence. Nevertheless, the stereotypes about ‘traditional’ associations glossed over what were in reality more complex and ambivalent articulations of historical legacies with current conditions and exigencies. I will show that many of these organizations adapted, with varying degrees of success, to the changing policy narratives and state practices, and that this enabled them to pursue a subhegemonic project of a partial preservation of their established role and practices. What is more, the reforms of the state–civil society frontier were less radical and comprehensive as of 2010–11 than they were presented as being, echoing the argument made in the previous chapter about their limited and uneven achievements.

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 177

Finally, taking a critical look at the new disability policy itself, I will argue that its rhetoric of self-reliance clashed with a general failure to effectively address the ongoing major obstacles to the autonomy of people with disabilities. In a context in which most remained dependent on state (and familial) provision of welfare and healthcare, the politics of ‘traditional’ associations emerge as essentially rational and democratically representative rather than a sign of an unwillingness to become equal and ‘independent’. These arguments are organized as follows. The first section discusses the development of these organizations in socialist Yugoslavia and early postsocialist Serbia. The second section analyses changing state policies towards people with disabilities after 2000. This serves as the general context for the third section, which proceeds to address this chapter’s central focus: the changes and continuities in the practices of ‘traditional’ organizations and their relations with the state and other civil society actors.

Organizations of People with Disabilities in Yugoslavia and Miloševic´’s Serbia Associations of people with disabilities were one group in a whole panoply of organizations that made up the particular Yugoslav form of civil society. They achieved impressive coverage in terms of both geography and medical diagnoses. Organizations of people with sensory disabilities led the way immediately after the war, to be joined by people with other disabilities from the 1960s onwards – very much in pace with the disability movement in the West and in sharp contrast to the Soviet Union, where even politically unthreatening sports clubs for people with disabilities only started to emerge in the early 1980s (Phillips 2011: 74–75). Since these organizations and Yugoslav civil society in general have not been objects of much scholarly interest, I had to draw mainly on Yugoslav period sources, which are often rather general and written in the obscure official lingo. Those on associations of persons with disabilities were typically written by members themselves or the medical, welfare or administrative workers involved with them. The task is further compounded by differences between the laws of the various republics and provinces and frequent constitutional, legal and institutional reforms. Because of this and the limited space, my focus will be especially on the situation in Serbia in the 1980s.

178 | Frontiers of Civil Society

According to the constitution and the programme of the Communist party, the Yugoslav system of socialist self-management was composed of three spheres: the state, social self-management and ‘the free association of working people and citizens in social organizations and associations’ (Zečević 1987: 4). Within this associational sphere, Miodrag Zečević, author of several works on the subject, differentiates organizations that: III. play a decisive role in the political process of management – sociopolitical organizations; III. absorb and express the interests (particular or general) of working people and citizens – social organizations . . . ; III. express the personal (private) interests of citizens – associations of citizens. (1987: 12)

This scheme, which is in line with the 1974 Constitution of the SFRY,6 reveals how these various organizations were understood and valorized. Sociopolitical organizations, such as the party, the League of Socialist Youth, labour unions and other mass organizations, were disproportionately larger and more powerful than the remaining two types. Given their predominantly political character and their importance for the regime, they are clearly beyond the remit of the liberal understanding of civil society. In Yugoslavia, too, they were regulated by separate legislation, suggesting that their inclusion in the associational sphere was largely nominal and ideological. Zečević (1987) also refrains from including them fully in the associational sphere – the title of his book only mentions Social Organizations and Associations in the Political System of Socialist Self-Management and his discussion of sociopolitical organizations is exclusively in relation to the remaining two types of organizations. Social organizations were understood as those that articulated and realized the interests of the entire society or particular social groups, thereby performing some of the functions of the state. As a result, they enjoyed a legal status superior to associations of citizens (Zečević 1987: 27), which were something of a residual category and clearly lowest in the hierarchy of value. Serbia’s 1982 Law on Social Organizations and Associations of Citizens illustrates this by defining social organizations as contributing to ‘general or broader social interests’ (Article 9), while leaving associations of citizens undefined. The obvious implication is that they were limited to the exercise of ‘private’ or ‘personal’ interests. Indeed, Zečević (1987: 12) mentions religious and hobby-based associations of citizens as typical examples.

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 179

Organizations of people with disabilities were constituted as social organizations. Some still describe themselves in their printed materials and on their websites as ‘social’ or ‘socio-humanitarian organizations’ (socijalno/društveno-humanitarne organizacije), although these terms are now devoid of legal meaning and the organizations are registered as associations of citizens (see also Vukasović 2008: 182). This terminological continuity signals a commitment to a residual identity that is distinct from that of the self-consciously nongovernmental organizations of the postsocialist era. Its roots must be sought in the Yugoslav concept of social organization as well as the particular history of organizations of disabled people, which was characterized by an imbrication with the socialist state. This can be traced back to the first organizations formed during World War II. For instance, the Belgrade People’s Liberation Front of the Blind was formed in November 1944 as a ‘local chapter’ of the Unitary People’s Liberation Front (later the People’s Front), the Communist-led political wing of the Partisan resistance movement.7 The first president of this ‘social, humanitarian, political and revolutionary organization of the blind’ had served as a wartime secretary of the Communist Youth Alliance in her native village before coming to liberated Belgrade in 1944 (Vukotić 1984: 89–91). The 1948 Rules of the Association of the Blind of Yugoslavia suggest that federal and republican government bodies controlled it directly in this period (YAB 1948, Articles 2 and 37). With the Communist leaders’ shift from their early Stalinism to Yugoslavia’s own more liberal brand of socialism, the relationship of the state to social organizations and associations moved from direct command to softer mechanisms of influence. The role of the People’s Front, in 1953 reconstituted as the Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, was especially salient. This was the broadest, umbrella-type sociopolitical organization whose collective members were other sociopolitical organizations and all social organizations and associations of citizens (Rožić 1980: 16). Its ‘leading ideological and political force’ was the party whose programme it followed (Rožić 1980: 19–20). Branka Šobot Jeličić, president of an organization of the blind in Kikinda, told me that according to the organization’s oral history, it was actually the Socialist Alliance (then still the People’s Front) that set it up in 1951. Darko, one of the oldest surviving members of the organization, further told me that one of the secretaries in the 1950s came from the Socialist Alliance. Zečević (1987: 61–63) describes the early postwar relationship of social organizations and associations vis-à-vis the party and the People’s Front as ‘transmissive’. It was supposed to become more

180 | Frontiers of Civil Society

democratic with the introduction of self-management, but a lack of top-down interest in such organizations prevailed in practice (see also Vukasović 2008: 192). Moreover, the Socialist Alliance continued to exert an implicit grip on social organizations and associations. The local police, as the body responsible for their registration, could request its opinion on whether a particular organization was ‘in line with the goals and interests of the self-managing socialist society’ (Zečević 1987: 22). If the opinion was negative, the request for registration was usually rejected.8 However, it seems that state institutions did not need to resort to repressive measures. Rather, there was a relationship of willing conformism that went beyond declarations of commitment to socialist ideals. Zečević is openly critical of the tendency of these organizations to become state-like and state-oriented (in Yugo-speak ‘etatized’). Their leaderships were bureaucratized and distanced from the membership (1987: 106); they were only responsive to the initiatives from the top, i.e. state bodies and sociopolitical organizations, especially the party (1987: 108); and many consciously copied the modus operandi, internal organization and stated aims of sociopolitical organizations (1987: 111–13). Such tendencies were indeed apparent in organizations of people with disabilities. They developed elaborate governance structures and mechanisms that mimicked those of the state. For instance, after the 1974 Constitution introduced the delegate system of representation as the foundation of the entire sociopolitical system, the Serbia Union of the Blind followed suit (Ristić 1999: 97). According to its 1975 Statute, all its bodies – assemblies of local organizations, city, provincial and republican conferences, executive bodies, supervisory boards and ‘organizational-cadre committees’ – were ‘constituted in accordance with the delegate principle’ (SUB 1975, Article 30). Also noteworthy is the territorial constitution of these organizations, which copied the spatiality of the state based on a series of concentric circles where the local community is encompassed by the region and the region by the state (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). The organizations were preoccupied with frequent reforms of their territorial structures, which however were not always synchronized with changes of the administrative-territorial structure of the state (see e.g. Vukotić 1984: 96–97). ‘Traditional’ associations today, including those established in the postsocialist period but following the old model, continue to be organized in hierarchical territorial structures that are separate for groups of diagnoses. At the local level, there are organizations for individual municipalities or several neighbouring municipalities,

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 181

which are members of unions (savezi) at the national level. Vojvodina has an additional intermediary level of provincial unions, which are also members of the national unions.9 One can thus speak about political, organizational, discursive and perhaps even aesthetic proximity to the state, or, in terms of my conceptual framework, about an elusive, almost invisible frontier, embedded in socialist hegemony with a radically different model of state–civil society relations. As we will see, the criticisms of ‘traditional’ associations alluded to this closeness with the state. However, the members of ‘traditional’ organizations whom I interviewed never complained about having been dominated or controlled by the socialist state. Branka Šobot Jeličić, president of the organization of the blind in Kikinda and a member since 1987, rather suggested that there was a vague feeling of being ‘something of the state’: People thought like somebody else takes care of it and [the organization] is part of the society, part of the state, you know. I think we all experienced it like that. As if it was something of the state [državno, lit. statal] . . . We didn’t understand we were just an ordinary association of citizens obliged to work on its own. Then, too, we had a system of governance in which we chose our leadership ourselves. But somehow we didn’t mentally experience it like that, that we’re autonomous, rather we always considered ourselves something like, I don’t know . . . that somebody is obliged to take care of us. And they did, the society did take care then.

Indeed, most of the people with disabilities I interviewed remembered socialism as a time when access to funding and material resources in general was easier and associations were able to provide much more for their members. Most money came from the profits of the state lottery. Šobot Jeličić told me that when the lottery was being re-established after the war, Tito said ‘this is money for the disabled’. Though I was not able to verify this claim, the Association of the Disabled War Veterans of Yugoslavia did have an exclusive right to sell lottery tickets in 1946–51.10 The usual practice later was to give a share of the income to the unions, which kept some for themselves and distributed the rest to the local organizations based on the size of their membership. Alongside some activities that they still organize today, the associations used the lottery money for purposes that now appear unthinkable. For instance, there were special municipal funds to which municipalities and local companies made contributions for the construction or purchase of subsidized homes for local workers. The organizations could obtain flats for their members by paying in their

182 | Frontiers of Civil Society

own contribution of the lottery money. Nikola, a middle-aged member of the Intermunicipal Organization of the Blind and Visually Impaired in Zrenjanin, recalled that a whole block of flats was built especially for the blind (see also Ristić 1999: 37). The lottery money was also used to subsidize jobs. In some towns, associations started their own companies that employed workers with disabilities. These were organized as ‘cooperatives’ (zadruge) in the early postwar years and later as ‘protected workshops’ (zaštitne radionice) entitled to tax discounts and other subsidies. Jobs were also available in mainstream enterprises. Another source of funding was municipal governments that covered especially the associations’ office costs and employee salaries. Money could also be obtained from ‘self-managing communities of interest’, known as SIZs (samoupravne interesne zajednice). From the early 1970s, these formally nongovernmental institutions were responsible for planning and funding public services. Again, local SIZs were associated to form provincial and republican SIZs. Decisions were supposed to be reached by a consensus of the delegates of both producers and consumers of services who jointly constituted SIZ assemblies and executive bodies. There were SIZs for healthcare, education, welfare, housing and communal services, sports, culture and so on. Their sources of funding were payroll taxes and taxes on the revenues of enterprises (Pejovich 1979). Healthcare and welfare SIZs were especially important for the organizations of people with disabilities (Mašović and Bosak 1977: 103; Savić 2009: 82). In sum, then, the organizations were able to direct a broad range of welfare resources to their members – jobs, homes and holidays, but also regular sport, cultural and social events. Knowing their current, much more limited possibilities, it is difficult to imagine that they had been able to engage in some of these forms of redistribution. Unsurprisingly, most elderly and middle-aged people with disabilities I interviewed expressed nostalgia for the period. For instance, Goran Perlić, president of the Banat Paraplegia Association whom I met at the roadblock, told me: I’m not a communist but communism was better for the people. Even in the nineties, we were getting all kinds of aid we don’t get now. Today, there might be more understanding but everyone just lies, tells us the same story for the hundredth time, organizes hundreds of lectures, for instance about writing projects. . .

Šobot Jeličić introduced more nuance into this account by telling me that cuts in funding had already started in the austerity-stricken

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 183

1980s. However, it was especially in the 1990s that the organizations’ allocative power declined sharply. The changes to their status paralleled those in the country at large – partial reform combined with a formal preservation of many elements of the old system, which became increasingly dysfunctional in practice. SIZs were scrapped, but organizations of people with disabilities continued, at least in theory, to be funded by the lottery. However, after the Socialist Alliance had ceased to exist in 1990, there were calls for organizations of people with disabilities, as its constituent parts, to follow its fate. Funding became scarce and irregular (Ražnjatović 1991: 135). The situation worsened still in the most chaotic period of wars and hyperinflation in 1992–93 (Savić 2009: 22). At the same time, the organizations assumed a new responsibility for distributing humanitarian (usually foreign) aid to their members. The parcels typically included essential foodstuffs and toiletries, but there could also be drugs or even wheelchairs. Such humanitarian aid became sporadic or stopped completely in the 2000s. Katica Ranđelović, who founded a cerebral and infant palsy organization in Niš in the 1970s and now heads the NGO Niš Centre for Independent Living of Persons with Disability, told me that the members got used to this form of provision and were frustrated when it stopped. As the quote above suggests, Goran Perlić also remembered it with a degree of appreciation. Another similarity with broader developments in the country was the processes of institutional decadence, if not outright criminalization, in some organizations. In the setting of lawlessness, economic crisis and dwindling resources, the latter became an immensely competitive environment, full of gossip, suspicion and intrigue between individual members or organizations at various levels (local, city, provincial, republican and federal). This was not unprecedented – already socialist-period sources contain veiled references to the ‘privatization’ of decision-making in these organizations in particular (Vukotić 1984: 102) or social organizations and associations in general (Zečević 1987: 112–13). ‘Privatization’ generally implied that a small circle of people in the management usurped all power and used it to enrich themselves or keep their positions while minimizing activities for the collective good. It seems that secretaries were often the chief perpetrators of such abuses in the postsocialist period. Secretaries of ‘traditional’ organizations are not elected officials (unlike presidents), but employees managing the everyday functioning of the organization. By now, the secretary is often the only paid employee. Following a long-standing pattern, secretaries are usually people without disabilities,11 which results in a markedly paternalist relationship

184 | Frontiers of Civil Society

between them and the members. In associations of the blind in particular, secretaries could abuse the members’ impairment with ease – by withholding information from them or lying about the content of documents that they had them sign. Branka Šobot Jeličić and a group of members of the Kikinda organization of the blind told me how the autocratic and disinterested mismanagement of a sighted secretary in the 1990s caused a drastic decline in membership and activities. While they had eventually managed to get rid of the secretary – though at a cost of a lengthy legal battle – they claimed that other organizations ‘still functioned like that’. I have heard about similar cases in other associations of the blind or people with different disabilities (see also Savić 2001). I also encountered allegations that secretaries or presidents privileged particular members when distributing humanitarian aid in return for their support, for example, in internal elections.

Disability Policy and Welfare Reforms after 2000 The current status and politics of ‘traditional’ organizations can be only understood in relation to the changing state policy vis-à-vis people with disabilities in the post-Milošević period. The 2006 Strategy of the Advancement of the Position of Persons with Disability (hereinafter the Disability Strategy) inaugurated an ideological shift condensed in this introductory remark: The foundation for the development of the Strategy were solutions proclaimed by the adopted domestic and international documents that define the issues of the treatment of persons with disability not as a segment of social policy but a question of respecting human rights. It is indisputable that a contemporary and successful society, to which the Republic of Serbia aspires as its strategic goal, means not only material welfare but a community of satisfied individuals who enjoy full participation in all segments of the society. (GRS 2006: 1)

The rest of the document is accordingly at pains to ground the new approach in the principles of antidiscrimination, equal rights, ‘individual autonomy’, ‘independence’ and ‘participation’ of people with disabilities (GRS 2006: 5–7). These new emphases can be traced back to two main drivers also indicated in the strategy. The first is the scores of international human rights norms adopted after the regime change (GRS 2006: 1–3), most relevantly the 2006 United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in the drafting of which Serbia actively participated. Its

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 185

delegate Damjan Tatić (2011: 224) wrote that this experience ‘logically’ influenced the parallel writing of the Disability Strategy, in which he was also involved. The strategy is further careful to stress its compatibility with key EU antidiscrimination norms12 (GRS 2006: 2). It is relevant here that the legal and juridical enforcement of rights, especially in relation to equal treatment and nondiscrimination, is the most developed component of the otherwise weak ‘social dimension’ of EU integration (Mabbett 2005). Serbian law has been extensively amended to achieve ‘harmonization’ with the international norms (SCILPD 2014; Tatić 2011). Symbolically most prominently, the 2006 Law on the Prevention of Discrimination against Persons with Disability (hereinafter the Disability Antidiscrimination Law) has become Serbia’s first antidiscrimination law, reinforced by a general antidiscrimination law three years later. Second, the Disability Strategy anchors the new policy in a ‘paradigm shift’ from the ‘medical model’ to the ‘social model’ of disability (GRS 2006: 6–8). Although a number of current approaches to disability (Phillips 2011: 77–84) appear to have had some influence in Serbia, it is not my intention to discuss the nuances of their differences and local reception. For my purposes, it suffices to note that it was the ‘social model’ that the workers of Serbian disability and human rights NGOs usually evoked as the perspective on disability that guided and legitimated their preferred solutions to the issues faced by disabled people. According to them, its key achievement was to reject the earlier medicalizing approach to disability and show that it was the discriminatory organization of society that turned impairments (biological conditions) into disabilities. From this perspective, advocating for and using antidiscrimination norms was not only feasible but also politically and morally appropriate strategy (see also Phillips 2011: 81–82, 134–35; Vanhala 2011). The new policy and the laws enacted in its name followed the standard human rights model in constructing people with disabilities as holders of rights and the state as the primary duty-bearer (Merry 2006). On a closer inspection, however, they also imposed moral and legal obligations on them. The Disability Strategy expects them to abandon their ‘long-term dependence and passive role’ and become ‘active and productive members of society’ (GRS 2006: 8). A table that sets out the medical and social models as binary opposites and evolutionary stages articulates this self-transformation in terms of becoming ‘citizens’ instead of ‘patients or recipients’ (presumably of welfare assistance). The 2009 Law on Professional Rehabilitation and Employment of Persons with Disability (hereinafter the Disability

186 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Employment Law) went further by introducing a number of ‘obligations’ of persons with disabilities, such as that they ‘actively seek employment’, ‘accept active employment policy measures’ and ‘accept employment in accordance to professional capabilities’. Finally, the 2011 Law on Social Protection enabled and in some cases obliged welfare agencies to conclude so-called Individual Activation Plan Agreements with recipients of various cash benefits, including ‘another person’s care’. The agreements bind the recipient to participate in a customized list of activities, especially various forms of work, training and jobseeking, or face the discontinuation of their benefits. Only individuals determined in a special procedure to be completely unable of work are exempt from these provisions. Their implementation has begun only after the adoption of a specifying bylaw in late 201413 and no data is yet available on their impact on persons with disabilities. Nevertheless, there has recently emerged a conspicuous pattern of government officials praising the work participation and self-sufficiency of some individuals with disabilities, thus implicitly stigmatizing others’ ‘dependence’ on welfare. As we will see, some workers of disability NGOs argued even more explicitly that a major reason why many Serbians with disabilities were not becoming independent and equal was their own ‘passivity’ and ‘dependence’ on the state. Similar discourses about people with disabilities have been identified in other postsocialist or late socialist contexts, such as Bulgaria (Mladenov 2017), China (Kohrman 2005: 113–43) and Ukraine (Phillips 2011: 7, 84–92; 2012: 493–95). While reflecting the unique social status of people with disabilities, their basic structure follows the more general narrative about insufficiently self-reliant and entrepreneurial postsocialist subjects, which was used to justify neoliberal reforms as much as their failures (Makovicky 2014b). The stigmatizing discourse and the ‘activation’ policy could be seen as elements of an emerging workfare regime in Serbia, which was intended to also embrace persons with personalities. Workfare is here understood as a tendency of welfare and politico-economic restructuring that seeks to ‘maximize work participation while minimizing “dependence” on welfare’ (Peck 2001: 10). This typically involves conditioning welfare assistance by participation in retraining programmes and/or acceptance of any jobs offered. Workfare in general is embedded in broader projects of neoliberalization and mutually reinforcing with the ‘flexibilization’ of labour markets (Makovicky 2013: 77, 2014a: 4, 7; Peck 2001; Szőke 2015). In the particular case of the Serbian disability policy, it has been further entangled with the rights-based approach, with which it shares basic philosophical

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 187

and normative assumptions of liberal individualism. This policy assemblage can be interpreted as the Serbian policy-makers’ attempt to navigate a ‘crowded internationalised policy space’ (Lendvai 2007: 28) by appeasing and securing the support of an array of actors with different stakes in disability policy and welfare reforms. This includes the international and national disability movement, international organizations promoting rights and antidiscrimination frameworks (especially the EU and various UN agencies) and the two international actors who were argued to have most influence on social policymaking in the post-Milošević period: the World Bank and the IMF (Arandarenko and Golicin 2007). The actualization of the policy assemblage has similarly comprised a set of diverse and not always explicitly connected measures, and was generally limited and uneven. The antidiscrimination norms enabled the use of litigation to address some issues of persons with disabilities, for example, the inaccessibility of public spaces and services, but so far on a very small scale and with modest achievements, especially when compared to the extent of persistent physical, economic and social barriers to the integration and autonomy of people with disabilities (UNCRPD 2012: 27). It might have been rather the increased emphasis in public and media discourse on the rights of people with disabilities that has stimulated some patchy but noticeable progress in areas such as accessibility or personal assistance services. Parallel to this, the workfare arm of the assemblage translated to a set of policies that pushed all those deemed to be fit to work to the labour market by curtailing their access to welfare. This included, in addition to the ‘activation’ programme, the progressive restricting of access to disability pensions and the underfunding and low coverage of welfare programmes such as ‘another person’s care’, which is the issue that the 2011 protests were responding to. The neoliberal policies of reducing pension expenditures, maintaining highly targeted and means-tested welfare programmes, and flexibilizing the labour market were all supported and influenced by the World Bank and the IMF (Arandarenko and Golicin 2007: 177; Vuković and Babović 2014; Vuković and Perišić 2011: 230–33). In recent years there have been additional cuts to welfare benefits for persons with disabilities, in particular those provided by local governments, under the terms of a standby arrangement with the IMF (PCRS 2015: 5, 89). Finally, the quota system introduced by the Disability Employment Law sought to maximize the work participation of people with disabilities by obliging employers to hire a certain proportion of such workers (with state subsidies for the first year of salaries) or pay fines. Nevertheless,

188 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the available data indicate that there has been so far a remarkable failure in getting persons with disabilities into employment beyond a small number of low-paid and temporary workfare jobs (GRS 2006: 24; NES 2016: 49–50; SCILPD 2014: 12). The new policies and discourses of human rights and economic ‘independence’ of people with disabilities were therefore one vital aspect of the changing institutional, legal and ideological landscape to which ‘traditional’ organizations were expected to adapt. Another aspect was the efficiency-driven policy of delegating state functions to nonstate actors such as NGOs, which the previous chapter identified as part of the neoliberal transformation of the Serbian state. The reform of the welfare system and ‘social protection’ (socijalna zaštita) in particular was one of the domains in which this idea was most developed. In Serbia, social protection is traditionally defined as the arm of the welfare state concerned with those facing pronounced and specific issues, such as poor, elderly or, indeed, disabled people – ‘vulnerable groups’ in current policy-talk. It encompasses the provision of both social services and needs-tested cash benefits, including ‘another person’s care’. One of the main principles of social protection reforms after 2000 was diversification, meaning an involvement of NGOs (and private businesses) in the delivery of social services (Arandarenko and Golicin 2007: 176; Bošnjak and Stubbs 2007). Commitment to such ‘welfare mix’ was articulated by two government strategies: the World Bank–sponsored Poverty Reduction Strategy (GRS 2003: 104, 107–8) and the Strategy of Social Protection Development. The latter called for an equal access of ‘public’, ‘nongovernmental’ and ‘private’ service providers to the public funding of social services – which was eventually legislated in 201114 – in order to develop a ‘more flexible and more competitive mixed model of social protection’ (GRS 2005: 37). Based on the kind of neoliberal rationality identified in the previous chapter, market competition between providers was expected to increase the cost-efficiency of services, as well as their geographical coverage, quality, variety and responsiveness to the needs of recipients.

Changes, Continuities and Struggles at the Frontier Following the general tendency in post-2000 welfare reforms, the new disability policy identifies a need for a ‘pluralism of service providers (government institutions, agencies, associations of citizens and the private sector)’ and ‘cross-sectoral cooperation in service provision

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 189

for persons with disability’ (GRS 2006: 11–12). The terms used here (‘associations of citizens’) and the recurrent references to ‘organizations of persons with disability’ throughout the Disability Strategy suggest that the policy-makers included ‘traditional’ organizations among nonstate actors expected to comprise the new multisectoral welfare system. Ljubica, advisor in the Sector for the Protection of Persons with Disability in the Ministry of Labour and Social Policy, confirmed such expectations to me in an interview. However, she added in one breath that many organizations were unprepared to meet their new tasks because they lacked adequate cadres, expertise and even basic professional skills, such as the ‘use of contemporary technology and the contemporary manner of work’. More than that, some of them apparently believed that there was no need to change their activities, which had remained more or less the same for decades. However, it was an ‘interesting fact’, Ljubica remarked, that many members still appreciated and demanded such activities. She gave sports competitions and literary evenings as examples. Since these were only for people with disabilities, they did not promote their social inclusion and demonstrate their ability to do things ‘equally’ (jednako) to others. The ministry had therefore already reduced funding for such activities and would continue to do so. In this case, too, I found that workers of disability NGOs and other NGOs working on disability issues shared the perspective of reformist state institutions. Some of the most trenchant critiques of ‘traditional’ organizations I encountered came from the late Lepojka Čarević Mitanovski, the head of an NGO network focusing on the issues of women with disabilities and victims of home violence. She told me in an interview: In the time of Milošević, humanitarian aid was the priority of all [disability] organizations, and so people with disabilities too got used to getting [things], they didn’t get used to give anything, to invest themselves in something, to educate themselves, to get employed . . . we have to teach them to be independent in their life. But in a traditional organization, they teach them to be dependent on the state. And they fight for benefits, not rights. For a reduced phone bill, smaller electricity bills. . .

This argument threw into sharp relief the way in which some of the advocates of the new policy contrasted ‘rights’ to welfare ‘dependence’ while accusing ‘traditional’ organizations of perpetuating the latter. Čarević Mitanovski continued that such organizations’ recent demands for larger disability benefits were ‘a completely rubbish category – the problem is that the state doesn’t have money, and second,

190 | Frontiers of Civil Society

why should someone receive a disability benefit for doing nothing and sitting at home?’ She claimed that such a policy ‘doesn’t exist anywhere’ and contrasted it with her own NGO that ‘fights for rights’ and ‘that I normally pay my bills and all my duties toward the state and have normal income as an employed person’. Further, similarly to Ljubica, the ministry official, she mentioned activities of ‘traditional’ organizations such as ‘bean stew cooking competitions’ that did not help anybody to become socially integrated and economically independent. And yet, she added, the social policy ministry continued to fund such retrograde activities while paying lip service to ‘reforms’. As these latter comments suggest, a good number of the critiques and efforts to reform ‘traditional’ organizations focused on their public funding. Ministry officials and workers of disability NGOs were in agreement that it was in need of an overhaul, both in its own right and as an effective way of transforming the practices of these organizations, considering their dependence on this source of funding. Since money was distributed through the line item 481, these interventions reflected the broader reform agenda analysed in the previous chapter, while responding to some specificities of the funding of ‘traditional’ organizations. First, there was the long-established practice of local ‘traditional’ organizations being funded by local governments. Disability NGO workers were especially unhappy about the fact that these grants could be used not only for the organizations’ activities but also for ‘material expenses’ (costs of running an office) and employee salaries. They considered this an unfair advantage since their own organizations had to cover such expenses from their project budgets. Further, employing the liberal norm of civil society autonomy from the state, NGO workers tended to argue that this practice made ‘traditional’ organizations dependent and subordinate to local governments, which gave rise to another pejorative label – that of ‘budget organizations’. For example, the workers of two NGOs (not exclusively disability focused) advocating for accessible public spaces in Niš and Zrenjanin told me that they secured the support of local ‘traditional’ organizations, but did not expect them to get involved in directly challenging the local governments for fear of losing the municipal funding and disrupting the pre-existing paternalist relations. The established funding practices were thus seen as limiting the organizations’ capacity to act as independent political actors and represent the interests of their members. Second, at the national level, there was the practice of so-called ‘programme funding’. The way this worked was that local ‘tradi-

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 191

tional’ organizations drafted ‘programmes’ of activities for the entire following year and submitted these to their unions. The unions processed and submitted the programmes to the social policy ministry that decided which activities it would fund. The grantees then had to document their spending of grants on a quarterly basis. This system was established in the early 2000s. The ministry created a Fund for the Financing of Disability Associations in 200215 and adopted a new regulation on the criteria for funding these organizations in 2003 (Savić 2009: 32–33). It was no longer organizations as such but programme activities that were funded, and organizations were therefore required to develop their programmes. Another option that became available to them was to apply for funding for one-off projects of limited duration. Before these changes, people from ‘traditional’ associations told me, they used to get money according to the number of members and did not even have to document how they spent it. By the early 2010s, the relatively recently introduced programme funding was already seen as problematic. Čarević Mitanovski admitted that ‘traditional’ organizations wrote their programmes of activities, but expressed doubts that the members benefited from them, implying that they were not useful or perhaps not even implemented. Ljubica, the ministry official, pointed out that since 2009, the public funding of associations of citizens was subject to mandatory public tendering. As a kind of compromise between this requirement and the established practice, the ministry started to distribute programme funding through public calls that, however, were reserved for the unions of ‘traditional’ organizations. There was one such call a year, plus one or more calls in which all associations of citizens could compete for grants for disability projects. Even in this residual form, programme funding was scheduled for a transition to the ‘project system of funding’, which Ljubica defined as follows: [S]o that a project has a certain purpose, goal, activities which are mutually linked, that there is a certain way of applying, reporting and evaluating the results. In the earlier system of funding, there wasn’t a cycle like that. Rather, there was a series of activities that were perhaps not mutually linked, they were intended for the members but were diverse.

At the time of my fieldwork, the social policy ministry and two other ministries were implementing the Delivery of Improved Local Services (DILS), a three-year project funded by a $46.4 million loan from the World Bank. Its components reflected the general direction of the social protection reform – decentralization and diversification of service provision coupled with the development of a ‘new regula-

192 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tory, oversight and quality-assurance role’ of the central state (World Bank 2008). The DILS activities of the ministry itself focused mainly on services for people with disabilities. The first aim was to support all types of NGOs in developing such services in line with the reform objectives, and the second was to assist ‘traditional’ organizations specifically in their transition to the ‘project system’. Ivana Ćirković, director of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society, told me that the DILS: works with these [‘traditional’] associations, teaching them to think in a project manner [projektno], to apply in a project manner . . . It’s not enough to include them but also to know what is the benefit of including them so that [public] administration is in a position – I imagine that would be its task – to follow how it is being implemented and evaluate the quality of the work, so that it will be a market, so when it turns out somebody isn’t good, somebody else is engaged – on a specific contract, in a specific public tender process, in a clear manner.

As Ćirković’s and Ljubica’s comments indicate, these particular reforms of the state–civil society frontier too were informed by the neoliberal model of increasing the efficiency of public funding through market-like procedures and institutions (tendering, fixed-term contractual relations) and audit techniques (reporting, evaluation). We also again encounter ‘projectification’ (Chapter 2) based on a creed in ‘the project’ as an inherently superior mode of organizing processes. As one could predict and Goran Perlić’s above quote hinted at, the transition to the ‘project system’ involved the attendance of the workers of ‘traditional’ organizations in many seminars on project skills. Tellingly, disability NGOs were often engaged to provide such seminars. The ministry calls for applications for DILS-funded projects were themselves considered part of the learning process, since they required ‘traditional’ organizations to write, carry out and report on projects rather than programmes. However, I found that people in ‘traditional’ organizations saw little difference between programmes and projects. They would explain programmes to me as ‘of the project type’ or ‘like mini-projects’, or talk about their programmes when I asked whether they had any projects going on. From their perspective, the ‘project system’ had been there for quite some time already. The problems they had with programme funding were rather different from those identified by the ministry or NGOs and it was not clear how the ‘project system’ could solve them. Milena, secretary of one association in Niš, told me she was frustrated by having to wait until the twentieth of each

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 193

month to learn how much money the ministry had granted them for the next month. Moreover, she found the manner in which the ministry approved or rejected activities quite arbitrary. Goran Perlić disliked the fact that the ministry mostly refused to fund sports and social events, arguing that the ‘healthy’ bureaucrats did not understand that for people with disabilities, these were ‘not just sports’. Others among my research participants, aware that the ministry had been cutting funding for such events, similarly said that these were often the members’ only chance to socialize and meet a partner. Finally, monthly programme grants to local organizations were rather small, typically a few hundred euros, so that making the already lean organizations even more ‘efficient’ was hardly a priority from their own perspective. The claims that ‘traditional’ organizations lacked the capacity for project work were not entirely unfounded. Many of my interlocutors admitted that there were few people in their organization who knew how to write project proposals. Older activists complained that educated young people with disabilities were not interested in helping because the organization was not in a position to remunerate them, while the young ones suggested that elderly secretaries and presidents refused to stand down and allow others to replace them. Some also adopted an attitude along the lines of ‘why would I bother to apply for funding when I know they’ll never give me any?’ Nevertheless, quite a few organizations were more or less successfully adapting to the ‘project system’ and the agenda of welfare reforms. For example, the Niš Association for Help to Mentally Insufficiently Developed Persons (sic), an organization founded in 1966, had been cooperating with other NGOs and public institutions on a DILS-funded project of a daycare service for mentally disabled children. The secretary Jovan Bogdanović, father of a disabled son and an active member of the organization since 1971, spoke the language of reforms fluently. He told me about their wish to develop ‘innovative’ services, support the process of ‘deinstitutionalization’ and apply for funding even from the demanding foreign donors. When I interviewed him in the summer of 2011, the DILS project had already ended, but they continued to provide the successful service on a voluntary basis. Their determination has paid off – the local government started to fund the service from 2012. Another such example was the North Banat Organization of the Blind in Kikinda. Since Branka Šobot Jeličić had become its president16 in 2000 or 2001 (she was not sure about the exact year), it carried out a number of projects funded by various ministries, the Vojvodina prov-

194 | Frontiers of Civil Society

ince government, the municipality of Kikinda and other donors. For instance, the renovation of the dilapidated premises obtained for use from the municipality was supported by the private foundation of a US ambassador’s wife. At the time of my visits to the association in late 2011, it was hosting two series of workshops as part of a project funded by the social policy ministry. A social worker and a psychologist advised the blind and their families during the first series and a typhlologist (blindness expert) taught them Braille in the second. The outcome of two pending applications for funding was expected. Interestingly, the turn to project funding brought a restoration rather than an abandonment of ‘traditional’ activities. The sports club, which had been discontinued in the 1990s due to a lack of funding, was re-established and a goalball team17 and very successful bowling team were having regular training sessions. Cultural activities were also continued. The municipality supported the publication of a poetry anthology by blind authors and Šobot Jeličić’s book, which combined autobiography with a discussion of problems faced by blind people. Every fortnight, one of the members, Jelka Bota, broadcast a special show on local radio. The members I talked to emphasized that they were welcome to come to the premises at any time to get help in their dealings with bureaucracy or just have some coffee and a game of chess. This made them feel, as Bota said, that the ‘organization is there for us, not for the organization’s sake’. Šobot Jeličić, the main engine of this success, told me that she was initially guided by the former secretary of the provincial Union of the Blind Koviljka Despotov, ‘the first among the blind in Serbia who got into the system of projects’. According to Šobot Jeličić, Despotov had visited blind colleagues in Slovenia and Bosnia shortly after the Yugoslav wars. Having learned that they were being funded through projects, she followed their example – ‘she took their forms and copied them’. In the early 2000s, Despotov gave some project samples to Šobot Jeličić, who started to apply with the aid of her sighted husband. She usually dictated the applications to someone while ad hoc collaborators helped her with specialist terminology. She and other members attended multiple seminars on project writing and other skills, such as the development of local action plans on disability. Šobot Jeličić was quite critical of the old system of funding, in which allocations depended on the number of members. She thought that programme funding – which she considered a kind of project funding – was better because it ‘reflects who wants to work’. When it started to be introduced, the Kikinda organization managed to obtain as much as 300,000 dinars a month (about €3,000 as per the 2011

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 195

exchange rate), while other associations in Vojvodina with a similar number of members had no activities at all. Šobot Jeličić connected this to her attitudes to work and postsocialist transformation. She professed that unlike most other people, she did not find it difficult to ‘understand the transition’ because ‘my parents taught me that one has to live off one’s work’. Because of that, she also ‘accepted the system of projects very easily’. She contrasted herself with the many blind people raised in boarding schools who supposedly expected somebody else to take care of all their needs. And yet, Šobot Jeličić did not embrace the norm of pure individual self-responsibility either. In her book, she wrote that associations of the blind were ‘nongovernmental organizations’ and the state did not have an obligation to fund them. The result was that: ‘Blind persons are simply left to their own devices. There is no official public institution that would gather and register blind persons and take care of them’ (Šobot Jeličić 2011: 41). When one is diagnosed with an untreatable condition of sight, her narrative continues, they are alone with their problem. There is nobody – except the associations – to advise blind people about their rights and the available aid and schooling options. During the interview, Šobot Jeličić similarly mentioned that ‘except the associations, nobody registers persons with disability as such’. This reveals that the established expectation that ‘traditional’ associations perform some state-like functions (‘registering’ the blind, advising them on welfare rights and mediating bureaucratic encounters) is not necessarily displaced by an engagement with the ‘project system’. Considering these proximities between (some) ‘traditional’ organizations and disability NGOs in practice, the latter’s discourse about their radical difference could be, on one level, interpreted as a claim to superior competence and authority in the scramble for scarce funding and policy influence. Particularly telling were the NGOs’ allegations that ‘traditional’ organizations enjoyed privileged access to public funding, which was all the more unfair for their tendency to waste it on useless activities or even abuse it. Čarević Mitanovski told me that these organizations were ‘protected like white bears’ and their representatives received ‘enormous’ salaries. At the same time, she maintained that ‘there is more corruption here than in any other field’. Corruption (broadly defined) was certainly present in a number of organizations, as indicated by the described developments in the 1990s and the members’ own willingness to confirm such experiences. Nevertheless, turning this into a general stereotype of corrupt (as well as regressive and incompetent) ‘traditional’ organizations

196 | Frontiers of Civil Society

was clearly a strategy of delegitimization that was combined with a highlighting of the contrastive virtues of NGOs. To understand why such strategies might have been necessary, one should remember that state funding had become increasingly important to NGOs due to the ongoing departure of foreign donors (Chapters 2 and 7). At the same time, the 2000 regime change and the policy of ‘partnerships’ enabled a generally increased participation of NGOs in the making and implementation of public policies, but in practice a narrow set of actors often enjoyed much better access than others, as we saw in the previous chapter. Finally, it is worth noting that both groups of organizations had their particular advantages in this competitive game. On the one hand, NGOs benefited from their better ability to access project funding and other kinds of support from foreign and private donors. In addition, their superior and more up-to-date professional and specialist expertise (real or perceived) as well as their social links to policy-makers in the ministries tended to put select NGOs in a privileged position to shape the making of social policies after 2000 (Vuković and Babović 2014). That this was likely also the case with disability policy is suggested by the ideological convergence between the ministry and disability NGOs. On the other hand, ‘traditional’ organizations enjoyed the noted residual privileges in accessing public resources. Furthermore, their sizeable memberships (of which they kept formal registries) allowed them to claim the status of ‘representative’ organizations, which the government seemed to accept. The Disability Strategy mentions that ‘organizations and representative groups’ of people with disabilities should be specifically supported in performing tasks such as interest representation, policy-making and monitoring (GRS 2006: 9). While several disability NGOs are also members of the National Organization of Persons with Disability, established in 2007 as the umbrella organization of the Serbian disability movement, nearly all members of its management board come from ‘traditional’ organizations. The government’s advisory Committee for Persons with Disability currently includes several representatives of ‘traditional’ organizations (often the same people who sit on the board of the National Organization), but nobody from disability NGOs. However, both groups of organizations were involved in the drafting of the Disability Strategy and the Disability Antidiscrimination Law (Tatić 2011: 176, 224). Furthermore, the reforms were less comprehensive and radical at the time of my fieldwork than they were usually presented as being,

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 197

which was another advantage for ‘traditional’ organizations. To begin with, the social policy ministry reserved one annual public call for funding applications for the unions of ‘traditional’ organizations. It also continued to cover the unions’ office costs and salaries (Tatić 2007: 15–16). Ljubica, the ministry official, also gave an indication that the transition to the ‘project system’ might allow for more continuity in the practices of ‘traditional’ organizations than she seemed to imply earlier in the same interview: Ljubica: With the new system of funding, we did not interrupt the funding of programmes; we just had to adapt it to the new manner. So, on the one hand, they implement their regular programmes that should exist, and on the other, it is necessary to change the manner in which all of that is planned, because it should be adapted to current conditions. Me: So the programmes will be basically funded through projects. Ljubica: Yes yes yes.

Changes at the local level were typically even slower and not so easily controlled by the central state. Local governments generally kept up the established practice of funding the material expenses and salaries of ‘traditional’ organizations, though the grants were often very modest. The organizations were usually free to use the money as they wished, including on social and sports activities. Since the adoption of the Law on Associations, this provision too had to be organized through public tendering, but the requirements tended to be more relaxed than in other cases. Katica Ranđelović, the head of the Niš Centre for Independent Living, provided an example of how old relations were sometimes maintained in new forms. At some point in the late 2000s, the Niš city government considered stopping paying the salaries of the employees of ‘traditional’ organizations. However, a compromise was found at a meeting of the city government’s advisory body for disability issues. Those who had been receiving salaries would continue to be paid, only their work would be now declared as ‘work engagement’ (radno angažovanje). This is legally supposed to be a temporary form of employment and Ranđelović hinted that the remuneration was modest. However, the people kept their jobs and the state continued to pay their contributions to the state pension fund. Despite now running a disability NGO and not receiving such a salary herself, Ranđelović supported this solution. She pointed out that these people had been doing the same job for decades and many were close to retirement age, so they would be hardly able to find other jobs.

198 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Conclusion With their origins in the social order of socialist self-management, ‘traditional’ associations of people with disabilities are of immense interest for the study of the legacies of Yugoslav civil society. This chapter has showed the complex and often contradictory set of pressures, opportunities and challenges that they were facing in the early 2010s. Neoliberal reforms at the state–civil society frontier assigned to them a new role of service providers in the emerging decentralized, diversified and competitive system of social service delivery. At the same time, the new rights-based disability policy called on people with disabilities (and their organizations) to become active participants in decision-making and promised to bring them equality, autonomy and integration in all domains of life. However, all these ostensibly emancipatory shifts were coupled with an exercise of the ‘will to improve’ (Li 2007) – efforts to change the practices and attitudes of ‘traditional’ organizations stereotyped as inefficient and outdated through education. This justified the introduction of governmental technologies that strengthened the power of the central state and its control over the organizations – paradoxically so, considering the declared commitment to the self-determination and empowerment of people with disabilities. The chapter has sought to destabilize the dominant discourse about ‘traditional’ associations in several different ways. First, it showed that despite their limited resources and capacities, some organizations succeeded, to various degrees, in adapting to the new expectations of the policy-makers. However, the problems that actually complicated such efforts, such as the insufficient funding and the bureaucratic detachment of the ministry, were excluded from the reform discourse. The case of the Kikinda association further indicates that such adaptations could result in a renewal of long-established practices that remained valuable to the members. While such preservation did not challenge the hegemonic project of post-Milošević transformation, it mediated and tempered its impact on the members by providing them with accessible services not supplied by other institutions and, in the best cases, a sense of community. All of this, and the fact that some ‘traditional’ organizations were actually founded in the postsocialist period, suggests a continuing appeal and resilience of this supposedly anachronistic form. It also hints at the instrumental motives behind the sweeping claims of disability NGOs about these organizations.

Welfare Restructuring and ‘Traditional’ Organizations of People with Disabilities | 199

Second, I argued that a more attentive look at the implementation of reforms reveals a great deal of continuity with pre-existing practices as well as often formal and/or uneven changes. Established practices were often relabelled or reduced in scope rather than completely scrapped. Such continuities can be found at the level of the central state, as we also saw in the previous chapter, but perhaps even more at the local level. Finally, I questioned the interpretation of the political mobilizations of ‘traditional’ associations as a sign of their ‘passive’ and ‘dependent’ mentality inherited from socialism. I argued that they were rather enactments of an assertive and essentially rational counterhegemonic strategy of conserving and extending whatever material entitlements people with disabilities still had. The new rights-based policy narrative was appealing with its promises of equality, integration and independence, and helped bring about limited progress in making public spaces accessible. But in a setting in which persons with disabilities continued to face major barriers to equality and integration, what it actually offered was procedural rights that could not be comprehensively enforced in the short run and were thus of little consequence for the lives of most. Most worryingly, its rhetoric of ‘independence’ served to legitimize the emergent workfare regime and shift the blame for the failure of the state to deliver on its promises onto people with disabilities themselves. While the future of ‘traditional’ organizations is difficult to predict, there are indications that many are likely to find ways of functioning in the new conditions. In the early 2010s, some were on the way to becoming professionalized service providers as envisaged by the social protection reform. There were also signs of an increasing cooperation with disability NGOs and other NGOs working in the field of disability. These often enrolled ‘traditional’ organizations as junior partners in their projects, for instance, in the local advocacy campaigns on accessibility. Such networking was important for the legitimacy of the projects since ‘traditional’ organizations with their large memberships could claim more plausibly than the NGOs to represent people with disabilities. Although not on equal terms, such cooperation could help ‘traditional’ organizations acquire much-needed project skills, knowledge of donor and policy idioms and social capital. What remains to be seen is whether it will empower or detract them from advocating for the majority of Serbians with disabilities, whose already fragile livelihoods are threatened by misconceived and ineffective welfare reforms.

200 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Notes 1. The organizers in central Serbia backed out on the day of the protest. 2. Formally ‘supplement for another person’s assistance and care’ (dodatak za pomoć i negu drugog lica). 3. Law on Social Protection, Article 92. 4. Law on Social Protection, Article 94. 5. For this part of the study, I followed two NGO projects in Zrenjanin and Niš that advocated a greater accessibility of public spaces and services for disabled people. I interviewed and interacted informally with fourteen leaders and members of associations of people with disabilities, four NGO workers and two government officials working in the field of disability. I repeatedly visited one association, the North Banat Organization of the Blind in Kikinda, to observe its daily activities and interact with members. I also undertook media, literature and archival research on disability associations and policies in socialist and postsocialist Serbia. 6. The 1974 Constitution of the SFRY, Basic Principle IV. 7. The deaf of Belgrade formed their own organization within the People’s Front. 8. The 1982 Law on Social Organizations and Associations of Citizens provided for this possibility in the process of registering social organizations, but not associations (Article 32). 9. Stevan Lukovnjak led one such provincial union. The decision to hold two parallel protests in Vojvodina and central Serbia reflected this organizational structure. 10. See ‘Kako je nastala Hrvatska Lutrija’ 2010. 11. See, for example, SUB 1959, Article 38. 12. These include: Article 13 of the Treaty of Amsterdam; Council Directive 2000/43/EC of 29 June 2000 implementing the principle of equal treatment between persons irrespective of racial or ethnic origin; and Council Directive 2000/78/EC of 27 November 2000 establishing a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation. 13. Bylaw on Social Inclusion Measures for Cash Social Assistance Beneficiaries. The national ombudsman and a sizeable group of NGOs challenged the constitutionality of the bylaw shortly after its adoption, arguing that it introduced forced labour with compensation beyond the legal minimum wage. The decision is still pending and the bylaw remains in force at the time of writing. 14. Law on Social Protection. 15. By 2004, it was replaced by two ministry funds that support disability projects of all NGOs, not just ‘traditional’ organizations. The money comes mainly from the state lottery. See Matković 2006: 56; Orlović 2011: 272. 16. In fact, Šobot Jeličić then became the president of the original organization established in the 1950s, called the Intermunicipal Organization of the Blind in Kikinda, Čoka and Novi Kneževac. This organization was deleted from the registry of associations of citizens for legal reasons in 2007. Šobot Jeličić and her followers then set up the North Banat Organization of the Blind, which attracted a majority of members. A minority joined another new organization created in the same period by the aforementioned former secretary and her supporters. 17. Goalball is a team sport designed for the blind.

PART IV Liberal Civil Society and the Wider Society

– Chapter 6 –

Philanthropy Development Indigenizing ‘Civil Society’, Reshaping the Public Realm

_

From the mid 2000s onwards, the reproduction, save for further development, of many Serbian liberal NGOs has become threatened by the declining volume and variety of foreign funding sources. At the same time, access to EU grants as one of the major remaining alternatives was highly unequal (Chapter 2). In this chapter, I examine early NGO efforts to address this issue by tapping into (relatively) new sources of financial and nonfinancial support – the donations of individual citizens and companies. This inaugurates a more general shift in the analytical focus in this section of the book. Part III focused on the roles of various civil society forces, state and political elites, and transnational actors in the hegemonic struggles over transformations of the Serbian state and its frontier with civil society. We saw that the liberal NGO sector has advocated and participated in transformations in line with the post-2000 hegemonic project. This part of the book remains concerned with reform models promoted by the liberal civil society, but moves the focus to its efforts to reconfigure its own relations with the national economy and society, and thereby, as I will argue, to redefine and redraw the public realm. A major obstacle to this project was the general lack of confidence in NGOs across Serbian society. I repeatedly noted that the colloquial meaning of the overlapping terms ‘nongovernmental organizations’ and ‘(organizations of) civil society’ was far from neutrally descriptive. Rather than referring to associations of citizens and foundations in general, it was limited to those established in the postsocialist period as smaller groups of professionals focusing on ‘project’ work. In – 203 –

204 | Frontiers of Civil Society

addition to these organizational features, NGOs were also defined by their politics that was supportive of the post-Milošević hegemonic project and aligned with the agendas of their foreign, especially Western donors. Most Serbians took a fairly negative view of NGOs thus understood. A 2009 survey found that only 13 per cent believed that NGOs ‘work in the society’s best interest’, though it should be noted that some public institutions fared even worse (Civic Initiatives 2009a: 20). Only slightly more than half said they knew what NGOs were, and of these about 40 per cent believed that one of their main attributes was ‘personal gain’ (Civic Initiatives 2009a: 37). The same percentage agreed with the view that ‘NGOs are paid by international agencies to promote their interests in Serbia’ (Civic Initiatives 2009a: 36). The NGO workers I worked with often complained, in conversations with me and with each other, that people did not know what NGOs were and did not trust them. They were also well aware of common negative stereotypes, such as that NGOs are foreign agents and ‘spies’, that they ‘steal’, ‘work only in their own interest’ or, worse, ‘against the interest of our nation and state’ (Civic Initiatives 2009a: 24). At the time of my fieldwork, BCIF was stepping up its efforts to develop ‘individual philanthropy’ and ‘corporate philanthropy’ at the local and national levels, the combination of which translated into an emergent NGO practice termed ‘fundraising from local sources’ (prikupljanje sredstava iz lokalnih izvora). As the leading indigenous foundation working on civil society development, BCIF was uniquely positioned to conceive and carry out this agenda. BCIF and NGO workers in general had no qualms about acknowledging the ongoing donor exit as the single most important driver of these initiatives to ‘change the funding model’, as they also described them. At the same time, the liberal commitment to the autonomy of civil society from the state led them to prefer individual and corporate donors over state funding, which was a potentially easier way of filling the resultant gap. To tap into the nonstate sources of funding, BCIF taught NGOs ways to develop what I call ‘rational philanthropy’. Here I am inspired by Erica Bornstein’s (2009, 2012) analytical differentiation of two types of philanthropy. ‘Traditional’ philanthropy corresponds to spontaneous, emotionally driven, often one-off giving where the donor remains detached from the receiver. ‘Modern’ philanthropy works as a kind of contractual exchange and instrumentally rational action oriented to long-term returns. It is channelled through durable institutional structures and the donor continues, or at least is

Philanthropy Development | 205

expected to continue, monitoring the use of her donation. Mirroring this divide closely, BCIF saw the shift to a more modern, ‘accountable’ and ‘transparent’ philanthropy as a solution to the problem of suspicion towards NGOs, while rejecting emotional appeals because of their supposed association with manipulation and fraud. However, the established indigenous forms of philanthropy in Serbia gravitated to the ‘traditional’ pole. Such practices were therefore potentially useful rather than detrimental to the economic success of fundraising. And indeed, we will see that the NGOs that had taken the BCIF courses tended to combine some of their elements with the rational approach to philanthropy when they actually started to raise funds. Even BCIF used familiar affective symbolism to appeal to the moral virtue of prospective donors in its own fundraising and awareness-raising campaigns. Importantly, though, the traditional philanthropic practices were deployed in a new politico-economic and ideological context. As already noted, they were reframed by the norms and techniques of accountability and transparency. In addition, they were closely related to the efforts of BCIF and other NGO ‘frontier masters’ (Chapter 4) to develop corporate social responsibility (CSR) and a more liberal regulatory environment for individual and corporate philanthropy. The change of the funding model was therefore part of a larger project that brought together emergent contractual and market-like relations of rational philanthropy with practices legitimating and supporting the privatization of the public realm. While driven by multiple ideologies and values and mired in contradictions at the level of implementation, philanthropy development was in some significant respects aligned with the hegemonic project of neoliberalization. An additional nuance is achieved by looking more closely at the strategies that fundraising NGOs used to overcome the suspicion. In response to their public image as foreign, disloyal and elitist, they attempted to gain trust and support by presenting themselves as indigenous and popular. As part of this effort, they adopted some traditional philanthropic practices as well as working-class and neotraditional social idioms. These strategies add another layer to the argument that the Serbian NGO sector is best understood not as a transnationalized elite, but as a distinct faction of the middle classes that has been subject to a process of precarization in the post-2000 period (see Chapters 1 and 2). At the same time, the fact that some liberal civil society actors began to address their relationship with the broader society hints at a potential shift in their class positioning and hence their relationship to the hegemonic project.

206 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Changing the Funding Model I begin with an overview of various activities that BCIF undertook in the late 2000s and early 2010s with the objective of transforming the funding of Serbian NGOs. Their multipronged nature indicates that BCIF approached this as a comprehensive shift towards a new political economy to match a vision of an authentically liberal civil society. This entailed a reconfiguration of its relationships not only with the wider national ‘society’ but also with other social domains understood in terms of essentialized ‘sectors’: the ‘economy’ and, once again, the ‘state’. In charge of all these activities since 2009 was Ksenija Graovac, the Philanthropy Programme manager. At the time, BCIF had two main departments or ‘programmes’ – Philanthropy and Donations. Philanthropy was much smaller than the core Donations and was only established in 2006. From the beginning, its focus was on the development of corporate and individual giving to NGOs (BCIF 2007: 20). For the first few years, it was the responsibility of a single person, Ksenija’s predecessor. By the time I arrived at BCIF in September 2010, three people were working on the programme: two full-time and one parttime. Despite this gradual expansion, the status of Philanthropy in relation to Donations was still somewhat marginal, suggesting that the ‘change of the funding model’ was in its early, exploratory and experimental stages.

Fundraising Development Programmes The first of the two BCIF fundraising development programmes that I followed was entitled ‘Fundraising from Local Sources’ and was implemented in 2010–11. It was an instance of cooperation between BCIF and its partner organization since 2005, the Prague-based Via Foundation. BCIF workers saw Via as their ‘role model’ because it had managed to move from a dependence on foreign donors to a more ‘diversified’ structure of incomes with the dominant role of corporate donors.1 Milada, Via project manager, told me that foreign donors had largely already left the Czech Republic by 2000. People from BCIF and Via therefore shared a view of their mutual relationship (and the relationship of Serbian and Czech NGOs more broadly) within the same dominant framework of ‘transition’. The Czech foreign ministry even funded Via/BCIF projects under the rubric of its curiously named Transition Promotion Programme. Serbians were assumed to be able to learn from Czechs because the latter

Philanthropy Development | 207

had already gone through what Serbians would inevitably experience with a lag of ten or fifteen years. The development of fundraising was envisaged and presented to Serbian NGOs as yet another instance of ‘catching up’ with the rest of ‘Europe’ through transnational transfers of knowledge. In this case of postsocialist-to-postsocialist cooperation, just as in the Slovak-Serbian project discussed in Chapter 2, the fact that knowledge came from a more advanced traveller along the same transition route enabled claims of its special relevance. The partnership was initially focused on transferring Via’s fundraising experiences directly to BCIF, but activities intended for a broader NGO audience soon followed. BCIF organized its first seminar on corporate philanthropy as early as 2006. Two years later, it cooperated with Via on the first fundraising programme whose title and basic structure were the same as in the 2010–11 programme. According to the Czechs I interviewed, the organizations participating in the pioneering programme clearly lacked any experience of fundraising. The decision was therefore made to develop a more comprehensive education stage that would encompass not just fundraising but also various aspects of what I call ‘organizational rationalization’: strategic planning, project management and financial management. The 2010–11 programme followed the same principle as other BCIF grant programmes. A group of small and medium-sized NGOs were selected whose projects BCIF funded and supported with advice. Fifteen organizations from different regions and working in diverse fields entered the programme. They attended three training sessions during first six months, each taking two or three days. Two Serbian trainers who followed a methodology supplied by Via taught the first session on strategic planning. The second class had a part about project management (taught by Via’s Milada) and another about financial management (by a BCIF worker with the relevant expertise). Two Via lecturers led the final session on fundraising from individuals and businesses. Other people, such as Ksenija or CSR managers she invited, gave shorter talks and Q&A sessions. The NGOs were asked to draft two documents each during the training phase: their own strategic plans for the next few years and fundraising plans describing one particular fundraising campaign – what they wanted to raise funds for, how much, from whom and how. Three external consultants were supposed to make two visits to each organization to help them with these tasks and assess their capacities in terms of leadership, human resources, organizational culture and so forth. These activities, as well as the structure of the

208 | Frontiers of Civil Society

training sessions, reflected a belief that successful fundraising required organizational rationalization. All but two organizations had submitted their strategic and fundraising plans. The consultants and BCIF programme managers evaluated these documents and the consultants’ reports, and chose nine NGOs for the second phase. This consisted of the fundraising itself, supported with small ‘technical assistance’ grants from BCIF, and lasted some eight months. In the end, BCIF gave the NGOs ‘matching grants’, that is, the same sum as they had raised, but only up to €3,000. Clearly, the programme was not only meant to equip the NGOs with the knowledge and skills necessary to fundraise, but also to motivate them financially to do so. Five organizations succeeded in raising the equivalent of €3,000 or more. The second fundraising programme I studied was entitled ‘Successful Fundraising’ and was implemented in 2011–12. It was a continuation of the earlier programmes, but this time was supported by USAID/ISC, which would continue to fund BCIF’s fundraising programmes up to the present day. There were again three training sessions, but unlike in the previous programme, they took place over a shorter time span (about three months) and were taught by Serbians. The first session again covered strategic planning, but the two remaining classes this time dealt with fundraising. The second session discussed individual and corporate philanthropy in general, while the third covered fundraising techniques, planning and financial management. Another change was that the organizations were expected to draft fundraising plans only. According to Ksenija, these changes were intended to make the training component fully geared towards fundraising. While skills such as strategic planning were indeed necessary for fundraising, Ksenija argued, writing strategic plans was not the programme’s real purpose. Twelve NGOs attended the course, of which ten submitted their fundraising plans. Seven organizations were chosen for the second phase. Small initial ‘technical assistance’ grants were again provided, as well as, at the end of the programme, matching grants of up to $5,000. Three organizations managed to collect the equivalent of $5,000 or more, while some organizations only raised $1,000–2,000.

The Virtus Awards The Philanthropy Programme was also concerned with developing individual and corporate philanthropy at the national level. BCIF workers talked about such efforts in terms of improving the ‘frame-

Philanthropy Development | 209

work’ in which giving to NGOs was taking place. These initiatives could be classified into two broad categories: ‘awareness raising’ or ‘promotion’ of philanthropy and its importance, and legal reforms supportive of philanthropy development. Raising awareness was considered indispensable since, as people in BCIF and other NGOs routinely claimed, there was ‘no culture of giving’ in Serbia. It included a range of activities. For example, BCIF has been co-organizing the Mesta u srcu (‘Places in Heart’) awards for the best ‘local partnerships’ of NGOs with companies and public institutions. Large corporations typically funded the prizes. One of the goals of the 2011 Conference on Partnerships, also co-organized by BCIF (see Chapter 4), was to promote ‘intersectoral partnerships’ between businesses and NGOs. It is also worth noting that BCIF has undertaken some of its own grant programmes in heavily branded partnerships with corporate sponsors. However, the foundation’s flagship awareness-raising activity on corporate philanthropy was Virtus, the first CSR awards in Serbia that it has been making since 2007 with the principal support of USAID. Those eligible for the awards were all companies and corporate foundations that had ‘supported a social or nonprofit action or organization’ during the previous year (BCIF n.d.). An independent jury decided on the winners. The criteria for making the awards in multiple categories illustrated BCIF’s preoccupation with promoting a rational approach to philanthropy. In addition to philanthropic activities over the previous year, they involved an assessment of the company’s ‘strategic approach to CSR’ (defined as its socially responsible policies towards employees, suppliers, contractors, customers, the community where it worked and the rest of the country) as well as its ‘strategic approach to corporate philanthropy’ (defined more narrowly as corporate donations for charitable purposes). Accordingly, Ksenija insisted in her media statements that the awards mirrored ‘measurable, clear results’. As much as she favoured this rationalist understanding, she rejected its opposite – sentimentality. Once, as I was preparing a summary of the applications for the jury, she commented: ‘Sometimes I must really laugh at the applications . . . Not just because of all the grammatical and stylistic mistakes but also because of the language they use. They often play on pathos [patetika] . . . the children [who were helped] and so on.’ However, some of the pathos that Ksenija professed to disparage did creep into the awards. Their Latin name means ‘virtue’, ‘goodness’, while the design of the logo and the prizes featured the shape of a heart (Figure 6.1). Very much in line with anthropologist Dinah

210 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Figure 6.1. Virtus prizes (photo by Mišo Gligorić, courtesy of the Trag Foundation).

Rajak’s (2011: 38) analysis of such CSR rituals, the award ceremonies ‘symbolise[d] an abstracted form of reciprocal gratitude in return for the benefits provided through the company’s moral endeavours’. This moral aspect was expressed by the name and visual identity of the awards, but also the rhetoric used at the 2010 ceremony that I attended. Deputy prime minister for European integration Božidar Đelić praised the award-winning companies for their ‘solidarity with citizens’. He said efcharistó (Greek for ‘thank you’) to the winner of the main prize, the Serbian subsidiary of the Greek group Eurobank EFG, and argued that it was ‘symbolic and significant’ that a Greek bank was recognized for its ‘philanthropic contribution’ in Serbia at the time of the financial crisis. By implying that the bank was motivated by the traditional Greek–Serbian friendship and the common Orthodox Christian identity, he attributed a deeply affective value to its philanthropic acts.

The Small Change is Not a Small Thing ‘The Small Change is Not a Small Thing’ was an awareness-raising campaign on individual philanthropy that BCIF carried out in 2010– 11 with the support of USAID/ISC. Its purpose was twofold: to raise

Philanthropy Development | 211

awareness about the importance of philanthropic giving by individuals and to collect money for an NGO working with socially disadvantaged children. The primary message of campaign billboards, TV advertisements and posters in Belgrade public transport vehicles and stops was that even small donations mattered. This was communicated by the name of the campaign, the slogan ‘Little Help – Full Heart’ and the central visual motif of Serbian dinar coins arranged into the shape of a heart (Figure 6.2). The female voice in the TV advertisement narrated: ‘Even if we give a little, we help a lot and we get a lot. Because when we help, our heart is full.’ Some of the posters further read: ‘The small change in your pocket can help somebody a lot.’ The campaign also invited people to take action and donate to the NGO by putting money into special boxes placed in the branches of campaign partners (a supermarket chain, the state lottery and two banks), sending text messages or paying money into a bank account. The campaign raised about €3,200. The sum was hardly astonishing, especially when compared to the expenses. However, people in

Figure 6.2. ‘The Small Change is Not a Small Thing’ visuals (courtesy of the Trag Foundation).

212 | Frontiers of Civil Society

BCIF generally considered the campaign to be a success. They especially congratulated Ksenija on the clever name, slogan and visual identity, which they thought delivered the message very effectively. When presenting the campaign to the participants in the 2010–11 fundraising programme, Ksenija said they wanted it to be ‘modern’ and ‘without pathos’ (nepatetično) – not exploiting the clichéd images of sad children and the like. We again encounter here an emphasis on the rational, even utilitarian possibilities of philanthropy, also suggested by the ad voiceover: ‘Even if we give little . . . we get a lot.’ But like the Virtus awards, the campaign actually did not abandon the traditional moral idea of philanthropy as ‘doing good’, embodied in the visual and verbal references to the heart symbolism. I return to this below.

Advocacy for Tax Reforms As the final arm of their philanthropy development efforts, BCIF workers aimed to create what they usually described as a ‘stimulative’ or ‘more favourable framework’ (podsticajni/povoljniji okvir) for philanthropy. On one level, these efforts targeted the state–civil society frontier and were part of the larger set of the foreign-sponsored initiatives I discussed in Chapter 4. Most relevant to philanthropy development was advocacy for reforms of tax laws, which were seen as an urgent priority. It was a constant refrain in the fundraising classes that Serbian tax laws did not promote philanthropy. Such critiques usually referred to the issue of ‘tax deductions’ (poreske olakšice) for philanthropic donations. These are legally defined as reductions of taxable income that the taxpayer may obtain on the basis of voluntary donations to nonprofit entities. They are practised by most EU member states and other countries, including the United States (Morris 2011; S. Smith 2011). Discussions in the classes might easily lead an uninformed observer to conclude that tax deductions were completely absent in Serbia. For instance, in her talk at the final session of the 2010–11 programme, Ksenija said authoritatively that ‘a stimulative framework doesn’t exist in Serbia’. In fact, deductions have been in place since the early 2000s. At the time of my fieldwork, the law2 allowed companies to claim tax deductions of up to 3.5 per cent of their gross revenue for donations for health, educational, scientific, humanitarian, religious, environmental, social protection and sports purposes (Lončar 2010: 122). While the fiscal limit for deductions compared favourably to other countries, the enumeration of eligible purposes was arguably restrictive, as well as the fact that the law only

Philanthropy Development | 213

applied to corporations, not individuals. However, Ksenija did not mention the fiscal limit at all. Rather, she continued that a reform of tax deductions was expected, but that it was ‘small’ and merely broadened the scope of eligible purposes. Moreover, its details depended on the wider tax reform that was taking a very long time to materialize. ‘So there is a problem of the state framework in which we work’, she concluded. In the same session, the participants were keen to learn from the Czech lecturers about tax deductions in the Czech Republic. The trainers confirmed that deductions were an important motive for many companies to give. The students further enquired about statistics comparing the volume of corporate donations before and after deductions were legislated. Hana, one of the lecturers, responded: ‘That’s difficult because we’ve always had them.’ When she added that Czech corporate donations amounted to about €100 million a year, the participants gasped and said that ‘it’s a lot’. On another occasion, they asked the coaches how much tax-exempt profit Czech NGOs were free to make. When Hana answered in general terms, they insisted on being told the exact sum. Upon hearing that it was up to about €12,000 a year, they started to laugh and exclaim ‘like us!’ This reaction was ironic, since the same limit in Serbia was actually about three or four times lower. The NGO workers thus communicated a belief that draconian and anachronistic laws were inhibiting charitable giving and the nonprofit economy in Serbia. I encountered similar expressions of discontent with the ‘state framework’ when I interviewed the NGO workers involved in the programme. They repeated that there were ‘no tax deductions’ and that this was an obstacle to philanthropy. They also compared this situation to the much better one in the Czech Republic or in a generalized ‘West’, implying that this was yet another domain in which Serbia was lagging behind. Being unaware of details of the relevant legislation at the time, I took these claims for granted and failed to challenge them. Had I done so, this might have thrown more light on whether the NGO workers truly believed that there were no deductions or deliberately exaggerated the situation to make their point. BCIF has been cooperating with the CI and the aforementioned legal expert Dragan Golubović on developing proposals for tax law amendments since 2007. According to Tanja Bjelanović, BCIF programme director, the CI focused on tax legislation relevant for associations of citizens, whereas BCIF worked on provisions relating to corporate and individual donations. They submitted their suggestions to the finance ministry in a document drafted by Golubović

214 | Frontiers of Civil Society

(2009). It demanded that the state introduce tax deductions for all donations ‘in the public interest’ (without imposing limits on what such interest might be), including donations made by individuals. It further demanded the scrapping of taxes on gifts to associations of citizens and endowments (and not just foundations as hitherto) and on real estate property owned by all these three types of organizations. In December 2010, the parliament passed an amendment that scrapped the tax on gifts to associations and endowments. The participants in the 2011–12 fundraising course were told about this change as well as the procedure for applying for the tax exemption. To my knowledge, none of the remaining proposals has been adopted at the time of writing.3 However, this does not diminish their analytical relevance. In tandem with BCIF’s other activities concerned with philanthropy development, they articulated a reformist vision of a future ‘civil society’ with improved relations, in both moral and instrumental terms, with the economy and wider society.

Towards an Ethical Political Economy of ‘Civil Society’ As we have seen, the ultimate horizon of the ‘change of the funding model’ was an overhaul of the political economy of NGOs – their extrication from dependence on foreign donors and their parallel embedding in the national economy. This change has been at least partly necessitated by the drying-up of foreign funding. But BCIF and other NGOs involved with philanthropy development were not simply concerned to find a replacement for foreign donors; they also wished to prevent another form of undesirable financial dependence – that on the state. The reason for this was that the dominant liberal model of civil society valued its autonomy and separation from the state and preferred a reliance on the market and citizenry. Branka, a BCIF mid-level manager engaged on the 2010–11 fundraising programme, told me in an interview that it was ‘pioneering’ because it addressed in novel ways two crucial issues – the funding of civil society and its ‘independence’. She said: ‘We don’t have that kind of sector now, we have a sector which is totally dependent on foreign donors and now it begins to rely partly on the state, but neither the first nor the second is good.’ Milada, the Via manager, told me in their Prague office that ‘it is the best [of all funding options] to get money from individuals. That is simply independent money’. She expressed doubts that state policies in ‘Central and Eastern Europe’ were ‘so smart and excellent that NGOs should follow them’ and al-

Philanthropy Development | 215

luded to technical and bureaucratic problems typical for state funding. She further opined that NGOs should be ‘independent’ of the state because if they are not and the state develops ‘usurping or totalitarian tendencies’, they can be easily co-opted or eliminated. Milada admitted that funding by companies is also not ‘ideal’ and that there are often ‘ethical issues’ to consider. However, she argued that NGOs can have more efficient relationships with companies since their style of operation is ‘more flexible’ and ‘more direct and humane’ than that of convoluted and rigid state bureaucracies. I heard similar arguments from the Serbian NGO workers, none of whom opposed fundraising from businesses in principle. I asked a number of them one of the two versions of the following deliberately ambiguous question: is it ‘more correct’ (ispravnije) to raise money from companies or the state/individuals? Interestingly, the interviewees typically associated ‘correctness’ with ethics only in relation to state funding. In the case of companies and individuals, they tended to understand the question of ‘correctness’ as one of viability. Accordingly, they would respond by telling me whether it would be feasible for them to collect donations from companies or individuals. In relation to businesses in particular, an external consultant on the 2010–11 programme told me that none of the participating NGOs had refused to raise money from them and only a few said they would not accept funding from alcohol or tobacco companies. While some interviewees also ruled out ‘tycoons’ who had enriched themselves in the 1990s, the single biggest donor to one of the participating NGOs was one such local entrepreneur and BCIF did not raise this as an ethical issue, despite being aware of his reputation. In one of the training sessions, an invited speaker who talked about his NGO’s successful fundraising was asked whether they worked with local tycoons. He stated that ‘when you do fundraising, first of all you collect money. That doesn’t mean you have to accept everything, but you should keep in mind that that is your main goal’. In line with this, they decided not to avoid approaching a controversial local businessman, and when he offered a donation of two tons of watermelons rather than cash, they took it and sold it off. It therefore appeared that NGO workers did not agree even on those few ethical limits on corporate donations. Beyond this, some interviewees recognized that corporate donors followed their own ‘interests’, especially to promote their brands but found this to be perfectly acceptable as long as they let their NGO do what it wanted. Corporate funding was thus generally understood as unthreatening to the political and ethical norms of the liberal civil society.

216 | Frontiers of Civil Society

However, BCIF and Via workers reserved the greatest praise for donations from individuals. They argued that once an organization builds a large base of regular supporters, this becomes the most stable and crisis-immune source of income, since all the small donors were unlikely to cease their donations at the same time. Moreover, although this was not openly stated, the understanding that individual donations were ‘independent money’ seemed to be based on the assumption that individual donors had less power to prescribe what the organization should do than state, corporate or nongovernmental donors, and were more likely to support its agenda as it was rather then attempt to change it. An ideological hierarchy of donors according to their compatibility with NGO autonomy was thus constructed, with individuals at the top, the state and foreign donors at the bottom, and companies in the middle. However, the Serbian reality was such that donations from individuals and companies were still a small or nonexistent source of funding for most NGOs. The aspiration was thus merely to increase their share in the structure of incomes and to show NGOs that this was possible. In the final session of the 2010–11 programme, the Czech trainers discussed this principle of ‘diversification’ in a talk revealingly entitled ‘Healthy Fundraising’. According to Hana, one of the conditions of such fundraising was that donors were diverse: ‘at any time, you work on several sources’ to make a good ‘fundraising mix’. Hana then displayed a pie chart of Via’s structure of revenues in 1998. This was an example of a bad fundraising mix, since Via then raised 54 per cent from foundations (‘actually, this was one big American donation’), 42 per cent from the US government, 4 per cent from Czech companies and nothing from individuals. The next structure of revenues, from 2008, was dramatically different – some 70 per cent was raised from companies, 20 per cent from foundations and the government, and the rest from individuals, endowment and service provision. ‘But we’re still not satisfied’, Hana said. ‘You can have a great corporate donor but then the manager changes and you lose it, so we want to increase our share of individual donors.’

Envisioning a New Public Realm While changing the sources of NGO funding was the immediate and instrumental objective of BCIF’s philanthropy development activities, these had important implications for a much broader set of social relations. Generally speaking, some notion of the public good was

Philanthropy Development | 217

their major precondition just like for any form of philanthropy. This was reflected in a phrase that BCIF workers used as a more native equivalent for the term ‘philanthropy’ – davanje za opšte dobro, literally ‘giving for the common good’. Even the fundraising programmes, which were primarily concerned with developing the capacities of NGOs, assumed that their increased exchanges with individuals and businesses should and would serve not only them but also the beneficiaries of their activities, defined variously as the users of their services, particular social groups, whole local communities or even the national society. We will see that the principles of rational philanthropy were meant to further enhance these public benefits of fundraising. The idea of the public good was constantly present in the background of the awareness-raising activities, which celebrated the benefits of corporate and individual philanthropy and publicly rewarded the virtue of particular donors. Yet it was the proposals for tax law amendments, which referred explicitly to a notion of ‘public interest’, that articulated most clearly the particular vision of public good built into philanthropy development. Miodrag Shrestha, BCIF executive director, told me that if the state wants to help develop ‘civil society’ and philanthropy in one go, it should renounce a share of its tax revenues in the form of tax deductions and allow individuals and companies to donate this money to NGOs. This was a better alternative to when the state took the money and redistributed it to NGOs, he argued, because it was a ‘market competition’ – the taxpayers could ‘choose’ whom to fund, while the costs of administering state funding were cut. This argument makes explicit the rationality of the proposed tax reforms. As we saw, they would allocate more social resources for the satisfaction of ‘public interests’ to NGOs (legally part of the private sector) at the expense of the state (the public sector). They would limit state control over the redistribution of social resources according to public policy objectives as well as over the very definition of ‘public interest’. Symmetrically, they would empower private sector actors – NGOs, businesses and individuals – to make more such decisions themselves, without state tutelage. This was seen as an improvement in both normative and economic terms. On the one hand, it would enhance individual freedom as well as the autonomy and self-governance of civil society and the wider society. On the other hand, inasmuch as these decisions and exchanges were assumed to conform to the ideological models of ‘free market’ and rational choice, they would enable a more cost-efficient production of public goods. These two tendencies – to privatize through transferring state functions to NGOs (and other private

218 | Frontiers of Civil Society

sector actors) and to economize by s(t)imulating market competition – suggest that the tax law proposals were related to the neoliberal reforms at the state–civil society frontier analysed in Part III. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile delving a little deeper into the exact forms of privatization and marketization at stake here. As John Clarke has cautioned, the publicness of the ‘public realm’ is defined by a: number of intersecting social phenomena: the idea of a ‘public interest’ which may require forms of collectivised expression; the institutionalisation of ‘public services’ (as a means of meeting the public’s needs); and the conception of a public – a collective (usually national) body that is capable of having interests and needs’. (Clarke 2004b: 27)

He further points out that the public/private distinction is not only historically variable and relational, but also delineated by multiple dichotomies that are not necessarily aligned. The ‘private’ may refer to a kind of ‘sector’ (the private sector defined by private ownership, interests and exchange), but also one of ‘sphere’ (the private sphere defined as individual, familial and domestic). The market, then, is private in the former sense but public in the latter sense (Clarke 2004b: 28). This double meaning of the private, Clarke (2004b: 31–32) argued, corresponds to a double form of the neoliberal privatization of the public realm: the first shifts activities and resources for the provision of goods and services from the public to the private sector (‘market’), while the second shifts social responsibilities from the public to the private sphere (individuals, families and households). The reforms examined here raise some additional complexities. They do shift, albeit partly and selectively, the delivery of public goods to both the private sector and the private sphere. Private corporations as well as private citizens are expected to increasingly fund the production of such goods by other private actors (NGOs) and to do so directly, i.e. privately and at the expense of state-based public redistribution. This introduces the tropes of rational choice and market competition between producers of public goods. And yet, as already noted above, NGOs occupy an ambivalent position in this scheme: they are nonpublic in the sense of being nonstate, but they are not like the private sector inasmuch as they are nonprofit (Clarke 2004b: 32), which is moreover a feature guaranteed by state regulation and oversight. Their activities are not oriented to profit-making through catering to private interests, but self-reproduction and expansion through catering to public interests. The whole point of philanthropy is by definition to satisfy some public and noncommercial

Philanthropy Development | 219

interests, from which no individual in particular stands to profit except in cases of regulatory failure. In that sense, I suggest that it is useful to see the agenda of philanthropy development not so much as a literal privatization of the public realm, but rather as its reconfiguration by blurring the public/ private distinction. As we saw, the tax reform proposals were very far from implying a dissolution of the state. The notion of the public interest was also not abandoned. Rather, it was redefined in a manner that assumed, rather optimistically, that public and private interests and collective and individual responsibilities could be easily reconciled and even blended. Individuals and corporations were increasingly expected to fund the provision of public goods not out of duty and through collectivizing institutions of the state, but out of their own will and through individualized choices between a panoply of competing state and nonstate providers. We therefore encounter the privatization of the public realm, especially in the sense of its decollectivization, quasi-marketization and, to the extent that many NGOs operate at subnational and transnational scales, denationalization. Obviously, the key outstanding question is what guarantees that individuals and corporations will actually engage in the voluntary acts of philanthropy. And it is precisely here that the two-way blurring of the public/private distinction becomes most visible. For at the same time as the public good is privatized by being subjected to private exchanges, the latter are redefined as public by being linked to the pursuance of the public good on top of private interests – as selfless and selfish at once. This hybrid meaning of philanthropic exchanges is particularly obvious in the case of corporations making donations via tax deductions. If given a choice between donating a sum of money or paying it in taxes, corporations may be expected to prefer the former because it serves their private commercial interests in the form of an improved brand image. But they will only reap these benefits if they can successfully represent their donations as moral rather than (purely) instrumental, and this rests precisely on supportive CSR narratives and practices such as the Virtus awards. As for individuals, even if tax deductions were instituted in Serbia, they would not stand to profit from donating as opposed to paying taxes. Persuading them to donate would therefore seem to be more decisively a matter of appealing to their moral virtue. But even here we find a strong streak of utility-maximization: as we will see below, the model of rational philanthropy assumed that individuals were much more likely to donate if they could personally benefit from the outcome. In addition, we will see that this model expected both cor-

220 | Frontiers of Civil Society

porate and individual donors to apply a utilitarian calculus when deciding between particular subjects competing for their support. There are telling parallels as well as deviations from Andrea Muehlebach’s (2011, 2012, 2013) argument that the rise of voluntary, unremunerated provision of social services in Italy, concomitant with the retrenchment of the welfare state, rested on a neoliberal rearticulation of Catholic and socialist moral traditions (for a similar Russian case, see Hemment 2009, 2012). This ‘moral neoliberal’ model, actively built by the Italian government, NGOs, the Catholic Church and a host of other actors, glorifies a particular kind of ethical subject who cares for others out of compassion and selflessness. According to Muehlebach (2012: 12), the voluntary labour of such citizens becomes ‘the pathos-laden vehicle through which collective transcendence and meaning and value get conjured’ and the ‘utopic promise at the heart of neoliberal reform’ is materialized. Philanthropy development in Serbia evoked similar individual and corporate virtues and responsibilities as the moral foundations of a reinvented public realm. When seen in its close relation to the broader set of reforms at the state–civil society frontier, it is clear that the purpose of this new public realm was to fill the gaps left by the inadequate and increasingly retrenched state provision of public goods. But the actors behind this project took a more modernizing view of traditional philanthropic idioms than the promoters of voluntarism in Italy. As I will show in the next section, they believed that the comparatively low level of development of the relevant institutions, frameworks and knowledge in Serbia was one of the main reasons behind the suspicion and unwillingness to donate to NGOs. Accordingly, they saw a shift to a modern and rational philanthropy, rather than a revival of established indigenous traditions, as the key to the remaking of the public realm. In that sense, this was another NGO-based project of postsocialist ‘reform’, promising to contribute to Serbia’s ‘unblocked transition’ through improving the governing of social relations in ways that were largely consistent with the post-Milošević hegemonic project. But it was at the same time a project that had to address the NGO sector’s own relations with the wider Serbian society, giving rise to a contradictory set of pressures and responses.

Debating Suspicion As already mentioned, most Serbian NGOs had little experience of raising funds from individuals and businesses and instead continued

Philanthropy Development | 221

to rely on foreign agencies, private foundations and increasingly also the state for funding. The NGO workers I talked to suggested four kinds of reasons as to why it was difficult for them to collect donations from individuals and domestic companies, which were treated in this respect as a single category due to the assumption that Serbian businesspeople, especially in smaller local companies, shared the outlook of the ‘ordinary Serb’. First, the NGO workers invariably mentioned the rampant poverty and the bad situation of many businesses, which had only been worsened by the economic crisis after 2008. Unlike these structural conditions, the remaining three issues were seen as something that NGOs could potentially affect. The second obstacle that my interlocutors often evoked was various recent cases of money collected for public good being abused or spent in a nontransparent manner, which made people suspicious about such initiatives in general. Third, they argued that people did not know about all the good things that NGOs did and blamed either the uninterested media or inadequate communication by NGOs themselves. And, finally, they evoked the already mentioned stereotypes about NGOs as enemies of their own nation. When they discussed the issue of fraud scandals, nearly all NGO workers mentioned the high-profile case of Katarina Rebrača, a former model arrested in 2010 on suspicion that she had embezzled substantial donations to her breast cancer foundation. Notably, the issue that her fundraising campaign addressed ‘was a strong story, much stronger than ours’, as one NGO worker put it. Such emotional appeals to empathy and compassion for select categories of deserving recipients were central to the whole range of established philanthropic practices, which often managed to raise significant sums of money in defiance of NGO workers’ claims that there was no ‘culture of giving’. Čarna Brković (2014, 2016) has shown how ‘humanitarian actions’ (humanitarne akcije) in Bosnia and Herzegovina, through which money is collected for the costly treatment of sick individuals, especially children, relied on localized but polyvalent and flexible social networks. In Serbia, reporting in TV news shows, with a sentimental emphasis on the beneficiaries’ youth, talents or good character, brought some such akcije to the national level. Large national and transnational (diaspora-oriented) fundraising campaigns likewise tended to focus on the collective needs of children, for example, for better healthcare, schooling or recreational facilities. Another typical objective was to help fellow Serbs in distress (such as those internally displaced in the Kosovo War or those still living in Kosovo), usually by providing humanitarian aid or housing. Finally, possibly

222 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the largest and most visible fundraising campaigns had a traditional humanitarian focus on the victims of natural disasters, such as the 2010 earthquake in Kraljevo or the disastrous 2014 floods. The most successful among the private foundations that had emerged in the post-Milošević period, such as the Ana and Vlade Divac Foundation or the B92 Fund, as well as more traditional charitable organizations, especially the Red Cross, focused the lion’s share of their activities on these areas. There have been highly mediatized cases of (suspected) abuse in all these categories of campaigns – even in humanitarian actions, for example, when parents of a seriously ill girl who died were accused of attempting to appropriate the donated money. NGO workers therefore came to associate the ‘traditional’ reliance on emotional images and messages with the nontransparent and unaccountable practice of philanthropy. As noted above, Ksenija Graovac, the director of BCIF’s Philanthropy programme, was adamant in her rejection of ‘pathos’. Some participants in the fundraising programmes echoed her opinion in interviews and added a perception of such practices as undignified ‘begging’ as another reason for avoiding them. Overall, however, they seemed to focus less on this issue than BCIF. As the next section will show, rational philanthropy emerged as a response to both this association between affect and fraud and the lack of public awareness about the valuable work of NGOs. The final obstacle to fundraising, the bad reputation of NGOs, can be traced back to their recent history. As detailed in Chapters 1 and 2, NGOs have been an important part of the antiregime bloc in the Milošević years and were openly critical of the various abuses of the regime. The government and the media used the strategy of nationalist demobilization and labelled them as ‘foreign mercenaries’ (strani plaćenici) and ‘domestic betrayers’ (domaći izdajnici), pointing to their foreign supporters as evidence of their opposition to national interests. After the regime change, nationalist public figures and tabloid media perpetuated this discourse in relation to the activities of certain NGOs, especially some of the largest human rights organizations and their leaders like Nataša Kandić or Sonja Biserko. These people have been branded as ‘anti-Serbs’ and ‘Serb haters’ for allegedly overemphasizing war crimes perpetrated by Serbs against others and downplaying those in which Serbs were victims. As the survey quoted in the introduction to this chapter showed, many people came to attribute this reputation to NGOs in general. I do not intend to assess the veracity of these claims here. What I wish to suggest is that these labels turned out to be so powerful partly because they did capture,

Philanthropy Development | 223

albeit in an exaggerated and overgeneralized manner, something essential about the political identity of NGOs, especially those most visible and influential – their embrace of antinationalism, liberal individualism and multiculturalism, which remained controversial positions in Serbian society. Many NGO workers I met readily recognized that this stereotype harmed the entire sector, including organizations that had little to do with human rights, transitional justice or interethnic relations. Quite a few were even willing to argue that the human rights figures themselves fed the stereotype, either because their media appearances were politically inept or because they were actually ‘Serb haters’. But there seemed to be an additional, more implicit issue that would explain why ‘ordinary people’ considered NGO workers as self-interested profit seekers. I argued in Chapter 1 that the sector emerged in the 1990s as the haven of a faction of the old socialist middle classes of intellectuals and professionals. These people shared ‘civil’ politics, high education and global cultural capital. Although the sector expanded in the post-2000 period and absorbed many members of younger generations, their class profile remained similar. Some people managed to find permanent NGO jobs for aboveaverage or average salaries – not a negligible achievement in a country with rampant unemployment and a massive informal sector. Others worked in NGOs for generally less reliable and lucrative honoraria, but often on top of regular salaries that they earned as public sector professionals. At the same time, NGO workers were right to note that the exact nature and collective benefits of the work they did eluded most people, which rendered their real or assumed privileges additionally undeserved. It therefore seems likely that the suspicious attitudes towards NGO workers reflected a social gap between them and popular masses (the other middle classes, working classes, small entrepreneurs, peasants and the declassed) that was material as well as articulated in public discourse, though in oblique ways. In a rare instance, Ksenija Graovac hinted at these issues in an interview. As we discussed the obstacles to fundraising, she suggested that many organizations operate as a kind of ‘foreign body in the local community’ and explained further: ‘There are very few organizations that their local communities take seriously. Serbia is simply a poor country, it is a country of poor people, and class differences are quite big.’ NGO workers are often ‘condemned’ by people around them for not being able to solve the huge problems in their communities. When they finish their work in the NGO, they again become neighbours and members of the community that they have failed to

224 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘satisfy’. This lowered their self-confidence, as well as the years of wars and poverty when they struggled to ‘survive in a projecty manner’. As a result, Ksenija argued, they: face big problems with getting respect in their communities – ‘recognition’, so that somebody recognizes them and appreciates what they do . . . When nobody likes you in the community, nobody recognizes what you’re doing, it is a very short-term help when you get money from a big donor, carry out a big project that has some good results, but what’s next?

To overcome the suspicious attitudes, Ksenija concluded, NGOs needed to become ‘well-grounded in their community’ and improve their ‘communication with the community’. As I will show next, these suggested solutions matched the advice given to NGOs in the fundraising programmes. However, what they seemed to have lost sight of was the association that Ksenija drew just moments earlier between being a ‘foreign body in the local community’ and ‘class differences’. The question that logically follows is whether the model of rational philanthropy promoted through the fundraising programmes equipped the NGOs with the tools necessary to address the issue of suspicion in its full complexity.

Rational Philanthropy BCIF and Via workers emphasized two general strategies for gaining the trust of individuals and businesses: developing rational philanthropy and accommodating the expectations, possibilities and communicational preferences of the new donors. The first strategy responded to the dissatisfaction with the established forms of philanthropy, which came to be defined by their overreliance on affect and lack of reliability. BCIF saw the solution in terms of a shift to more contemporary and globally tuned practices, which was also reflected in its deliberate promotion of the international term ‘philanthropy’ ( filantropija) instead of terms more familiar to the general population, but burdened with traditional and religious connotations, such as ‘benefaction’ and ‘charitable giving’ (dobročinstvo, dobrotvorno davanje). Following global NGO trends, this upgraded form of philanthropy was supposed to rest on the principles of ‘accountability’4 and ‘transparency’ (Bornstein 2012: 54–60; Rutzen 2011: 268). In the fundraising programmes, these were defined in terms of observing some practical rules and using prescribed techniques. First, the NGO should make

Philanthropy Development | 225

absolutely clear what exactly the purpose of fundraising was. Especially when communicating with businesspeople, fundraisers should be ready to answer all manner of questions about money: how much the NGO needed to fundraise, how much it already had, what were the planned expenses, what were the employee salaries and so on. Second, the donations should be spent precisely as promised. And, third, the NGO should publish regular reports to inform donors on how their money had been spent. Some of the NGOs themselves took up the idea of giving donors receipts for their donations. It has been argued that such models of accountability construct the relationship of NGOs and their donors as a principal–agent relationship in which principals (donors) develop ways of monitoring and constraining agents (NGOs) to ensure that they do what they want them to do – spend the donations as promised (Stein 2008: 126–27). In this case, the NGOs took the initiative and imposed the disciplines of accountability and transparency upon themselves to woo potential donors. To the extent that the relationships of NGOs with donors and each other were modelled in terms of market competition, such practices were expected to increase the quality of the ‘product’ that the NGO was selling (a public good) and hence its competitive advantage. The principal–agent model, assumptions of methodological individualism and instrumental rationality, and even the particular techniques used (financial reports) demonstrate the close connection between the model of rational philanthropy and the neoliberal reforms of the state–civil society frontier analysed above. In addition to these practices linked directly to fundraising and financial management, the NGOs were expected to aim at a broader organizational rationalization and professionalization. As mentioned above, they were taught and required to write strategic and fundraising plans on which they were given feedback. The people who created and directed the programmes considered this necessary because most NGOs, due to their dependence on foreign donors, had got used to thinking and acting ‘in a projecty manner’ (projektno)5 or a ‘tendering-processy manner’ (konkursno). They lacked long-term plans and ‘lived from project to project’: when implementing a project, they were active, and when they were not, they went into hibernation. This financial instability went hand in hand with a programmatic inconsistency, as organizations hopped between agendas in response to donors’ current tendering processes. Instead of following their mission (the short written statement of their purpose), if they had one at all, NGOs focused on ‘satisfying the donors’ and on shortterm survival strategies – they were ‘whatevering’ (svaštariti). BCIF

226 | Frontiers of Civil Society

therefore strove to teach the NGOs to develop their fundraising campaigns according to their long-term strategies. The second major strategy for gaining trust was to accommodate the expectations of the new donors. The lecturers constantly emphasized that for individuals to give, the goal of the fundraising campaign had to reflect their own interests. The same basic principle applied to companies, yet, in addition, there was the explicit recognition, formulated in the classes and echoed by the NGO workers I interviewed, that companies might very well be socially responsible, but their primary concern was for their own brand. Hana, the Czech lecturer, said at the final session of the 2010–11 programme that people give out of ‘pure philanthropy’, but companies expect returns: ‘And it makes sense, companies were created to make profit, not to be good.’ At a different point, she said: There are topics that companies don’t like so much. If you’re working with children or disabled people, you’re fine, companies understand that . . . However, if you’re doing some advocacy work, work on home violence, or with drug addicts or on other controversial topics, there’s a very small chance you’ll get money from companies.

She said this matter-of-factly, without passing any judgement on companies’ definition of what is ‘controversial’. The audience also kept quiet and looked as if this was not news to them. Indeed, some of the NGO workers I interviewed expressed scepticism that they would be able to get any donations from businesses because they worked, for instance, with addicts or ethnic minorities. Since they assumed that such ‘topics’ were not very attractive for most individuals either, the new funding model implied a distinct movement away from such legitimate NGO agendas. When asked directly, BCIF workers also proved well aware of these limitations of individual and corporate funding. This recognition contradicts the optimistic assumption that the new funders posed no serious ethical dilemmas or threats to NGO independence. Points to be considered were not just the wishes but also the possibilities of donors. For instance, Klára, another Czech coach, emphasized that businesses may find it easier to provide other things than money, such as services, goods, information, volunteers or even interest-free loans. ‘You need to know what a donor has’, she argued. Indeed, the NGO workers I interviewed expected the companies to offer, for example, construction materials or machinery rather than money, and in some cases even planned to ask for such donations straight away. As for individuals, they emphasized that most oper-

Philanthropy Development | 227

ated very strained domestic budgets and hence would ‘give as much as they can’, i.e. there would be no minimum donation. Finally, adjusting to donors was closely related to the adoption of a new communication style. A frequent self-criticism that NGO workers made was that they used excessively technocratic jargon replete with Anglicisms, which the ‘ordinary person’ found unintelligible. The trainers provided guidelines for a different, marketing-like and can-do style of communication. At various points in the final session of the 2010–11 programme, Hana argued that ‘fundraising is selling’ and stressed that one should use ‘normal, clear, human language’ and ‘communicate in a warm, informal manner’. A good fundraiser has to be ‘convincing’, ‘sincere’, able to ‘understand the donor’, ‘patient’ and ‘persistent’. She further commented that ‘one thing I learned from our friends in the West is that people like to give to winners, not losers’. Therefore, one should not complain about how poor their organization was, but rather should talk about its achievements and ambitions. Hana also recommended that the statement of mission be short, clear and ‘understandable to the donor’, that is, based on ‘concrete language, not philosophical concepts’. Finally, the Czech trainers advised the NGOs to use a lot of pictures in their promotional materials, preferably with ‘concrete people’ who received their services.

Fundraising Practices The NGOs that took the courses usually did not follow the received advice dogmatically in their actual fundraising. Rather, they used some of the suggested techniques and combined them with other strategies in an effort to overcome the obstacles to fundraising as they saw them in their particular fields of operation. Such a creative approach, which went beyond the model of rational philanthropy, can be illustrated by the fundraising campaign of the Cobra Group. Cobra entered the 2010–11 programme as an informal, unregistered youth group, but it soon got registered as an association of citizens. It had been active since 2008 in the villages of Donja Trnava and Donja Toponica6 near Niš, Serbia’s third-largest city located in the poor south-east. Despite their rural residence, the members matched the middle-class profile of most NGO workers – they were mostly university graduates or students in their twenties. Under the enthusiastic leadership of Milan Stojiljković, a graduate of economics, they had undertaken several down-to-earth initiatives to improve life in the villages. NGO workers who knew them regarded this as both valu-

228 | Frontiers of Civil Society

able and unusual, since rural areas afflicted by poverty, outmigration and poor public services have not been the focus of much NGO work. By the time Cobra entered the fundraising programme, it was hailed in the Serbian NGO sector as a prime example of a successful ‘grassroots’, ‘community-based’ organization and was decorated with a number of awards. Cobra undertook a successful fundraising campaign aimed at opening a modest public ‘internet centre’ in Donja Toponica and providing a computer use and CV writing course to those requiring it. Its original goal, however, was to construct a stage for cultural events. Following what Milan and other members described as a period of despondency and doubts about the point of fundraising, they changed the idea to an internet centre, which they believed was more of a ‘priority’ for the community. For various reasons, many villagers did not have an internet connection in their homes. Milan argued that this was a problem as it prevented them from looking for jobs and publishing their CVs online. Both the original and the amended goal were highly illustrative of the BCIF-sponsored fundraising campaigns, which mostly aimed at creating or upgrading various kinds of public facilities, such as children’s playgrounds,7 sports, cultural and educational facilities or open-air recreational spaces. The NGO workers argued in interviews that people were most likely to donate for something ‘concrete’ and ‘palpable’, facilities that they could ‘see’ and use themselves. For instance, an NGO worker from Aleksinac, a small town in south-east Serbia, told me: ‘The good thing in this whole story is that when we finish raising funds, we will make something concrete [two playgrounds] and the people will see that we have really spent the money on something.’ The NGO workers clearly came to see fundraising as a kind of transaction that was most likely to take place and be repeated if they gave the donors an easy and hardfast way of verifying that they delivered their part of the deal. While this understanding was broadly in line with the principles of accountability and transparency, it did not take the recommended form of public reports, not to mention the more complex budgetary and accounting techniques discussed in Part III. To render themselves accountable to individuals and small-time businesspeople, NGO workers considered it more effective to promise delivering something that was evident in its physicality as well as useful and accessible to the donors, and then follow up on that promise. This might have reflected their realistic estimation of the likelihood that the donors would be satisfied with studying their annual reports.

Philanthropy Development | 229

At the same time, the fact that the goals of fundraising became quite uniform in practice put in doubt the belief that individual donations were inherently more conducive to NGO ‘autonomy’ than funding from the state or foreign donors. The difference rather turns out to be that NGOs conceived their agendas such as to satisfy the donors from the very start, which constitutes a less conspicuous but equally powerful form of ‘dependence’ than the opportunistic accommodation of whatever priorities the other categories of donors might have. Cobra relied especially on personal acquaintances in order to raise funds. As Milan put it, ‘the campaign will be door-to-door, since this is a small place and we all know each other’. Apart from visiting the villagers, the NGO organized football matches and concerts – all with the aim of interacting directly with potential donors. It was found that local businesspeople did not respond particularly well to emails and phone calls; talking to them personally was much more effective. Villagers employed in larger companies in Niš mediated between Cobra and CSR managers. Members of Cobra also asked their relatives and friends for small donations. Milan told me that most villagers had helped Cobra in the past according to their circumstances – with little money, labour or food and drinks. For instance, when Cobra cleaned an illegal waste dump and planted trees and built playground facilities in its stead, people spontaneously joined them or brought them refreshments. The same was the case when Cobra refurbished (with BCIF funding) the ruined and empty House of Culture and readapted it as its seat and multipurpose public facility (one room became the internet centre). The other NGOs also predominantly relied on personal relationships and face-to-face contact, in a manner that was in essence quite similar to the traditional ‘humanitarian actions’. Branka, BCIF manager, told me that some of the more ‘fancy’ fundraising techniques suggested by the Czech trainers, such as wine auctions for managers, may be applicable in Belgrade, but: the hinterland is a different story, [there] we cannot talk about professional fundraising but rather use of friendly and kin relationships to achieve company sponsorship for some activities . . . which is also alright considering the economy is undeveloped and small and medium enterprises make business like that, of course they don’t have a CSR department. . .

Apart from friendship and kinship, relations based on living in the same town could also drive this manner of fundraising, which Ksenija Graovac called the ‘I did it for a neighbour principle’. Compared to most Western contexts, the concept of ‘neighbour’ (komšija) retains

230 | Frontiers of Civil Society

stronger affective connotations, and both neighbours and non-neighbours (even complete strangers) often use it as a term of address to reduce social distance and establish a sense of community. In sum, then, all the sophisticated advice about organizational rationalization, proper communication and fundraising techniques has in practice appeared to come down to a recognition that those most likely to give were the people who ‘knew’ the NGO workers and were connected to them by affective, ascriptive or communal ties. Cobra also benefited from its ability to revive the memories of socialist practices to mobilize the ageing village population. Milan recounted to me how they called all the villagers to the House of Culture to introduce their organization that had just been founded. When they told them that they were an ‘informal group’ and aspired to become an ‘NGO’ and ‘write projects’, people looked at them suspiciously. Seeing this, Milan changed his vocabulary: I said, let me begin differently – we are a group of young people who have nothing to do with any political party, we want action, we want to work, clean the wild dump in the village! . . . And when they see that, [like] ORA which used to be then, youth work actions (omladinske radne akcije), and when they see young people collecting waste with rakes, they join them en masse and that probably returns them to that period and that changes the image [they have of NGOs].

It was also interesting that Cobra continued to use the old name of the House of Culture (Dom kulture), which is strongly associated with the socialist past.8 I sometimes heard middle-aged people regret that many rural Houses of Culture, which used to be the principal venues for folk music concerts and youth parties, had fallen into disuse and disrepair. Until Cobra reopened the House of Culture, there was no community space in Donja Toponica. Especially in relation to the middle-aged and elderly, then, these subtle continuities helped Cobra overcome the initial suspicion, not necessarily because the villages were die-hard socialists, but because they remembered the period as one when people of various ages and backgrounds came together more easily and more frequently to work for the common good. While the continuities with socialism were relatively specific to the case of Cobra, the other ways of reducing distance that Milan mentioned were not. A number of NGO workers told me that they avoided presenting themselves as an ‘NGO’ and instead used the more familiar and neutral term ‘association’. The reason for this was invariably the ‘Serb-hating’ stereotype discussed above. One young NGO leader from a west Serbian town told me that when people

Philanthropy Development | 231

hear ‘NGO’, they imagine that ‘we chase Mladić’. People who grew to appreciate his organization insisted that it was an ‘association’ and was by no means an ‘NGO’. Two middle-aged female workers from the NGO in Aleksinac told me that when people hear the word, all they think of is Nataša Kandić and Sonja Biserko. These women described how an earlier project took them on a tour of tens of villages in their region, which is one of Serbia’s poorest. Upon their arrival, the ‘peasants’ would first ask them whether they had anything to do with Kandić or whether they were a political party. Once they said no to both questions and explained what exactly they were doing, the locals welcomed them warmly. They appreciated that somebody had ‘remembered’ them and had come to visit them in their villages that had been forgotten by everybody. This element of togetherness, being with people on their own terms, can also be traced in Milan’s quote above – the scene of young university students labouring and dirtying their hands moved their fellow villagers to join them. Such practices addressed more directly the issue of the social gap that the fundraising courses largely bypassed.

Conclusion On one level, BCIF’s fundraising programmes fulfilled their stated purpose. The NGO workers came to understand that they needed to overcome the suspicion of their potential new donors if their organizations were to survive. However, if we agree with Bornstein (2012: 86) that suspicion is ‘an evaluative frame to mark those whom one knows (and hence can trust) and those whom one does not’, the question of ‘[w]hy is the audit – rational, bureaucratic, economic – associated with truth’ logically follows. And, indeed, the fundraising beginners appeared to have recognized that the way people evaluated the trustworthiness of an NGO was more likely to rely on direct personal knowledge than the parameters of financial management. In the context where NGOs were associated with persistent negative stereotypes, personal relationships, and popular and neotraditional forms of communication, solidarity and community emerged as more realistic ways of embedding NGOs in the national society than strategic planning and marketing-style communication. The structural characteristics of a neoliberalizing public realm push in a broadly similar direction. As the provision of public goods becomes increasingly dependent on the voluntary participation (financial or otherwise) of individual and corporate citizens, appealing

232 | Frontiers of Civil Society

to sentiments and invoking moral values becomes an indispensable strategy of persuasion. NGOs like BCIF, which actively promote these transformations of the public realm, find themselves in a contradictory situation of resorting to the very elements of traditional philanthropic practices that they profess to oppose as irrational and associated with nontransparency and corruption. The changes to the funding of NGOs along these lines are certainly not devoid of problems. It is an organization-level and competitive strategy and as such is likely to produce winners and losers. Some NGOs start from better positions in terms of having the relevant resources, experiences or relationships with prospective donors, as well as pursuing the kinds of agendas that are appealing to them. This has implications not only for NGOs and the likely narrowing of their agendas, but also for the larger vision of a public realm with a greater role for individualized and voluntary participation in the provision of public goods. On the one hand, the resulting preference for serving the needs of local communities, preferably those that are universal and material, privileges parochial forms of intervention and redistribution. On the other hand, the focus on select ‘uncontroversial’ categories of beneficiaries, such as children, fellow Serbs or ‘innocent victims’ of natural disasters or individual tragedies, marginalizes others who are morally equally deserving of help. Yet these are established and functional practices, and, as we saw, they can be used for new purposes and in new ways. Their important promise is that they might gradually extricate the NGO sector from its dependence on foreign donors and their top-down, exogenous priorities, which mostly tended to reproduce and deepen the post-Milošević hegemonic project. As NGOs become more indigenous and popular in their loyalties and modes of operation, they might increasingly align their objectives with the needs and expectations of nonelite citizens. However, the material presented in this chapter suggests that the emphasis is likely to be on pragmatic and subhegemonic agendas that address the gaps and failures of the dominant mode of restructuring rather than the latter as such.

Notes Parts of the material in this chapter were published in the article ‘Indigenizing “Civil Society” in Serbia: What Local Fund-Raising Reveals about Class and Trust’, Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 71: 43–56.

Philanthropy Development | 233

1. BCIF workers would also mention the Pontis Foundation from Slovakia (Chapter 2) as a role model for the same reason. 2. Article 15 of the Law on Corporate Income Tax. 3. However, a 2013 amendment of the Law on Corporate Income Tax raised the 3.5 per cent limit on tax deductions for corporations to 5 per cent. 4. This term does not have a precise Serbian equivalent. The term odgovornost (‘responsibility’) is used as its closest approximation. 5. Such use of the term projektno was directly opposed to its strongly positive valorization by government officials, who used it to denote a superior, more modern mode of public funding of NGOs (Chapter 5). 6. Some members came from other neighbouring villages. 7. Note the focus on children as a classic example of what BCIF tended to dismiss as ‘pathos’. 8. On these institutions elsewhere in socialist Europe, see Siegelbaum 1999; Taylor 2011; White 1990.

– Chapter 7 –

PUBLIC ADVOCACY Engaging Actually Existing Local Politics

_ I first met Virđinija Marina Guzina in September 2010, some three weeks into my fieldwork. Two BCIF workers took me on one of their ‘monitoring’ trips – quick visits to NGOs to which the foundation provided project grants. The second stop in our itinerary was Vršac, a town of 35,000 people in the South Banat region of Vojvodina. This is where Virđinija led an NGO called the ‘Free’ City of Vršac Civic Parliament (FCVCP).1 With BCIF funding, it was implementing a ‘public advocacy’ project to stop the long-term neglect of a historically and functionally valuable public park. The basic principle was the same as in most advocacy projects in Serbia – an NGO gets a grant to influence a local government (or, more exceptionally, the national government) to achieve a policy change that is determined to be in the public interest. Virđinija, a middle-aged theatre director and journalist, and her collaborators on the project met us in a communal NGO room. Wearing all black, dark red lipstick and black-dyed hair, she gave us a short presentation in her literate, often sarcastic and radically critical manner of talking. She described the problem addressed by the project as a ‘provincial political story’ about informal ‘power centres’ (centri moći) that had ruled Vršac for the past two decades. One of them was the director of the utility company that was the park’s custodian. Virđinija argued that the interlocking interests of these power centres and their unaccountable control over local institutional politics had long prevented the adoption of measures that would stop the park’s deterioration.

– 234 –

Public Advocacy | 235

This first encounter led to my closer engagement with the advocacy project, which allowed me a glimpse of how its leading actors understood and participated in local politics. With hindsight, I realized that much of the particular nature of this politics was captured by a native trope that Virđinija used to describe it – that of ‘province’ (provincija). She reminded me of it months later when she called me to tell me some news about Miodrag Babić, who until the early 2010s had been the single most influential ‘power centre’ of Vršac and the long-term director of Hemofarm, a large pharmaceutics company with headquarters and a plant in the town. Virđinija told me that Hemofarm had recently received one of BCIF’s Virtus awards for corporate philanthropy. It was for a ‘contribution to the local community’ and already the second Virtus award given to Hemofarm. Because of that earlier award, Virđinija even had a public fight with two doyens of the liberal civil society. ‘BCIF and all the foundations . . . I’m angry with them for not having a sensibility for provincija’, she said. She believed that BCIF failed to understand the setting in which she was waging her struggle while, inconsistently, supporting it. It was these tensions between donor assumptions and local realities, as well as Virđinija’s willingness to discuss the latter with me openly, which made the Vršac project an invaluable opportunity to learn about the contradictions of public advocacy as the final NGObased reform of government examined in this book. Similarly to the development of philanthropy and especially local fundraising discussed in the previous chapter, this was an intervention that sought to reconfigure social relations between multiple domains and actors with an inbuilt focus on the subnational scale. As we will see, NGOs were being trained and assisted to represent the interests of ‘local communities’ to their local governments. While the short-term objectives were specific policy changes, the long-term aim was nothing less than ‘democratization’ – part of the effort to reshape the public realm in line with the hegemonic project of ‘transition’. With the support of foreign actors, the liberal civil society was trying to reconfigure its own frontiers with, on the one hand, the state and institutional politics, and, on the other, the wider society so as to become a crucial institutional domain mediating between the three other domains. By establishing such new mechanisms of public interest representation, it was expected to make the local state more accountable to citizens while increasing the latter’s participation in decision-making. As a model of social relations based on a particular normative view of society and its governance, advocacy shared important similarities with

236 | Frontiers of Civil Society

what Foucaldian scholars conceptualized as ‘government through community’, itself part of a broader neoliberal governmentality. However, as Virđinija’s comments suggest, the assumptions of advocacy intersected with another, native model of local political and social relations – that of provincija. Nearly everything in Serbia is often colloquially described as provincija in relation to Belgrade, whereas all Serbia is provincija in relation to Western Europe. In this nesting centre–periphery relationship, the centre is imagined as dynamic, active, the source of innovations that spread outwards, whereas the periphery is static, passive and receiving innovations with some delay. By describing Vršac as provincija and the problem that the advocacy project was addressing as a ‘provincial political story’, Virđinija highlighted the durability of informal relations in the periphery that was a far cry from the institutionalist assumptions and fixes imported from the centre – here, the advocacy model imported by foreign development agencies and ‘leading’ Belgrade NGOs. Yet the latter did acknowledge the conditions on the ground in some of the advice given to the advocating NGOs. In doing so, they departed from the normative models of civil society and democracy, and invited the NGO workers to broker between interests in personalistic ways. It was this kind of approach that allowed Virđinija and her collaborators to achieve some progress. While this was at one level undoubtedly a pragmatic concession to the logic of local politics, it also enabled these people to pursue objectives informed by their deeply political resistance to the local power bloc. The unfolding of the Vršac project thus has important implications for understanding not only the contradictions and possibilities of public advocacy but also the broader relationship between the liberal civil society and actually existing politics in the post-Milošević Serbia.

Importing Public Advocacy to Serbia Advocacy is generally defined as ‘the organized efforts and actions of people to access and influence those who make decisions that affect their lives’ (Vetta 2013: 252). In Serbia, foreign development agencies operationalized advocacy as the provision of training and funding to NGOs to help them achieve formal policy changes, usually at the local level (Blair et al. 2004: 1, 7; Vetta 2013: 251–56). This was justified in terms of strengthening the influence of public interest on government institutions, which continued to govern in insufficiently responsive and accountable ways. Advocacy was also supposed to involve

Public Advocacy | 237

citizens so that they ‘become aware of their rights and power and use them to successfully participate in decision-making processes’ (Đorđević, Stojanović and Vesić Antić 2009: 42). The end result would be more accountable, representative, participative and hence democratic governance (USAID/Serbia n.d.: 3).2 At the same time, to the extent that the NGO sector was equated with civil society, support for this form of advocacy was presented as also conducive to civil society building. Professionalized NGOs were expected to become the instigators and platforms for the emergence of an authentically participative and pluralistic civil society that would include the whole of society. This was a goal in itself as well as part and parcel of the democratization effort, based on the liberal axiom that a ‘vibrant civil society’ is a precondition of mature democracy. The perceived usefulness of advocacy for these overlapping agendas can be gleaned from the recurrent pledges in USAID/Serbia strategies to support ‘NGO advocacy’ or ‘civil society advocacy’ (used interchangeably) in order to democratize governance, strengthen civil society organizations and reduce ‘political instability’ (Blair et al. 2004; USAID/Serbia 2005: 7–8, n.d.: 2–3). USAID/Serbia apparently found the concept of advocacy so crucial that it named its entire 2007–13 civil society assistance programme the Civil Society Advocacy Initiative. A few of my NGO interlocutors claimed that donors pushed advocacy so much that there was a sense of oversaturation in many locales by the early 2010s and instances of advocacy being done without much seriousness or achievements to speak of. Public advocacy was particularly typical of the genre of NGObased reforms that followed the model of ‘transition’ to the Western norm by means of importing concepts, institutions and techniques. Its main protagonists were international development agencies, foreign private donors and the ‘leading’ Serbian NGOs that the former funded to relay standardized advocacy knowledge to other, typically much smaller NGOs through capacity-building and grant programmes. An implicit double centre–periphery model thus structured the introduction of advocacy to Serbia at the nesting international (from the West to Serbia) and national scales (from Belgrade NGOs to NGOs in the regions). There was an assumption, similar to the native concept of provincija, that the periphery was both lagging behind and dependent on imports of knowledge from the dynamic centre to make progress. This was reflected in the way in which the disseminators of advocacy – trainers and BCIF workers – understood their work in terms of education and raising the awareness about basic principles of democracy, which they believed was woefully in-

238 | Frontiers of Civil Society

adequate among decision-makers, the general population and even many NGOs. In this respect, it was revealing that advocacy was styled as a foreign import without indigenous precedents. The Serbian terms for public advocacy, javno zastupanje or less commonly javno zagovaranje, were neologisms, direct translations from English and items of the NGO jargon rather than colloquial language. BCIF advocacy textbooks reproduced definitions of advocacy from English-language sources and presented advocacy in a largely generic, historically and geographically ostensibly neutral manner (Đorđević, Stojanović and Vesić Antić 2009; Vesić and Stojanović 2006). The language of advocacy trainers whose classes I observed was peppered with the buzzwords of the Anglo-Saxon discourse on democracy such as ‘accountability’ or ‘watchdog’.

‘Government through Community’ or NGO Brokerage? The Vršac project was one of a number supported by BCIF through its Public Advocacy in Local Communities programme since 2005. It was part of the 2010–11 programme cycle, which was funded by the DfID and overlapped partially with the 2011–12 round programme by USAID. Each cycle consisted of a call for project proposals, selecting about ten NGOs to attend a course on advocacy, having them develop and resubmit their advocacy proposals, and funding the implementation of all or some of the projects. In early 2011, I attended the complete course of three training sessions, each of which took place over the weekend in a Belgrade hotel. These were part of the 2011–12 programme that focused on ‘budget advocacy’ – advocating changes in local government budgets. Apart from this thematic focus, the trainings sessions must have been quite similar to those that Virđinija and her collaborator Dejan Maksimović had attended a year earlier. One of the trainers was the same – Snežana Stojanović, a social worker and counsellor to BCIF who had been teaching advocacy from the programme’s inception and coauthored two BCIF advocacy manuals. Vukosava Crnjanski Šabović, another long-time advocacy coach, director of an NGO working on government accountability and former politician, joined her for the sessions I attended. The discourse of advocacy differentiated three types of relevant actors: ‘community’, ‘civil society’ (or ‘nongovernmental sector’) and ‘decision-makers’. Community (zajednica) was posited as the end beneficiary and very raison d’être of advocacy, as the name of the

Public Advocacy | 239

BCIF programme itself signalled. It could be a whole ‘local community’ or its specific subsets (often described as ‘vulnerable groups’) defined by characteristics such as gender, age or disability. At the beginning of the first training session, Stojanović asked the students: ‘What is important for you to set in motion?’ The students responded ‘community’ and ‘the public’. Stojanović said yes, it is important to achieve a policy change, but to include and mobilize community is a goal in itself. Probably not accidentally, she used the same phrase as the one used in the title of the BCIF advocacy textbooks series – Let’s Set Communities in Motion. On the following day, the students were presented with a list of questions to consider when defining their goal. One of them was: ‘Is solving the problem a priority for the community, and why?’ This question was the key criterion for the ongoing assessment of the projects being developed by the participating NGOs. Miroljub, a BCIF manager engaged on the programme, told me that the organizations should always include ‘beneficiaries’ (korisnici) in their work because that gives them legitimacy to say ‘we represent them’. The textbooks also emphasized the principles of relevance to the community and its involvement. I will return shortly to the issue of what forms this took in practice. In the final training session, participants were asked to read out their homework: descriptions of the goals of their potential advocacy campaigns. Two men represented an NGO that aimed to advocate for better healthcare for rural women in one municipality. Specifically, they intended to demand money for a local Gender Equality Committee that would consult with the women to identify their priorities and spend the money accordingly. Miroljub commented: Have you heard of the Chinese MP who said that everyone who provides help to someone who hasn’t asked for it should be punished? Well, imagine that the committee finds out that the women supposedly want better pews in the church and then it uses the money for that, will you be happy? You probably wanted something else.

A woman from another NGO commented that both speakers were male and asked why they had not brought a female colleague with them, implying that would boost their legitimacy to represent women’s interests. Stojanović summed up: ‘The citizens should be here with you . . . You shouldn’t let the [Gender Equality] Committee decide what the women’s priorities are, you should ask them yourself.’ There was a revealing contradiction: while the aims of advocacy were supposed to be determined by the beneficiaries, the reference to the

240 | Frontiers of Civil Society

‘pews in the church’ suggests that some agendas might have been pre-excluded by the donors. The focus on community in the public advocacy discourse is reminiscent of the technology of ‘government through community’ described by Nikolas Rose (1996b, 1999: 167–96). Rose is a member of the group of so-called British governmentality scholars whose interpretations of Foucault’s concept of governmentality had a major influence on the anthropological literature on neoliberalism (Kipnis 2008), although their term of choice was actually ‘advanced liberal governmentality’ (Collier 2012: 193). According to Rose (1996b: 333), the shift from classical welfare state to advanced liberalism means that ‘community’ replaces the ‘social’ as the dominant concept of moral relations among individuals. Since the social corresponded to the continuous space of the nation-state, this involves a ‘detotalization’ of the territory of government, or what I have described as denationalization in the previous chapter. Community becomes the new ‘means of government: its ties, bonds, forces and affiliations are to be celebrated, encouraged, nurtured, shaped and instrumentalised’ (Rose 1996b: 335, emphasis in original). If they have been lost, they must be ‘re-activated’, which in practice often comes down to attempting to persuade a group of people that they are a community. Rose associated government through community with the policies of various Western governments in the late twentieth century that sought to constitute ‘communities’ as autonomous entities. This was part of the broader argument in the British governmentality literature about the advanced liberal technology of ‘responsibilization’ of individuals as well as communities (Barry, Osborne and Rose 1996; Miller and Rose 2008). Several anthropologists used the concept of government through community to analyse fairly diverse governmental interventions (Buur and Kyed 2005: 12; Li 2007: 230–69; Muehlebach 2012: 63). The idea of mobilizing communities to become responsible for their own welfare could be detected in public advocacy and was closely associated with the assumption of an insufficient democratic knowledge. For example, Jasmina, head of a municipal budget department, said in her guest talk in one of the training sessions that she was often ‘fascinated’ by the citizens’ superficial understanding of the local public budget. She illustrated this with the heavily publicized story about Dragan ‘Palma’ Marković, the mayor of Jagodina, and his expensive purchase of a giraffe for the local zoo. Jasmina highlighted that the Jagodina citizens seemed to be pleased by that farcical show of populism rather than concerned about its cost. Miroljub, the BCIF

Public Advocacy | 241

manager, intervened by commenting that the giraffe was an ‘image of our society’ and politicians were but a mirror of the citizens. In the ensuing Q&A session, someone asked Jasmina to what extent her department was obliged to be ‘public’ in its work. She responded: ‘Well, to the extent that you think it should be public.’ Miroljub appreciated this retort when I interviewed him later and reiterated that the ‘state is but . . . a result of what its citizens look like’. Vukosava Crnjanski Šabović, the trainer, echoed his sentiments when she told me that Serbia’s problem was that people became egocentric and concerned only with their personal wellbeing. Politicians should respond to the needs of citizens and include them in decision-making, she argued, but people should understand their own responsibility for getting involved. BCIF workers understood its overall mission in terms of supporting and developing local communities, often also described as ‘active’ or ‘sustainable’, which in practice corresponded to the aid to what were believed or expected to be community-based, bottom-up and grassroots NGOs. The NGO’s English name until 2013 was the Balkan Community Initiatives Foundation. One of its flagship grant programmes, focused on smaller general-purpose grants, was called ‘Active Communities’. This orientation was not just a manner of self-presentation but also a principle that the workers frequently discussed among themselves and appeared to be genuinely committed to. As the cases of advocacy as well as local fundraising in the previous chapter suggest, the quality of grantees’ relationships with their communities was a constant concern. Community was furthermore central to the discourse of international development actors active in Serbia, including BCIF’s own principal donors, such as the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation or USAID. One of the biggest USAID programmes in Serbia was the $200 million Community Revitalization through Democratic Action (CRDA) in 2001–7, which addressed democratization and post-Milošević reconstruction in a single package (Blair et al. 2004; Merritt 2006; Sneed 2006; Vetta 2013: 95–131). It required the formation of Community Development Groups – councils of ‘ordinary’ citizens whose gender, ethnic, etc. composition was supposed to reflect the composition of local communities. These would decide democratically about the priority needs of the community and obtain funding from USAID on condition of 25 per cent of the cost being shouldered by the community. As this shows, the pluralistic civil society to be built as an institutional domain for mediating between the state and society was in the context of advocacy spatialized at the local (‘community’) level.

242 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Theodora Vetta (2013: 99) has argued that the ‘CRDA was introducing a liberal political rationality for the formation of a new political subjectivity’. However, she has qualified this with the surprisingly distant historical origins of community development (Vetta 2013: 101) and, more importantly, the fact that the CRDA pretended to introduce local democracy into a context with the decades-old, though by now severely marginalized, institution of local communities, which are elected councils at the submunicipal level (Vetta 2013: 116–25). Unsurprisingly, some Serbians expressed a lack of patience with the Americans’ assumption that they dealt with a society with no traditions of community engagement and local democracy (Vetta 2013: 120). These observations reflect a broader issue with the identification of all and any efforts to promote individual or community self-responsibility as ‘neoliberal’ (Dunn 2004: 92–129; Paley 2001: 140–81; Zigon 2011). To the extent that neoliberal governmentality is assumed to emanate from the contemporary West, there is a tendency to automatically interpret its non-Western forms or analogues as outcomes of recent diffusion (Kipnis 2008). More nuanced analyses show that pre-existing local traditions of government may combine with recently imported ideas to yield hybrid, rather than purely neoliberal, formations (e.g. Collier 2011; Hemment 2009, 2012; Matza 2009, 2012). In my view, however, the key point that these critiques underline is the need for a more historical perspective on neoliberalism that does not focus solely on particular forms of governmentality, but rather the work they do in the historical conjunctures in which they are deployed. Originating in the ethos of self-management socialism, Yugoslav authorities promoted and enacted ideas about the self-governance of communities and their responsibility for their own development that are broadly similar to those that might be identified under the rubric of neoliberal government through community today. While foreign donors might have believed that they were the first to introduce such ideas, workers at BCIF and its grantee organizations did not appear to see them as particularly foreign and novel. In addition, while the NGO workers sometimes evoked community self-reliance in a manner that was at least potentially neoliberal in the sense of being aligned with and supportive of the ongoing neoliberalization of the nation-state and the public realm, in practice public advocacy was not really equipped to build self-sufficient communities. It ended up by pursuing less ambitious and ideologically marked objectives of policy change in the public interest and hence, possibly, democrati-

Public Advocacy | 243

zation. Its concern with community should therefore be seen primarily as an effort to create novel, NGO-centred mechanisms of political participation and representation. More fundamentally, some crucial tendencies in the practice of advocacy departed from its ostensible preoccupation with community. These had already become apparent in the training sessions. While community was supposed to be the end beneficiary, the trainers and BCIF workers made it clear that those that the NGOs were expected to engage were primarily the ‘decision-makers’ – formal political or bureaucratic bodies and their individual members. The NGOs were instructed to identify decision-makers relevant for their goals, classify them as ‘allies’, ‘opponents’ or ‘neutral’, and visually represent these relationships in a diagram called a ‘power map’. The key task in the implementation phase was to enrol the allies into a ‘support network’, defined as a ‘group of organizations and individuals who exchange information and/or services’ (Đorđević, Stojanović and Vesić Antić 2009: 55). In the final training session, Snežana Stojanović defined advocacy network similarly as comprising institutions and individuals connected in various ways (including ‘informal’), working on a common goal and trading favours in the form of information and services. Jasmina, the municipal budget department head, offered an example of how that might work by presenting herself as a local administration insider who tends to be supportive of NGO initiatives and can help with her knowledge of how to present them to the mayor, using an odd psychological trick or white lie if necessary. At first sight, the references to the ‘informal’ as something advantageous and legitimate seem surprising given the heavy involvement of Serbian NGOs in anticorruption and transparency initiatives. However, the disseminators of advocacy attempted to define informality in ways that would prevent such a contradiction and would perpetuate the commitment to the liberal norm of a clear, well-defined boundary between civil society and political field. There was not even a hint of the notion that the NGOs might collaborate with informal ‘power centres’. In fact, such actors were not mentioned at all and the idea of informality was limited to informal relations with formal institutions. One of the textbooks mentions ‘know[ing] formal and informal processes and procedures of decision-making institutions’ as a precondition of successful ‘lobbying’ in the context of advocacy. But in the same breath, it calls for ‘adherence to certain values, not making concessions according to the “friendly key” or so-called “favours”’ (Đorđević, Stojanović and Vesić Antić 2009: 61). Vetta (2013: 255–56)

244 | Frontiers of Civil Society

has also noticed that the principle of ‘not asking for personal favours’ was evoked to justify informal relationships in advocacy. The coaches took yet another approach to the issue. After Stojanović defined the network and discussed the benefits and risks of networking, she asked the participants to answer questions about whom they planned to include in their network and why. At one point during their presentations, Crnjanski Šabović advised the participants to ‘always consider their interests’. For instance, a political party may want to get involved to demonstrate its hard work in the public interest, even if the issue is not really its priority. The next NGO to present said it would like to include a party that used to help it in the past. But Crnjanski Šabović was not satisfied: ‘A network includes those who can exert pressure on politicians, not politicians themselves. I hope I didn’t confuse you when I talked about working with political parties and finding someone in parties who can be of help, but you shouldn’t work with parties as such.’ She thus drew a line between, on the one hand, (legitimate) influencing of parties through either friendly insiders or mutual satisfaction of interests and, on the other, (illegitimate) ‘working with’ the whole party. The NGOs appeared to comply – none indicated an intention to cooperate with parties in their final proposals. When they actually started to advocate, building networks turned out to be a much more fitting description of the practice of advocacy than mobilizing communities. None of the projects that I more or less closely followed mobilized community in the sense of the whole local population or its subset. The NGOs typically informed the public through the media and organized some events that were in theory open to everyone, but were attended mainly by representatives of local authorities and NGOs. Instead of directly involving the targeted community, for example, residents with disabilities, they networked with other civic associations with members from that community. This helped to legitimate the project, especially when the lead NGO lacked members from the given beneficiary group. Workers of BCIF and the advocating organizations told me in interviews that having such representatives of beneficiaries on their side was essential for their legitimacy to speak on their behalf. While sharing this approach to the involvement of community, the NGOs followed different strategies of engaging ‘decision-makers’. Some held formal meetings with many different institutional stakeholders to explain the reasons and goals of advocacy and to elicit their support. However, more common approach was to combine such strategies with the more informal practices suggested by the trainers, such as working with friendly

Public Advocacy | 245

insiders in local institutions to access necessary information and get the institutions on board. Social relations created by such practices of advocacy are best understood as multiscalar, cross-domain and transnational brokerage networks. A parallel can be made with the way in which a substantial anthropological literature analyses international development as a form of brokerage and its leading protagonists as brokers (Bierschenk, Chauveau and Olivier de Sardan 2000, 2002; Lindquist 2015; Mosse 2011, 2013; Mosse and Lewis 2006; Olivier de Sardan 2005: 166–84). The case of advocacy as a development project is particularly fascinating in that it explicitly instructs the advocating NGOs to do just that – build ‘(support) networks’ and mediate resource flows and the construction of shared meanings and interests between ‘communities’, ‘decision-makers’, donors and themselves. Based on the ‘rapid, deterritorialized point-to-point forms of connection (and disconnection)’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002: 994) of transnational governmentality, advocacy often results in superficial and fleeting transformations, limited to one-off decisions without much follow-up. However, it may also conjure up more durable connections and institutional forms. By gaining the support of other civic associations as representatives of the beneficiary ‘communities’, the advocating NGO positions itself as the nodal point of a hierarchically organized network. The latter may be re-activated in the future (e.g. for new projects) so that the NGO becomes a more permanent broker between the ‘community’, the local institutions and donors. Some advocacy campaigns have also resulted in the establishment of new interstitial institutions of local government, such as advisory committees or ad hoc coordinating bodies that bring together representatives of local political parties, government institutions and NGOs, including those who advocated for their establishment. These institutions generally have limited competences and resources, but they formalize the involvement of NGOs in public decision-making and provide a springboard for more ambitious objectives in the future. At the same time, they reveal that the supposedly static and rigid boundary between civil society and institutional politics was in fact a dynamic and permeable frontier. An important outstanding question is whether the NGO workers conformed to the approved, sanitized idea of informality when tackling the powerful informal logic of actually existing local politics. To address this question, and to provide a more ethnographically grounded account of NGO brokerage, I will first turn my focus to the nature of such politics at the national level and in Vršac in particular,

246 | Frontiers of Civil Society

and will then analyse the unfolding of the advocacy project that attempted to intervene in it.

The Sheriffs of Vršac While informal relationships were prominent in politics and the economy in socialist Yugoslavia, there is a broad consensus that they became even more pervasive in postsocialist Serbia, as described in broad terms in Chapter 1. Anthropologists and sociologists tended to argue that in postsocialist societies, this was a response to the dysfunctionality of formal norms and institutions, which became largely irrelevant to fast-changing conditions on the ground (Ledeneva 2006, 2011; Wedel 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003, 2009: 47–72). It is important not to understand this in functionalist terms – informal practices have inherently contradictory effects in that they help compensate for the inadequacies of the formal order, while in the same time undermining it (Ledeneva 2006: 11). Informal relations and norms may thus become relatively durable and systemic foundations of actually existing politics and economy, existing in a dynamic interplay with formal institutions and rules. Thus, informal elite relationships were the backbone of the Milošević regime, but also contributed to its demise. When the new capitalist class and key state agencies, both of whom answered to the regime top in extra-institutional ways, lost trust in the continued ability of the regime to serve their interests, they established similar relationships with the opposition. While the formation of the post-Milošević hegemonic project changed the personnel of these alliances, their social logic adapted to the changing institutional setting. Obviously, the informal is an extremely broad analytical category delineated by little else other than its supposedly dichotomous relationship to the formal, which usually turns out to be much more ambiguous in practice. More specific and nonbinary concepts of classical political anthropology such as the clique, patronage and clientelism can throw more light on the nature of ‘power centres’ of the kind found in Vršac. Janine R. Wedel (2003: 430), building on the work of Jeremy Boissevain (1974), defined the clique as a ‘core group of people who contact one another for many purposes’. In her opus on elites in postsocialist states such as Russia or Poland, she showed how cliques capitalized on their capacity to traverse and mediate between public and private spheres, state and market, legal and illegal, and central and peripheral levels of the system (Wedel 1996, 1999,

Public Advocacy | 247

2003). Unlike the largely egalitarian cliques, patronage is a model of exchange and social hierarchy whose basic form is a dyadic, interpersonal, semi-institutionalized and unequal exchange relationship between patron and client (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980: 42–51). It may also become the founding principle of larger formations, such as ‘patronage networks’ – multiplex structures that combine vertical (patron–client) and horizontal (patron–patron) links (Scott 1972: 96–97). Formal bureaucracies and political institutions may also take the form, in part or in whole, of patronage networks. For instance, political organizations theorized as ‘political machines’ or ‘clientelistic parties’ rely on patronage rather than ideological mobilization to obtain and maintain power (Bailey 1963; Kaufman 1974; Scott 1969; Weingrod 1968). The native concept of particracy describes parties in contemporary Serbia as precisely such political machines. At the time of my fieldwork, public life in many towns was thought to be dominated by patron figures known as local ‘potentates’ (moćnici), ‘sheriffs’ (šerifi) or, indeed, ‘power centres’. These men (very rarely women) had often become wealthy and powerful under Milošević. Some served as government or party officials, but their personal power far surpassed their official mandate. Their reputation was often controversial: while critics insisted that they mismanaged public resources and distorted democracy and the rule of law, supporters maintained that they were true benefactors of their communities. The anonymous author of an online compilation of biographies of ‘All Serbian Local Sheriffs’ argues: In some cities in the hinterland, [these] people, as either representatives of the elected local government or rich entrepreneurs or members of the underworld, by their decisions and interests, with the aid of a network of yes men, decide the fate of citizens and the place where they live. [A typical sheriff ] is the founder of a local party organization, he owns a firm or firms through which he sponsors a local sports club, or he is the donator of a local church. He is friends with judges at the municipal court. . . (‘Svi srpski lokalni šerifi!’ 2010)

It is no accident that Miodrag Babić opens this list of sheriffs. My interlocutors argued that he was, or used to be until very recently, so omnipotent that he ‘made the sky clear and clouded’. The original foundation of his power was his long-term directorship in Hemofarm, the biggest local employer in the protracted period of rampant unemployment. As the Appendix to this chapter indicates, Babić used his control of vast economic resources to achieve the status of a local benefactor, broadly in line with the quoted description of a typical sheriff, if not the particular modalities mentioned.

248 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Babić became openly engaged in local politics in 2004 when a ‘group of businesspeople and notables’ (Grujić 2010) acting on his initiative founded a local party called the Vršac Region – European Region Movement (VRER). Babić was publicly presented as an ‘éminence grise’ of what has immediately become the strongest local party. Through the VRER, Babić’s pre-existing clients initiated or restarted their political careers. For example, Jovica Zarkula was a regime person under Milošević – first the head of the Vršac police, then the mayor from 1997 to 2000. After the regime change, he found a safe haven in Babić’s sphere of influence. He first worked as the director of the Millennium Centre (see the Appendix to this chapter). Right after the VRER had been founded, he headed its candidate list in the 2004 elections. The party’s victory returned him to the mayor’s office. A slightly different case was Čedomir Živković, who spent the 1990s in a daughter company of Hemofarm. He became the executive director of the Millennium Centre in 2000 and replaced Zarkula as director in 2004. The VRER then catapulted Živković to the top of local politics. He (again!) replaced Zarkula as the mayor in 2008 and remained in this office until 2016. These examples suggest that the VRER was an instance of the ‘politicization’ of a pre-existing patronage network (Scott 1972: 109). While Babić’s personalized influence over local politics was an important aspect of the backdrop for the advocacy project, another ‘power centre’ had a direct influence on the particular problem that it addressed. Ljubisav Šljivić has been the leader of local Socialists since time immemorial and a paradigmatic example of the continuity of Serbian political elites. He already led the local Communist party in the late 1980s (Martinov 2000) and, since the early 1990s, the Socialist Party as its heir. By 1997, he headed a communal enterprise and allegedly embezzled its funds for the party (Živanov 1997). He still headed the same enterprise at the time of my fieldwork – the ‘October Second’ Socially Owned Enterprise for Communal Undertakings, described by my interlocutors as the ‘bastion’ of the Socialists. Employing some 500 people, it distributed water, gas and heat, produced bottled water, cleaned and maintained public spaces, cemeteries and greenery, ran three restaurants and so forth. In the meeting described at the beginning of this chapter, Virđinija described the company as ‘our biggest enemy’, since it had been the legal custodian of the neglected park since 1973. It was a ‘communal enterprise’ (komunalno preduzeće) – a utility providing local public services. Such companies were typically ‘social’ in socialist Yugoslavia, i.e. nominally owned and controlled by the workers, and this also seems to have been the

Public Advocacy | 249

case with the October Second’s predecessor. It was allegedly nationalized in 1991, at the same time as the other utilities (Lazic and Sekelj 1997: 1065). Just before the 2000 regime change, however, the management decided to transform the company back into ‘social’ ownership. In that period, Zarkula was the mayor of Vršac as well as the president of the board of directors of October Second. The municipality and the privatization ministry issued supporting decisions that verified that the company’s entire capital was ‘social’. These were apparently false, as post-2000 audits revealed that there had been a significant state-owned share all along, but they were enough for the court to confirm the transformation (Vlahović 2006). The company was still ‘social’ at the time of my fieldwork, but it was unclear who the shareholders were. My interlocutors claimed that the actual owners were Šljivić and a handful of his associates in the management. Šljivić remained a reasonably popular leader after 2000. Many people apparently voted for the Socialists because their livelihoods depended on October Second and Šljivić was a decent employer. Such integration of local communal enterprises into the system of particratic state capture was common. The case of October Second was special in that it was not a public, but, at least formally, a ‘social’ company. While a substantial share of its income came from the municipal budget, this form of ownership left the local government with few means of controlling it. Unlike public communal enterprises, it also could not be subjected to the common practice of ‘dividing’ parts of local state apparatus between ruling parties. While a loyal Socialist, Šljivić openly admitted that he was also at the VRER’s birth: ‘I conceived the Movement together with Miodrag Babić in 2004 and our goal was to depose [the DP which had governed since 2000] in which we succeeded’ (‘Šljivić: Pokret je interesna grupa’ 2012). My interlocutors argued that the alliance was due to a deep and long-standing mutual hostility between the local Socialists and Democrats, but there were also the pre-existing overlaps between Babić’s and Šljivić’s spheres of interest mediated by figures like Zarkula. Accordingly, the VRER and the Socialists formed coalitions in 2004–8 and 2008–12. Zarkula and some other Socialists even ran in the elections for the VRER rather than their own party. Šljivić himself continued to run for the Socialists and to represent them in the municipal parliament. Up to 2010, he also served as the president of the assembly of shareholders in the Millennium Centre, in which October Second owned a small share. Throughout the 2000s, then, local politics remained under the strong personalized influence of Babić, Šljivić and their clients. Through a combination of patron–

250 | Frontiers of Civil Society

client and cliquish relationships, they used their control of economic resources to maintain political power and vice versa, straddling or circulating between leadership positions in both spheres. However, by the time the advocacy project began, major transformations had been under way. After Babić had left Hemofarm in 2010, Živković, the VRER mayor and former Babić’s protégé, replaced Šljivić at the helm of the shareholder assembly of the Millennium Centre. And when Babić’s wife Jelena resigned in early 2011 as the president of the board of directors of the Hemofarm Foundation, which was the majority owner of the Millennium Centre, Živković took that office too. Speculations arose that Živković and people around him were working to marginalize Babić and effectively take over the VRER and Babić’s substantial endowments to the town. This was by no means insignificant property – in 2011, the assets of the Hemofarm Foundation were worth more than €20 million. Gossip had it that Babić wished to personally enter politics after his resignation from Hemofarm, but it ‘didn’t work out’, presumably because the established VRER politicians refused to support him. The shifting relationships of local parties reflected these developments, but also changes at the higher levels of government. The local Democrats had been in opposition in 2004–8, but after coming second in the 2008 local elections, they signed a coalition agreement with the VRER. My interlocutors linked this new pact to the fact that the Democrats won in the simultaneous national and provincial3 elections and went on to lead the governments at these levels in 2008–12. The local Democrats were thus in a position to act as brokers between the VRER and the central and provincial governments that approved various public investments in Vršac. This mediating role was also believed to benefit from a personal link – Milorad Đurić, the local DP leader, was a member of the provincial government. In this period, the Socialists had their own agreement with the VRER, but none with their Democrat archenemies. Relationships between all three parties were tense. The Democrats often publicly attacked Šljivić, claiming that he mismanaged October Second. The VRER sometimes backed decisions proposed by the Democrats but opposed by the Socialists. The latter acted like a pseudo-opposition and supported the proposals of the other two parties only selectively. However, the VRER–Socialist agreement had been formally observed until just before the 2012 elections (i.e. after my fieldwork), when the conflict erupted publicly. Šljivić called the VRER an ‘interest group’ and expelled Zarkula and four other Socialists – all of whom were

Public Advocacy | 251

about to run for the VRER in the upcoming elections – from the Socialist Party. He implied in interviews with the local media that the VRER and its Democrat allies had been busy stripping Babić’s endowments of assets. It is revealing that his relationship with the VRER became openly hostile only after Babić had been sidelined, again suggesting some kind of patron–patron cooperation/cohabitation between them. The logic of these developments may be understood with the aid of the classical theorizations of relationships between patronage and spatial or scalar dichotomies of the centre (e.g. national government) or translocal forces (e.g. the market), on the one hand, and geographically distant and/or variously distinct peripheries, described variously as local, regional, provincial or rural, on the other. Patron–client relationships were found to prevail in situations where local political autonomy was high (Scott 1972: 109) and the centre was insufficiently autonomous from resources found at the periphery. Unable to integrate the periphery through regular administrative means, the centre had to co-opt it through patron–client linkages (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1980: 64–65). Local patrons thus became brokers or mediators between their local clients and patrons at the centre. The effects of such mediation appeared to be contradictory: while some authors argued that patronage allowed central institutions to penetrate the periphery, others emphasized that it obstructed the development of rational bureaucracy and representative democracy (Boissevain 1966; Powell 1970; Wolf 1966; cf. Lemarchand and Legg 1972; Zuckerman 1977). In Milošević’s Serbia, the ‘centre’ (the top of the regime hierarchy) pursued a strong centralization policy in the legal and institutional domains, but its de facto power and autonomy vis-à-vis the ‘peripheries’ of the system was rather fragile. With the advancing consolidation of capitalism, the control of economic resources became increasingly independent of the state and some of the new business elites became politicians’ patrons rather than clients. Faced with hostile patronage networks of oligarchs allied with the opposition, the regime top was compelled to grant its loyal clients considerable discretion in their spheres of influence. Babić had established himself as a local business leader before Milošević’s rise to power and hence possessed a significant degree of autonomy, which the patronage literature identifies as a situation when the centre resorts to patronage to co-opt the periphery. The regime and Babić indeed appeared to have found some kind of cohabitation (see the Appendix to this chapter). As discussed in Chapter 1, the regime change in 2000 has involved a negotiated settlement that guaranteed effective impunity for the

252 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Milošević-period elites. This meant a continued relative weakness of the centre despite the formal political shift. In Vršac, Babić has not only maintained his power, but, following the interlude of the DP reign in 2000–4, has succeeded in expanding it into the political field by creating a political machine-type party, which benefited from his existing patronage networks, and allying with the Socialists. In 2008, when the DP became the dominant party at the national level, the local Democrats were also integrated into the local power bloc and mediated its access to the higher levels of the government. While the Democrats had to tolerate the continued power of ancien régime elites, the latter suffered increased internal tensions because of the pact with the DP. We will see below how the advocacy project was able to benefit from these tensions. This analysis shows that both the native concept of provincija and the idea of periphery, which undergirded the introduction of advocacy in Serbia, exaggerated the extent to which such peripheries were passive, static and dependent on the centre. This is far from a uniquely Serbian phenomenon. For example, the rural political and administrative elites in Romania obstructed the land restitution policies of the weak central government and used their control of these resources to create their own clients (Mungiu-Pippidi 2005; Sikor, Stahl and Dorondel 2009; Verdery 2002). Dominant local actors in Italy were found to establish patron–client links to the centre on their own terms (Tarrow 1977). In such situations, hierarchy and the direction of resource flows between the centre and the periphery are not predetermined, but emerge from idiosyncratic, though structurally constrained, negotiations and struggles between two active parties. However, Vršac was and remained a provincija/periphery in one fundamental respect – the persistent personalistic and clientelistic logic of local politics and the continued power of particular actors, both of which remained largely unchanged, despite major political shifts at both the national and the local levels. This would seem to justify the need for importing democratization strategies such as public advocacy.

Local Struggles, Translocal Links: Doing Advocacy in Vršac The Vršac advocacy was aimed at improving the management of the local City Park (Gradski park). The park, which was mostly shaped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (FCVCP 2010: 14– 18), features architectural elements from that period and a variety of

Public Advocacy | 253

plant species, mostly mature deciduous trees. It is one of the prettiest and oldest public parks in Serbia and a valuable natural and cultural heritage site. By far the largest public park in Vršac, it is also functionally and emotionally important to the residents. It was first put under protection by a 1973 bylaw of the municipal assembly,4 which banned any interventions that might change its appearance and placed it ‘under the authority and use’ of the company that was the predecessor of the present-day October Second. The company thus became what the law calls the ‘custodial institution’ or ‘managing institution’ of the park. The bylaw obliged the company to only carry out works previously approved by the Institute for Nature Conservation of Vojvodina Province (INCVP) and, in some cases, the municipal government (FCVCP 2010: 19; INCVP 2011: annex 2). The first attempt to amend this protection regime was a ‘protection study’ that the Institute for Nature Conservation of Serbia drafted in 2000 to harmonize the regime with the legislation then in force. The protection study is a document drafted by either of the two state conservation institutes5 that describes the area/object to be protected and proposes protection measures. The study serves as the basis for a ‘bylaw on the establishment of a protected area’. The bylaw must be adopted by the government body in charge according to the level of protection indicated in the study. The 2000 study envisaged the third (lowest) level of protection, so the bylaw was to be adopted by the municipal assembly. The study had duly been sent to the municipality, but the bylaw has never been adopted (INCVP 2011: preface). The condition of the park has meanwhile continued to deteriorate. Many tree specimens, up to 200 in 2005–10, were lost due to biological ageing as well as inadequate care (FCVCP 2010: 37). Some of the historical structures were damaged or destroyed altogether. The advocacy participants I talked to all singled out October Second (or, in more personal terms, Ljubisav Šljivić) as the main culprit behind this neglect. The new protection study, written as a result of the advocacy project, confirmed this view (INCVP 2011: 48). My interlocutors argued that it was not in Šljivić’s interests to take proper care of the park because it was simply not profitable. Since October Second was a ‘social’ enterprise, the municipality had no way of sanctioning it directly. Varoš, a public utility owned by the municipality, paid for October Second’s services and was formally supposed to supervise it. However, my interlocutor in Varoš told me that the informal balance of power was such that October Second chose what it would do in the park (i.e. the most basic level of maintenance) and Varoš merely paid for this. Šljivić was further accused of using his power to block

254 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the adoption of a new protection bylaw. Various possible reasons for this were mentioned. October Second ran a restaurant in the park for which it should by rights have paid a rent to the municipality, but supposedly it did not, and the protection bylaw might change that. Another explanation was that the company was planning to construct some new commercial objects in the park. For Virđinija and some of her allies, the project was the most recent episode of a longer struggle over urban space that they had waged with the local power bloc. When I first met Virđinija, she connected the degradation of the park with the interventions of the local government that resulted in covering Vršac with concrete and destroying its ‘identity’. She gave us a brochure published as part of the project that made it clear that this identity referred to much more than threatened greenery: the multicultural, multiethnic and urban tradition of Vršac, which was characteristic of the Vojvodina region. The cover featured historical photographs and documents, and gave the name of the project, ‘This is My Place’, in Romanian, Hungarian and German as well as English and Serbian. Germans were the biggest ethnic group in the town before World War I and the most responsible for the development of the park. The booklet also described how Germans and Serbs lived in tolerance and cooperated to make Vršac ‘one of the most developed cities of this part of the world’ (FCVCP 2010: 12). This happened in the eighteenth and (especially) nineteenth centuries, when previously small cities in the Austro-Hungarian part of what would later become Yugoslavia started to grow rapidly (Spangler 1983: 78). As for Romanians and Hungarians, they lived and still live in Vršac in significant numbers; Virđinija herself was Romanian and active in minority politics. When I commented on these references in the booklet, she said that since we are both ‘Central Europeans’, we obviously ‘understand the same stories’. To her mind, the material reminders of the Austro-Hungarian past connected Vršac symbolically to ‘Europe’ with its connotations of modernity and civilizational progress. On my next visit to Vršac a few weeks later, Virđinija took me for a walk in the City Park. We crossed a long and broad street called Žarko Zrenjanin Boulevard on our way there. Until a few years ago, Virđinija told me, it used to be called Žarko Zrenjanin Street and was lined with beautiful old limes. These were felled to make room for new concrete paving. Small saplings were planted in their stead and the street was renamed. Laughing, Virđinija turned my attention to how the ‘boulevard’ ended in a small side street (unlike, presumably, real boulevards) and commented that ‘Jelena Babić probably saw

Public Advocacy | 255

something similar on her travels’. The struggle for the park is symbolic, she continued; if they manage to preserve it, it will be a way of countering the ‘erasure’ of the Vojvodinian identity of Vršac. We strolled through the park and emerged on its eastern side. Towering before us was the blue glass and white tile structure of the Millennium Centre, huge by Vršac standards and dominating its surroundings. Virđinija ridiculed its six-storey tower as ‘Babić’s phallus’. She then digressed into Serbian anthropogeographic discourse (Živković 2011: 76–93) in a manner I did not really expect from her. All that she was fighting against was the work of colonists who came to Vojvodina from the mountains of Bosnia, she said. These were the people who took the houses of expelled Germans, ‘half-rural’, ‘primitive’, ‘full of inferiority complex’, always loyal to the regime and therefore privileged, heavily present in the military and the police. Those who came to Vojvodina after World War I had assimilated by now, but not those who came after World War II. Babić and his people, she pointed out, were children of the second-wave colonists, and although they were already born or raised in Vojvodina, they still had their ‘complexes’. Since the late 1990s, a series of squares and streets in the historical centre of Vršac have been paved with the same grey blocks of concrete as those in the ‘boulevard’, only occasionally interspersed with a line of red paving stones. The Hemofarm Foundation funded several of these projects and even those it did not copied the same style – hence Virđinija’s mention of Jelena Babić who used to direct the foundation. While the local government and the media praised the renewed spaces as modern and ‘ordered’ (uređen) up to ‘European standards’, Virđinija derided their aesthetics as ‘socialist realist’, ‘vulgar’ and ‘newly composed’ (novokomponovana), borrowing the latter adjective from the expression ‘newly composed folk music’ referring to lowbrow pop-folk. Work on one of the squares led to another smaller park being felled and replaced with young saplings in 2009 – apparently without any public discussion. Virđinija told me about a protest meeting against this during my last visit in Vršac in September 2011 as we sat on a terrace overlooking the town. I then found her changed beyond recognition by the cancer chemotherapy that she was taking, but also full of life and plans for the future. At the protest, Virđinija told me, she ‘named’ (prozvati) Jelena Babić as responsible for the felling and asked rhetorically why she ‘shapes our lives to such an extent’. ‘I think that is when I got sick’, she observed without a hint of irony. These words have become even more tragic with Virđinija’s death after her condition suddenly deteriorated three months later.

256 | Frontiers of Civil Society

On one level, then, Virđinija experienced her struggle as deeply personal. She waged it against people whom she suspected of damaging her career. She told me about how the DP Prime Minister Đinđić visited Vršac in 2002 and ‘didn’t go to the [local] Democrats who were then in government but he went to Babić’. When Đinđić met with citizens, she took an opportunity to address him and expressed her disappointment that ‘our first democratic prime minister’ is paying homage to the ‘sheriff of the town’. A month later, with hardly any explanation, she lost her job as the director of the drama programme at the Novi Sad state radio. She believed that the local elites had prevented her from getting a job in her field (theatre) in Vršac ever since. The struggle was also personal in the sense that she waged it for her place, as the title of the campaign hinted. At the 2009 protest whose footage I saw, she was visibly upset when she declaimed: I don’t want to be very melodramatic, but I probably will be very melodramatic, because this is about my past, my sentiment, my emotions, my childhood! They took everything from us and now they are taking our memories too, and our nostalgias, and everything that ties us with this city.

Virđinija’s confrontational attitude made her somewhat of a controversial rebel figure, as others readily confirmed to me. This, and the enmity with the local power bloc, was something she shared with her husband Branislav Guzina, a journalist and theatre and documentary film director who worked with her on the campaign and published scathing articles about Vršac politics online. Shortly after the regime change, he lost his job as the editor-in-chief of the Belgrade programme on the national state TV station after writing news stories criticizing Babić and other potentates. Closely related but distinct from this most personal dimension was the complex of ideas with which Virđinija defined her political and social belonging and that had a lot in common with the subject position of the liberal civil society as it had formed in the 1990s. As I learned from our conversation, Virđinija thought of herself as someone ‘civil’, leftist/social democratic, tolerant to diversity, Vojvodinian and ‘(Central) European’. She associated some of these identifications with the past of Vršac, whose material legacies she wanted to preserve. This was in sharp contrast to the categories she attributed to her foes. These concerned their social and cultural background, but also political trajectories and style – she described them as ‘commies’ and people with an ‘old socialist way of thinking’. For Virđinija and her husband, then, the advocacy project was also fundamentally po-

Public Advocacy | 257

litical in ways that embedded it in long-term contestations at the local and national levels. Virđinija’s politics also influenced the tactical alliances that she made to get the advocacy project off the ground. When I first met her, she described the local Democrats as ‘currently our biggest problem’, ‘devoid of ideas’ (bezidejni) and ‘conservative’. Indeed, the DP-led local administration in 2000–4 had already been criticized for changing very little and ruling in a familiar particratic and nepotistic manner.6 The Democrats’ cooperation with the VRER four years later was a further disappointment for many of their supporters. Despite these experiences and her strong critique of the party, Virđinija told us in that same monitoring meeting that she counted on the assistance of Stevica Nazarčić, then the DP president of the municipal assembly. She characterized him as ‘our man’ and a ‘partisan apparatchik, but with a civil quality to him’. Her expectations that Nazarčić might be of help were not arbitrary. On a different occasion, she hinted at the fact that she used to be on very good terms with the local Democrats in the period before and after the regime change. Her relationship with Nazarčić was also personal. He told me in an interview that he had known her and her husband for a long time and that they used to publish a magazine together in the 1990s. He further said that the DP had recently done a door-to-door survey in which many citizens mentioned the park’s bad condition as a problem. This gave the Democrats a motive to support the initiative. The campaign originally demanded that the municipal assembly finally adopt a protection bylaw based on the 2000 study. If October Second was found to be unable or unwilling to carry out the prescribed protection measures, the bylaw would appoint a new custodian (FCVCP 2010: 38). This plan was seemingly agreed upon at a roundtable organized by Virđinija’s NGO, the Civic Parliament, in October 2010 and attended by people from the local government, the Institute for Nature Conservation of Vojvodina Province, October Second, Varoš, environmental NGOs and the media. Virđinija was clearly doing her best to be diplomatic and upbeat as she chaired the event. She avoided mentioning the issue’s political background, appreciated that all stakeholders were present, and described the meeting as a ‘step forward’ and the ‘first time we’re communicating’. This approach seemed to bear fruit: the representatives of the Province Institute pledged to revise the 2000 study and align it with the most recent environmental legislation, while the local government representatives promised to adopt the protection bylaw once the study was ready.

258 | Frontiers of Civil Society

Despite everyone else’s best efforts, Dejan Maksimović made sure that the meeting would not pass without a diagnostic event that brought local public secrets to the surface. Dejan, a committed environmentalist, was Virđinija’s long-time acquaintance and a key collaborator on the project. At the time, he was based in the Vršac NGO sector as the president of the Gea Natural Science Society, a large environmental organization, as well as the programme director of a smaller NGO that he had founded. He was also active in local politics. From 2004 to 2008, when a coalition of the VRER, the Socialists, the Serbian Radical Party and another party held power in the local government, Dejan served as the Radical member of the municipal council (i.e. local executive government) for the environment. He later left the Radicals and joined the Serbian Progressive Party, which splintered off from the Radicals in 2008. The local Progressives were in opposition at the time of the advocacy project. In his address, Dejan said that the municipal council attempted to initiate a discussion about adopting the protection bylaw in 2005. The council managed to get it on the agenda of the municipal assembly, but it was soon dropped because a ‘certain party opposed it’ and the same thing happened in 2006. Throughout the roundtable discussion, Dejan continued to argue that a ‘third interested party’ needed to be brought into the process, otherwise it was doomed to fail again. When somebody finally asked him whom he meant, he answered that it was the Socialists. (Dejan later told me that Šljivić blocked the legislative process ‘in an informal manner’.) This provoked an angry reaction from Milan Matijašević, deputy director of October Second, member of the local Socialist leadership and municipal council member. He said that the Socialists, as a modern and progressive party, ‘will not be a brake on any positive trends’. He also argued that the meeting should not be spent on analysing who was responsible for what. He thought that we were beyond this ‘era of conspiracy theories’ – instead, we should be constructive! Dejan replied that he believed that there was still a problem that might reappear once the new protection bylaw was ready for adoption. His estimation proved to be correct. Although a consensus had seemingly been achieved at the roundtable, the Province Institute received a letter only a month later in which October Second protested at an ‘expansion of the protection area boundary’ and ‘change of the protection regime’ (INCVP 2011: 47). The company seemed poised to obstruct the protection bylaw again. A new strategy was needed. I learned what this was in a smaller nonpublic meeting at the seat of the municipal government in February 2011. Apart from

Public Advocacy | 259

Virđinija, her husband and Dejan, the meeting was attended by: Biljana Panjković, director of the Province Institute; two experts from the institute, one of whom wrote the new study; Orhideja Štrbac, a horticulturalist from Varoš; Stevica Nazarčić, the DP president of the municipal assembly; and the deputy president of the municipal assembly, also a Democrat. All other political parties as well as October Second were not represented. Panjković unveiled a new idea – the updated study would put the park under a higher, second level of protection. It was obvious that the others had been briefed about the proposal beforehand and they supported it unanimously. The official justification for this shift referred to the law and expert knowledge. Article 41 of the Law on Nature Protection defines the third level of protection as a ‘protected area of local importance’, whereas the second level indicates a ‘protected area of provincial/regional, i.e. substantial importance’. While the 2000 study put the park in the third category, the 2011 study argued that it properly belonged to the second (INCVP 2011: 2). Panjković echoed this argument at the meeting. However, some other considerations clearly (also) drove the proposal and the support for it. Acts establishing second-class protected areas must be adopted by the national parliament or, if the area is in Vojvodina, the provincial parliament. As a lower branch of government, the government of the municipality where the area is situated must comply. The proposal thus offered a possibility of bypassing the deadlock at the local level. It would also save municipal money – if a protected area is established by the provincial parliament, protection measures are funded from the provincial budget. For the Democrats, then, this was a way of pushing through a popular policy against the will of their Socialist rivals, reaping the electoral benefits and largely externalizing the costs. The obvious outstanding issue was that of custodianship. According to the law, the conservation institute that drafted the protection study may recommend a custodian, but the latter should be selected in a public tendering process wherever possible and is ultimately appointed by the protection bylaw. This did not prevent the attendees at the February meeting from agreeing that Varoš (represented at the meeting, unlike October Second) would make a good new custodian. The deputy president of the municipal assembly even quoted a sum that the municipality had supposedly already earmarked for works in the park to be done by Varoš. This meeting revealed how the project addressed the informality of local politics with a network of personalistic and cliquish relationships of its own. Key people in the advocacy network were connected

260 | Frontiers of Civil Society

by long-term friendships. They were or used to be active in the NGO sphere, politics and the public sector, in some cases simultaneously. This enabled them to mediate between these domains and the project. Dejan’s case was already described. Thanks to his contacts in the field of environmental governance, he had known Panjković from before and was the first to contact her about the project. The Varoš horticulturalist who attended both meetings was active in Dejan’s NGO Gea. At the February meeting, Panjković remarked that one of the advantages of Varoš as a potential custodian is that ‘it has assistance of the nongovernmental sector’, presumably mediated by the horticulturalist. October Second, to my knowledge, had no such links that could be useful, for instance, in obtaining external project funding for protection measures. Virđinija, for her part, mobilized her personal links to the Democrats. Several interviewees told me that their involvement could be explained by the fact that it was a pre-election year when parties did their best to present themselves in a positive light. She suggested the same when, towards the end of the February meeting, she said that ‘this time we should finish it properly’ and then addressed the two politicians, laughing: ‘Well, it’s a pre-election year, so it could serve you well.’ Panjković commented ‘yes, everyone’s a winner’ and also gave a little laugh. The Democrats could have also been motivated by a wish to limit the influence of the Socialists. They also had a partisan link to the provincial government that they could rely upon to obtain the necessary funding for interventions in the park – the secretary (the provincial equivalent of a minister) for urbanism, construction and environment protection was a Democrat. Moreover, as mentioned, the leader of the Vršac Democrats was a member of the provincial government. Thus, when these efforts to reform the local finally started to bear some fruit, it was, paradoxically, by translocal means. Through a combination of the legal and institutional opportunities and the personal and partisan links to provincial institutions, it was possible to eschew, if not cut, the local Gordian knot of political and economic interests that had previously prevented any improvement in the park’s management. The project itself was also translocal in the sense that the foreign donor (the DfID) and its Belgrade mediator (BCIF) supplied money, advocacy knowhow and a measure of authority. The woman who assisted with the administration of the project told me she believed that the fact that it was a ‘foreign donation’ was important and that the project team deliberately emphasized this to impress the local elites.

Public Advocacy | 261

The epilogue is, perhaps characteristically, ambiguous. Dejan told me in June 2011 that the Province Institute informed him that it had sent the protection study to the province secretariat for environment protection. However, by the end of my fieldwork, there have been no public consultations and the protection bylaw has not been adopted. As of October 2017, the website of the Province Institute still lists the City Park as a ‘protected area in the procedure of [establishing] protection’. By law, the protection regime defined in the new protection study has been in force since the issue of the study. However, the provincial government has not assumed the obligation to fund protection measures because the provincial parliament failed to adopt the protection bylaw, possibly for precisely that reason. This also means that there has been no change in the custodial institution. The municipal government funded works on the central historical fountain, lighting and paths in 2011–12, which can be seen as an important material achievement of the advocacy campaign. However, sick mature trees continue to be felled and are only replaced by spontaneous growth, presumably due to the unwillingness of the local municipality to fund expensive replanting that would now have to comply with the demanding conservation guidelines of the Province Institute. The park is gradually losing its original design and botanical composition. The change of the protection status has thus provided a stronger formal and institutional guarantee against purposeful alterations of the park, but has done little to solve the original issue addressed by the advocacy campaign: the loss of its historical features. The main reason seems to be the discrepancy between the expectations of the advocacy actors vis-à-vis the provincial government and the latter’s actual (lack of) actions.

Conclusion The actually existing politics in Vršac were dominated by an adaptable and resilient structure of clientelistic and cliquish relationships that also extended to include the manner in which local actors related and interacted with political and state actors at the national and regional levels. Public advocacy in general leads the advocating NGOs to broker between the interests, perspectives and resources of ‘communities’, donors and local political actors. In Vršac, this brokerage needed to reflect the particular constraints and opportunities of local politics if some limited progress was to be achieved. As a result, the

262 | Frontiers of Civil Society

advocacy activists, who were supposed to stay put in the territory of civil society, crossed the frontier with local state and institutional politics to establish cross-domain alliances. They also cooperated with nonlocal actors whose leverage helped overcome the local deadlock. These findings point to the limitations of top-down interventions that seek to bring political transformations in ‘peripheries’ like Vršac through formal democratic channels, assuming that the boundaries of institutionally defined fields translate into practice unproblematically, or the mobilization of purely local (‘community’) resources, ignoring the importance of relationships at other scales. The anthropological scholarship on patrons, clients and brokers has often been criticized as ‘methodologically individualist’ and ignorant of the political or economic structural constraints on individual action. But we do not need to fall back on the old dichotomy. Writing about postapartheid South Africa, where the state combines neoliberal reforms with redistributive measures, Deborah James (2011: 336) has described the re-emergent figure of the broker as both the product and the producer of a new kind of society who ‘creates and perpetuates such conditions, and indeed embodies the contradictions which ensue’. Brokers are intriguingly complex subjects who mediate between registers of social organization and political authority through practice as well as their own subjectivities. As such, they are not only important objects of enquiry in their own right, but also windows on the larger domains at the frontiers of which they operate. The advocacy brokers play a somewhat contradictory role in relation to the aim of ‘democratization’. While Virđinija and her collaborators acted in a manner constrained by the logic of local politics, they saw this as a tactical necessity for attaining goals that they believed were in line with the law, the public interest, and their own political subjectivities and values. Such actually existing ways of getting things done deserve to be assessed with an open mind. They also invite us to reconsider what has sometimes been an excessively cynical anthropological view of the NGO-ized civil society. The case of the Vršac advocacy shows that some NGO workers did not abandon bold and open politics for an abstract technocratic agenda. And in a similar manner to local fundraising, it points to their concern for articulating and pursuing agendas relevant for people in the places in which they lived, thus pointing to another potential mode of indigenization of the liberal civil society – one that was more political than the development of philanthropy analysed in Chapter 6.

Public Advocacy | 263

Appendix: Miodrag Babic´ Miodrag Babić (born 1951) spent his earliest childhood in a village about 80 kilometres from Vršac. His family were Bosnian Serb ‘colonists’ – people who came to Vojvodina after World War II to occupy the properties of expelled Germans. As a child, Babić moved to a hamlet near Vršac. He obtained a degree in organic chemistry in 1974 and worked in a Vršac cleaning products factory before he became the director of Hemofarm, then a purely local company, in 1982. In the economically disastrous 1990s, Hemofarm prospered under his management and opened new production facilities in Serbia and abroad. Babić was allegedly granted access to scarce foreign currency from the National Bank, i.e. at official rates much lower than those on the black market. Babić was a member of Milošević’s Socialist Party, but was not openly involved in politics (Grujić 2010). However, high-level government officials often visited Hemofarm (Belić 2001). In February 2000, the European Council listed Babić among the people ‘whose activities support President Milošević’ and who were therefore banned from entering the EU; he was removed from the list three months later. The International Crisis Group also included him among businesspeople with close ties to the regime (ICG 2003: 17). Although there is no direct evidence for this, the implication is that Babić funded the regime in return for the privileges. The fact is that the regime, which was known for appointing its clients as managers, never threatened Babić’s position. The transformation of Hemofarm into a joint stock company began in 1990. However, the 1994 law renationalized a majority share. Privatization restarted after 2000. The German transnational Stada Arzneimittel bought a 98 per cent share for €475 million in 2006. Babić received €9 million for his 1.8 per cent share, remained president and became Stada’s vice president. However, he resigned in 2010, apparently after coming into conflict with Stada. Locals worried that the ‘Germans’ would lay off many of the 2,000 workers (as of 2010) who had lost their protector. But jobs were not the only thing for which many felt indebted to Babić. The company built Hemograd (‘HemoCity’), a whole prestigious neighbourhood for employees. The Hemofarm Foundation, established at Babić’s initiative in 1993, invested large sums of money, chiefly donations from Hemofarm, into charitable activities and both commercial and public-purpose construction projects in Vršac and its neighbouring villages. Most spectacular was the Millennium Centre, a state-of-the-

264 | Frontiers of Civil Society

art sports and concert hall completed in 2001 and majority-owned by the foundation. Babić first acted as the president of its board of directors and later as ‘honorary president’. Hemofarm also established a presence in the local media.

Notes 1. The organization’s name was ironic – the quotation marks were meant to signal that Vršac was actually far from free. 2. See also Nuti (2006) on NGO advocacy in Macedonia. 3. Here I refer to the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, in which Vršac is located. 4. Bylaw on the Protection of the ‘Vršac Park’ Natural Monument. 5. One of the institutes is responsible for Serbia proper and the other for Vojvodina. The Serbia institute wrote the 2000 study because the Vojvodina institute had been dissolved by the Milošević regime and was only re-established in 2010. 6. See ‘(Ne)vidljiva dinamika promena’ 2003.

CONCLUSIONS

_ This book has developed a historical anthropological and Gramscian perspective to trace the hegemonic struggles of the liberal, NGOized form of Serbian civil society as well as its nationalist and postYugoslav counterparts over the transformations of the state, the frontiers of civil society with other social domains, and the public representation of these processes in categories of common interest and common sense. I have combined this with a Foucaultian lens to identify the rationalities, norms and technologies deployed by the ‘reforms’ of particular, sometimes localized areas and mechanisms of government, while also attending to their relations with the broader tendencies of restructuring. My primary focus has been on reforms that I was able to witness in the early 2010s, in the context that was in some respects (the emphasis on ‘Europeanization’) the climax of what I theorized as the post-Milošević hegemonic project of transnational integration and neoliberalization. At the same time, I sought to track retrospectively the origins and unfolding of these processes as well as the continuities and ruptures in the subject positions, class alliances and organizational practices of the various civil society forces from the late socialist period up through Milošević’s illiberal capitalism in the 1990s to the ‘unblocked transition’ after 2000. The idea of civil society re-emerged in Yugoslavia in the 1980s in the form of a relatively diverse and open-ended set of positions from which urban intellectuals and movements critiqued the socialist social order and demanded its democratization through a greater selfgovernment and autonomy of society from the party-state. In the 1990s, factions of political and cultural elites and the old socialist middle class defined in clear political and organizational terms the subject position of the liberal civil society. This largely NGO-ized and foreign-funded civil society made crucial contributions to the formation of the new hegemonic project in opposition to the Milošević regime and played important ideological and tactical roles in the regime – 265 –

266 | Frontiers of Civil Society

change in 2000. As a part of the newly ascendant power bloc, it went on to participate in the hegemonic restructuring both from within and beyond its original base in the NGO sector. While its frontiers with (oppositional) party politics have already been highly porous in the 1990s, the arrival of the former opposition to power had major implications for its previously fairly rigid boundaries with the state. After it contributed to the shift from Milošević’s isolationist policy to an orientation towards transnational, in particular EU, integration, the liberal civil society continued to assist in its deepening in multiple ways. I documented how it reproduced the hegemonic narrative of integration as a modernization of the backward Balkans and a return to ‘normality’ centred on the idea of an effective and orderly state, though often in the paradoxical form of a critique of the actual integration process and calls for a ‘genuine Europeanization’. The discourse surrounding the LGBT Pride Parade in Belgrade was one of the examples of how the NGO sector tended to favour the framing of integration as an identitarian and cultural issue of becoming European, thus contributing to the sidelining of debates about its material effects. This ideological hegemony has even partly shaped the terms in which the nationalist civil society contested EU integration, leading it to foreground the contrastive themes of Serb ethnonational and cultural self-sufficiency and retraditionalization. Further, through projects like the Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, NGOs sought actively to establish cooperative and ‘constructively critical’ relationships with the transnationalizing state and provide expert inputs for the myriad legal, institutional and policy reforms linked to integration. The expansion of such relations was simultaneously promoted by the agenda of state–civil society partnerships, the declining availability and diversity of NGO funding, and the demand for NGO skills in public administration, which has grown as integration has advanced. The liberal civil society was similarly supportive of the neoliberalization of the Serbian state and the public realm. Leading NGOs advocated for, helped conceive and contributed donor and their own resources to a range of interventions that sought to reform the frontiers of civil society with the state, the economy and wider society in line with the neoliberal norms of efficiency and transparency. These reforms used neoliberal and neoclassical theories rooted in assumptions of methodological individualism and instrumental rationality to diagnose the causes of problematic human behaviour and/or prescribe techniques for its optimization. This resulted in a preference for strategies of marketization, privatization and denationalization that

Conclusions | 267

conformed to the broader logic of neoliberal restructuring after Milošević. Beyond their implications for the particular policy domains that this book examined, such as state–civil society cooperation, social service provision or the tax system, these interventions had a more diffuse ideological effect of reinforcing a neoliberal common sense (such as the axioms that transparency promotes competition and competition promotes efficiency), especially in influential policy circles. This hegemony of neoliberalism as a form of rationality was reflected in the fact that it was rarely directly challenged by the counterhegemonic and subhegemonic narratives of the other forms of civil society; for example, we saw that some of the post-Yugoslav organizations of disabled people have accepted its elements as progressive and have sought to transform their own practices accordingly. It is crucial to note the complementary, if not synergic, relationship between these two hegemonic tendencies. It was a neoliberal policy consensus that has gave the EU project its form of market-making rather than, and at the expense of, market-correcting integration (McNamara 1998; Scharpf 2002, 2010; van Apeldoorn 2002; van Apeldoorn, Drahokoupil and Horn 2009). We saw that other foreign actors that exerted influence on public policy in the post-Milošević period, such as the World Bank or bilateral donors, likewise pushed for reforms consistent with neoliberalization, such as the residualization of the welfare state coupled with workfare tendencies and emphasis on individual rights and formal equality. The NGO-ized civil society supported and shaped these policies while itself being expected to overtake some of the functions of the state in a more market-like and hence efficient manner. This was particularly apparent in the provision of social services and other public goods undersupplied by the state whose capacities were diminished as a result of Serbia’s particularly regressive pathway of ‘transition’. Increasingly pressured as well as self-conditioned to take up the role of competitive public goods providers in order to survive in the increasingly resource-scarce setting, NGOs were at the same time carriers and objects of neoliberalization, while the post-Yugoslav organizations of people with disabilities found themselves in a more lopsided position of objects of the hegemonic expectations. The combined effect of these processes was what appears as a general blurring of the boundaries of civil society with the state and the economy, but with some recognizable dominant tendencies. Probably the most prominent process was the push of the state–civil society frontier deeper into the territory of civil society in the form of the ‘partnerships’ and the transfer of some statal functions to civil

268 | Frontiers of Civil Society

society, which promoted its subjection to the agendas, expectations and oversight of the state. At the same time, especially in the case of philanthropy development, I described the largely self-induced adaptation of the NGO sector to the logic and methods of the capitalist market economy. Both of these processes were supported by the relevant transnational actors and were, from the perspective of the liberal civil society, an adaption to the changing material conditions; the second tendency could also be justified with the liberal emphasis on the autonomy of civil society understood as autonomy from the state in the first place, while the first tendency posed more of a challenge to its subject position. I also noted the more limited and tentative movements of the frontier in the opposite directions. The projectification of the state, that is, its uptake of ‘the project’ as the dominant model of designing and managing processes, again under the influence of foreign actors, has led to the creation of some new, reform-oriented state organizations with a workforce drawn largely from the NGO sector and attuned to its characteristic preoccupations and styles of work. Through the promotion of discourses and practices of CSR, the liberal civil society further stimulated and rewarded corporations for becoming more like the state and civil society in the sense of being concerned with the public interest and the production of public goods alongside, and in an ostensible harmony with, private profit-making. Finally, we saw the emergence of the ambiguous, often transient and non-institutionalized interstitial spaces and practices of government, such as in the case of the civil society policy-making and law-making or public advocacy. Overall, then, my analysis has confirmed the dominant trends in the transformation of government associated with the idea of neoliberal governmentality, such as denationalization, destatization and strengthening networked, multiscalar and cross-domain arrangements and mechanisms. Nevertheless, it has departed from the Foucaultian literature in linking these transformations to social relations and interests, political strategies and properties of the state and the political economy, all of which are important for understanding why the reforms of government shared the hegemonic market-oriented content as well as why their actualization remained chronically incomplete, uneven and contested.

The (Anti-)Politics of Reform and Civil Society The analyses of particular reform processes in this book has demonstrated time and again how Serbian NGO workers, and the politi-

Conclusions | 269

cians and civil servants who shared their perspectives and objectives, presented the reforms that they advocated for, and the wider tendencies of restructuring in which these were embedded, as nonpolitical or even antipolitical in the sense of being consciously opposed to an undesirable influence of politics. Most obviously, these people invoked ‘depoliticization’ or ‘departization’ as the principles of necessary transformations of the state that they purported to adhere to and put in practice. But there was a range of more implicit tropes that served to present the content of reforms in terms of technical and utilitarian improvements: ‘formalization’, ‘rationalization’, a greater cost-efficiency, progress towards an ‘order/system’ or even ‘normality’. Through insisting on such supposedly universal and politically neutral benefits of the reforms, their proponents and protagonists sought to represent them as being in the common interest of Serbian society. I repeatedly referred to the frequent argument in anthropological and other critical approaches to planned interventions that identifies the systematic tendency of practitioners to constitute the problematics, methods and purposes of such interventions as technical. This effect of depoliticization or antipolitics, so the argument goes, exempts such interventions from the realm of political contestation and deliberation, and instead places them in much more socially exclusive domains dominated by various kinds of expertise and experts. Processes of neoliberalization unfold in a similar manner to the extent that their proponents present the defining neoliberal preoccupation with the economic efficiency of government, understood in radically pro-market and pro-capitalist terms, as value-neutral and often explicitly antipolitical (‘let experts/businesspeople, not politicians, deal with the economy’). In addition, institutional arrangements that help to lock in neoliberalization, such as the primacy of fiscal discipline over other ends, tend to be ‘constitutionalized’ in the form of legal arrangements that are difficult to politically challenge, not to mention reverse. As we saw, such argumentative and legitimating strategies accompanied the reform interventions conducted by and towards the Serbian liberal civil society in the early 2010s. A more subtle and paradoxical form of antipolitics also underpinned the hegemonic idea and practice of civil society itself. To the extent that liberal theory presumes a virtuous relationship between the diversity and liveliness of civil society and the quality of democracy, it would be logical to assume that civil society is something deeply political. But the liberal model of civil society, particularly its contemporary instrumental

270 | Frontiers of Civil Society

version reproduced by purposeful ‘civil society building’, actually severely constrains its legitimate relationship to politics with a reference to political-theoretical and moral norms. Based on the idea of social order as divided into mutually autonomous ‘sectors’, civil society is or at least should be separate from the domain of politics. As such, it is identified with a ‘sector’ delineated by several in practice more or less closely overlapping attributes, such as ‘civil’, ‘nongovernmental,’ ‘nonprofit’ or ‘third’. Those Serbian organizations that fall into the native category of NGOs and civil society organizations typically consider it mandatory to describe themselves officially as nonpolitical and nonpartisan, even in cases where such attributes might be easily questioned. They prefer to ground their agendas not in explicitly politically articulated commitments, but rather in what are held to be legal principles and/or universal moral ‘values’, such as human rights or the rule of law, in addition to the seemingly technical concern with efficiency. As we saw, even public advocacy, an NGO-based intervention with an obvious relation to politics, was conceptualized as a development project that would achieve democratization by establishing new mechanisms for the participation of ‘communities’ in public decision-making and representing their interests in relation to the state and party politics. This suggests that there is a need for a more graded concept of depoliticization that would distinguish between its various possible registers in addition to the emphasis on instrumental rationality. One such register analysed in this book was the discourse about a meritocratic allocation of resources, which has become increasingly central to the ways in which the liberal civil society justified its reformist efforts and very raison d’être in the post-2000 period. This simultaneously more rational and more moral allocation was to be achieved through competitive and transparent (market-like) regulation, as a direct negation and a way of preventing the immoral ‘particratic’ or otherwise corrupt redistribution (Mikuš 2016). Another register of depoliticization stresses normative ideas about liberal democracy that are articulated as moral rather than political, such as the emphasis on individual rights and equality in the new policy towards people with disabilities or the concern for limiting state involvement in philanthropic exchanges in the interests of individual freedom and choice. Finally, the narratives of modernization, here found in their incarnations of transition and Europeanization, represented reforms as evolutionary rather than historical processes, and as a means of progress understood as a development of culture and knowledge rather than an outcome of political struggles. In this perspective, the

Conclusions | 271

cumulative effect of reforms would be to erase the retrograde legacies of socialism and nationalist authoritarianism as well as the layers of a premodern ‘collectivist’ culture that the former were said to have conserved (Mikuš 2013). They would elevate Serbia to modernity by introducing ‘European values’ and strengthening modern and orderly habits of behaviour and mind at the level of public institutions, as well as government of the self. Just as we need a diversified notion of depoliticization, we should not lose sight of its multiple limits and possibilities of subversion – the diverse ways in which politics may seep back into or remain implicit in ostensibly apolitical reforms. Probably the subtlest articulation of politics and NGO-based reform among the examined cases is that of public advocacy. The top-down disseminators of advocacy knowledge attempted to pre-emptively constrain the ways in which ‘civil society’ could legitimately relate to the domain of party politics and achieve what were inevitably political objectives. Politics was thus not really excluded from this type of intervention and defined as something that could only be re-introduced to it from the outside. The advocacy knowledge instead folded politics into NGO interventions through what could be understood as its technicization – a paradoxical discursive construction of the very practice of politics as technical in the sense of not having an inherent political content, but rather facilitating, in as neutral a manner as possible, between the interests and agendas of ‘communities’, politicians and state bodies. But the case of the advocacy campaign in Vršac revealed that this finely calibrated engagement with politics turned out to be impossible, or at least self-defeating, when confronted with the established relationships that the technologies of advocacy were expected to transform. In addition, while being drawn into the strategies of others through negotiation and compromise, the activists themselves approached advocacy in part as a means to pursue their own pre-existing and deeply political agendas, the meaning of which well went beyond the ideal of an impartial representation of the interests of the ‘community’. This implies that the professionalization and NGO-ization of ‘civil society’ does not necessarily eliminate its potential for contention even as this becomes buried under layers of depoliticizing rhetoric and practices. In relation to the latter point, it is also important to note that multiple strands of liberal thought have informed the subject positions of the liberal civil society and its individual actors. As we saw, the origins of the liberal civil society in late socialist and Milošević’s Serbia have engendered its commitment to political liberalism and its core

272 | Frontiers of Civil Society

values threatened in those contexts, such as civil and political rights and liberties, minority rights, the secular state, the rule of law, the division of powers and so forth. These have remained relevant to the politics of the liberal civil society in the post-2000 period due to the ongoing perceived inadequacy of the state in those respects (giving rise to the critiques of the ‘illusion of reform’) as well as the support of the foreign allies of civil society for politically liberal agendas (e.g. LGBT rights). I further showed that the liberal civil society has also supported economic liberalism to the extent that it conditioned a true democracy and civil society with a market economy based on private property. While the early ideologues such as Đinđić (1987), Pešić (1987) or Pavlović (1995) made such arguments at an abstract level, as a matter of general principle based on the same legacy of classical liberalism from which they derived their concepts of civil society, we also saw that from the late 1990s at the latest, some civil society actors participated in the formulation and execution of specifically neoliberal reforms, that is, historically contextualized market-oriented interventions inspired by the intellectual corpus of neoliberalism and experiences with neoliberalization elsewhere. Finally, the liberal civil society has also been influenced by social liberalism and its concern with a degree of redistribution and social equality in the context of market capitalism, as reflected in the ‘social democratic’ self-identification of many of my NGO research participants. Therefore, some actors of the liberal civil society were committed neoliberals, but others had a more ambiguous relationship with neoliberalization and were led to support it by historical enabling and constraining conditions, including: the need to end Milošević’s rule as the primary common interest of the power bloc, which was perceived as the precondition of any progressive transformation; the resulting accommodation of the interests of other parts of the bloc (capitalist class, political elites and foreign actors); the hegemonic narratives about ‘transition’ and ‘Europeanization’ that justified and naturalized neoliberalization; the discredited old left and the lack of an authentic new left; the neoliberal elements of economic ‘common sense’; and the particularistic interests of the NGO sector that neoliberal reforms promised to benefit. In this context, the different kinds of liberalism have given rise to a less than monolithic relationship of the liberal civil society to the hegemonic project. As we saw, for example, in the case of disability, it often helped articulate key elements of political liberalism (human rights or procedural equality) as the supporting moral narratives of neoliberalization, thus contributing to its depoliticization. But the different emphases of various liberalisms, as well as the in-

Conclusions | 273

creasingly apparent failure of hegemonic restructuring to deliver on original expectations, have also given rise to tensions. The example of the debates about EU integration showed that these often remained implicit and limited to private or semi-private contexts, but the case of the Vršac advocacy revealed their potential for also inspiring an open and public politicization of select aspects of the restructuring. I will return to this issue shortly. Another possible articulation of the politics and antipolitics of reform is when an official discourse of depoliticization serves as a more or less deliberate strategy for obscuring the underlying particularistic interests and agendas and legitimating interventions as oriented to neutral principles and universal benefits. In the studied cases, criteria such as those of efficiency, transparency or commitment to human rights improved the relative position of those who advocated for their institutionalization – particularly well-positioned NGOs and the NGO sector more broadly – in the competition for power and public and private resources with other kinds of actors. These were different from NGOs in terms of organizational resources and forms of knowledge, but also pre-existing social relations and subject positions (‘particratic’, ‘traditional’, nationalist, etc.). For example, one of the more diffuse outcomes of the reforms was to reproduce and reinforce exclusionary social and political relationships. As the case of civil society policy-making showed, such relationships included flexible but resilient informal networks and interstitial political arenas at the state–civil society frontier. The political stakes of these struggles thus included but also went beyond mere instrumental competition for resources. The involvement of international and supranational organizations in these processes was not incidental. Cris Shore (2006: 720–21) has argued that the celebratory discourse of ‘multilevel’ or ‘European governance’, produced by the EU itself and much of the academia, obscures the ways in which it promotes a ‘weak, polycentric state and a centreless society increasingly regulated and manipulated by market forces and through the opaque processes of intergovernmental or intra-institutional bargaining’ (see also Jessop 1999, 2008: 199–224). In the cases examined in this book, reforms bound up with EU integration overlapped with those that organizations such as the World Bank or the IMF introduced by the means of aid or loan conditionalities. The actors privileged by these interventions instituted neoliberal norms and techniques of regulation, but their own access to policy-making and donor resources was partly based on personalistic and cliquish relationships. The reforms therefore contradicted their

274 | Frontiers of Civil Society

own principles of competition and transparency as well as those of participation and representativness that were given as the rationales for the involvement of ‘civil society’ in governance. In fact, the supposed clear and rigid boundaries of the liberal civil society and party politics were also in doubt at the level of the entire NGO sector, as the phenomena of party NGOs or party-mediated ‘boundary crossing’ show. In particular, the case of the CDF and its Slovak-Serbian project illustrated how partisan alignments and channels of circulation established at the time of the formation of the liberal civil society in the 1990s tended to be perpetuated through the 2000s. However, the NGO critiques of insincere Europeanization or ‘illusion of reform’, including the reproduction of Milošević-period elites and relationships of domination, suggest that these alignments became increasingly disrupted as the liberal civil society lost confidence in the reformist commitments of its partisan allies. This reveals the rolling fragmentation of the anti-Milošević power bloc due to the loss of its original shared interest – ousting Milošević. In the changed context, the ‘democratic’ and ‘pro-European’ political and state elites started to prioritize their particularistic interests, which often led them to work with the individuals, networks and groups linked to the old regime or perpetuate the ‘political capitalist’ relationships and modi operandi. By the early 2010s, many in the liberal civil society came to experience this as an outright betrayal and hijacking of the supposedly ‘unblocked’ post-Milošević transformation. But the most direct challenge to the antipolitics of ‘civil society’, and a reminder of the inherently incomplete and contested nature of the post-Milošević hegemonic project, was that both the NGO sector and the kind of reforms that it promoted and carried out were commonly interpreted and treated as resolutely political, despite their own pretences to the contrary. The liberal civil society has largely failed to put its own universalist ideals into practice and to become an inclusive, classless and pluralistic associational sphere of democratic society that provides mechanisms for the articulation and exercise of sectional interests within the shared framework of liberal norms. On the contrary, other actors continued to associate it with a very distinct kind of politics, which was moreover distant from popular perspectives and priorities. As we saw, NGOs were perceived as self-interested or even hostile to the Serb ethnonation. This might gradually change should liberal NGOs undergo, in large numbers and a more sustained manner, the kind of transformations aimed at by the efforts to develop local fundraising. But as of the early 2010s, the liberal civil society was still socially fairly exclusive and politi-

Conclusions | 275

cally distinct, and the incipient trend towards indigenization was less significant than the continued professionalization of the small coterie of leading NGOs such as BCIF. As this in itself implies, Serbian civil society as a whole corresponded to a plurality of subject positions and agencies. Some citizens became or continued to be active in other kinds of organizations and movements that, despite often sharing organizational forms and practices with NGOs, developed very different perspectives and agendas in relation to the post-2000 restructuring. Some of the Yugoslav socialist forms of associational practice and state–civil society relations have not withered away, despite being marked as anachronistic. The nationalist civil society became more visible and oriented to an entrance into party politics precisely at the time when established nationalist parties have been weakened more than ever in the postsocialist period. These ‘other’ civil societies interpreted the hegemonic transnational integration and neoliberalization through counternarratives that rejected its very interpretation as the logical or perhaps the only possible pathway of ‘transition’, and articulated more or less radically different visions of collective future. Many members of the post-Yugoslav associations of people with disabilities doubted whether the new ‘project system’ of public funding would bring any significant improvements to the status quo and considered other changes to be the priority. They refused to believe that the exalted discourse of equal rights (coupled with the more sinister emphasis on the obligation to become ‘independent’), so valued by disability NGOs and the reformist policy-makers, would solve their many predicaments. They responded to the reforms with a political strategy aimed at a preservation and consolidation of the inherited welfare institutions and material entitlements. Nationalist groups openly rejected the very idea of equal rights for particular categories and groups of people, and fought for a neotraditionalist social order that would privilege the collective rights of undifferentiated popular masses. Instead of modernization in the guise of economic, political and cultural globalization, they envisaged a radically different development strategy that was based on a vision of ethnonational sovereignty, autonomy and authenticity. Clearly, then, liberalism, individualism and cosmopolitanism are far from being universally accepted in Serbian society and exempted from the possibility of political contestation. This conclusion speaks in favour of one of the most significant anthropological critiques of the depoliticization thesis – namely, that its focus on discursive construction easily results in an overestimation of the actual success of

276 | Frontiers of Civil Society

depoliticizing strategies in shaping the understandings and practices of those variously involved in planned interventions. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that the liberal civil society has been complicit in some more indirect processes of depoliticization. It has helped to reproduce the hegemonic metadiscourse about Serbian popular politics that narrates antagonisms in categories such as civil/ nationalist and pro-European/traditionalist, and thereby focuses attention on the issues of identity and culture rather than the political economy and social justice. It has also participated in the sustained elite-sponsored effort to establish neoliberalism as a foundation of expert consensus and ultimately, with the assistance of the media, popular common sense about how the economy and society should be properly governed. While I have shown in several places in this book how by the early 2010s elements of neoliberalism have been subject to various forms of contestation from multiple positions in Serbian civil society, this was clearly insufficient to change the hegemonic tendencies of restructuring to any significant degree. This ambiguous situation in Serbia parallels the broader uncertainty about the future of neoliberalism and potential alternatives in the wake of the global financial and economic crisis. In the Epilogue, I contribute to this debate, and reflect once more on the relationship between civil society and hegemony, from the vantage point of most recent developments in Serbia.

EPILOGUE Civil Society and Hegemonic Re-alignments after Crisis

_ I have started by placing this historical anthropological study in the context of the still inchoate but acutely present zeitgeist of major shifts in the hegemonic struggles over postsocialist transformations in Eastern Europe. While most of the region had already been integrated into continental and global value chains some time ago, it was the more recent experiences of recession and stagnation that exposed the disappointing and fragile achievements of the two decades of capitalist transformation. In more successful ‘competition states’ (Drahokoupil 2008), the 2000s have seen a visible convergence with Western Europe as per conventional indicators of economic growth and material wellbeing. But a considerable gap endures and the progress made came at a price of rising social and regional inequalities, outmigration, new insecurities linked to technological development and the financialization and transnationalization of capital, and public retrenchment that constrains equitable access to essential goods and services. In addition to the economic difficulties, the appeal, credibility and legitimacy of the EU project have also been eroded by the debt and public finance crises and waves of austerity across the continent, the lack of a unified response to the ‘refugee/migrant crisis’, the renewed tensions with Russia and, most recently, the British decision to leave the EU. In this context, many citizens of postsocialist countries, even those whose recovery came nearest to the precrisis pace of growth, embrace increasingly critical views of such erstwhile tenets of the transitional dogma as privatization, globalization and orientation to the North Atlantic bloc. To be sure, such critiques are often overshadowed by louder and less direct, through certainly not unrelated frustrations over elite corruption, living standards or the state of public infrastructures and services. Party politics and government policies, most – 277 –

278 | Frontiers of Civil Society

forcefully in Hungary and Poland but with similar developments elsewhere, became increasingly dominated by nationalist, populist and authoritarian agendas, such as the antimigrant and xenophobic paranoia, neoconservative agendas, performances of national sovereignty vis-à-vis the EU, and attacks on the judiciary, media, universities and civil society organizations. But under the rhetorical surface, the political elites have actually done relatively little to change the neoliberal national models of development and welfare established in the 1990s and consolidated in the 2000s. Meanwhile, they face mounting challenges from even more radical nationalist and populist parties and movements (typically on the far right), insurgent publics clustered around illiberal and anti-Western ‘alternative media’ promoting ‘conspiracy theories’, and civic and labour mobilizations over specific issues that tend to be larger and more sustained than before the crisis. This conjuncture has important implications for the debate about the status of neoliberalism after the crisis. Early on, some authors argued that as a result of its implication in the processes of financialization and deregulation that led to the crisis, neoliberalism was dead as an explicit ideological and intellectual project. However, it persisted as a ‘mode of crisis-driven governance’ – a kind of living dead, ‘animated by technocratic forms of muscle memory, deep instincts of self-preservation, and spasmodic bursts of social violence’ (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009: 105). With hindsight, even this highly qualified notion of a ‘postneoliberal’ situation seems rather overstated. The popular legitimacy of neoliberalism might be lower than before the crisis, but the actual policies of European governments and the EU suggest that what they really want to do is to shore up the neoliberal and financialized economic model by timid regulation of some of its worst excesses, permanent austerity for the public sector and ‘quantitative easing’ for the private sector to start yet another boom-and-bust cycle. Even the government of Viktor Orbán in Hungary, which claims to be building an ‘illiberal state’ and reverting the failures of the neoliberal transition, has used ‘unorthodox’ economic policies to achieve ‘orthodox’ ends in line with neoliberalism and the criteria of haute finance, such as public debt reduction or balanced budget (Johnson and Barnes 2014), while also putting much emphasis on workfare programmes as a neoliberal welfare policy par excellence (Szőke 2015). On one level, such an outcome seems consistent with the idea of the ‘neoliberalization of regulatory uneven development’ introduced in Chapter 1, which asserts that rather than being just an ‘internal’ characteristic of particular state projects, neoliberalism is

Epilogue | 279

by now shaping the very ecology and relationality of these projects, thus making reversals at the national level ever more difficult (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009: 108). Nevertheless, this on its own can hardly explain the particular and, on the face of it, surprising rearticulation of neoliberalism in post-crisis Eastern Europe. I agree with Kalb (2012: 321) that this task necessitates going beyond the world of policies and policy-makers to the much broader field of ‘public politics and mytho-poetics of and against neoliberalism’. Such a move enables us to see how the elites, by stimulating and manipulating the bottom-up nationalism and populism, steer the focus of contestations away from neoliberalism itself and achieve new, if sometimes quite unstable, hegemonic realignments (Kalb 2012: 321–23). As the recent political shifts in the United States and the United Kingdom or the strengthening challenges from the far right in France and Germany show, to mention but a few major examples from the West, this is certainly not an exclusively Eastern European development. Nor is it a totally new phenomenon in that region – for example, Nicolette Makovicky (2013) argued that an ‘authoritarian populist’ variant of neoliberalism had already served to legitimate policies towards the Romani underclass in Slovakia in the mid 2000s. Finally, this is not to be understood as an epochal, across-the-board shift – in the East and even more in the West, alliances between economic neoliberals and political and social liberals still remain, at least for the time being and obviously to varying extents, central to national-level hegemonies. The crisis tended to be stronger and longer in South-East Europe than most other parts of Europe and Serbia was no exception to this pattern. The government has achieved some progress in the attempted shift to an export-led model of growth necessitated by a looming fiscal crisis, but foreign investments remained minuscule and recovery modest at best. The impact of the crisis was all the more painful due to the fact that Serbia had been already lagging behind other postsocialist countries in terms of GDP growth and the standard indicators of ‘transitional’ restructuring. I have repeatedly alluded to the mounting popular frustrations over this status quo at the time of my fieldwork. These were often directed against the incumbent DP, which had gradually lost most of its supporters and reformist credentials due to the poor achievements of the post-2000 transformations, corruption scandals and collusion with Milošević-period structures. This has set the scene for what some have described as a veritable ‘political tsunami’. In the 2012 general elections, the Serbian Progressive Party, which splintered off from the ultranationalist Serbian Radical Party in 2008, dethroned the DP both at the national level

280 | Frontiers of Civil Society

and in many municipalities. It has since proceeded to expand and consolidate its dominance at all levels and institutions of government by means of two early national elections that it itself called in 2014 and 2016, and regular local and provincial elections. It has consistently used populist posturing to mobilize voters. In 2011, while still in opposition, it has used inflammatory rhetoric not unlike that of the nationalist organizations to tap into popular frustrations over the outcomes of the ‘transition’. For example, posters inviting people to a public meeting with the Progressives in Belgrade in February 2011 asked passers-by provocatively, in large type, whether they counted themselves among the ‘Privileged or Cheated?’ Below, they listed the following two sets of keywords that presumably characterized the privileged elite and the cheated masses: ‘corruption, monopoly, protection, tycoons, lawlessness’, as opposed to ‘poverty, unemployment, destroyed economy, disenfranchisement, economic collapse’ (Figure 9.1). Since their rise to power, the Progressives presided over media-hyped arrests of ‘tycoons’, opposition politicians and organized crime figures as well as emergencies over alleged conspiracies (including assassination attempts) of these internal enemies and foreign agencies against the party and its leader and incumbent President Aleksandar Vučić, who is the object of a personality cult unseen since the time of Milošević. Vučić has been repeatedly accused of resorting to illegitimate and illegal methods, such as abusing public institutions for partisan agendas, covering up responsibility for official misconduct, using state-controlled or allied private media for an uninterrupted information war, or slandering representatives of independent institutions. However, in a major parallel with East-Central Europe, the Progressives did not change the core orientation of the post-2000 restructuring. On the contrary, they used their populist demagoguery and ‘patriotic’ credentials inherited from the Radicals to salvage the waning legitimacy of the hegemonic project initiated by the former anti-Milošević opposition. In a direct negation of the ominous warnings by the ‘democratic’ politicians and liberal public intellectuals who had urged the voters to make a ‘pro-European’ choice in the watershed 2012 elections, the Progressives went on to take unprecedented strides in the ‘normalization’ process with Kosovo in order to push EU integration forward. Having granted Serbia candidate status in 2012, the European Council officially started membership negotiations at the beginning of 2014. However, progress since then has been fairly slow, with only two out of 34 negotiation chapters closed and further eight opened as of October 2017. This was presumably part

Epilogue | 281

Figure 9.1. The Serbian Progressive Party posters, Belgrade, January 2011. Photo by the author.

of the troubled EU’s broader policy of putting expansion on a backburner, but in the case of Serbia, it might have been to some extent aided by concerns over Vučić’s style of rule. The government has meanwhile continued to insist on Serbia’s military autonomy, formal sovereignty over Kosovo and an ‘independent’ foreign policy,

282 | Frontiers of Civil Society

including friendly ties and much-lauded investments from Russia, China and the Middle East. This, combined with the EU’s own issues, the allusions to hostile foreign interests and, probably most of all, the further dragging-out of an already extremely protracted integration process, has led to a drop in public support for EU accession from nearly two-thirds in 2011 to just 41 per cent in mid 2016 (SEIO 2016: 3). However, the rise in the share of those who would vote against accession was less marked, suggesting a growing equanimity of citizens towards integration. The successive Progressive-led administrations also made headway in the hegemonic form of politico-economic restructuring. In his inaugural address in 2014, Vučić announced a package of characteristically neoliberal policies such as internationalization, privatization, labour market flexibilization and strengthening the private sector and market competition.1 The renewed push for privatization has targeted, for example, former ‘social’ enterprises, local public utilities, the media, agricultural land and even urban public space. I showed elsewhere how the Progressives blended neoliberal and populist registers to generate moral panic over the extent of corruption and inefficiency in the public sector and to justify cuts in the workforce and salaries under an IMF standby arrangement in simultaneously rational and moral terms (Mikuš 2016). By March 2016, public sector employment was reduced by 16,000 workers compared to the end of 2014; a further 6,500 were to be laid out in the second half of the year and possibly tens of thousands more in the coming years (IMF 2016: 54). The Progressives have thus used populism, nationalism and authoritarian methods to re-invent the hegemonic project of transformation while still maintaining its defining tendencies. However, this rearticulation also gave rise to new and more radical forms of contestation in party politics and civil society. The opposition, nearly wiped out of the national parliament in 2014, rebounded somewhat while also becoming more fragmented in the early elections two years later. In line with the growing public visibility and state-oriented strategies of nationalist organizations at the time of my fieldwork, radical nationalist populism has returned to parliamentary politics from near-oblivion. As mentioned, Dveri succeeded in entering the assembly in a coalition with the Democratic Party of Serbia, which has thus returned to the parliament. The Radicals achieved the same feat as the third-strongest party after receiving a boost from the decisions of The Hague tribunal to release from detention and acquit their long-standing leader Vojislav Šešelj. However, their 8 per cent of

Epilogue | 283

the vote was still far below their former strength. The 2016 elections have thus brought to the parliament three weak parties that openly reject further integration with the North Atlantic bloc from nationalist positions. Another new entrant to the parliament was the Dosta je bilo (Enough is Enough) movement, which combines a populist focus on elite corruption with a technocratic and neoliberal economic programme. It criticizes the ways in which the Progressives do the exact opposite of what they dramatically claim to be doing – eradicating the ‘particratic’ capture and mismanagement of the state and the economy. The picture of a generally weak but diverse and radicalized opposition is complete with two party blocs that mopped up the remnants of the former anti-Milošević opposition, mostly the DP and its various derivatives, both of which passed the 5 per cent threshold for entering the parliament by a narrow margin. More relevantly to the focus of this book, the Progressive ascendancy led to a repoliticization of the liberal civil society and the emergence of new, more radical initiatives, many of which are nevertheless variously linked to the former. Established NGOs focused on human rights, transparency and accountability continued to play their traditional ‘watchdog’ role vis-à-vis the government, but in a context in which the state–civil society frontier became again more rigid than at the time of my fieldwork. They were joined by independent, especially online media platforms, which often used the NGO organizational form and rose in significance due to the capture or co-optation of mainstream media by the ruling party and its elimination of most of the traditional media that continued to resist. Vučić and other Progressives responded to their critiques and investigative reports with a type of discourse rarely heard since the time of Milošević. They accused NGOs of spreading lies and serving as mercenaries of foreign donors and ‘tycoons’ who wanted to bring down the government. Even the EU was charged with using NGOs in this manner. The liberal civil society has thus resumed, partly by being pushed to do so from the outside and partly by the force of its own subject position, more political and confrontational relations with the state instead of the technocratic and cooperative relations promoted at the time of my fieldwork. Its commitment to the principles of political liberalism threatened by the Progressive rule, such as the freedom of speech and the press, once again becomes the ideological basis of its radicalization. As mentioned in the Introduction, Igor Štiks and Srećko Horvat (2015: 6) recently argued that while politicians, media and academics in postsocialist South-East Europe struggle to keep the hegemonic

284 | Frontiers of Civil Society

idea of an ‘incomplete transition’ alive, in fact ‘[i]t is as if no one dares to say that the transition as such is long over’. They connect this disconcerting but potentially also hopeful sense to the increasingly apparent disconnect between the promises of transition and the realities of dispossession experienced by most citizens. As the key symptom of this shift and the main force of its potential consummation, they highlight the surge of what they describe as counterhegemonic civic mobilizations and radical leftist politics, which had previously been totally marginalized in the region (see also Morača 2016: 3–5). To begin with, there have been waves of mass protests stemming from popular anger over poverty, corruption and state dysfunctionality. The protest cycles, some of which were described as ‘uprisings’, varied considerably in terms of their scale, duration, political articulation and achievements, ranging from little visible change on the ground (Bosnia and Herzegovina) to significant shifts (Macedonia). Some, such as those in Bosnia, included experiments in direct democracy in the form of civic plenums (Arsenijević 2014). What they all had in common is that they addressed, though often in inchoate ways, the detrimental impact of the hegemonic model of transition on welfare, equality and popular sovereignty. Beyond these broad popular mobilizations, there was a visible strengthening of several kinds of movements and struggles focused on more specific issues (Jansen 2015: 221–32; Kraft 2015; Štiks and Horvat 2015: 11–16). Student movements, in particular in Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia, challenged the commodification and unequal access to higher education through conventional protests but also university occupations. Workers intensified their classic strikes and street protests (in Serbia especially those in education, healthcare and privatized companies gone bankrupt), mobilized against privatization and started to experiment with corporate takeovers and worker shareownership (Musić 2013). Another set of new movements defends public goods from privatization and mismanagement: in particular public spaces in cities, such as the City Park in Vršac, but also the environment or public utilities. Croatia, where such movements might have been strongest, also experienced a stellar rise of popular contention focusing on the issues of household debt and its expansion into parliamentary politics. The most prominent among such new movements in Serbia is Inicijativa Ne da(vi)mo Beograd, which is loosely translated as ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ Initiative. It became active in 2014 in opposition to the highly controversial Belgrade Waterfront construction project, better known as Beograd na vodi (‘Belgrade on Water’). The

Epilogue | 285

€3.5 billion project envisages a conversion of a large section of downtown Belgrade along the right bank of the river Sava, home to the central railway station and a decrepit industrial zone, into a luxurious business and residential district. The structures under construction in 2016 included a 170-metre glass skyscraper and the future ‘largest shopping mall in the Balkans’; five-star hotels were to be added later. While there have long been discussions and specific concepts for a transformation of this highly valuable but misused part of the city, this form of development failed all reasonable expectations. Instead of open public spaces and institutions of national importance expected by urbanists, architects and interested citizens, it will create a fully commercial, private, highly socially exclusive and possibly even partially closed district. It is likely to deepen spatial segregation, increase traffic and disrupt the city skyline and vistas, to mention but a few issues. In addition, the project has been marked from the start by a dubious legality, a lack of democratic participation and transparency, and questions over whether it serves the public interest even in the most rudimentary economic terms. While a private investor from the United Arabic Emirates is expected to fund the construction, the state will shoulder the exorbitant costs of relocating the railway station and preparing the plots for construction in return for a minority ownership share (and hence little effective control) in the project. The existing contract actually obliges the investor to provide only a direct investment of €150 million and the same sum as a loan to the government. The drafting of the spatial plan was fully geared to accommodating the pre-existing interests of the investor, excluded any meaningful public participation and broke the relevant professional standards, if not national law. Yet the Progressive-controlled national and city governments have promoted the project as the supposedly biggest investment of recent years and adopted special laws to speed up execution. The controversy culminated in April 2016, when a group of masked individuals illegally demolished several buildings overnight in the construction area and the police failed to respond to citizens’ emergency calls. The likely collusion of the state institutions in the incident seems to be corroborated by the fact that almost a year and a half later, the investigation is yet to identify those responsible.2 Tijana Morača (2016) analysed the diverse range of discursive frames and protest tactics that We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own has used to contest the Belgrade Waterfront project. On the one hand, it invoked principles within the remit of the dominant transition model and the norms of political and economic liberalism – democratiza-

286 | Frontiers of Civil Society

tion, transparency, the rule of law and economic efficiency. But it went beyond such liberal arguments by challenging the privatization of public space and framing the project explicitly in terms of class and social inequality. However, Morača (2016: 11) is right to note that the latter kind of critique had its own limits. It targeted the authoritarian-leaning government and its dubious deal with the investor, but did not make much effort to relate the Belgrade Waterfront to the broader logics of Serbia’s capitalist transformation, including, for example, the not-so-benevolent role of the EU. Yet, as Morača herself recognizes, this approach might have actually been intentional and strategic. Dobrica Veselinović, one of the most publicly visible figures of the movement, told me in an interview that the group had no doubt about its own leftist orientation, but chose not to emphasize it as such, instead embedding it in focused and not necessarily explicitly ideological critiques of the Belgrade Waterfront. While he did not spell out the implications in those exact terms, this approach seemed to be motivated by hopes that it would allow the movement to mobilize the broadest possible level of support for its critique of the project and reinvigorate leftist analysis in a setting in which it had been discredited and marginalized. The movement has similarly relied on a diverse combination of practical tactics. It used available institutional channels and the core activists’ professional expertise in spatial planning to submit a series of official complaints against the project. It also organized roundtables and published in-depth analyses of the spatial plan, the contract and other aspects of the project on its blog, on social media and in two issues of a print newspaper handed out on the streets. However, it gradually shifted towards more confrontational tactitcs, such as various subversive public performances and street protests. In particular, some of the demonstrations that took place after the April 2016 incident brought together tens of thousands of people and thus became the largest such mobilizations since the regime change in 2000. Understandably, this builds up hopes about We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own as a progressive challenge to the Progressive dominance. The movement has built a varied set of alliances. It collaborates with various kinds of civic society organizations in Serbia, including, for example, professional associations of architects as well as established liberal NGOs. In October 2016, it became part of a new Serbia-wide network of seven civic associations and movements called Građanski front (‘Civic Front’). The network includes, for example, a movement protesting against the 2016 wave of dismissals in the Vojvodina state TV station and other measures seen as an effort

Epilogue | 287

by the new Progressive government of the province to bring the TV station under its control. Another member is the Association of the Presidents of Homeowners’ Assemblies, which has organized a series of protests against the rising prices of public utilities in Niš. The Civic Front intends to focus on, inter alia, defending public resources, changing their management and use, and increasing media freedom and public control over decision-making (Torović 2016). Beyond the national borders, We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own is a member of the Global Platform for the Right to the City and maintains regular contacts with similar movements across the former Yugoslavia. This heterogeneity of practices mirrors the initiative’s transitional nature ‘between the “grassroots” and NGO models’ (Morača 2016: 12). The movement itself was only registered as an association of citizens in 2016. What it does is clearly political activism rather than supposedly apolitical NGO projects, and it relies on voluntary labour and fundraising from supporters rather than donor funding. There is an ongoing discussion about the potential future participation of the Civic Front in elections. Such expectations and pressures are driven by its successful protest mobilizations and the bankruptcy of the established ‘democratic’ parties. However, there are worries that its entry into party politics might be premature and/or harmful for the grassroots legitimacy of the Front members. On a more organizational side, all three members of the core group of some twenty activists whom I interviewed3 emphasized the essentially horizontal and self-organizing character of the initiative. There is no formalized leadership, decisions are taken consensually or occasionally by a general vote, and working groups are formed and discontinued as necessary. However, the movement has obvious formal and social connections to the NGO sector that go beyond networking. It was originally initiated by Ministarstvo prostora (‘Ministry of Space’), which is a collective of some five people best known for their work on the utilization of abandoned public buildings and spaces, including by means of occupations. These people, including Veselinović, are now crucial members of We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own. Another organization that overlaps with the movement is Mikro Art, which is a registered association. Both Ministarstvo prostora and Mikro Art operate in a more typical NGO manner and access project funding from a range of donors (foreign bilateral, private and state), which helps cover some of the expenses of the movement (e.g. for office space) and provides modest honoraria for some of its core members (Morača 2016: 12–20). However, this project work, and other livelihood activities of

288 | Frontiers of Civil Society

the activists, also means that movement-related activities are largely relegated to their leisure time. Equally crucial is a class connection with the NGO sector. Highly educated, urban and relatively young middle-class professionals and experts, including many NGO workers, appear to be particularly well-represented not only in the core group of activists but also the broader mass of supporters. The latter fact is likely to be related to the initiators’ own profile as well as the particular kinds of rhetoric, media and practices that they use to contest the Belgrade Waterfront. Clearly, then, enthusiasm over the expansion of new forms of radical politics should not lead us to ignore the close connections between some of them and the dominant model of civil society. Morača (2016: 21–22) is spot-on with her diagnosis that tackling such ambivalences, however inimical it might seem for a search for authentic grassroots contention, is crucial for an understanding of whether and how a progressive counterhegemonic project can emerge in the post-Yugoslav space. As the case of We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own suggests, the continuities between some of the new movements and the dominant model of civil society might pose challenges for their ability to mobilize a broad support throughout society and, ultimately, mediate the formation of a new power bloc. But I would add that these continuities are also a source of possibilities. To the extent that the dominant idea and practice of civil society, as this book has sought to show, helped legitimate, deepen and extend the hegemonic transition, redefining that idea and harnessing those practices for different agendas are likely to be important for the eventual defeat of its authoritarian postcrisis mutation. Morača (2016), a former NGO worker herself, points in this direction when she asks whether the new post-Yugoslav movements could mark the rise of a new, counterhegemonic and progressive civil society. The noted continuities obviously complicate the answer, but less apparently they hint at a crucial political possibility of a transformation of the dominant form of civil society, with its existing vital resources, from the inside. It is in this constructive kind of spirit that this book has attempted to nuance the usual argument about the antipolitics of an NGO-ized civil society by insisting on its enduring relationships with politics. What I hope for it, then, is that it has made its own modest contribution to the much-needed expansion of left critique to a ‘left art of government’ (Ferguson 2011) by capturing the productive openings of the current conjuncture and as yet uncertain transformation.

Epilogue | 289

Notes 1. See Dokumentacioni centar ‘Vreme’ 2014. 2. For more on the Belgrade Waterfront project and the April 2016 incident, see Aksentijević 2015; Morača 2016; PCRS 2016; WWLBD 2014, 2016. 3. Apart from Veselinović, these were Natalija Simović and Vjekoslav Vuković, whom I came to know as BCIF workers during my fieldwork and who still work in the nowrenamed organization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

_ Abu-Lughod, L. 1990. ‘The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power through Bedouin Women’, American Ethnologist 17(1): 41–55. Aksentijević, M. 2015. ‘Belgrade Waterfront: The Dark Side of “Urban Renewal”’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/ marko-aksentijevi/belgrade-waterfront-dark-side-behind-urban-renewal. Alcock, P., and D. Scott. 2002. ‘Partnerships with the Voluntary Sector: Can Compacts Work?’, in C. Glendinning, M.A. Powell and K. Rummery (eds), Partnerships, New Labour and the Governance of Welfare. Bristol: Policy Press, pp. 113–30. Aleksov, B. 1994. Deserters from the War in Former Yugoslavia. Belgrade: Women in Black. Anastasakis, O. 2005. ‘Europeanization of the Balkans’, Brown Journal of World Affairs 12(1): 77–88. Andreas, P. 2005. ‘Criminalizing Consequences of Sanctions: Embargo Busting and its Legacy’, International Studies Quarterly 49: 335–60. Anguelova-Lavergne, D. 2012. ‘Think Tanks: Actors in the Transition to Global Politics; A Bulgarian Case Study’, in B. Petric (ed.), Democracy at Large: NGOs, Political Foundations, Think Tanks, and International Organizations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 75–95. Anheier, H., M. Kaldor, and M. Glasius. 2012. ‘The Global Civil Society Yearbook: Lessons and Insights 2001–2011’, in M. Kaldor, H.L. Moore and S. Selchow (eds), Global Civil Society 2012: Ten Years of Critical Reflection. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 2–26. Antidiscrimination Coalition (AC). 2011. ‘Povodom sramne presude pripadnicima pokreta “Obraz”’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://cups.rs/2011/04/21/povodom-sramnepresude-pripadnicima-pokreta-obraz. Antonić, S. 2007. Srbi i Evro-Srbi. Belgrade: Čigoja štampa. ———. 2011. ‘Politička korektnost na hotentotski način’. Nova srpska politička misao, 20 February. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.nspm.rs/kolumne-slobodana-an tonica/politicka-korektnost-na-hotentotski-nacin.html?alphabet=l. Arandarenko, M. 2001. ‘Waiting for the Workers: Explaining Labor Quiescence in Serbia’, in S. Crowley and D. Ost (eds), Workers after Workers’ States: Labor and Politics in Postcommunist Eastern Europe. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 159–79. ———. 2006. ‘International Intervention and Ownership of Socio-economic Reforms in Serbia after 2000’, in M. Weichert (ed.), Dialogues: From International Intervention to National/Local Ownership? Sarajevo: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, pp. 89–102. ———. 2010. ‘Politička ekonomija nezaposlenosti’, in M. Arandarenko, A. Praščević and S. Cvejić (eds), Ekonomsko-socijalna struktura Srbije: učinak prve decenije tranzicije. Belgrade: Ekonomski fakultet, pp. 71–86. ———. 2011. ‘Distributive Consequences of the “New Growth Model” in Serbia’, in M. Ehrke (ed.), Export-Led Growth: Central European Experiences – Magic Formula for the Western Balkans? Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, pp. 107–15.

– 290 –

Bibliography | 291

Arandarenko, M., and P. Golicin. 2007. ‘Serbia’, in B. Deacon and P. Stubbs (eds), Social Policy and International Interventions in South East Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 167–86. Arato, A. 1981. ‘Civil Society against the State: Poland 1980–81’, Telos 47: 23–47. Arias-King, F. 2007a. ‘Orange People: A Brief History of Transnational Liberation Networks in East Central Europe’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 15(1): 29–71. ———. 2007b. ‘Revolution is Contagious: Interview with Marek Kapusta’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 15(1): 133–37. Arsenijević, D. (ed.). 2014. Unbribable Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Fight for the Commons. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Aulich, J. 2011. ‘The Democratic Delusion: New Media, Resistance and Revolution in Serbia 1995–2000’, Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media 5: 1–21. Avlijas, S. 2011. ‘Social Policy Reform: Financing Social Services. Practical Lessons from Slovakia’. Policy paper. Bratislava: Pontis Foundation. Avlijas, S., and M. Uvalic. 2011. ‘Political Economy of Local Level Public Sector Employment: A Case Study of Serbia’, Southeastern Europe 35: 209–28. Babović, M. 1999. ‘Potential for an Active Society’, in M. Lazić (ed.), Protest in Belgrade: Winter of Discontent. Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 33–59. Backović, O., M. Vasić and A. Vasović. 1998. ‘Ko to rado ide u vojnike’. Republika 10(198– 199). Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.yurope.com/zines/republika/arhiva/ 98/198/198_18.HTM. Bailey, F.G. 1963. Politics and Social Change: Orissa in 1959. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bajari, P., and S. Tadelis. 2001. ‘Incentives versus Transaction Costs: A Theory of Procurement Contracts’, RAND Journal of Economics 32(3): 387–407. Baker, C. 2012. ‘Prosperity without Security: The Precarity of Interpreters in Postsocialist, Postconflict Bosnia-Herzegovina’, Slavic Review 71(4): 849–72. Baker, G. 1999. ‘The Taming of the Idea of Civil Society’, Democratization 6(3): 1–29. Bakić-Hayden, M. 1995. ‘Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia’, Slavic Review 54(4): 917–31. Bakić-Hayden, M., and R.M. Hayden. 1992. ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review 51(1): 1–15. Balkan Civil Society Development Network (BCSDN). 2012. ‘Donor Map Serbia (Last Updated 12 January 2012)’. Retrieved 10 March 2013 from http://balkancsd.net/compo nent/content/article/956.html?tmpl=component. Balkan Community Initiatives Fund (BCIF). 2005. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2004’. Belgrade. ———. 2007. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2006’. Belgrade. ———. 2009. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2008’. Belgrade. ———. 2010. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2009’. Belgrade. ———. 2011. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2010’. Belgrade. ———. 2012. ‘Godišnji izveštaj 2011’. Belgrade. ———. n.d. ‘Virtus’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://www.tragfondacija.org/pages/ virtus-en/award.php?lang=EN. Balthazar, A.C. 2017. ‘Made in Britain: Brexit, Teacups, and the Materiality of a Nation’, American Ethnologist 44(2): 220–24. Banks, N., and D. Hulme. 2012. ‘The Role of NGOs and Civil Society in Development and Poverty Reduction’. BWPI Working Paper 171. Manchester: Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester. Barry, A., T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds). 1996. Foucault and Political Reason. London: Routledge.

292 | Bibliography

Bechev, D. 2006. ‘Constructing South East Europe: The Politics of Regional Identity in the Balkans’. RAMSES Working Paper 1/06. Oxford: European Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Becker, J., et al. 2010. ‘Peripheral Financialization and Vulnerability to Crisis: A Regulationist Perspective’, Competition and Change 14(3–4): 225–47. Begović, B., and B. Mijatović (eds). 2005. Četiri godine tranzicije u Srbiji. Belgrade: Centar za liberalno-demokratske studije. Belić, B. 2001. ‘Trapavi preletači’. NIN 2628. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www .nin.co.rs/2001-05/17/18034.html. Bernal, V., and I. Grewal. 2014a. ‘The NGO Form: Feminist Struggles, States, and Neoliberalism’, in V. Bernal and I. Grewal (eds), Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–18. ——— (eds). 2014b. Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bieber, F. 2003a. ‘The Other Civil Society in Serbia: Non-governmental Nationalism: The Case of the Serbian Resistance Movement’, in P. Kopecký and C. Mudde (eds), Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-Communist Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 19–36. ———. 2003b. ‘The Serbian Opposition and Civil Society: Roots of the Delayed Transition in Serbia’, International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 17(7): 73–90. Bieber, F., A. Galijaš and R. Archer (eds). 2016. Debating the End of Yugoslavia. London: Routledge. Bierschenk, T., J.-P. Chauveau and J.-P. Olivier de Sardan (eds). 2000. Courtiers en développement: les villages africaines en quête des projets. Paris: Karthala. ———. 2002. ‘Local Development Brokers in Africa: The Rise of a New Social Category’. Working Paper 13. Mainz: Department of Anthropology and African Studies, Johannes Gutenberg University. Bilić, B. 2011. ‘A Concept That is Everything and Nothing: Why Not to Study (Post-)Yugoslav Anti-war and Pacifist Contention from a Civil Society Perspective’, Sociologija 53(3): 297–322. ———. 2016a. ‘Europe ♥ Gays? Europeanisation and Pride Parades in Serbia’, in B. Bilić (ed.), LGBT Activism and Europeanisation in the Post-Yugoslav Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 117–53. ———. 2016b. ‘Whose Pride? LGBT “Community” and the Organization of Pride Parades in Serbia’, in K. Slootmaeckers, H. Touquet and P. Vermeersch (eds), The EU Enlargement and Gay Politics: The Impact of Eastern Enlargement on Rights, Activism and Prejudice. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 203–20. Bjekic, V. 1994. ‘Nova partija ili nessto drugo?’. AIM, 20 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.aimpress.ch/dyn//pubs/archive/data/199409/40920-002-pubsbeo .htm. Blagojević, M. 2006. ‘Current Religious Changes in Serbia and Desecularization’, Filozofija i društvo 31: 239–53. Blair, E. 1986. ‘Yugoslavia’s Permanent Crisis’, East European Reporter 2(2): 46–50. Blair, H. 1997. ‘Donors, Democratisation and Civil Society: Relating Theory to Practice’, in D. Hulme and M. Edwards (eds), Too Close for Comfort? NGOs, States and Donors. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 23–42. Blair, H., et al. 2004. ‘Strategic Assessment of Civil Sector & Political Processes for Serbia’. A report produced for USAID/Serbia and USAID Office for Democracy and Governance. Washington DC: Management Systems International. Bohle, D. 2006. ‘Neoliberal Hegemony, Transnational Capital and the Terms of the EU’s Eastward Expansion’, Capital & Class 88: 57–86. Boissevain, J. 1966. ‘Patronage in Sicily’, Man 1(1): 18–33. ———. 1974. Friends of Friends: Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Bibliography | 293

Bokovoy, М.K., J.A. Irvine and C.S. Lilly (eds). 1997. State–Society Relations in Yugoslavia, 1945–1992. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bolcic, S. 2005. ‘Blocked Transition and Post-socialist Transformation: Serbia in the Nineties’, Review of Sociology 9(2): 27–49. Bornstein, E. 2003. The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe. New York: Routledge. ———. 2009. ‘The Impulse of Philanthropy’, Cultural Anthropology 24(4): 622–51. ———. 2012. Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Böröcz, J. 2001. ‘Introduction: Empire and Coloniality in the Eastern Enlargement of the European Union’, in J. Böröcz and M. Kovács (eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Unveiling EU Enlargement. Telford: Central European Review, pp. 4–50. Börzel, T.A. 2010. ‘Why You Don’t Always Get What You Want: EU Enlargement and Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe’, Acta Politica 45(1/2): 1–10. Boškovic, A. 2005. ‘Distinguishing “Self” and “Other”: Anthropology and National Identity in Former Yugoslavia’, Anthropology Today 21(2): 8–13. Bošnjak, V., and P. Stubbs. 2007. ‘Towards a New Welfare Mix for the Most Vulnerable: Reforming Social Services in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia’, in J. Šipić (ed.), Social Policy and Regional Development Proceedings. Zagreb: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Institute of Economics, pp. 139–65. Brenner, N., J. Peck and N. Theodore. 2010. ‘Variegated Neoliberalization: Geographies, Modalities, Pathways’, Global Networks 10: 182–222. Bridger, S., and F. Pine (eds). 1998. Surviving Postsocialism: Local Strategies and Regional Responses in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. London: Routledge. Brković, Č. 2014. ‘Surviving in a Moveopticon: Humanitarian Actions in Bosnia and Herzegovina’, Contemporary Southeastern Europe 1(2): 42–60. ———. 2016. ‘Scaling Humanitarianism: Humanitarian Actions in a Bosnian Town’, Ethnos 81(1): 99–124. Brown, K. (ed.). 2006. Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia. Bloomfield, NJ: Kumarian. Bruszt, L., and J. Langbein. 2017. ‘Varieties of Dis-embedded Liberalism: EU Integration Strategies in the Eastern Peripheries of Europe’, Journal of European Public Policy 24(2): 297–315. Bunce, V., and S. Wolchik. 2006a. ‘Favorable Conditions and Electoral Revolutions’, Journal of Democracy 17: 7–18. ———. 2006b. ‘International Diffusion and Postcommunist Electoral Revolutions’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 39(3): 283–304. ———. 2007. ‘Defining and Domesticating the Electoral Model: A Comparison of Slovakia and Serbia’. Working Paper 6–07. Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. ———. 2011. Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post-communist Countries. New York: Cambridge University Press. Burawoy, M. 1998. ‘The Extended Case Method’, Sociological Theory 16(1): 4–33. Burawoy, M., and K. Verdery (eds). 1999. Uncertain Transitions: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Burchell, G. 1993. ‘Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self’, Economy and Society 22(3): 267–82. Büscher, B. 2010. ‘Anti-politics as Political Strategy: Neoliberalism and Transfrontier Conservation in Southern Africa’, Development and Change 41(1): 29–51. Buttigieg, J.A. 1995. ‘Gramsci on Civil Society’, boundary 2 22(3): 1–32. Buur, L., and H.M. Kyed. 2005. ‘State Recognition of Traditional Authority in Mozambique: The Nexus of Community Representation and State Assistance’. Discussion Paper 28. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

294 | Bibliography

Buyandelgeriyn, M. 2008. ‘Post-post-transition Theories: Walking on Multiple Paths’, Annual Review of Anthropology 37: 237–50. Byford, J. 2002. ‘Christian Right-Wing Organisations and the Spreading of Anti-Semitic Prejudice in Post-Milošević Serbia: The Case of the Dignity Patriotic Movement’, East European Jewish Affairs 32(2): 43–60. Callewaert, S. 2006. ‘Bourdieu, Critic of Foucault: The Case of Empirical Social Science against Double-Game Philosophy’, Theory, Culture & Society 23(6): 73–98. Carmin, J. 2010. ‘NGO Capacity and Environmental Governance in Central and Eastern Europe’, Acta Politica 45(1/2): 183–202. Carmody, P. 2007. Neoliberalism, Civil Society and Security in Africa. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Carothers, T. 2001. ‘Ousting Foreign Strongmen: Lessons from Serbia’. Policy Brief 1(5). Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Carter, A. 1982. Democratic Reform in Yugoslavia: The Changing Role of the Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Centre for Democracy Foundation (CDF). 1999. ‘Profile’. Retrieved 14 June 2013 from http://www.greekhelsinki.gr/english/organizations/cdf-profile.html. ———. 2004. ‘10 godina’. Belgrade. ———. 2010. ‘Aktuelni projekti: Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.centaronline.org/?stranica=kom_clanak&naredba=prik az&id=251&br_stranice=&sortiranje=&id_kategorija=8&id_menu=10. Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector (CDNS). 2011a. ‘Dotacije nevladinim organizacijama u budžetima opština i gradova 2007–2010’. Belgrade. ———. 2011b. ‘Dotacije nevladinim organizacijama u budžetima Republike Srbije 2007– 2009’. Belgrade. ———. n.d. ‘NVO finansirane iz budžeta Srbije 2008–2010’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.crnps.org.rs/nvobudzet. Chambers, S., and J. Kopstein. 2001. ‘Bad Civil Society’, Political Theory 29(6): 837–65. Chandhoke, N. 1995. State and Civil Society: Explorations in Political Theory. New Delhi: Sage. Cheater, A.P. 1999. ‘Power in the Postmodern Era’, in A.P. Cheater (ed.), The Anthropology of Power: Empowerment and Disempowerment in Changing Structures. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1–12. Civic Initiatives. 2004. ‘Zakon o udruženjima građana’, Mreža 38/39: 7. ———. 2007. ‘Javna rasprava o Nacrtu zakona o udruženjima’, Mreža 67: 1–2. ———. 2008. ‘Završen rad na Prednacrtu zakona o zadužbinama i fondacijama’, Mreža 80/81: 2. ———. 2009a. ‘Percepcija i stavovi javnosti o nevladinom sektoru u Srbiji u 2009. godini’. Belgrade. ———. 2009b. ‘Predstavljamo: “Stvaranje podsticajnog okruženja za razvoj OCD u Srbiji”’, Mreža 82/83: 7–8. ———. 2009c. ‘Vodič za primenu Zakona o udruženjima’. Belgrade. ———. 2011. ‘Procena stanja u sektoru organizacija civilnog društva’. Belgrade. Clark, J.N. 2008. Serbia in the Shadow of Milošević: The Legacy of Conflict in the Balkans. London: Tauris Academic Studies. Clarke, J. 2004a. Changing Welfare, Changing States: New Directions in Social Policy. London: Sage. ———. 2004b. ‘Dissolving the Public Realm? The Logics and Limits of Neoliberalism’, Journal of Social Policy 33(1): 27–48. Cohen, J.L., and A. Arato. 1994. Civil Society and Political Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohen, L.J. 2001. Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milošević. Boulder, CO: Westview.

Bibliography | 295

Collier, S. 2005. ‘The Spatial Forms and Social Norms of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”: Toward a Substantive Analytics’. International Affairs Working Paper 2005–04. New York: New School University. ———. 2011. Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Neoliberalism as Big Leviathan, or. . . ? A Response to Wacquant and Hilgers’, Social Anthropology 20(2): 186–95. Čolović, I., and A. Mimica (eds). 1992. Druga Srbija. Belgrade: Plato. ——— (eds). 1993. Intelektualci i rat. Belgrade: Centre for Antiwar Action. Comaroff, J. 2011. ‘Populism and Late Liberalism: A Special Affinity?’, ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 637: 99–111. Comaroff, J.L., and J. Comaroff (eds). 1999a. Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999b. ‘Introduction’, in J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–43. Coombe, R.J. 1997. ‘Identifying and Engendering the Forms of Emergent Civil Societies: New Directions in Political Anthropology’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20(1): 1–12. Crehan, K. 2002. Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology. London: Pluto. ‘Crkva dala vetar u leđa protivnicima gej parade’. 2010, Blic, 9 October. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.blic.rs/Vesti/Tema-Dana/211033/Crkva-dala-vetar-u-ledja--protivnicima-gej--parade. Civil Society Focal Points (CSFP). 2008. ‘Support to the Government of the Republic of Serbia in the Process of Institutionalization of Cooperation with the Civil Sector’. Proposal for a meeting with the deputy prime minister Đelić held on 27 March 2008. Belgrade. Čulić, N., J. Trifunović and D. Golubović. 2011. Vodič za primenu Zakona o zadužbinama i fondacijama. Belgrade: Balkan Community Initiatives Fund. Ćurković, V., and D. Mijačić. 2012. ‘Impact Assessment of EU Financial Assistance to the Republic of Serbia: Time for Change?’ Policy Brief 1/2012. Belgrade: Institute for Territorial Economic Development. Cvejić, S. (ed.). 2016. Informal Power Networks, Political Patronage and Clientelism in Serbia and Kosovo. Belgrade: SeConS. Cvetičanin, P., and M. Popescu. 2011. ‘The Art of Making Classes in Serbia: Another Particular Case of the Possible’, Poetics 39: 444–68. Daskalov, R. 1997. ‘Ideas about, and Reactions to Modernization in the Balkans’, East European Quarterly 31(2): 141–80. Dawson, J. 2016. Cultures of Democracy in Serbia and Bulgaria: How Ideas Shape Publics. Abingdon: Routledge. Deacon, B. (ed.). 2000. Civil Society, NGOs and Global Governance. Helsinki: STAKES. Delegation of the European Union to the Republic of Serbia (DEURS). 2011. ‘Contracts Awarded (Last Updated 1 August 2011)’. Retrieved 14 March 2013 from http://europa .rs/en/kakodofondova/dodeljeni-ugovori.html. Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS). 2000. ‘Program za demokratsku Srbiju’. Vreme 502, 19 August. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.vreme.com/arhiva_html/ 502/10.html. Dereta, M. 2005. ‘Zakon o NVO pre leta?’, Mreža 44: 1. Diamond, L. 1994. ‘Toward Democratic Consolidation’, Journal of Democracy 5(2): 4–17. Di Lellio, A. 2009. ‘The Missing Democratic Revolution and Serbia’s Anti-European Choice: 1989–2008’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 22(3): 373–84. Đinđić, Z. 1987. ‘Socijalizam i građansko društvo’, Družboslovne razprave 4(5): 38–40.

296 | Bibliography

———. [2002] 2007. ‘Uloga nevladinih organizacija u demokratskom društvu’, in Ž. Paunović (ed.), Budućnost civilnog društva u Srbiji. Belgrade: MilenijuM – Centre for the Development of Civil Society, pp. 9–12. Dokić, G. 2017. ‘States of Victimhood and Irreparable Losses: Serbian Veterans of the Post-Yugoslav Wars’, Glasnik Etnografskog instituta SANU 65(1): 97–110. Dokumentacioni centar ‘Vreme’. 2012. ‘Rascepi i ujedinjenja u Demokratskoj stranci’. Vreme 1123, 12 July. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.vreme.com/cms/ view.php?id=1062449. ———. 2014. ‘Iscrpan ekspoze Aleksandra Vučića’. Vreme, 27 April. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1193813. Dolenec, D. 2011. ‘Dvojbe klasifikacije’, Političke perspektive 3: 129–35. Đorđević, S., S. Stojanović and A. Vesić Antić. 2009. Pokrenimo zajednice! 5. Priručnik za javno zastupanje u procesu decentralizacije. Belgrade: Balkan Community Initiatives Fund. Dragojević, M., and A. Konitzer. 2013. ‘The Forensics of Patronage: Identifying the Linkage between Parties and Public Sector Employment in Serbia’, Sociološki pregled 47(1): 3–22. Dragović-Soso, J. 2002. Saviours of the Nation: Serbia’s Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Dragović-Soso, J., and L.J. Cohen (eds). 2008. State Collapse in South-Eastern Europe: New Perspectives on Yugoslavia’s Disintegration. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Drahokoupil, J. 2008. Globalization and the State in Central and Eastern Europe: The Politics of Foreign Direct Investment. London: Routledge. Drezgić, R. 2010. ‘Religion, Politics and Gender in the Context of Nation-State Formation: The Case of Serbia’, Third World Quarterly 31(6): 955–70. ‘Država najavila odgovor na nasilje’. 2010, B92, 10 October. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2010&mm=10&dd=10&nav_ category=11&nav_id=464334. Dunn, E. 1996. ‘Money, Morality and Modes of Civil Society among American Mormons’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, pp. 25–46. ———. 2004. Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dveri. 2011a. ‘Ekonomski manifest Dveri’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www .dverisrpske.com/sr-CS/nasa-politika/izborni-program/ekonomski-manifest-dveri.php. ———. 2011b. ‘Saopštenje Policijskog sindikata Srbije i Dveri’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.dverisrpske.com/sr-CS/nasa-politika/saopstenja/2011/drustve na-odgovornost.php. ———. 2012. ‘Pisma biračima’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.dverisrpske .com/sr-CS/nasa-politika/pisma-biracima. ———. n.d. ‘Izborni program’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://dverisrpske.com/ sr-CS/nasa-politika/izborni-program. Dyker, D.A. 1990. Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt. London: Routledge. Eisenstadt, S.N., and L. Roniger. 1980. ‘Patron–Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 22(1): 42–77. Elyachar, J. 2005. Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). n.d. ‘Structural and Institutional Change Indicators’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.ebrd.com/ downloads/research/economics/macrodata/sci.xls. European Centre of Serbian Diaspora (ECSD) and SNP 1389. 2010. ‘Bože pravde: zbirka dokaza o kršenju Ustava i zakona Republike Srbije povodom organizovanja Parade ponosa’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://ecsd-bozepravde.blogspot.co.uk.

Bibliography | 297

European Commission. 2009. ‘Serbia 2009 Progress Report’. Brussels. ———. 2010. ‘Serbia 2010 Progress Report’. Brussels. ———. 2011. ‘Analytical Report Accompanying the Document: Communication from the Commission to the European Council and the Parliament: Commission Opinion on Serbia’s Application for Membership of the European Union’. Brussels. European Economic and Social Committee (EESC). 2008. ‘Opinion of the European Economic and Social Committee on EU–Serbia Relations: The Role of Civil Society’. Brussels. European Movement in Serbia (EMinS). 2008. ‘EPUS više ne učestvuje u organizaciji projekta “Najevropljanin godine”’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.emins .org/sr/press/saopstenja/2008/08-10-28.pdf. ———. n.d. ‘Nagrada Najevropljanin godine’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://em ins.org/sr/mreza/najevropljanin.html. Eurostat. 2016a. ‘Gini Coefficient of Equivalised Disposable Income - EU-SILC Survey’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?da taset=ilc_di12&lang=en. ———. 2016b. ‘Social Protection Statistics – Pension Expenditure and Pension Beneficiaries (Data from July 2016)’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://ec.europa.eu/ eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Social_protection_statistics_-_pension_expen diture_and_pension_beneficiaries. Eyal, G. 2000. ‘Anti-politics and the Spirit of Capitalism: Dissidents, Monetarists, and the Czech Transition to Capitalism’, Theory and Society 29(1): 49–92. Eyal, G., I. Szelényi and E. Townsley. 1998. Making Capitalism without Capitalists: Class Formation and Elite Struggles in Post-communist Central Europe. London: Verso. Fagan, A. 2006. ‘Transnational Aid for Civil Society Development in Post-socialist Europe: Democratic Consolidation or a New Imperialism?’, Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics 22(1): 115–34. Falina, M. 2007. ‘Svetosavlje: A Case Study in the Nationalization of Religion’, Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101: 505–27. Featherstone, K. 1998. ‘“Europeanization” and the Centre Periphery: The Case of Greece in the 1990s’, South European Society & Politics 3(1): 23–39. Ferguson, J. 1990. The Anti-politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2004. ‘Power Topographies: Beyond “the State” and “Civil Society” in the Study of African Politics’, in D. Nugent and J. Vincent (eds), A Companion to the Anthropology of Politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 383–99. ———. 2011. ‘Toward a Left Art of Government: From “Foucauldian Critique” to Foucauldian Politics’, History of the Human Sciences 24(4): 61–8. Ferguson, J., and A. Gupta. 2002. ‘Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality’, American Ethnologist 29(4): 981–1002. Fisher, J. 1998. Nongovernments: NGOs and the Political Development of the Third World. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian. Fisher, S. 2006. Political Change in Post-communist Slovakia and Croatia: From Nationalist to Europeanist. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fisher, W.F. 1997. ‘Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices’, Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 439–64. Forbrig, J., and P. Demeš (eds). 2006. Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe. Washington DC: German Marshall Fund. Fotev, G. 2004. ‘Civil Society against Balkanization’, in D.R. Gordon and D.C. Durst (eds), Civil Society in Southeast Europe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–22.

298 | Bibliography

Foucault, M. 1991. ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 87–104. ———. 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979, trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ‘Free’ City of Vršac Civic Parliament (FCVCP). 2010. ‘Ovo je moje mesto: zaštitimo Gradski park’. Vršac. Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. ———. 2001. ‘Social Capital, Civil Society and Development’, Third World Quarterly 22(1): 7–20. Gagnon, V.P. 2004. The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Garsten, C., and M. Lindh de Montoya (eds). 2008. Transparency in a New Global Order: Unveiling Organizational Visions. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gąsior-Niemiec, A. 2007. ‘The Role of Social Partners in the Programming, Management and Evaluation of the European Regional Development Fund in Poland’, in J. Šipić (ed.), Social Policy and Regional Development Proceedings. Zagreb: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Institute of Economics, pp. 112–38. ———. 2010. ‘Lost in the System? Civil Society and Regional Development Policy in Poland’, Acta Politica 45(1/2): 90–111. Ghodsee, K. 2009. ‘Symphonic Secularism: Eastern Orthodoxy, Ethnic Identity and Religious Freedoms in Contemporary Bulgaria’, Anthropology of East Europe Review 27(2): 227–52. Gill, L. 2000. Teetering on the Rim: Global Restructuring, Daily Life, and the Armed Retreat of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia University Press. Gingrich, A., and M. Banks. 2006. ‘Introduction: Neo-nationalism in Europe and Beyond’, in A. Gingrich and M. Banks (eds), Neo-nationalism in Europe and beyond: Perspectives from Social Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–26. Giuliani, M. 1999. ‘Europeanization and Italy’, 6th Biennial Conference of the European Community Studies Association, Pittsburgh, 2–5 June 1999. Gligorijević, J. 2010. ‘Udarne pesnice’. Vreme 1034, 28 October. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=957624. GLOBSEC. n.d. ‘Milan Nič’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://www.globsec.org/ people/milan-nic. Goati, V. 1986. Politička anatomija jugoslovenskog društva. Zagreb: Naprijed. Godenhjelm, S., R.A. Lundin and S. Sjöblom. 2015. ‘Projectification in the Public Sector: The Case of the European Union’, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business 8(2): 324–48. Golubović, D. 2009. ‘Predlog izmena poreskih zakona od značaja za OCD’. Retrieved 26 December 2012 from http://www.gradjanske.org/admin/download/files/_id_157/Rev ised Poreske reforme za OCD (Izvestaj DG).doc. Golubović, D., and B. Anđelković. 2009. ‘Institucionalni mehanizam saradnje vlade i civilnog društva: uporedna iskustva i preporuke za Srbiju (nacrt)’. Belgrade: Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point. Golubović, Z. 2005. ‘Rezultati demokratske tranzicije kroz prizmu građana Srbije 2005’, Filozofija i društvo 32(2): 13–44. ———. 2007. ‘Objektivna ili subjektivistička interpretacija “Otpora”. U povodu teksta S. Naumovića: “Otpor kao postmoderni Faust”’, Filozofija i društvo 18(1): 215–18. ———. 2008. ‘Šta je “normalna nauka”? Odgovor na drugi deo teksta Slobodana Naumovića u “Filozofija i društvo” 3, 2007’, Filozofija i društvo 19(1): 325–30.

Bibliography | 299

Gordy, E.D. 1999. The Culture of Power in Serbia: Nationalism and the Destruction of Alternatives. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Gould, J. 2005. ‘Timing, Scale and Style: Capacity as Governmentality in Tanzania’, in D. Mosse and D. Lewis (eds), The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London: Pluto, pp. 61–84. Gould, J.A., and C. Sickner. 2008. ‘Making Market Democracies? The Contingent Loyalties of Post-privatization Elites in Azerbaijan, Georgia and Serbia’, Review of International Political Economy 15(5): 740–69. Government of the Republic of Serbia (GRS). 2003. ‘Strategija za smanjenje siromaštva u Srbiji’. Belgrade. ———. 2005. ‘Strategija razvoja socijalne zaštite’. Belgrade. ———. 2006. ‘Strategija unapređenja položaja osoba sa invaliditetom u Republici Srbiji’. Belgrade. ———. 2010a. ‘Akcioni plan za ispunjavanje preporuka iz Godišnjeg izveštaja Evropske komisije za 2010. godinu, radi ubrzanja sticanja statusa kandidata’. Belgrade. ———. 2010b. ‘Serbia 2020: Concept of Serbian Development by the Year 2020 (Draft for Public Debate)’. Belgrade. ———. 2011a. ‘Potrebe Republike Srbije za međunarodnom pomoći u periodu 2011-2013. godine’. Belgrade. ———. 2011b. ‘Strategija komunikacije o pristupanju Republike Srbije Evropskoj uniji’. Belgrade. ———. 2014. ‘Second National Report on Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction in the Republic of Serbia’. Belgrade. Gramsci, A. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith. New York: International. Grdešić, M. 2008. ‘Mapping the Paths of the Yugoslav Model: Labour Strength and Weakness in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia’, European Journal of Industrial Relations 14: 133–51. Green, M. 2012. ‘Anticipatory Development: Mobilizing Civil Society in Tanzania’, Critique of Anthropology 32(3): 309–33. Greenberg, J. 2006. ‘Nationalism, Masculinity and Multicultural Citizenship in Serbia’, Nationalities Papers 34(3): 321–41. ———. 2007. ‘Citizen Youth: Student Organizations and the Making of Democracy in Postsocialist Serbia’. Ph.D. dissertation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago. ———. 2010. ‘“There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do about It”: Participation, Apathy, and “Successful” Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia’, Slavic Review 69(1): 41–64. ———. 2011. ‘On the Road to Normal: Negotiating Agency and State Sovereignty in Postsocialist Serbia’, American Anthropologist 113(1): 88–100. ———. 2014. After the Revolution: Youth, Democracy, and the Politics of Disappointment in Serbia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Grozdanić, R., and M. Radović-Marković. 2015. ‘Family Businesses Motives for Internationalisation: Evidence from Serbia’, in L.-P. Dana and V. Ramadani (eds), Family Businesses in Transition Economies: Management, Succession and Internationalization. Cham: Springer, pp. 267–92. Grujić, D. 2010. ‘Lik i delo: Miodrag Babić’. Vreme 1023, 12 August. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=945131. Grupa 17. 1999. ‘Završni račun: ekonomske posledice NATO bombardovanja: procena štete i sredstava potrebnih za ekonomsku rekonstrukciju Jugoslavije’. Belgrade: Stubovi kulture. Gupta, A. 2012. Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Poverty, and Structural Violence in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gusterson, H. 2017. ‘From Brexit to Trump: Anthropology and the Rise of Nationalist Populism’, American Ethnologist 44(2): 209–14.

300 | Bibliography

Haddad, M.A. 2006. ‘Civic Responsibility and Patterns of Voluntary Participation around the World’, Comparative Political Studies 39(10): 1220–42. ———. 2007. Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press. Halmai, G. 2011. ‘(Dis)Possessed by the Spectre of Socialism: Nationalist Mobilization in “Transitional” Hungary’, in D. Kalb and G. Halmai (eds), Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 113–41. Handelman, D. 2005. ‘Microhistorical Anthropology: Toward a Prospective Perspective’, in D. Kalb and H. Tak (eds), Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 29–52. Hanlon, J. 2004. ‘Do Donors Promote Corruption? The Case of Mozambique’, Third World Quarterly 25(4): 747–63. Hann, C. 1996. ‘Introduction: Political Society and Civil Anthropology’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, pp. 1–26. ———. 2002a. ‘Farewell to the Socialist “Other”’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 1–12. ——— (ed.). 2002b. Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. ‘Is Balkan Civil Society an Oxymoron? From Königsberg to Sarajevo, via Przemyśl’, Ethnologia Balkanica 7: 63–78. Hann, C., and E. Dunn (eds). 1996. Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge. Hann, C., and K. Hart. 2011. Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hansen, T.B. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hansen, T.B., and F. Stepputat. 2001. ‘Introduction: States of Imagination’, in T. Blom Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–38. Harbeson, J.W., N. Chazan and D. Rothchild (eds). 1994. Civil Society and the State in Africa. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Hart, K., and H. Ortiz. 2014. ‘The Anthropology of Money and Finance: Between Ethnography and World History’, Annual Review of Anthropology 43: 465–82. Harvey, D. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Havel, V. 1989. Living in Truth. London: Faber & Faber. Hayden, R.M. 1992. ‘Constitutional Nationalism in the Formerly Yugoslav Republics’, Slavic Review 51(4): 654–73. ———. 1999. Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2011. ‘What’s Reconciliation Got to Do with It? The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) as Antiwar Profiteer’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding 5(3): 313–30. ———. 2013. From Yugoslavia to Western Balkans: Studies of a European Disunion, 1991–2011. Leiden: Brill. Helms, E. 2014. ‘The Movementization of NGOs? Women’s Organizing in Postwar BosniaHerzegovina’, in V. Bernal and I. Grewal (eds), Theorizing NGOs: States, Feminisms, and Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 21–49. Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia (HCHRS). 2011. ‘Human Rights Reflect Institutional Impotence. Annual Report: Serbia in 2010’. Belgrade. Hemment, J. 2007. Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Bibliography | 301

———. 2009. ‘Soviet-Style Neoliberalism? Nashi, Youth Voluntarism and the Reconstructing of Social Welfare in Russia’, Problems of Post-Communism 56(6): 36–50. ———. 2012. ‘Redefining Need, Reconfiguring Expectations: The Rise of State-Run Youth Voluntarism Programs in Russia’, Anthropological Quarterly 85(2): 519–54. Hetherington, K. 2011. Guerrilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hilgers, M. 2011. ‘The Three Anthropological Approaches to Neoliberalism’, International Social Science Journal 61(202): 351–64. Holman, O. 2004. ‘Integrating Peripheral Europe: The Different Roads to “Security and Stability” in Southern and Central Europe’, Journal of International Relations and Development 7(2): 208–36. Holmes, D.R. 2000. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism, Neofascism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Howell, J., and J. Pearce. 2000. ‘Civil Society: Technical Instrument or Social Force for Change?’, in D. Lewis and T. Wallace (eds), New Roles and Relevance: Development NGOs and the Challenge of Change. West Hartford, CT: Kumarian, pp. 75–88. Hulme, D., and M. Edwards. 1997. ‘NGOs, States and Donors: An Overview’, in D. Hulme and M. Edwards (eds), NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 3–22. Humphrey, C. 2002. ‘Does the Category “Postsocialist” Still Make Sense?’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 12–15. Ilić, A. 2009. ‘Serbia: The Role of Religion in Society from 1990 to the Present’, in I.A. Murzaku (ed.), Quo Vadis Eastern Europe? Religion, State and Society after Communism. Ravenna: Longo, pp. 237–52. Ilić, V. 2001. ‘Otpor’ – više ili manje od politike. Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. Institute for Nature Conservation of Vojvodina Province (INCVP). 2011. ‘Spomenik prirode “Gradski park” u Vršcu: predlog za stavljanje pod zaštitu kao zaštićenog područja velikog značaja – II kategorije’. Novi Sad. Institute for Sustainable Communities (ISC). n.d. ‘Grants and Assistance’. Retrieved 3 August 2013 from http://csai.iscserbia.org/what_we_do/grants_and_assistance. International and Security Affairs Centre (ISAC). n.d. ‘ISAC Fund’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://www.isac-fund.org/en/about-us/who-we-are. International Crisis Group (ICG). 2003. ‘Serbian Reform Stalls Again’. ICG Balkans Report 145. Belgrade/Brussels. International Monetary Fund (IMF). 2016. ‘Republic of Serbia: Fourth and Fifth Reviews under the Stand-by Arrangement and Rephasing of the Arrangement – Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for the Republic of Serbia’. Washington DC. Ivancheva, M. 2011. ‘The Role of Dissident-Intellectuals in the Formation of Civil Society in (Post)Communist East-Central Europe’, in K. Kouki and E. Romanos (eds), Protest beyond Borders: Contentious Politics in Europe since 1945. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 251–63. Jackson, S. 2005. ‘“The State Didn’t Even Exist”: Non-governmentality in Kivu, Eastern DR Congo’, in J. Igoe and T. Kelsall (eds), Between a Rock and a Hard Place: African NGOs, Donors and the State. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, pp. 165–96. Jalušič, V. 2001. ‘Ideologija in realnost civilnih družb (Slovenija in naslednice nekdanje Jugoslavije ter primer feminističnih skupin)’, in D. Fink-Hafner and M. Haček (eds), Demokratični prehodi II.: Slovenija v primerjavi z drugimi nekdanjimi jugoslovanskimi republikami. Ljubljana: Fakulteta za družbene vede, pp. 173–96.

302 | Bibliography

James, D. 2011. ‘The Return of the Broker: Consensus, Hierarchy, and Choice in South African Land Reform’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17: 318–38. Jano, D. 2008. ‘From “Balkanization” to “Europeanization”: Stages of Western Balkans Complex Transformations’, L’Europe en Formation 349–50: 55–69. Jansen, S. 2000. ‘Victims, Underdogs, and Rebels: Discursive Practices of Resistance in Serbian Protest’, Critique of Anthropology 20(4): 393–418. ———. 2001. ‘The Streets of Beograd: Urban Space and Protest Identities in Serbia’, Political Geography 20: 35–55. ———. 2009a. ‘After the Red Passport: Towards an Anthropology of the Everyday Geopolitics of Entrapment in the EU’s “Immediate Outside”’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 815–32. ———. 2009b. ‘Hope and the State in the Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes’, Ethnologia Europea 39(1): 54–60. ———. 2014a. ‘Hope for/against the State: Gridding in a Besieged Sarajevo Suburb’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 79(2): 238–60. ———. 2014b. ‘On Not Moving Well Enough: Temporal Reasoning in Sarajevo Yearnings for “Normal Lives”’, Current Anthropology 55(S9): S74–S84. ———. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex. New York: Berghahn Books. Jennings, R.S. 2009. ‘Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution: Evaluating Internal and External Factors in Successful Democratic Breakthrough in Serbia’. Working Paper 105. Stanford, CA: Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Jessop, B. 1990. State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 1999. ‘Narrating the Future of the National Economy and the National State: Remarks on Remapping Regulation and Reinventing Governance’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 378–405. ———. 2008. State Power: A Strategic-Relational Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2013. ‘Putting Neoliberalism in Its Time and Place: A Response to the Debate’, Social Anthropology 21(1): 65–74. Johnson, J., and A. Barnes. 2014. ‘Financial Nationalism and Its International Enables: The Hungarian Experience’, Review of International Political Economy 22(3): 65–74. Jung, S. 2012. ‘Building Civil Society on Rubble: Citizenship and the Politics of Culture in Taiwan’, Critique of Anthropology 32(1): 20–42. Kalandadze, K., and M.A. Orenstein. 2009. ‘Electoral Protests and Democratization: Beyond the Color Revolutions’, Comparative Political Studies 42(11): 1403–25. Kalb, D. 2002. ‘Afterword: Globalism and Postsocialist Prospects’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 317– 34. ———. 2009a. ‘Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Post-socialism (and beyond)’, American Ethnologist 36(2): 207–23. ———. 2009b. ‘Headlines of Nationalism, Subtexts of Class: Poland and Popular Paranoia, 1989–2009’, Anthropologica 51(2): 289–301. ———. 2011. ‘Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe’, in D. Kalb and G. Halmai (eds), Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–36. ———. 2012. ‘Thinking about Neoliberalism as if the Crisis Was Actually Happening’, Social Anthropology 20(3): 318–30. ———. 2014. ‘Elias Talks to Hayek (and Learns from Marx and Foucault): Reflections on Neoliberalism, Postsocialism and Personhood’, in N. Makovicky (ed.), Neoliberalism,

Bibliography | 303

Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 187–202. Kalb, D., and G. Halmai (eds). 2011. Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn Books. Kalb, D., and H. Tak. 2005. ‘Introduction: Critical Junctions: Recapturing Anthropology and History’, in D. Kalb and H. Tak (eds), Critical Junctions: Anthropology and History beyond the Cultural Turn. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–28. ‘Kako je nastala Hrvatska Lutrija’. 2010, Poslovni dnevnik, 28 August. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.poslovni.hr/domace-kompanije/kako-je-nastala-hrvat ska-lutrija-154032. Kalik, M. 2008. ‘Liberalni fašizam i rasizam u Srbiji’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://starisajt.nspm.rs/koment_2007/2008_kalik12.htm. Kamat, S. 2002. Development Hegemony: NGOs and the State in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Karim, L. 2008. ‘Demystifying Micro-credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs, and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh’, Cultural Dynamics 20(1): 5–29. Karlström, M. 1999. ‘Civil Society and Its Presuppositions: Lessons from Uganda’, in J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 104–23. Kaufman, R.F. 1974. ‘The Patron–Client Concept and Macro-politics: Prospects and Problems’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 16(3): 284–308. Keane, J. (ed.). 1988a. Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London: Verso. ———. 1988b. ‘Despotism and Democracy: The Origins and Development of the Distinction between Civil Society and the State 1750–1850’, in J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London: Verso, pp. 35–70. Kideckel, D.A. 2002. ‘The Unmaking of an East-Central European Working Class’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practies in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 114–32. ———. 2007. Getting by in Postsocialist Romania: Labor, the Body, and Working-Class Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kipnis, A.B. 2008. ‘Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist Legacy, or Technologies of Governing?’, American Ethnologist 35(2): 275–89. Klajn, I. 2001. ‘Neologisms in Present-Day Serbian’, International Journal of the Sociology of Language 151: 89–110. Kluvers, R. 2001. ‘Program Budgeting and Accountability in Local Government’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 60(2): 35–43. Koch, I. 2017. ‘What’s in a Vote? Brexit beyond Culture Wars’, American Ethnologist 44(2): 225–30. Kohrman, M. 2005. Bodies of Difference: Experiences of Disability and Institutional Advocacy in the Making of Modern China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ‘Kolubara – prevara veka: Transkript treće epizode’. 2011, Insajder, 14 February. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from https://insajder.net/sr/sajt/prevaraveka/257. Konrád, G. 1984. Antipolitics: An Essay, trans. R.E. Allen. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Konstantinović, R. 2002. ‘Druga Srbija je Srbija koja se ne miri sa zločinom’, in A. Mimica (ed.), Druga Srbija: deset godina posle (1992–2002). Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, pp. 10–12. Kopecký, P. 2003. ‘Civil Society, Uncivil Society, and Contentious Politics in Post-communist Europe’, in P. Kopecký and C. Mudde (eds), Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-communist Europe. London: Routledge, pp. 1–17. Kopecký, P., and C. Mudde (eds). 2003. Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Post-communist Europe. London: Routledge.

304 | Bibliography

Kostovicova, D. 2004. ‘Post-socialist Identity, Territoriality and European Integration: Serbia’s Return to Europe after Milošević’, GeoJournal 61: 23–30. ———. 2006. ‘Civil Society and Post-communist Democratization: Facing a Double Challenge in Post-Milošević Serbia’, Journal of Civil Society 2(1): 21–37. Kováč, P. 2011. ‘Dotácie u Dzurindu. Po známosti?’. Pravda, 4 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://spravy.pravda.sk/domace/clanok/171626-dotacie-u-dzu rindu-po-znamosti. Kraft, M.G. 2015. ‘Insurrections in the Balkans: From Workers and Students to New Political Subjectivities’, in S. Horvat and I. Štiks (eds), Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. London: Verso, pp. 199–222. Krstić, G., and P. Sanfey. 2010. ‘Earnings Inequality and the Informal Economy: Evidence from Serbia’. Working Paper 114. London: European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Kumar, K. 1993. ‘Civil Society: An Inquiry into the Usefulness of an Historical Term’, British Journal of Sociology 44(3): 375–95. Kutter, A., and V. Trappmann. 2010. ‘Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe: The Ambivalent Legacy of Accession’, Acta Politica 45(1/2): 41–69. Kuus, M. 2004. ‘Europe’s Eastern Expansion and the Reinscription of Otherness in East-Central Europe’, Progress in Human Geography 28(4): 472–89. ———. 2007. ‘Something Old, Something New: Eastness in European Union Enlargement’, Journal of International Relations and Development 10(2): 150–67. Kuzio, T. 2006. ‘Civil Society, Youth, and Societal Mobilization in Democratic Revolutions’, Communist and Postcommunist Studies 39(3): 365–86. Laclau, E., and C. Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Toward a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Laffont, J.-J., and J. Tirole. 1993. A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lalić, V. 2011. ‘Raspamećuj’. Retrieved 2 May 2013 from http://www.pressonline.rs/info/ komentar-dana/162924/raspamecuj.html. Lapčić, V. 2011. ‘Njihova pravila i naša posla’, ekonom:east 568: 16–9. Lazić, M. 2000. ‘Serbia: The Adaptive Reconstruction of Elites’, in J. Highley and G. Lengyel (eds), Elites after State Socialism: Theories and Analysis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 123–40. ———. 2005. Promene i otpori: Srbija u transformacijskim procesima. Belgrade: Filip Višnjić. ———. 2011. Čekajući kapitalizam: nastanak novih klasnih odnosa u Srbiji. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Lazić, M., and S. Cvejić. 2005. ‘Stratificational Changes in Serbian Society: A Case of Blocked Post-socialist Transformation’, in A. Milić (ed.), Transformation and Strategies: Everyday Life in Serbia at the Beginning of the Third Millennium. Belgrade: Institute for Sociological Research, pp. 35–50. Lazić, M., and J. Pešić. 2012. Making and Unmaking State-Centered Capitalism in Serbia. Belgrade: Institute of Sociology and Social Research, Čigoja štampa. Lazic, M., and L. Sekelj. 1997. ‘Privatisation in Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)’, Europe-Asia Studies 49(6): 1057–70. Lazić, M., and V. Vuletić. 2009. ‘The Nation State and the EU in the Perceptions of Political and Economic Elites: The Case of Serbia in Comparative Perspective’, Europe-Asia Studies 61(6): 987–1001. Ledeneva, A. 2006. How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2011. ‘Open Secrets and Knowing Smiles’, East European Politics and Societies 25(4): 720–36.

Bibliography | 305

Lemarchand, R., and K. Legg. 1972. ‘Political Clientelism and Development: A Preliminary Analysis’, Comparative Politics 4(2): 149–78. Lendvai, N. 2007. ‘Europeanization of Social Policy? Prospects and Challenges for South East Europe’, in B. Deacon and P. Stubbs (eds), Social Policy and International Interventions in South East Europe. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 22–44. Leve, L., and L. Karim. 2001. ‘Introduction: Privatizing the State: Ethnography of Development, Transnational Capital, and NGOs’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 24(1): 53–58. Levitsky, S., and L. Way. 2002. ‘The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism’, Journal of Democracy 13(2): 51–65. Lewis, D. 1998. ‘Inter-agency Partnerships in Aid-Recipient Countries: Lessons from an Aquaculture Project in Bangladesh’, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 27(3): 323–38. ———. 2002. ‘Civil Society in African Contexts: Reflections on the Usefulness of a Concept’, Development and Change 33(4): 569–86 ———. 2004. ‘On the Difficulty of Studying “Civil Society”: Reflections on NGOs, State and Democracy in Bangladesh’, Contributions to Indian Sociology 38(3): 299–322. ———. 2008. ‘Crossing the Boundaries between “Third Sector” and State: Life-Work Histories from the Philippines, Bangladesh and the UK’, Third World Quarterly 29(1): 125–41. Li, T.M. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lindquist, J. 2015. ‘Brokers and Brokerage, Anthropology of’, in J.D. Wright (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2nd edn, vol. 2. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 870–74. Linz, J.J., and A. Stepan. 1996. ‘Toward Consolidated Democracies’, Journal of Democracy 7(2): 14–33. Liotta, P.H. 2001. ‘Paradigm Lost: Yugoslav Self-Management and the Economics of Disaster’, Balkanologie 5(1–2): 1–15. Lo, D. 2012. Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization: Studies in the Political Economy of Institutions and Late Development. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Lončar, J. 2010. ‘Odnos civilnog društva i države nakon 5. oktobra 2000. godine’, in D. Pavlović (ed.), Razvoj demokratskih ustanova u Srbiji: deset godina posle. Belgrade: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, pp. 119–30. Long, N. 2001. Development Sociology: Actor Perspectives. London: Routledge. Lydall, H. 1984. Yugoslav Socialism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Clarendon. Mabbett, D. 2005. ‘The Development of Rights-Based Social Policy in the European Union: The Example of Disability Rights’, Journal of Common Market Studies 43(1): 97–120. Madžar, L. 2011. ‘Stupice izlaska iz socijalističkog poretka: dugo putovanje ka tržišnoj privredi’, in S. Mihailović (ed.), Dometi tranzicije od socijalizmu ka kapitalizmu. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, pp. 197–215. Magrath, P. 2010. ‘Beyond Governmentality: Building Theory for Weak and Fragile States’, Anthropology Matters 12(2): 1–18. Makovicky, N. 2013. ‘“Work Pays”: Slovak Neoliberalism as “Authoritarian Populism”’, Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 67: 77–90. ———. 2014a. ‘Introduction: Me, Inc.? Untangling Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism’, in N. Makovicky (ed.), Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 1–16. ——— (ed.). 2014b. Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism: Enterprising Selves in Changing Economies. Farnham: Ashgate. Malešević, M. 2006. ‘Pravoslavlje kao srž “nacionalnog bića” postkomunističke Srbije’, Zbornik Etnografskog instituta SANU 22: 99–121.

306 | Bibliography

Mandel, R. 2002. ‘Seeding Civil Society’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 279–96. Mandel, R., and C. Humphrey (eds). 2002. Markets and Moralities: Ethnographies of Postsocialism. Oxford: Berg. Marinković, D. 1995. Štrajkovi i društvena kriza. Belgrade: Institut za političke studije. Marković, M. 1981. ‘New Forms of Democracy and Socialism’, Praxis International 1(1): 23–39. Marković, V. 2001. ‘“Druga Srbija” u Diskrepanciji: elementi ideologija neoliberalizma i orijentalizma u procesu konstituisanja jednog balkanskog civilnog društva’, Diskrepancija 2(3): 19–24. Martinov, Z. 2000. ‘Pred ambisom’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.yurope .com/zines/republika/arhiva/2000/propileji/2.html. Mašović, S., and S. Bosak. 1977. ‘Zakonodavna zaštita distrofičara u SFRJ’, Neurologija 25: 101–7. Masquelier, A. 1999. ‘Debating Muslims, Disputed Practices: Struggles for the Realization of an Alternative Moral Order in Niger’, in J.L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff (eds), Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 219–50. Mastnak, T. (ed.). 1986. Socialistična civilna družba? Zbornik. Ljubljana: Republiška konferenca ZSMS. ———. 1992. ‘Civil Society in Slovenia: From Opposition to Power’, in J. Seroka and V. Pavlovic (eds), The Tragedy of Yugoslavia: The Failure of Democratic Transformation. London: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 49–66. ———. 1994. ‘From Social Movements to National Sovereignty’, in J. Benderly and E. Kraft (eds), Independent Slovenia: Origins, Movements, Prospects. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 93–112. ———. 2005. ‘The Reinvention of Civil Society: Through the Looking Glass of Democracy’, European Journal of Sociology 46(2): 323–55. Mathews, D. 2001. War Prevention Works: 50 Stories of People Resolving Conflict. Oxford: Oxford Research Group. Matić, J. 2012. ‘(Too) High Expectations of Democracy in Serbia? Interpretation of Empirical Research Results’, Southeastern Europe 36: 304–27. Matković, G. 2006. Decentralizacija socijalne zaštite u Srbiji. Belgrade: Centar za liberalnodemokratske studije. Matković, G., G. Krstić and B. Mijatović. 2015. ‘Serbia: Income and Living Conditions 2013’. Belgrade: Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia. Matza, T. 2009. ‘Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the Self, Publics, and Politics on the Russian Talk Show’, Cultural Anthropology 24(3): 489–522. ———. 2012. ‘“Good Individualism”? Psychology, Ethics, and Neoliberalism in Postsocialist Russia’, American Ethnologist 39(4): 804–18. McNamara, K.R. 1998. The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Medina, L.K. 2010. ‘When Government Targets “The State”: Transnational NGO Government and the State in Belize’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(2): 245–63. Mercer, C. 2002. ‘NGOs, Civil Society and Democratization: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Progress in Development Studies 2(1): 5–22. Merritt, J.S. 2006. ‘Quick Impact, Slow Recovery? Funders’ Priorities and the Local Realities of Transition Programming’, in K. Brown (ed.), Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia. Bloomfield, NJ: Kumarian, pp. 27–44. Merry, S.E. 2006. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Bibliography | 307

Mertz, E., and A. Timmer. 2010. ‘Introduction: Getting It Done: Ethnographic Perspectives on NGOs’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 33(2): 171–77. Michnik, A. 1985. Letters from Prison and Other Essays, trans. M. Latynski. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mićunović, D. 2000. ‘Zalazak sunca na Golom otoku’. NIN 2586, 20 July. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.nin.co.rs/2000-07/20/13644.html. Mihailović, S. (ed.). 2005. Pet godina tranzicije u Srbiji I. Belgrade: Socijaldemokratski klub, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. ——— (ed.). 2006. Pet godina tranzicije u Srbiji II. Belgrade: Socijaldemokratski klub, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. ——— (ed.). 2011. Dometi tranzicije od socijalizma ka kapitalizmu. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Mijatović, B. (ed.). 2008. Reforme u Srbiji: dostignuća i izazovi. Belgrade: Centar za liberalnodemokratske studije. ‘Milinkevich Impresses in Bratislava’. n.d. WikiLeaks. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://wikileaks.org/cable/2006/12/06BRATISLAVA961.html. Mikuš, M. 2011. ‘“State Pride”: Politics of LGBT Rights and Democratisation in “European Serbia”’, East European Politics and Societies 25(4): 834–51. ———. 2013. ‘“European Serbia” and Its “Civil” Discontents: Beyond Liberal Narratives of Modernisation’. Working Paper 7. Graz: Centre for Southeast European Studies, University of Graz. ———. 2015a. ‘Civil Society and EU Integration of Serbia: Toward a Historical Anthropology of Globalizing Postsocialist Europe’, in H. Cervinkova, M. Buchowski and Z. Uherek (eds), Rethinking Ethnography in Central Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 147–71. ———. 2015b. ‘“Faggots Won’t Walk through the City”: Religious Nationalism and LGBT Pride Parades in Serbia’, in S. Sremac and R.R. Ganzevoort (eds), Religious and Sexual Nationalisms in Central and Eastern Europe: Gods, Gays and Governments. Leiden: Brill, pp. 15–32. ———. 2016. ‘The Justice of Neoliberalism: Moral Ideology and Redistributive Politics of Public-Sector Retrenchment in Serbia’, Social Anthropology 24(2): 211–27. Mikuš, M., and G. Dokić. 2016. ‘“Nobody’s Stronger than the State”: Crisis and Hope among Serbian NGO Workers and War Veterans’, Ethnologia Balkanica 18: 385–403. Miladinović, V. 2010. ‘Gde su, što ne rade: Heroji 5. oktobra’. Press, 19 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.naslovi.net/2010-09-19/press/gde-su-sto-nerade-heroji-5-oktobra/1988673. Milenković, M.R. 2010. ‘Saglasni da Evropa ima alternativu’. Danas, 20 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/politika/saglasni_da_ev ropa_ima_alternativu_.56.html?news_id=199774. Miljković, M., and M.A. Hoare. 2005. ‘Crime and the Economy under Milošević and His Successors’, in S.P. Ramet and V. Pavlaković (eds), Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milošević and after. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 192–226. Miller, P., and N. Rose. 2008. Governing the Present: Administering Economic, Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Minić, J., and M. Dereta. 2007. ‘Izlaz 2000: An Exit to Democracy in Serbia’, in J. Forbrig and P. Demeš (eds), Reclaiming Democracy: Civil Society and Electoral Change in Central and Eastern Europe. Washington DC: German Marshall Fund, pp. 53–87. Ministry of Finance (MoF). 2014. ‘Public Finance Bulletin no. 124’. Belgrade. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Slovak Republic (MFASR). 2003a. ‘Country Strategy Paper: Slovak Official Development Assistance to the State Union of Serbia and Montenegro’. Bratislava.

308 | Bibliography

———. 2003b. ‘Medium-Term Strategy for Official Development Assistance: 2003–08’. Bratislava. ———. 2009a. ‘National Programme of the Slovak Official Development Assistance for 2009’. Bratislava. ———. 2009b. ‘Strednodobá stratégia oficiálnej rozvojovej pomoci Slovenskej republiky na roky 2009–2013’. Bratislava. Miorelli, R. 2008. ‘The Discourse on Civil Society in Poverty Reduction Policy in the Argentina of the 1990s: The Neoliberal and Populist Political Project’s Struggles for Hegemony’. Ph.D. thesis. London School of Economics and Political Science. Mitchell, K. 2011. ‘Transnationalism, Neoliberalism, and the Rise of the Shadow State’, Economy and Society 30(2): 165–89. Mitchell, T. 1999. ‘Society, Economy and the State Effect’, in G. Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 76–97. ———. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mladenov, T. 2017. ‘Governing through Personal Assistance: A Bulgarian Case’, Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 19(2): 91–103. Mojžita, M. 2003. Belehrad: poznámky 1995–2001. Bratislava: Dilema. Morača, T. 2016. ‘Between Defiance and Compliance: A New Civil Society in the PostYugoslav Space?’. Occasional paper. Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso. Morris, D. 2011. ‘The Case of England and Wales: Striking the Right Balance of “Hard” Law versus “Soft” Law’, in S.D. Phillips and S.R. Smith (eds), Governance and Regulation in the Third Sector: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 37–68. Mosse, D. 2005a. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto. ———. 2005b. ‘Global Governance and the Ethnography of International Aid’, in D. Mosse and D. Lewis (eds), The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London: Pluto, pp. 1–36. ———. 2011. ‘Introduction: The Anthropology of Expertise and Professionals in International Development ‘, in D. Mosse (ed.), Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 1–31. ———. 2013. ‘The Anthropology of International Development’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 227–46. Mosse, D., and D. Lewis (eds). 2005. The Aid Effect: Giving and Governing in International Development. London: Pluto. ———. 2006. ‘Theoretical Approaches to Brokerage and Translation in Development’, in D. Lewis and D. Mosse (eds), Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies. Bloomfield, NJ: Kumarian, pp. 1–26. Muehlebach, A. 2011. ‘On Affective Labor in Post-Fordist Italy’, Cultural Anthropology 26(1): 59–82. ———. 2012. The Moral Neoliberal: Welfare and Citizenship in Italy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2013. ‘The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy, Italy’, American Anthropologist 115(3): 452–65. Munck, R. 2002. ‘Global Civil Society: Myths and Prospects’, Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 13(4): 349–61. Mungiu-Pippidi, A. 2005. ‘Reinventing the Peasants: Local State Capture in Post-communist Europe’, in S. Dorondel and S. Serbans (eds), Between East and West: Studies in Anthropology and Social History. Buchurest: Editura Institutului Cultural Roman, pp. 308–26. Musić, G. 2011. ‘Yugoslavia: Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm’, in I. Ness and D. Azzelini (eds), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Chicago, IL: Haymarket, pp. 172–90.

Bibliography | 309

———. 2013. Serbia‘s Working Class in Transition 1988–2013. Belgrade: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung. ———. 2014. ‘Serbia’s Protracted Transition under State-Led and Neoliberal Models of Capitalist Development (1988–2008)’, METU Studies in Development 41(3): 371–88. Narotzky, S., and G. Smith. 2006. Immediate Struggles: People, Power, and Place in Rural Spain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Naši. 2010. ‘Održan još jedan zabranjeni protest’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from https:// nasisrbija.org/odrzan-jos-jedan-zabranjeni-protest. ———. 2011. ‘SNP Naši: Krvava Meri je žedna još srpske krvi!’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from https://nasisrbija.org/snp-nasi-krvava-meri-je-zedna-jos-srpske-krvi. ‘Nasilje uz blagoslov: Transkript prve epizode’. 2010, Insajder, 22 November. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://insajder.net/sr/sajt/nasilje/255/Transkript-prve-epizode .htm. National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia (NARS). n.d. ‘European Integration’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.parlament.gov.rs/activities/european-inte gration.606.html. National Coalition for Decentralization (NCD). n.d. ‘Finansijski izveštaj o radu Nacionalne koalicije za decentralizaciju za period 2011-13. godina’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://nkd.rs/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/fin2011-2013.pdf. National Employment Service (NES). 2016. ‘Izveštaj o radu Nacionalne službe za zapošljavanje za 2015. godinu’. Belgrade: National Employment Service. Naumović, S. 2002. ‘The Ethnology of Transformation as Transformed Ethnology: The Serbian Case’, Ethnologia Balkanica 6: 7–37. ———. 2005. ‘The Social Origins and Political Uses of Popular Narratives on Serbian Disunity’, Filozofija i društvo 26: 65–104. ———. 2006. ‘“Otpor!” kao postmoderni Faust: društveni pokret novog tipa, tradicija prosvećenog reformizma i “izborna revolucija” u Srbiji’, Filozofija i društvo 31: 147–94. ———. 2007. ‘Da li je Faust bio “otporaš”? O subjektivističkom objektivizmu i objektivističkom subjektivizmu u interpretaciji (post)modernih društvenih i političkih pokreta’, Filozofija i društvo 18(3): 147–94. Navaro-Yashin, Y. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Nedeljković, V. 2010. ‘Porodičnom šetnjom protiv Parade ponosa’. Press, 8 October. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.pressonline.rs/sr/vesti/vesti_dana/story/ 136016/Porodičnom+šetnjom+protiv+Parade+ponosa.html. ‘(Ne)vidljiva dinamika promena’. 2003, Republika 15(312–13). Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.republika.co.rs/312-313/12.html. NGO Policy Group. 2001. ‘Third Sector in Serbia: Status and Prospects’. Belgrade: Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector, NGO Policy Group. Nonprofit Sector Development Fund of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina (NSDFAPV). 2007. ‘Informator o radu Fonda za razvoj neprofitnog sektora Autonomne pokrajine Vojvodine’. Retrieved 10 August 2012 from http://www.fondrnps.org.rs/ ?page_id=319. Nuti, P.J. 2006. ‘Toward Reflective Practice: Understanding and Negotiating Democracy in Macedonia’, in K. Brown (ed.), Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia. Bloomfield, NJ: Kumarian, pp. 73–94. Obad, O. 2010. ‘The Importance of Being Central European: Traces of lmperial Border(s) in Croatian Accession to the EU’. WS 4 2010 Working Paper 98. EastBordNet. Obradović, B. 1999. ‘Kosovsko ogoljenje’, Nova Iskra 7(56): 20–21. ‘Odustajanje od EU bila bi katastrofa’. 2011, Press, 4 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.pressonline.rs/info/politika/174136/odustajanje-od-eu-bilo-bi-k atastrofa.html.

310 | Bibliography

Office for Cooperation with Civil Society (OCCS). 2011. ‘Strateški okvir Kancelarije za saradnju sa civilnim društvom za period 2011–2014’. Belgrade. ———. 2014. ‘Godišnji izveštaj o radu za period januar – decembar 2013. godine’. Belgrade. ———. n.d. ‘Obuka za državne službenike’. Retrieved 3 January 2018 from http://civilnod rustvo.gov.rs/poziv.39.html?invitationId=253. Olivier de Sardan, J.-P. 2005. Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Social Change. London: Zed Books. Ong, A. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. ‘Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology’, Transactions 32: 3–8. Ost, D. 2005. The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). n.d. ‘Aid (ODA) Disbursements to Countries and Regions [DAC2a]’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=42233&lang=en. Orlović, S. 2011. ‘Political Transformation and Socio-economic Changes in Serbia’, in M. Stambolieva and S. Dehnert (eds), Welfare States in Transition: 20 Years after the Yugoslav Welfare Model. Sofia: Friedrich Ebert Foundation, pp. 262–87. Palairet, M. 2001. ‘The Economic Consequences of Slobodan Milošević’, Europe-Asia Studies 53(6): 903–19. Paley, J. 2001. Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-dictatorship Chile. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Pantić, D.J. 1995. ‘Dominantne vrednosne orijentacije u Srbiji i mogućnosti nastanka civilnog društva’, in V. Pavlović (ed.), Potisnuto civilno društvo. Belgrade: Eko centar, pp. 71–103. Paunović, Ž. 1997. ‘Profil nevladinog sektora u SR Jugoslaviji’. Republika 9(177–78). Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.yurope.com/zines/republika/arhiva/97/177/ 177_16.HTM. ———. 2001. ‘Exit 2000: Non-governmental Organizations for Democratic and Fair Elections: Pre-elections Campaigns of NGOs in Serbia’. Belgrade: Centre for Democracy Foundation, Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector, Civic Initiatives. ———. 2006. Nevladine organizacije. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Pavićević, Đ. 2010. ‘Peti oktobar: nedovršena revolucija’, in D. Pavlović (ed.), Razvoj demokratskih ustanova u Srbiji: deset godina posle. Belgrade: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, pp. 41–52. Pavlaković, V. 2005. ‘Serbia Transformed? Political Dynamics in the Milošević Era and after’, in S.P. Ramet and V. Pavlaković (eds), Serbia since 1989: Politics and Society under Milošević and after. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, pp. 13–54. Pavlović, V. (ed.). 1987. Obnova utopijskih energija. Belgrade: Istraživačko-izdavački centar SSO Srbije. ———. 1995. ‘Civilno društvo i mogućnosti demokratskih promena ka otvorenom društvu’, in V. Pavlović (ed.), Potisnuto civilno društvo. Belgrade: Eko centar, pp. 11–48. ———. 2014. Civilno društvo i demokratija. Belgrade: Udruženje za političke nauke Srbije i Crne Gore. Pavlovich, P. 1989. The History of the Serbian Orthodox Church. Toronto: Serbian Heritage. Pavlowitch, S.K. 2002. Serbia: The History behind the Name. London: Hurst. Peck, J. 2001. Workfare States. New York: Guilford Press. Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner. 2009. ‘Postneoliberalism and Its Malcontents’, Antipode 41(1): 94–116. Pejovich, S. 1979. Social Security in Yugoslavia. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.

Bibliography | 311

Pelczynski, Z.A. 1988. ‘Solidarity and “the Rebirth of Civil Society” in Poland, 1976–81’, in J. Keane (ed.), Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives. London: Verso, pp. 361–80. Pelkmans, M. 2009. ‘The “Transparency” of Christian Proselytizing in Kyrgyzstan’, Anthropological Quarterly 82(2): 423–45. Perica, V. 2006. ‘The Politics of Ambivalence: Europeanization and the Serbian Orthodox Church’, in T.A. Byrnes and P.J. Katzenstein (eds), Religion in an Expanding Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 176–203. Perišić, N., and J. Vidojević. 2014. ‘Responses of the Serbian Welfare State to the Global Economic Crisis’, Revija za socijalnu politiku 22(2): 177–94. Pešić, J. 2006. ‘Persistence of Traditionalist Value Orientations in Serbia’, Sociologija 48(4): 298–307. Pešić, V. 1987. ‘Civilno društvo i pacifikacija unutrašnjih odnosa’, Družboslovne razprave 4(5): 105–12. ———. 2006. ‘(De)blokiranje tranzicije i unutarstranačka demokratija’, in Z. Lutovac (ed.), Demokratija u političkim strankama Srbije. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Institut društvenih nauka, pp. 21–30. ———. 2007. ‘State Capture and Widespread Corruption in Serbia’. Working Document 262. Centre for European Policy Studies. ———. 2010. ‘Rekonstrukcija petooktobarskih zbivanja na osnovu memoarske i stručne literature’, in D. Pavlović (ed.), Razvoj demokratskih ustanova u Srbiji: deset godina posle. Belgrade: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, pp. 25–40. Peškir, T. 2010. ‘Slovakia as an Example: Advancing Consumer Policy in Serbia in Light of EU Accession’. Policy paper. Bratislava: Pontis Foundation. Petrova, T. 2010. ‘Thinking about Transnational Diffusion and Cycles of Protest: The 1996– 2005 Wave of Democratization in Eastern Europe’, in S. Teune (ed.), The Transnational Condition: Protest Dynamics in an Entangled Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 146–66. Petrović, T. 2014. ‘Introduction: Europeanization and the Balkans’, in T. Petrović (ed.), Mirroring Europe: Ideas of Europe and Europeanization in Balkan Societies. Leiden: Brill, pp. 3–19. ———. 2015. ‘On the Way to Europe: EU Metaphors and Political Imagination of the Western Balkans’, in S. Horvat and I. Štiks (eds), Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. London: Verso, pp. 103–21. Phillips, S.D. (ed.). 2005. ‘Special Issue on “Postsocialism, Governmentality, and Subjectivity”’, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 70(4): 437–537. ———. 2011. Disability and Mobile Citizenship in Postsocialist Ukraine. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ———. 2012. ‘Representations of Disability in Print News Media in Postsocialist Ukraine’, Disability & Society 27(4): 487–502. Pond, E. 2009. ‘Serbia’s Choice’, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 51(2): 123–36. Pontis Foundation. 2004. ‘Výročná správa 2003’. Bratislava. ———. 2005. ‘Výročná správa 2004’. Bratislava. ———. 2006. ‘Výročná správa 2005’. Bratislava. ———. 2007. ‘Výročná správa 2006’. Bratislava. ———. 2009. ‘Výročná správa 2008’. Bratislava. ———. n.d. ‘‘Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund’. Retrieved 25 January 2012 from http://www.nadaciapontis.sk/en/14519. Pošarac, A. 1995. ‘Pauperizacija stanovništva u Srbiji: jedan od osnovnih uzroka potisnutosti civilnog društva’, in V. Pavlović (ed.), Potisnuto civilno društvo. Belgrade: Eko centar, pp. 329–66.

312 | Bibliography

Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point (PRSIFP). 2008. ‘Počela izrada baze projekata NVO – saradnja sa poslovnim sektorom’, Bilten o primeni Strategije za smanjenje siromaštva u Srbiji 14: 5. ———. 2009. ‘Baza projekata OCD: Praćenje rezultata i predstavljanje poslovnom sektoru’, Bilten o primeni Strategije za smanjenje siromaštva u Srbiji 17: 2. Powell, J.S. 1970. ‘Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics’, American Political Science Review 63: 411–25. ‘Predstavljanje Uredbe kojom će biti regulisano Finansiranje udruženja iz budžeta Republike Srbije’. 2012. Retrieved 16 October 2012 from http://www.webtv.rs/media/mc/go play.asp?oid=37738. Pridham, G. 2005. ‘Political Elites in Central and Eastern Europe and the EU’s Democratic Conditionality: A Case of Convergence?’, Second International Conference on Elites and EU Enlargement, Bremen, Germany, 13–14 May 2005. ‘Pro-EU Forces Win in Serbia’. 2008, Deutsche Welle, 12 May. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.dw.com/en/pro-eu-forces-win-in-serbia/a-3330014. Prokopijević, M. 2010. ‘Propuštena prilika: deset godina ekonomske tranzicije u Srbiji’, in D. Pavlović (ed.), Razvoj demokratskih ustanova u Srbiji – deset godina posle. Belgrade: Heinrich Böll Stiftung, pp. 73–82. Protector of Citizens of the Republic of Serbia (PCRS). 2015. ‘Regular Annual Report of the Protector of Citizens for 2014’. Belgrade. ———. 2016. ‘Policija u naselju Savamala nije blagovremeno postupila po prijavama građana’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.ombudsman.rs/index.php/ 2012-02-07-14-03-33/4723-2016-05-09-14-55-34. Putnam, R.D. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2000. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster. Radojičić, M. 2006. ‘Srbija u procesima evroatlantskih integracija – između traumatičnog iskustva i real-političke nužnosti’, Filozofija i društvo 30: 135–48. Rahman, M.A. 2002. ‘The Politics of “Uncivil” Society in Egypt’, Review of African Political Economy 29(91): 21–35. Rajak, D. 2011. In Good Company: An Anatomy of Corporate Social Responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ramet, S.P. 2002. Balkan Babel: The Disintegration of Yugoslavia from the Death of Tito to the Fall of Milošević, 4th edn. Boulder, CO: Westview. Ranđelović, S. 2010. ‘Unapređenje performansi poreskog sistema Srbije kroz reformu poreza na dobit’, in M. Arsić (ed.), Poreska politika u Srbiji – pogled unapred. Belgrade: USAID Sega Project, pp. 75–94. Rankin, K.K. 2001. ‘Governing Development: Neoliberalism, Microcredit, and Rational Economic Woman’, Economy and Society 30(1): 18–37. Rankin, K.K., and Y.B. Shakya. 2007. ‘Neoliberalizing the Grassroots? Microfinance and the Politics of Development in Nepal’, in K. England and K. Ward (eds), Neoliberalization: States, Networks, Peoples. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 48–76. ‘Razbijanje Gay parade’. 2001, B92, 30 June. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www .b92.net/specijal/gay-parada/tema_dana.phtml. Ražnjatović, N. 1991. ‘Aktuelni problemi organizacija saveza slepih i slabovidih Srbije u uslovima složene društvene ekonomske krize’, Socijalna politika i socijalni rad 27(2–3): 132–38. Rhodes, R.A.W. 1996. ‘The New Governance: Governing without Government’, Political Studies 44: 652–67. Ristić, Đ. (ed.). 1999. Da se ne zaboravi: 1949–1999. 50 godina postojanja i razvoja pokrajinske

Bibliography | 313

organizacije slepih i slabovidih Vojvodine. Novi Sad: Pokrajinski odbor Saveza organizacije slepih i slabovidih Vojvodine. Robinson, M. 1993. ‘Governance, Democracy and Conditionality: NGOs and the New Policy Agenda’, in A. Clayton (ed.), Governance, Democracy and Conditionality: What Role for NGOs? Oxford: International NGO Training and Research Centre, pp. 35–52. ———. 1997. ‘Privatising the Voluntary Sector: NGOs as Public Service Contractors?’, in D. Hulme and M. Edwards (eds), NGOs, States and Donors: Too Close for Comfort? Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 59–78. Rose, A. 2003. ‘Results-Orientated Budget Practice in OECD Countries’. Working Paper 209. London: Overseas Development Institute. Rose, N. 1996a. ‘Governing “Advanced” Liberal Democracies’, in A. Barry, T. Osborne and N. Rose (eds), Foucault and Political Reason. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 37–64. ———. 1996b. ‘The Death of the Social? Re-figuring the Territory of Government’, Economy and Society 25(3): 327–56. ———. 1999. Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. Roseberry, W. 1994. ‘Hegemony and the Language of Contention’, in G.M. Joseph and D. Nugent (eds), Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 355–66. Rožić, M. 1980. Socijalistički savez u socijalističkom samoupravljanju. Belgrade: Radnička štampa. Rupnik, J. 1979. ‘Dissent in Poland, 1968–78: The End of Revisionism and the Rebirth of the Civil Society’, in R.L. Tőkés (ed.), Opposition in Eastern Europe. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, pp. 60–112. Rusinow, D. 1977. The Yugoslav Experiment 1948–1974. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Rutherford, B. 2004. ‘Desired Publics, Domestic Government, and Entangled Fears: On the Anthropology of Civil Society, Farm Workers, and White Farmers in Zimbabwe’, Cultural Anthropology 19(1): 122–53. Rutzen, D. 2011. ‘Global Perspectives on the Legal Framework for Civil Society and Relational Governance’, in S.D. Phillips and S.R. Smith (eds), Governance and Regulation in the Third Sector: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 268–76. Sampson, S. 1996. ‘The Social Life of Projects: Importing Civil Society to Albania’, in C. Hann and E. Dunn (eds), Civil Society: Challenging Western Models. London: Routledge, pp. 119–40. ———. 2002a. ‘Beyond Transition: Rethinking Elite Configurations in the Balkans’, in C.M. Hann (ed.), Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. London: Routledge, pp. 297–316. ———. 2002b. ‘Weak States, Uncivil Societies and Thousands of NGOs: Western Democracy Export as Benevolent Colonialism in the Balkans’, in S. Resic and B. Törnquist-Plewa (eds), The Balkans in Focus: Cultural Boundaries in Europe. Lund: Nordic Academic Press, pp. 27–44. ———. 2004. ‘Too Much Civil Society? Donor-Driven NGOs in the Balkans’, in L. Dhundale and E.A. Andersen (eds), Revisiting the Role of Civil Society in the Promotion of Human Rights. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for Human Rights, pp. 197–220. ———. 2016. ‘Angry White Males as Suffering Subjects’. FocaalBlog, 16 December. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.focaalblog.com/2016/12/16/steven-sampsonangry-white-males-as-suffering-subjects. Sanders, T., and H.G. West. 2003. ‘Power Revealed and Concealed in the New World Order’, in H.G. West and T. Sanders (eds), Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–37.

314 | Bibliography

Savić, L.M. 2001. Bela knjiga o stanju u Savezu gluvih i nagluvih Jugoslavije 1995-2001. godine. Belgrade: Centralni odbor Saveza gluvih i nagluvih Jugoslavije. ———. 2009. Četiri decenija rada Saveza distrofičara Srbije: juče, danas, sutra. Belgrade: Savez distrofičara Srbije. Scharpf, F.W. 2002. ‘The European Social Model: Coping with the Challenges of Diversity’, Journal of Common Market Studies 40(4): 645–70. ———. 2010. ‘The Asymmetry of European Integration, or Why the EU Cannot Be a “Social Market Economy”’, Socio-Economic Review 8: 211–50. Schierup, C.-U. 1992. ‘Quasi-proletarians and a Patriarchal Bureaucracy: Aspects of Yugoslavia’s Re-peripheralisation’, Soviet Studies 44(1): 79–99. ———. 1999. ‘Memorandum for Modernity? Socialist Modernisers, Retraditionalisation and the Rise of Ethnic Nationalism’, in C.-U. Schierup (ed.), Scramble for the Balkans: Nationalism, Globalism and the Political Economy of Reconstruction. Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 32–61. Schuller, M. 2009. ‘Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32(1): 84–104. ———. 2012. Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs. New Brunswick: Ruitgers University Press. Scott, J.C. 1969. ‘Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change’, American Political Science Review 63(4): 1142–58. ———. 1972. ‘Patron–Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’, American Political Science Review 66(1): 91–113. Sekelj, L. 1987. ‘Socijalističko građansko društvo – izlaz iz krize?’, Družboslovne razprave 4(5): 157–66. Serbia Centre for Independent Living of Persons with Disabilities (SCILPD). 2014. ‘Report on Compliance of Legislative and Institutional Framework in the Republic of Serbia with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Recommendations for Harmonization’. Belgrade. Serbia Union of the Blind (SUB). 1959. ‘Pravila Saveza slepih Srbije donesena na II Kongresu 1959’. Belgrade. ———. 1975. ‘Statut Saveza slepih Srbije’. Belgrade. Serbian Business Registers Agency (SBRA). n.d. ‘Pretraga fondacija i zadužbina’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://pretraga.apr.gov.rs/FoundationAndEndowment WebSearch/FAEBusinessDataPage.aspx?beid=5687709&type=&rnd=41A32309A 7E4400EF0B3CF20851AA8D5E6B38A26. Serbian European Integration Office (SEIO). 2005a. ‘Memorandum o saradnji u procesu evropskih integracija između Vlade Republike Srbije, koju predstavlja Kancelarija za pridruživanje Evropskoj uniji i nevladinih organizacija’. Belgrade. ———. 2005b. ‘NVO i Kancelarija potpisali Memorandum o saradnji’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://seio.gov.rs/%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8.39.html ?newsid=251. ———. 2011. ‘European Orientation of the Citizens of the Republic of Serbia: Trends: Presentation of Public Poll Results (July 2011)’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http:// www.seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/nacionalna_dokumenta/istrazivanja_javnog_mn jenja/opinion_poll_june_2011.pdf. ———. 2012a. ‘European Orientation of the Citizens of the Republic of Serbia: Trends’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/nacionalna_do kumenta/istrazivanja_javnog_mnjenja/opinionpoll_december_2011.pdf. ———. 2012b. ‘Nacionalni program za integraciju do sada u celini ispunjen 81 odsto’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.seio.gov.rs/vesti.145.html?newsid=1289. ———. 2016. ‘Serbian Citizens’ Attitude towards the EU: Public Opinion Poll (June 2016)’.

Bibliography | 315

Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.seio.gov.rs/upload/documents/nacional na_dokumenta/istrazivanja_javnog_mnjenja/opinion_poll_june_2016.pdf. ———. n.d.a. ‘Director’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.seio.gov.rs/office .534.html. ———. n.d.b. ‘Direktor Kancelarije’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.seio .gov.rs/kancelarija.533.html. ‘Serbian Reformers Claim Victory’. 2008, BBC News, 12 May. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7394339.stm. Shah, A. (ed.). 2007. Budgeting and Budgetary Institutions. Washington DC: World Bank. Sharma, A. 2006. ‘Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women’s Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India’, Cultural Anthropology 21(1): 60–95. Sharma, A., and A. Gupta. 2006. ‘Introduction’, in A. Sharma and A. Gupta (eds), The Anthropology of the State. Blackwell, pp. 1–41. Shore, C. 2006. ‘“Government without Statehood”? Anthropological Perspectives on Governance and Sovereignty in the European Union’, European Law Journal 12(6): 709–24. Shore, C., and S. Wright. 1997. ‘Policy: A New Field of Anthropology’, in C. Shore and S. Wright (eds), Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. London: Routledge, pp. 3–39. Siegelbaum, L.H. 1999. ‘The Shaping of Soviet Workers’ Leisure: Workers’ Clubs and Palaces of Culture in the 1930s’, International Labor and Working-Class History 56: 78–92. Sikor, T., J. Stahl and S. Dorondel. 2009. ‘Negotiating Post-socialist Property and State: Struggles over Forests in Albania and Romania’, Development and Change 40(1): 171–93. Slavujević, Z.Đ. 2006. ‘Promene socijalne utemeljenosti i socijalne strukture pristalica relevantnih političkih stranaka u Srbiji prvih godina XXI veka’, in Z. Lutovac (ed.), Demokratija u političkim strankama Srbije. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Institut društvenih nauka, pp. 189–235. ‘Šljivić: Pokret je interesna grupa’. 2012, eVršac, 4 April. Retrieved 19 November 2012 from http://evrsac.rs/vest.php?id=2325&naslov=%8Aljivi%26%23263%3B%3A_Pokret_je_in teresna_grupa. Smith, A.M. 1998. Laclau and Mouffe: The Radical Democratic Imaginary. London: Routledge. Smith, G.A. 2004. ‘Hegemony: Critical Interpretations in Anthropology and Beyond’, Focaal: European Journal of Anthropology 43: 99–120. ———. 2011. ‘Selective Hegemony and Beyond-Populations with “No Productive Function”: A Framework for Inquiry’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 18(1): 2–38. Smith, S.R. 2011. ‘The Government–Nonprofit Relationship in the US: New Challenges and Possibilities’, in S.D. Phillips and S.R. Smith (eds), Governance and Regulation in the Third Sector: International Perspectives. New York: Routledge, pp. 194–214. Sneed, C. 2006. ‘Neutrality, Development, Gender: Fostering Democratic Culture in Southwestern Serbia’, in B. Keith (ed.), Transacting Transition: The Micropolitics of Democracy Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia. Bloomfield, NJ: Kumarian, pp. 99–120. SNP 1389. 2011a. ‘Podrška za svu braću koja nepravedno trunu po Tadićevim zatvorima!!!’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.snp1389.rs/index.php?option=com_con tent&view=article&id=412:2011-01-25-21-34-49&catid=42:blogs&Itemid=86. ———. 2011b. ‘Tribina u Novoj Pazovi’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.snp1389 .rs/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=497%3At---&catid=36%3Av esti&Itemid=82.f. Šobot Jeličić, B. 2011. Pipanje u mraku. Kikinda: Organizacija slepih ‘Severni Banat’. Sörensen, J.S. 2003. ‘War as Social Transformation: Wealth, Class, Power and an Illiberal Economy in Serbia’, Civil Wars 6(4): 55–82.

316 | Bibliography

———. 2009. State Collapse and Reconstruction in the Periphery: Political Economy, Ethnicity and Development in Yugoslavia, Serbia and Kosovo. New York: Berghahn Books. Spangler, M. 1983. ‘Urban Research in Yugoslavia: Regional Variation in Urbanization’, in M. Kenny and D.I. Kertzer (eds), Urban Life in the Mediterranean Europe. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 76–108. Spasić, I. 2005. ‘Politika i svakodnevni život u Srbiji 2005: Odnos prema političkoj sferi, promena društvenog poretka, javnost’, Filozofija i društvo 30(2): 45–74. ———. 2006. ‘ASFALT: The Construction of Urbanity in Everyday Discourse in Serbia’, Ethnologia Balkanica 10: 211–27. ———. 2013. Kultura na delu: društvena transformacija Srbije iz burdijeovske perspektive. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga. Spasić, I., and M. Subotić (eds). 2001. Revolution and Order: Serbia after October 2000. Belgrade: Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory. Spoerri, M. 2014. Engineering Revolution: The Paradox of Democracy Promotion in Serbia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2003. The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stamenkovic, S., and J. Otovic. 2010. ‘Food Safety Improvement and Labelling of Traditional Meat Processed Products in Serbia: EU Experience of Slovak Republic’. Policy paper. Bratislava: Pontis Foundation. Stanisavljević, N. 1995. ‘Yugoslavia’, Družboslovne razprave 11(19/20): 95–112. Staniszkis, J. 1991. The Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: The Polish Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Stanojević, M. 2003. ‘Workers Power in Transition Economies: The Cases of Serbia and Slovenia’, European Journal of Industrial Relations 9(3): 283–301. Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia (SORS). 2011. ‘2011 Census of Population, Households and Dwellings in the Republic of Serbia: First Results’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://media.popis2011.stat.rs/2011/prvi_rezultati.pdf. ———. 2013. ‘Disability: Data by Municipalities and Cities’. Belgrade. ———. n.d. ‘Database’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://webrzs.stat.gov.rs/WebSite/ public/ReportView.aspx. Stein, J.G. 2008. ‘Humanitarian Organizations: Accountable – Why, to Whom, for What, and How?’, in M. Barnett and T.G. Weiss (eds), Humanitarianism in Action: Politics, Power, Ethics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 124–42. Štiks, I., and S. Horvat. 2015. ‘Introduction: Radical Politics in the Desert of Transition’, in S. Horvat and I. Štiks (eds), Welcome to the Desert of Post-socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia. London: Verso, pp. 1–17. Stojanović, D. 2000. ‘The Traumatic Circle of the Serbian Opposition’, in N. Popov (ed.), The Road to War in Serbia: Trauma and Catharsis. Budapest: Central European University Press, pp. 449–78. ———. 2003. Srbija i demokratija: istorijska studija o ‘zlatnom dobu srpske demokratije’. Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju. ———. 2008. Kaldrma i asfalt: urbanizacija i evropeizacija Beograda 1890–1914. Belgrade: Udruženje za društvenu istoriju. Stojiljković, Z. (ed.). 2012. Lavirinti tranzicije. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Fakultet političkih nauka, Centar za demokratiju. Stokes, G. 1990. Politics as Development: The Emergence of Political Parties in NineteenthCentury Serbia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stubbs, P. 1996. ‘Nationalisms, Globalization and Civil Society in Croatia and Slovenia’, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change 19: 1–26. ———. 2001. ‘New Times? Towards a Political Economy of “Civil Society” in Contemporary Croatia’, Narodna umjetnost 38(1): 89–103.

Bibliography | 317

———. 2007a. ‘Civil Society or Ubleha? Reflections on Flexible Concepts, Meta-NGOs and New Social Energy in the Post-Yugoslav Space’, in H. Rill, T. Šmidling and A. Bitoljanu (eds), 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change. Belgrade: Centre for Nonviolent Action, pp. 215–28. ———. 2007b. ‘Community Development in Contemporary Croatia: Globalisation, Neoliberalisation and NGO-isation’, in L. Dominelli (ed.), Revitalising Communities in a Globalising World. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 161–74. Sudbery, I. 2010. ‘The European Union as Political Resource: NGOs as Change Agents?’, Acta Politica 45(1/2): 136–57. Sussman, G. 2012. ‘Systemic Propaganda and the Branding of Nations in Central and Eastern Europe’, Western Political Science Association, Portland, Oregon, 24 March 2012. Sussman, G., and S. Krader. 2008. ‘Template Revolutions: Marketing U.S. Regime Change in Eastern Europe’, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 5(3): 91–112. ‘Svi srpski lokalni šerifi!’ 2010. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.aikb.net/ t1069-svi-srpski-lokalni-serifi. Szőke, A. 2015. ‘A “Road to Work”? The Reworking of Deservedness, Social Citizenship and Public Work Programmes in Rural Hungary’, Citizenship Studies 19(6–7): 734–50. Tadić, B. 2011. ‘Čestitka predsednika Republike Borisa Tadića povodom 15. februara: Dana Vojske Srbije’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.mod.gov.rs/lat/2672/ cestitka-predsednika-republike-borisa-tadica-povodom-15-februara-dana-vojske-sr bije-2672. Tarrow, S. 1977. Between Center and Periphery: Grassroots Politicians in Italy and France. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Tatić, D. 2011. Zaštita ljudskih prava osoba sa invaliditetom. Belgrade: Službeni glasnik. Taylor, M.N. 2011. ‘From House of Culture to Community Center: The Production of Social Space in “Liberalizing” Socialist Hungary’. Unpublished manuscript. Terrier, J., and P. Wagner. 2006. ‘Civil Society and the Problématique of Political Modernity’, in P. Wagner (ed.), The Languages of Civil Society. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 9–28. Thelen, T. 2011. ‘Shortage, Fuzzy Property and Other Dead Ends in the Anthropological Analysis of (Post)Socialism’, Critique of Anthropology 31(1): 43–61. Todorova, M. 2009. Imagining the Balkans, updated edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tomić, N. 2011. ‘Omladina DS u Vojvodini po naredbi formira NVO’. Danas, 15 July. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/politika/omladina_ds_u_ vojvodini_po_naredbi_formira_nvo.56.html?news_id=219615. Torović, V. 2016. ‘U Nišu formiran Građanski front Srbije’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.blic.rs/vesti/srbija/u-nisu-formiran-gradanski-front-srbije/2074rly. Trouillot, M.-R. 2001. ‘The Anthropology of the State in the Age of Globalization: Close Encounters of the Deceptive Kind’, Current Anthropology 42(1): 125–38. Türkeş, M., and G. Gökgöz. 2006. ‘The EU’s Strategy Towards the Western Balkans: Exclusion or Integration?’, East European Politics and Societies 20(4): 659–90. United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). 2012. ‘Consideration of Reports Submitted by States Parties under Article 35 of the Convention: Initial Reports of States Parties Due in 2011: Serbia’. United States Agency for International Development (USAID). 2012. ‘The 2011 CSO Sustainability Index for Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia’. Washington DC. Upchurch, M., and D. Marinković. 2011. ‘Serbia from the 2000 October Revolution to the Crash’, in G. Dale (ed.), First the Transition, Then the Crash: Eastern Europe in the 2000s. London: Pluto, pp. 229–50. USAID/Serbia. 2005. ‘Strategy Statement: The Republic of Serbia’. Belgrade. ———. n.d. ‘Summary: USAID/Serbia Country Strategic Plan 2011–2015’. Belgrade. Uvalic, M. 2010. Serbia’s Transition: Towards a Better Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

318 | Bibliography

———. 2012. ‘Serbia’s Transition to Market Economy: Why Has the Model Not Delivered?’, Montenegrin Journal of Economics 8(2): 87–98. Valtner, L. 2011. ‘Svaka politička partija ima svoje NVO’. Danas, 13 July. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.danas.rs/danasrs/politika/svaka_politicka_partija_ima_ svoje_nvo.56.html?news_id=219399. Van Apeldoorn, B. 2002. Transnational Capitalism and the Struggle over European Integration. London: Routledge. Van Apeldoorn, B., J. Drahokoupil and L. Horn (eds). 2009. Contradictions and Limits of Neoliberal European Governance: From Lisbon to Lisbon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Van de Port, M. 1998. Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilisation and its Discontents in a Serbian Town. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. ———. 1999. ‘“It Takes a Serb to Know a Serb”: Uncovering the Roots of Obstinate Otherness in Serbia’, Critique of Anthropology 19(1): 7–30. Van Nispen, F., and J. Posseth. 2009. ‘Performance Informed Budgeting in Europe: The Ends Justify the Means, Don’t They?’ Working Paper RSCAS 2009/39. Florence: European University Institute. Vanhala, L. 2011. Making Rights a Reality? Disability Rights Activists and Legal Mobilization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vasiljević, J. 2011. ‘Citizenship and Belonging in Serbia: In the Crossfire of Changing Nationhood Narratives’. CITSEE Working Paper 2011/17. Edinburgh: School of Law, University of Edinburgh. Velat, D. 2012. ‘Predstavljanje Uredbe o sredstvima za podsticanje programa ili nedostajućeg dela sredstava za finansiranje programa od javnog interesa koja realizuju udruženja’. Retrieved 16 October 2012 from http://www.bcif.org/Vesti/2012-01-27-Pred stavljanje_Uredbe_o_sredstvima.htm. Veljović, S. 2010a. ‘Brzo, ne i kuso’, ekonom:east 530: 36–37. ———. 2010b. ‘Ko riskira, profitira’, ekonom:east 536: 42–44. ———. 2010c. ‘Samo za hrabre’, ekonom:east 534/535: 36–37. Verdery, K. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: Reburial and Postsocialist Change. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. 2002. ‘Seeing Like a Mayor: Or, How Local Officials Obstructed Romanian Land Restitution’, Ethnography 3(1): 5–33. Vesić, A., and S. Stojanović. 2006. Pokrenimo zajednice! 4. Priručnik za javno zastupanje u lokalnim zajednicama. Belgrade: Balkan Community Initiatives Fund. Vetta, T. 2009. ‘“Democracy Building” in Serbia: The NGO Effect’, Southeastern Europe 33: 26–47. ———. 2011. ‘“Nationalism is Back!” Radikali and Privatization in Serbia’, in D. Kalb and G. Halmai (eds), Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class: Working-Class Populism and the Return of the Repressed in Neoliberal Europe. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 37–56. ———. 2012. ‘NGOs and the State: Clash or Class? Circulating Elites of “Good Governance” in Serbia’, in B. Petric (ed.), Democracy at Large: NGOs, Political Foundations, Think Tanks, and International Organizations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 169–90. ———. 2013. ‘Let’s Get Up! NGOs, Class and Culture in Serbia: An Anthropology of Democracy Aid’. Ph.D. thesis. Paris: École des hautes études en sciences sociales. Vladár, V. 2010. ‘Prenos slovenských skúseností v rozvojových projektoch Nadácie Pontis’, in E. Nečej (ed.), Slovenské skúsenosti z integračného procesu do NATO a EÚ: aktivity mimovládnych organizácií pri ich odovzdávaní. Bratislava: Centre for European and North Atlantic Affairs, pp. 55–64. Vladisavljević, N. 2008. Serbia’s Antibureaucratic Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism and Nationalist Mobilization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bibliography | 319

———. 2016. ‘Competitive Authoritarianism and Popular Protest: Evidence from Serbia under Milošević’, International Political Science Review 37(1): 36–50. Vlahović, N. 2006. ‘Državno je privatno i obrnuto’. Tabloid 116, 16 November. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.magazin-tabloid.com/casopis/clanak.php?br=116& clanak=7. Volčič, Z. 2005. ‘The Notion of “the West” in the Serbian National Imaginary’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 8(2): 155–75. Vujadinović, D. 2009. Civilno društvo i političke institucije: Srbija u vrtlogu promena. Belgrade: Pravni fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu. Vujović, S. [1992] 2002. ‘Drugi Beograd’, in A. Mimica (ed.), Druga Srbija: deset godina posle (1992–2002). Belgrade: Helsinški odbor za ljudska prava u Srbiji, pp. 74–77. Vukasović, P. 2008. ‘Invalidske organizacije u Srbiji – problemi tranzicije’, in S. Gajin (ed.), Organizacije osoba sa invaliditetom. Belgrade: Centar za unapređivanje pravnih studija, pp. 13–60. Vukomanović, M. 2005. What the Church Can(not) Be Asked about: The Serbian Orthodox Church, State and Society in Serbia. Belgrade: Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia. Vukotić, Đ. 1984. Graditelji svog života. Slepi Beograda od 1941. do 1981. Belgrade: Savez slepih Beograda – Gradska konferencija. Vuković, D., and M. Babović. 2014. ‘Social Interests, Policy Networks, and Legislative Outcomes: The Role of Policy Networks in Shaping Welfare and Employment Policies in Serbia’, East European Politics and Societies 28(1): 5–24. Vuković, D., and N. Perišić. 2011. ‘Social Security in Serbia: Twenty Years Later’, in M. Stambolieva and S. Dehnert (eds), Welfare States in Transition: 20 Years after the Yugoslav Welfare Model. Sofia: Friedrich Ebert Foundation, pp. 228–61. Vuletić, V., D. Stanojević, and J. Vukelić. 2011. ‘Srpska tranzicija u sociološkom ogledalu’, in S. Mihailović (ed.), Dometi tranzicije: od socijalizma ka kapitalizmu. Belgrade: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, pp. 327–42. Vulić, Z. 2000. ‘Ko je ovaj čovek? Dragoljub Mićunović’. Glas javnosti, 23 March. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://arhiva.glas-javnosti.rs/arhiva/2000/03/24/srpski/P00032307 .shtm. Wagner, P. (ed.). 2006. The Languages of Civil Society. New York: Berghahn Books. Walley, C.J. 2017. ‘Trump’s Election and the “White Working Class”: What We Missed’, American Ethnologist 44(2): 231–36. We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own (WWLBD). 2014. ‘Ne da(vi)mo Beograd: odbacimo plan područja posebne namene’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from https://nedavimobeograd .wordpress.com/2014/10/07/naslov. ———. 2016. ‘Drugi broj glasila Inicijative Ne da(vi)mo Beograd’. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from https://nedavimobeograd.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/drugi-broj-glasila-inic ijative-ne-davimo-beograd. Wedel, J.R. 1996. ‘Clique-Run Organizations and US Economic Aid: An Institutional Analysis’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 4(4): 571–602. ———. 1999. ‘Rigging the US–Russia Relationship: Harvard, Chubais and the Transidentity Game’, Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 7(4): 469–500. ———. 2001. Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe. New York: Palgrave. ———. 2003. ‘Clans, Cliques and Captured States: Rethinking “Transition” in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union’, Journal of International Development 15: 427–40. ———. 2009. Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York: Basic Books. Weingrod, A. 1968. ‘Patrons, Patronage, and Political Parties’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 10(4): 377–400.

320 | Bibliography

West, H.G., and P. Raman (eds). 2009. Enduring Socialism: Explorations of Revolution & Transformation, Restoration & Continuation. New York: Berghahn Books. White, A. 1990. De-Stalinization and the House of Culture: Declining State Control over Leisure in the USSR, Poland, and Hungary, 1953–89. London: Routledge. Wolf, E.R. 1966. ‘Kinship, Friendship and Patron–Client Relations in Complex Societies’, in M. Banton (ed.), The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies. London: Tavistock, pp. 1–22. Woodward, S. 1995a. Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington DC: Brookings Institution. ———. 1995b. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia 1945–1990. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. World Bank (WB). 2008. ‘Project Appraisal Document on a Proposed Loan in the Amount of Euro 32.0 Million (US$46.4 Million Equivalent) to the Republic of Serbia for a Delivery of Improved Local Services (DILS) Project’. Washington DC. ———. 2009. ‘Serbia: Doing More with Less: Addressing the Fiscal Crisis by Increasing Public Sector Productivity’. Washington DC. Yugoslavia Association of the Blind (YAB). 1948. ‘Pravila Udruženja slepih Jugoslavije’. Belgrade. Zarković, M. 2010. ‘Mladen Obradović: Optužuju nas da smo nasilni oni koji su nasiljem prigrabili vlast’. Pečat, 17 September. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.pe cat.co.rs/2010/09/mladen-obradovic-optuzuju-nas-da-smo-nasilni-oni-koji-su-nasiljemprigrabili-vlast. Zečević, M. 1987. Društvene organizacije i udruženja u političkom sistemu socijalističkog samoupravljanja. Belgrade: Savremena administracija. Zigon, J. 2011. ‘HIV is God’s Blessing’: Rehabilitating Morality in Neoliberal Russia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zimbauer, D. 2001. ‘From Neo-classical Economics to New Institutional Economics and beyond: Prospects for an Interdisciplinary Research Programme’. Development Studies Institute Working Paper 01-12. London School of Economics and Political Science. Živanov, S. 1997. ‘Kulturna upotreba politike’. Naša borba, 21 July. Retrieved 1 December 2017 from http://www.yurope.com/nasa-borba/arhiva/Jul97/2107/2107_17.HTM. Živković, M. 2011. Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milošević. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Zuckerman, A. 1977. ‘Clientelist Politics in Italy’, in E. Gellner and J. Waterbury (eds), Patrons and Clients in Mediterranean Societies. London: Duckworth, pp. 63–79. Legal norms The norms are listed by their English titles used in the text, followed by the official Serbian title and, if applicable, the issue(s) of the official gazette in which the norms, and their subsequent amendments, were published. Budget Funding for Associations Bylaw. Uredba o sredstvima za podsticanje programa ili nedostajućeg dela sredstava za finansiranje programa od javnog interesa koja realizuju udruženja. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 8/2012, 94/2013 and 93/2015. Bylaw on the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society. Uredba o Kancelariji za saradnju sa civilnim društvom. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 26/2010. Bylaw on the Protection of the Vršac Park Natural Monument. Rešenje SO Vršac o zaštiti SP ‘Vršački park’ broj 633-11/73-01. Službeni list opštine Vršac i Plandište, no. 8/1974. Internal Organization and Job Positions Classification Bylaw of the Office for Cooperation with Civil Society. Pravilnik o unutrašnjem uređenju i sistematizaciji radnih mesta u Kancelariji za saradnju sa civilnim društvom. Zaključak Vlade RS 05 broj 110-9124/2011. Law on Associations. Zakon o udruženjima. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 51/2009 and 99/2011.

Bibliography | 321

Law on Corporate Income Tax. Zakon o porezu na dobit pravnih lica. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 25/2001, 80/2002, 80/2002, 43/2003, 84/2004, 18/2010, 101/2011, 119/2012, 47/2013, 108/2013, 68/2014, 142/2014, 91/2015, 112/2015 and 113/2017. Law on Endowments and Foundations. Zakon o zadužbinama i fondacijama. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 88/2010 and 99/2011. Law on Nature Protection. Zakon o zaštiti prirode. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 36/2009, 88/2010, 91/2010 and 14/2016. Law on Professional Rehabilitation and Employment of Persons with Disability. Zakon o profesionalnoj rehabilitaciji i zapošljavanju osoba sa invaliditetom. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 36/2009 and 32/2013. Law on Social Organizations and Associations of Citizens. Zakon o društvenim organizacijama i udruženjima građana. Službeni glasnik SRS, no. 24/1982, 39/1983, 17/1984, 50/1984, 45/1985 and 12/1989, and Službeni glasnik RS, no. 53/1993, 67/1993, 48/1994 and 101/2005. Law on Social Protection. Zakon o socijalnoj zaštiti. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 24/2011. Law on the Prevention of Discrimination against Persons with Disability. Zakon o sprečavanju diskriminacije osoba sa invaliditetom. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 33/2006 and 13/2016. Standard Classification Framework and Budget System Chart of Accounts Bylaw. Pravilnik o standardnom klasifikacionom okviru i Kontnom planu za budžetski sistem. Službeni glasnik RS, no. 20/2007, 37/2007, 50/2007, 63/2007, 25/2008, 50/2008, 3/2009, 26/2009, 37/2009, 64/2009, 110/2009, 11/2010, 31/2010, 40/2010, 53/2010, 101/2010 and 10/2011.

Index

1389 Serbian National Movement, 112, 123, 132, 133, 136n9

_

accountability, 233n4, and civil society, 12, 14, 283, and philanthropy, 37, 205, 224–25, 228, and public advocacy, 235, 236–37 (see also foreign donors) affect, and nationalist populism, 36, 109, 110, 124, 128, 134–135, and philanthropy, 37, 204–205, 209– 10, 212, 220, 221–22, 229–30, 233n7 Albanians, 48, 53, 76n4, 116 Aleksinac, 228, 231 antibureaucratic revolution, 48, 50–51 antidiscrimination, 176, 184, 185, 187, 196, 200n12 antinationalism, and liberal civil society, 57, 74, 111, 222 antipolitics. See depoliticization Antonić, Slobodan, 87 Arandarenko, Mihail, 68, 69 Aranđelovac, 131, 133 Association of the Presidents of Homeowners’ Assemblies, 287 associations (of citizens), 10–11, 12, 16, as an everyday term in Serbia, 55–56, 112, 173–74, 230–31, as a legal subject in Serbia, 32, 40n22, 42, 47, 58, 76n7, 112, 156, 162–66, 174, 178, 179–80, 200n8, 214, professional, 42, in socialist Serbia, 47, 200n8, in socialist

Yugoslavia, 47, 55–56, 178–80, 183, sports, 155, 156, 157, 160, 170 (see also foundations; NGOs in Serbia; sports clubs) authoritarianism, in East-Central Europe, 151, 278, hybrid, 52, legacies of, 271, and Serbian Progressive Party, 280, 282, in Slovakia, 89 (see also Milošević regime; neoliberalism) Avlijaš, Sonja, 94–96 Babić, Jelena, 250, 254, 255 Babić, Miodrag, 235, 247–50, 251, 252, 255, 256, 263–64 Balkanism, 81, 85–86 (see also Orientalism) Balkanization, 85, 106n6 Balkans, 13, 58, 71, 85, 226 (see also former Yugoslavia; South-East Europe; Western Balkans) BCIF (Balkan Community Initiatives Fund), 27, 28, 32–34, 37, 39n15, 40n22, 79–80, 141, 147, 154, 161, 165, 166–67, 168, 171n7, 171n8, 204–17, 222, 224–26, 234, 235, 237–39, 240–41, 242–44, 260, 275, 289n3 Belarus, 92, 93 Belgrade, 27, 28, 30, 33, 46, 48, 49, 58, 59, 61, 79, 88–89, 90, 91, 92, 94, 97, 99, 100, 105, 114–15, 128, 129–30, 131, 132, 141, 166, 172, 179, 211, 229, 236, 237, 238, 260, 280–81, 284–86

– 322 –

Index | 323

Belgrade LGBT Pride Parade, 28, 35– 36, 108, 109, 114–19, 123, 124, 129–30, 132, 134, 135, 136n5, 136n8, 266 Belgrade Open School, 106 Belgrade Waterfront, 284–85, 289n2 Bernal, Victoria, 15, 21–22 Bilić, Bojan, 15 Biserko, Sonja, 222, 231 Bjelanović, Tanja, 165, 166, 213 Boissevain, Jeremy, 246 Bornstein, Erica, 204–5, 231 Bosnia and Herzegovina, 7, 9, 14, 53, 67, 76n11, 86, 107n22, 136n10, 221, 255, 284 boundary crossing, 73, 74, 103, 274 Bratislava, 27, 90, 93, 94–96 Bratislava Process, 90, 92 (see also Slovakia) Brexit, 134, 135, 277 British embassy in Serbia, 147, 165, 167, 169 Brković, Čarna, 221 brokerage, 38, 236, 245, 250, 251, 261–62 (see also clientelism; patronage) Brussels, 27, 89, 92–93, 97, 102, 103, 104, 105 Bulgaria, 6, 79, 90, 95, 100, 101, 126, 186 Burchell, Graham, 21 Čačak, 131, 132 capitalism, and civil society, 10, 11, 46, 56, 272, illiberal, 65, liberal/ free-market, 4, 13, 64, 272, in Milošević Serbia, 52, 53–54, 65, 251, national, 65, 131, political, 52, 54, 65, 69–70, 274, in postMilošević Serbia, 65, 69, statecentred, 54, transition to, 4, 11, 13, 49, 53–54, 62–63, 64, 277 (see also neoliberalization; socialist Yugoslavia; transition; transnational integration) Čarević Mitanovski, Lepojka, 189–90, 191, 195

CDF (Centre for Democracy Foundation), 27, 30–32, 40n18, 61, 74, 87–94, 102, 166, 274 (see also Democratic Centre; DP; Mićunović, Dragoljub) CDNS (Centre for the Development of the Nonprofit Sector), 156– 57, 161, 164, 167, 168 (see also Filipović, Jasna) Center for International Private Enterprise, 62 Central and Eastern Europe, 11, 33, 41, 107n22, 107n24, 214 (see also Central Europe; East-Central Europe) Central Europe, 85, 151, 254, 256 (see also Central and Eastern Europe, East-Central Europe) centre–periphery relationships, 7–8, 49, 64, 66, 72, 85, 99–100, 109, 110, 237, at national scale, 236, 237, 251–52, 262, 277 Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, 33, 241 Chetniks, 120, 121, 123 China, 54, 186, 282 CI (Civic Initiatives), 90, 102, 161, 163–68, 171n8, 213 (see also Dereta, Miljenko) Ćirković, Ivana, 142, 144–46, 147, 148, 149, 150, 154, 157–58, 158, 165, 166, 167, 171n2, 192 City Park (Vršac), 234, 248, 252–55, 259–61, 284 Civic Front, 286–87 civil society, 9–10, anthropology of, 5–7, 12–16, 111, depoliticization of, 21, 269–70, discourse of, 4-7, 11–12, 41–43, 45–47, 55–58, 80, 141–42, 144, 147–48, 151–52, dominant model of, 4–5, 11–13, 41–44, 56–57, 89–90, 288, emic Serbian category of, 15–16, 39n10, as field of practices, 9, 17–18, 45, frontiers of, 17–19, 35–38, 81, 82, 93, 111, 142–43, 161–71, 175–76, 181, 188–99, 212,

324 | Index

217, 218–20, 225, 235, 245, 261– 62, 265–68, 273, 283, Gramscian concept of, 16–19, 45, 104, and hegemony in Serbia, 18–19, 35–38, 45, 51, 61–62, 72, 75, 80–82, 86–88, 96, 99, 104–5, 115–17, 118, 123–24, 168–69, 174–76, 198–99, 203–4, 205, 220, 232, 235, 265–68, 275, 276, 288, late socialist discourses of, 11, 21, 45–47, 56, 76n8, 265, 271–72, liberal models of, 6, 10–14, 20–22, 37, 46, 56–58, 111, 151, 237, 269–70, 271–73, 283, 285–86, and inequality, 21, 24–25, 45, neoliberal models of, 12, 21–23, 56, 151–60, in nonWestern settings, 11–13, 14–15, official definitions of, 41–43, 148, organizations of, 39n10, 41–43, 55, 141, 151–52, 154, 203–4, 270, and reforms, 4–5, 9–10, 24, and rights, 20–21, 46, 56, 275, Serbian legal regulation of, 42, 76n7, 154–55, 165, 166–67, socialist models of, 46–47, 177– 81, and universalism/relativism, 14–15, 44, and wider society, 9–10, 17–19, 19, 45 (see also accountability; capitalism; civil society building; civil society funding; class; competition; democracy; democratization; development; Eastern Europe; economy; electoral revolutions; EU; Eurocentrism; evolutionism; foreign donors; governmentality; hegemony; individualism; informality; liberal civil society; nationalist civil society; new social movements; NGO-ization; NGOs; NGOs in Serbia; party politics; post-Yugoslav civil society; pluralism; rule of law; socialist Yugoslavia; state; state–civil society partnerships; subject positions; transition; uncivil society)

civil society building, 11–12, in postsocialist Europe, 12–13, 58, in Serbia, 13, 21, 42, 58, 237 (see also liberal civil society; NGO-ization) civil society funding, by the EU, 101– 2, 102, 107n20, 107n21, 107n22, 107n24, 141–42, by the state, 36–37, 73, 74, 75, 101–2, 105, 131, 143, 154–61, 169–71, 175, 190– 97, 214–16, 273 (see also foreign donors; liberal civil society; local fundraising; nationalist civil society; NGOs in Serbia; organizations of people with disabilities; philanthropy development) Clarke, John, 218 class, 9, and civil society, 13, 16–17, 24–25, 56–57, and intersections with other inequalities, 9, 36, 110, 134–35, and liberal civil society, 57–60, 62, 105–6, 205, 223–24, 227, 265–66, 286, 288, Serbian capitalist, 54, 62, 65, 67, 215, 224, 246–252, 263–64, 272, Serbian middle, 55, 57–60, 62, 65, 68, 110, 128–29, 131–32, 134–35, 288, Serbian peasant, 58, 59, 62, 223, 231, Serbian petty capitalist, 131, 134–35, Serbian working, 52, 55, 58, 59–60, 62, 68–69, 110, 131–32, 134–35, transnational capitalist, 67 (see also civil society; hegemony; inequality; nationalist civil society; nationalist populism) clientelism, 38, 54, 69–70, 103, 170, 246–252 (see also brokerage; patronage) cliques, 170, 246–47, 250, 259, 261, 273 Cobra Group, 227–28, 229–31 collectivism, 46, 136n1, 271 Collier, Stephen, 8, 159 Communist Party, and Milošević regime, 51, 52, 54–55, in socialist Serbia, 48, 50–51, in socialist Yugoslavia, 46, 47, 178, 179

Index | 325

community, development of, 241–45, discourse about, 223–24, 228, 235–36, 238–40, 240–43, 270, 271 (see also government through community) competition, in Serbian civil society, 36–37, 101, 102, 142, 143, 155– 56, 160–61, 175–76, 195–96, 232, 273, technologies of, 22, 36–37, 143, 158–60, 169–71, 225 (see also efficiency; marketization; neoliberalism; neoliberalization; public procurement; public tendering; transparency) constitutions, in Milošević Serbia, 52–53, 53–54, in post-Milošević Serbia, 54, 118, in socialist Yugoslavia, 76n4, 178 corruption, discourse of, 3, 63, 74, 97, 195, 232, 280, 282, 283, and donors, 170 Council of Europe, 43, 162–64 counterhegemony. See hegemony; liberal civil society; nationalist civil society; organizations of people with disabilities crisis, in post-Milošević Serbia, 68–69, 124, 143, 152, 221, 279, in socialist Serbia, 48–51, in socialist Yugoslavia, 49, 50–54 (see also former Yugoslavia; neoliberalism) Crnjanski Šabović, Vukosava, 238, 241, 244 Croatia, 5, 53, 85, 90, 284 CSFP (Civil Society Focal Points), 144–46, 147, 157, 167, 171n4 CSR (corporate social responsibility), 205, 207, 209–10, 219, 229, 268 Czech Republic, 21, 206, 213, 216, development assistance to Serbia, 25, 206–7 Danas (daily), 82 decentralization, 42, 47, 94–95, 175, 191–92, 198 decline, demographic, 124, discourse of, 3, 63, 124, 126, 280 decollectivization, 37, 219

de-democratization, 109, 134, 169 Đelić, Božidar, 144, 145, 146, 147, 210 democracy, and civil society, 4, 10–13, 38, 46, 111, 151, 237, 269, 272, 274, 284, direct, 284, electoral, 51–52, 55, 133, and the EU, 83, 84, 99, 141, liberal, 4, 11, 12, 13, 54, 56, 64, 69, 83, 134, 270, 274, local, 242, in Serbia, 51–52, 55, 63, 69–70, 80, 242, participative, 151, 237, representative, 237, 251, socialist, 46–47, 242, transition to, 4, 11–13, 62–63, 64, 83, 91, 235, 237, 285–86 (see also civil society; de-democratization; democratization; liberal civil society; public interest representation; social democracy) Democratic Centre, 30–31, 40n19 Democratic Party of Serbia, 75, 131, 132, 133, 135, 282 ‘democratic’ political forces, 90, 274, 280, 287 democratization, and civil society, 11–12, 28, 38, 46–47, 60, 90, 92, 141, 143, 151–52, 165, 169–171, 235, 236–38, 241–43, 265, 285–86, and liberal civil society, 28, 38, 56–57, 60–61, 80, 92, 141, 143, 151–52, 169–171, 235, 236–38, 240–41, 252, 261–62, 269–70, 274, 285–86 (see also civil society; democracy; liberal civil society, public advocacy) denationalization, 22, 219, 240, 266, 268 (see also local level; subnational level) depoliticization, 24, 269–71, 272, 273, 275–76, limits to, 24, 262, 271– 76, rhetoric in Serbia, 70, 269, 273 (see also civil society) Dereta, Miljenko, 90, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 171n6 development, anthropology of, 17, 18, 19, 22, 23–24, 245, 269, and civil society, 7, 11–13, 17, 19, 42, 43, of civil society, 12,

326 | Index

32, 33–34, 41–43, 147–48, 167, 168, 171, 204, postsocialistto-postsocialist, 25, 90–92, policies towards Serbia, 13, 25, 90–92, 206–7, Serbian strategies of national, 84, 96, 98, 275, 279, uneven, 64, 66 (see also community; NGOs; NGOs in Serbia; philanthropy development) DfID (Department for International Development), 147, 238, 260 Đinđić, Zoran, 30, 46, 80, 162, 256, 272 disability, 9, 28, 36–37, 172–77, 179– 99, 200n5, 239, 272 dissent, in socialist Serbia, 30, 48–49, 51, 76n6, in socialist Yugoslavia, 29, 46 document analysis, 27, 39n14 DOS (Democratic Opposition of Serbia), 31, 40n19, 62, 71 DP (Democratic Party), 30–31, 32, 40n19, 40n20, 73, 74–75, 82–83, 84, 87, 93, 107n7, 118, 256, 279, 280–81, 283, in Vršac, 249, 250– 51, 252, 256, 257, 259, 260 Dveri Serbian National Movement, 28, 112, 113, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129–33, 135, 282 Dzurinda, Mikuláš, 90, 92 East-Central Europe, 11, 54, 67, 109, 280 (see also Central and Eastern Europe; Central Europe) Eastern Europe, civil society in, 4–6, 11, 12–13, 15, 21, 41–43, 46, European integration in, 7, 71, 74, 85, 95, 277, 278 (see also Central and Eastern Europe; Central Europe; East-Central Europe; nationalist populism; South-East Europe; transition) ECNL (European Centre for Not-forProfit Law), 161, 163, 164, 165, 171n8 economics of regulation, 143, 159

economy, and civil society, 4, 9, 10–11, 13, 16–17, 18–19, 20–21, 43, 266–67, and liberal civil society, 37, 56–59, 206, 208–10, 212–21, 226, 229, 266–67, 267–68, in Milošević Serbia, 52, 53–55, 62, 263, in post-Milošević Serbia, 38n2, 63, 66–69, 279, 282 (see also state) efficiency, and liberal civil society, 36–37, 75, 102, 103, 105–6, 143, 154, 158–60, 169–71, 175–77, 217–18, 267, 270, 273 (see also competition; marketization; neoliberalism; NGOs; state; transparency) egalitarianism, and liberal civil society, 21, 286 elections, in Milošević Serbia, 30, 51– 52, 60, 61, 90, in post-Milošević Serbia, 82–83, 94, 123, 127, 131, 132, 133, 162, 163, 165, 250, 279–80, 280, 282–83 electoral revolutions, 61–62, 90, and civil society, 13, 60–62, 81, 89– 90, 91–92, 93, in Slovakia, 89–90 (see also October Revolution) EMinS (European Movement in Serbia), 87, 102, 107n7, 161 endowments (legal subject in Serbia), 42, 76n7, 166, 214 Enough is Enough (Dosta je bilo) Movement, 283 ethnography, 26–27 EU (European Union), and civil society discourse, 141–42, 147– 48, 151, 154, Western Balkans, 71–72, 85, 110 (see also civil society funding; democracy, rights) EU delegation to Serbia, 102, 141, 148 Eurocentrism, and civil society, 5, 6, 7, 11, 14–15 Europe, as a construct, 82, 83, 84–86, 87, 99, 125, 254, ‘path to’, 82, ‘return to’, 71, 80, 86, ‘there is no alternative to’, 83, 86–87, 98, 99

Index | 327

European Commission, 38n1, 83, 115, 145 European Council, 83, 263, 280 European Economic and Social Committee, 93, 147–48 European integration, as ‘engine of reform’, 83–84, 97, and liberal civil society, 35–36, 42, 79–82, 83, 86–89, 91–106, 115–16, 141–42, 148–49, 152, 154, 266, 267, 273, 274, 286, and neoliberalization, 66, 71–72, 142–43, 267, and reforms, 3–4, 35, 38n1, 82, 83–84, 96, 97, 103–4,142–43, 147–48, 267, 278, Serbia’s, 38n1, 70–71, 82–84, 95, 280–82, Slovakia’s, 88, in Southern Europe, 85, support for Serbia’s, 3, 86, 282 (see also Eastern Europe; Europeanization; Stabilization and Association Process) Europeanization, hegemonic discourse of, 6, 18, 35, 71, 81, 82–88, 96, 97–99, 105, 106n2, 115–16, 135, 265, 270, 272, and liberal civil society, 35, 86–88, 96–100, 105, 115–16, 266, 273, 274, as modernization myth, 84, NGO workers’ readings of, 95, 96–100, and subjectivity, 98 (see also European integration; liberal civil society; normality; ‘pro-European’ politics) European Parliament, 93, 115 ‘European values’, 80, 82, 98, 115, 271 (see also Europeanization) evolutionism, and civil society, 5, 10, 11, 43–44, 57–58, and transition, 18, 64, 84, 270–71 (see also Europeanization) extended case method, 27 Eyal, Gil, 21 family, and nationalist civil society, 117, 127–28, 129–30, 131, 132, and private sphere, 218

FCO (Foreign & Commonwealth Office), 147, 167, 169 FENS (Forum of Yugoslav Nongovernmental Organizations), 31, 162–63, 164 Ferguson, Adam, 10 Ferguson, James, 21 field sites, 25–34 Filipović, Jasna, 157, 164 financial management, 207, 208, 225, 231 (see also organizational rationalization) financial reporting, 156, 158, 160, 165, 166, 192, 225 (see also accountability; transparency) First Serbian Uprising, 119, 120, 121 football hooligans, and nationalist civil society, 128 foreign aid, to Serbia, 72, 90–91, 100–1, 107n11, 107n19, 146–47 foreign donors, and accountability, 169, and civil society, 5, 13, 41–43, 89–90, and liberal civil society, 30, 31, 33–34, 41–43, 56, 59, 60, 72, 73, 81–82, 101–2, 107n20, 107n21, 143, 164, 165, 169, 170, 196, 203–4, 214, 216, 222, 225, 236–38, 241–42, 245, 260, 266, 273, 283, 287 foreign investments, 67, 83, 96, 100, 279 ‘formalization’, 143, 146, 151, 154, 170, 269 former Yugoslavia, anthropology of, 8–9, 86, peace activism in, 15, post-crisis mobilizations in, 6, 283–84, 288, the state in, 8–9 (see also Bosnia and Herzegovina; Croatia; FRY; Kosovo; Macedonia; Milošević Serbia; Montenegro; post-Milošević Serbia; Slovenia; South-East Europe; Western Balkans) Foucault, Michel, 19–24, 66, 153, 240 foundations (legal subject in Serbia), 40n22, 42, 60, 76n27, 79, 166–67, 194, 214, 221–22, 235

328 | Index

France, 11, 79, 279 ‘Free’ City of Vršac Civic Parliament, 234, 257 frontier masters, 34, 36, 161–68, 170– 71, 171n8, 205 FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia), 52, 76n5 (see also Milošević Serbia)

Graovac, Ksenija, 206, 207, 208, 209, 212, 213, 222, 223–24, 229 Greece, 85, 210 Greenberg, Jessica, 8–9, 86 Grewal, Inderpal, 15, 21–22 Grubješić, Suzana, 107n16 Gupta, Akhil, 21, 23 Guzina, Branislav, 256, 257, 259

G17 Plus, 62, 73, 74, 75, 93–94, 102, 103, 106, 107n16 Gea Natural Science Society, 258, 260 gender, 9, 150, 189, and liberal civil society, 31, 33, 88–89, 137n15, 239, and nationalist civil society, 110, 114, 115, 119–20, 127, 128, 134–35 generation, 9, 70, and liberal civil society, 58, 59, 60, 61, 106, 227, 230–31, 288, and nationalist civil society, 110, 114, 115, 128, 131, 132, 135, and organizations of people with disabilities, 193, Georgia, 90 Germany, 30, 100, 263, 279 Glišić, Vladan, 117, 126, 130, 131 Golubović, Dragan, 145, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–68, 171n8, 213 good governance, 153 government of the self, 20, 271 (see also neoliberal governmentality; subjectivity) government through community, 38, 235–36, 240, 242 governmentality, 19–24, 240, advanced liberal, 240, and civil society, 20–23, 153–54, 161, 235–36, 240–45, 268, critiques of, 22–24, 65–66, 242, 268, and inequality, 24, 66 (see also development; government of the self; hegemony; liberalism; neoliberal governmentality; NGOs; state; subjectivity; transnational governmentality) Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 16–17, 19, 45, 50, 56, 104, 160

Hana (Via Foundation), 213, 216, 226, 227 Hanlon, Joseph, 170 Hann, Chris, 14 Hayden, Robert M., 8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 10, 16 hegemony, 16, 64–65, and civil society, 16–19, 24–25, 45, 104, 111, 288, and class, 9, 16, 17, 24–25, 65, 104–5, 205, 272, and common interest, 17, 18, 25, 51, 64–65, and common sense, 17, 51, 81, 160, and frontal attack, 50, 62, 108, 119, and governmentality, 24, 65–66, and inequality, 9, 24–25, 45, and nationalism, 35–36, 51, 123–24, 278, 280, and neoliberalism, 18, 23, 35, 36–37, 65, 66–67, 71–72, 109, 143, 160, 168–69, 174–76, 198–99, 205, 265–68, 272–73, 276, 279, 282, and passive revolution, 50, 52, and populism, 51, 279, 280, socialist, 181, and the state, 16–17, 25, 45, and war of manoeuvre, 19, 50, and war of position, 19, 62, 108 (see also civil society; Europeanization; ideology; liberal civil society; liberalism; Milošević Serbia; nationalist civil society; neoliberalism; neoliberalization; post-Milošević hegemonic project; post-Milošević Serbia; post-Yugoslav civil society; power bloc; transition; transnational integration)

Index | 329

Helms, Elissa, 7 Hemofarm, 235, 247, 248, 250, 263–64 Hemofarm Foundation, 250, 255, 263 historical anthropological approach, 26–27, 39n13 Horvat, Srećko, 6, 283–84 humanitarian actions, 221–22, 229 Hungary, 15, 101, 277–78 ICTY (International Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia), 71, 72, 83, 116, 135, 136n10, 282 ideology, 24–25, 45, 64–65, 81, 86–88, 99, 104–5, 123–24, 160, 266–67, 276, 279, 280 (see also Milošević Serbia) IMF (International Monetary Fund), 49, 66, 69, 187, 273, 282 independent regulatory bodies, 96– 97, 107n17, 146 India, 17, 23 individualism, and civil society, 10–11, 12, 46, 223, 275, and liberalism, 10–11, 19–20, methodological, 159, 225, 262, 266 inequality, in Serbia, 59, 67–69, relationships of, 9, 24–25 (see also centre–periphery relationships; civil society; class; disability; gender; generation; governmentality; hegemony; liberal civil society; nationalist civil society) informality, 246, and civil society, 16, 18, and liberal civil society, 36, 102, 143, 170, 236, 243–46, 259–60, 273, in Milošević Serbia, 52, 55, 246, 247, 251, in Vršac, 234–35, 247–52, 253–54, 254–62 (see also brokerage; clientelism; cliques; informal sector; particracy; patronage; state capture) informal sector, 55, 68, 223 Institute for Nature Conservation of Serbia, 253

Institute for Nature Conservation of Vojvodina Province, 253, 257, 258, 259, 261, 264n5 instrumental rationality, 159, 161, 204, 225, 266, 270 (see also utility-maximization) interdisciplinarity, 26 interviewing, 27–28, 96, 112 ISAC (International and Security Affairs Centre), 89, 93, 94 ISC (Institute for Sustainable Communities), 34, 41, 163, 165, 208, 209 Italy, 16, 85, 220, 252 Ivanović, Ivan, 115, 118, 125, 127, 132, 133 James, Deborah, 262 Jansen, Stef, 8–9, 86 Jessop, Bob, 44–45 JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army), 53 JUL (Yugoslav Left), 54 Kalb, Don, 9, 108–9, 129, 279 Kamat, Sangeeta, 17 Kandić, Nataša, 222, 231 Kapusta, Marek, 91, 92 Karađorđević dynasty, 119, 120, 122 Keane, John, 45, 56, 76n8 Kikinda, 110, 179, 181, 184, 193–95, 200n5, 200n16 Konstantinović, Radomir, 57 Kosovo, 48–49, 50, 51, 71, 72, 76n4, 83, 116, 123, 221, 280, 281 Kosovo War, 53, 55, 62, 221 Koštunica, Vojislav, 71, 83, 106n4, 163, 165 Kukan, Eduard, 92, 93 Kyrgyzstan, 90, 161 Labus, Miroljub, 93–94 Laclau, Ernesto, 24–25 Lazić, Mladen, 54 League of Social Democrats of Vojvodina, 75 left art of government, 288

330 | Index

left, in former Yugoslavia, 6, 284, in Serbia, 272, 286 (see also left/ right distinctions; liberalism; social democracy) left/right distinctions, 136n1 liberal civil society, 18–19, 21, ‘changing the funding model’ of, 204, 205, 206, 214, counterhegemonic agendas of, 38, 254, 256–57, 288, cultural capital in, 58, 59, 223, 255, 256, and (human) rights, 42, 46, 57, 74, 176, 184, 189–90, 222–23, 270, 272, 273, 275, 283, indigenization of, 6, 33, 37, 205, 262, 275, inequalities within, 82, 102, 161, 168, 170, 237, 275, and law-making, 22, 36, 143, 161–68, 212–14, and neoliberalism, 56, 61, 62, 73, 74, 93, 98, 153, 158–61, 169, 225, 267, 272, 276, and neoliberalization, 18, 35, 36–37, 73, 99–100, 142–43, 151–58, 168– 71, 188, 216–20, 231–32, 242–43, 265–68, 272–73, and particracy, 36, 75, 103, 157, 160–61, 270, 273, and policy-making, 22, 79, 101, 196, political economy of, 81–82, 100–4, 206, 214, popular idioms in, 205, 229–32, and postYugoslav civil society, 36, 42–43, 47, 175, 267, 275, professional biographies in, 92–94, 103–4, 105–6, pro-Western orientation of, 57, 58, and social democracy, 256, 272, socialist idioms in, 230, and the state, 35–38, 73–74, 80, 82, 115–16, 141–71, 212–19, 245, 266–67, 267–68, subhegemonic agendas of, 232, subject position of, 35, 57, 73–75, 81, 100, 222–23, 256, 265, 268, 271, 283, and technocracy, 6, 34, 75, 103, 160, 161, 227, 256, 283, and various strands of liberalism, 21, 74, 271–74, 275, and wider society, 37–38, 74, 203–4, 205, 206–8,

210–32, 238–46, 262, 266–67, 274–75 (see also antinationalism; boundary crossing; class; democratization; economy; efficiency; egalitarianism; European integration; Europeanization; foreign donors; gender; generation; informality; media; Milošević Serbia; NGOs in Serbia; October Revolution; organizational rationalization; Other Serbia; party politics; post-Milošević hegemonic project; postMilošević Serbia; privatization; public sector; reforms; rule of law; transition; urbanity) Liberal Democratic Party, 74, 75, 87 liberalism, 275, classical, 10–11, 12, 21, 56, 74, 151, 153, 272, economic, 272, 285–86, hegemonic, 6, 11–13, 111, and internal rule of maximum economy, 20, 153, and neoliberalism, 12, 20, 21, 56, 153, 271–73, political, 74, 271–72, 283, 285–86, and rights, 6, 12, 20, 21, 46, 56, 271–72 (see also civil society; governmentality; individualism; liberal civil society; subjectivity; rule of law) local community. See community local fundraising, 34, 37, 204, 206–8, 212, 215, 225–26, 227–31, 235, 241, 262, 274 (see also philanthropy development) local level, 18, 180, 197, 199, 204, 236, 241, 251–52, 260, 262 (see also community; local fundraising; subnational level) Macedonia, 264n2, 284 Makovicky, Nicolette, 279 Maksimović, Dejan, 238, 258, 259, 260, 261 Marina Guzina, Virđinija, 168, 234–35, 236, 238, 248, 254–60, 262 Marinković, Igor, 126, 132, 133

Index | 331

marketization, 49, 63, 66, 153, 158–59, 188, 192, 205, 217–218, 226, 266–267, quasi-, 37, 142, 219 (see also competition; efficiency; liberalism; marketization; neoliberal governmentality; neoliberalism; neoliberalization) Marković, Dragan ‘Palma’, 240 Marković, Mihailo, 46 Marković, Milan, 146 Marković, Mira, 54 Marx, Karl, 10, 16, 56 Marxism, 16, 30 Mastnak, Tomaž, 46, 76n8 Mečiar, Vladimír, 89 media, and liberal civil society, 57, 90, 222, 236, 276, 283, 286–87, 288, and Milošević regime, 48, 50, 51, 52, 57, 61, 222, in postMilošević Serbia, 63, 278, 280, 282, 283, 286–87 meritocracy, 70, 158, 160, 270 (see also competition; marketization; technocracy; particracy) Michalko, Peter, 91, 92 Mićunović, Dragoljub, 30–32, 40n17, 40n19, 40n20, 40n21 Milada (Via Foundation), 206, 207, 214–15 Mill, John Stuart, 10 Millennium Centre (Vršac), 248, 249, 250, 255, 263–64 Milošević, Slobodan, 3, 48, 50–52, 52, 54 Milošević regime, 52–55, 246, 251, and centralization, 50, 251, moderate/antinationalist opposition to, 30, 31, 46, 57, 60–62, 71, 76n6, 90, 112, 248, 283, nationalist opposition to, 53, 76n6, 113–14, social base of, 52, 59–60 (see also Communist Party; media; populism) Milošević Serbia, hegemony in, 51–52, 61–62, 65, 265–66, 272, ideology in, 52–54, labour unions in, 60,

liberal civil society in, 30, 31, 55–58, 59–62, 73–74, 86, 90, 106, 222, 265, nationalization in, 54, and passive revolution, 52, organized crime in, 52, 53–54, 62, security and intelligence services in, 52, 54, 62 (see also capitalism; constitutions; economy; elections; nationalism; nationalist civil society; state; welfare) Ministry of Education (Serbia), 73, 105 Ministry of Labour and Social Policy (Serbia), 73, 172, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 197 Mladić, Ratko, 116, 121, 136n10, 231 Moldova, 90 monarchism, in Serbia, 119–23 Montenegro, 31, 33, 50, 52, 53, 55, 72, 76n4 Morača, Tijana, 285–86, 288 morality, and neoliberalism, 220, 231–32, 272, 282 (see also meritocracy; particracy; populism; technocracy) Mouffe, Chantal, 24–25 Muehlebach, Andrea, 220 multilevel governance, 273 Muslims, 53, 116 Nacionalni stroj, 123 Naši 1389 Serbian National Movement, 116, 121, 136n29 Naši Serbian National Movement, 112, 115, 118, 123, 125, 126, 132, 133, 136n29 National Coalition for Decentralization, 41–42 nationalism, in Milošević Serbia, 52–53, 57, 110, 113–14, in postMilošević Serbia, 71, 74, 123–24, 280–83, in socialist Serbia, 48–51 (see also hegemony; nationalist civil society; nationalist populism) nationalist civil society, 19, 28, 35–36, 111–14, and class, 110, 126–27,

332 | Index

128–29, 134–35, conflicts in, 132–33, counterhegemonic project of, 36, 71, 108, 115–17, 118, 123–24, 266, 275, funding sources of, 112–13, 131, and geopolitical subalternity, 110, 116, and inequality, 109, 126–28, 134–35, and liberal civil society, 35–36, 87, 108, 111–13, 125, 237, in Milošević Serbia, 113–14, and neoliberalization, 109–110, 134–35, 275, and rights, 28, 117, 124–25, 127, 131, 134, 275, and sovereignty, 28, 35, 108, 110, 116, 119, 122, 126, 130, 275, and the state, 108, 110, 113, 118–24, 130–31, 133, 136n6, subhegemonic agendas of, 36, 123–24 (see also family; football hooligans; gender; generation; nationalist populism; neotraditionalism; party politics; populism; postMilošević hegemonic project) nationalist organizations and movements. See nationalist civil society nationalist populism, 108–109, 133–34, and class, 109, 110, 129, 131–32, 133–35, in Eastern Europe, 109, 277–79, and neoliberalization, 108–109, 133–34, in postMilošević Serbia, 36, 108, 109–110, 129, 131–32, 133–35, in socialist Serbia, 51, 109–110, and transition 108–10, 124, 134–35, 275 (see also affect; populism) NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 89, bombing of Serbia, 32, 55, 99, 113, Serbia’s integration into, 93, 116, 277, 283 Nazarčić, Stevica, 257, 259 neighbours, 229–30 neoclassical economics, 36, 159, 160, 266 neoliberal governmentality, 20, 21–22, 23, 65–66, 98, 153, 161, 236, 240–42, 268

neoliberalism, after the crisis, 277–79, anthropology of, 20, 21–22, 65–66, 240, 242, authoritarian populist variants of, 279, 282, 288, and efficiency, 22, 143, 153, 159, 170, 188, 217–218, 267, 269, hegemonic, 266–67, 269, 272, 277–82, and market competition, 20, 66, 153, 159, 170–71, 188, 217–218, 225, 267, 270, 282, and politics, 65–66, 143, 160–61, 170–71, as a school of thought, 20, 36, 143, 153, 159–60, 272, and the state, 21–22, 66, 153, 240 (see also civil society; competition; efficiency; liberal civil society; liberalism; morality; NGOs; subjectivity) neoliberalization, 65–66, 186, 269, in Serbia, 23, 35–37, 66–67, 69, 71– 72, 73, 142–43, 151–58, 168–71, 175–76, 186–88, 191–92, 280–83 (see also capitalism; European integration; liberal civil society; nationalist civil society; NGOs) neotraditionalism, 36, 86, 108, 110, 116–18, 122, 124–28, 134, 135, 205, 231, 266, 275 networking, 31, 33, 58, 199, 243, 244 networks, 18, 22, 36, 38, 52, 54, 61, 70, 73, 81, 88, 91, 143, 161, 167, 169, 221, 243, 244–45, 247, 248, 251, 252, 259–60, 268, 273, formal, 30, 41, 101, 144, 164, 189, 286–87 new public management, 148, 153 new social movements, 45, 56, 76n8 NGO-ization, 6, 7, 16, 17, 18, 271 NGOs, analytical concept of, 15–16, anthropology of, 15, 21–22, and civil society, 4–7, 12–13, 15–16, 41–43, 89–90, 152–53, and development, 12, 152, 236–37, 241, 245, 270, and efficiency, 12, 143, 152, 188, native Serbian concept of, 15–16, 42–43, 55–56, 154–55, 203–4, 230, 231–32, 270, and neoliberal governmentality, 21–22, 153, and neoliberal

Index | 333

restructuring, 12, 153, and party politics, 4, and the state, 4, 12, 21–22, and transition, 4–5, 12–13, transnationality of, 21–22, 245 NGOs in Serbia, and development, 41–43, 236–37, 241, 245, 270, disability-focused, 37, 176, 186, 189–90, 192, 195–96, 197, 198, 199, 275, expansion after 2000, 72, human rights–focused, 74, 185, 222–23, 283, institutional funding of, 59, ‘leading’, 42, 149, 165, 236, 237, 266, 275, project funding of, 59, 224, 225–26, 233n5, 260, 287–88, transfer of state functions to, 21, 36–37, 143, 151–54, 169, 188–89 (see also associations; endowments; foundations; party NGOs; wages) Nikolić, Tomislav, 83 Niš, 28, 131, 132, 183, 190, 193, 197, 227, 229, 287 Niš Centre for Independent Living, 183, 197 Niš Committee for Human Rights, 28 Nomokanon Association of the Students of the Faculty of Law, 112, 118, 128 normality, 4, 86, 98, 266, 269 North Banat Organization of the Blind, 179, 181, 184, 193–95, 198, 200n5, 200n16 Novi Sad, 131, 172, 173, 256 Obradović, Mladen, 114, 115, 124, 125, 126 Obraz Fatherland Movement, 112, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 129 October Revolution (Serbia), 13, 60–62, and liberal civil society, 13, 30, 60–62, 90 ‘October Second’ Socially Owned Enterprise for Communal Undertakings, 248–49, 249, 250, 253, 253–54, 257, 258, 259, 260

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 38n1, 67, 68, 72 Office for Cooperation with Civil Society, 28, 42, 83–84, 101–2, 141–42, 144–52, 154, 157, 158, 161, 167–68, 170, 192 Orbán, Viktor, 278 organizational rationalization, 207–8, 225–27, 230 (see also financial management; professionalization; project management; strategic planning) organizations of people with disabilities, counterhegemonic agendas of, 37, 174–76, 199, 275, and disability NGOs, 173–74, 189–90, 195–96, in Milošević Serbia, 175, 182–84, 189, and rights, 176, 188, 189–90, 195, 275, in socialist Yugoslavia, 47, 175, 172–77, 179–82, as social organizations, 178–80, and the state, 174–76, 180–81, 190–97, and state functions, 178–79, 195, state funding of, 190–95, 196, 197, 200n15, subhegemonic agendas of, 37, 174–76, 198, and welfare reforms, 175, 176, 188–90, 193, 198–99 (see also generation; postMilošević hegemonic project; post-Yugoslav civil society; Vojvodina) Orientalism, 61, 85, 86 (see also Balkanism) OSCE (Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe), 163, 164 Other Serbia, 57, 86–87, 98 (see also liberal civil society) Otpor, 61, 62, 73, 90, 92, 103, 106, 112 Ottoman domination, 85, 117, 119, 121, 125 Pajević, Milan, 93–94, 107n16 Panjković, Biljana, 259, 260

334 | Index

particracy, 70, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 9, in Serbia, 70, 75, 247, 249, 283 (see also state capture) party NGOs, 74–75, 157, 274 (see also particracy) party politics, and civil society, 4, 15, 56, and liberal civil society, 30–32, 34, 36, 38, 57, 60–62, 73, 74–75, 90, 93–94, 168, 235–36, 242–46, 257–66, 265–66, 271, 274, and nationalist civil society, 108, 129–33 patronage, 54, 55, 69–70, 246–52, 262 (see also clientelism) Pavlović, Vukašin, 56, 57, 76n9, 272 Pelkmans, Mathijs, 161 pensioners, in Serbia, 68, 69, 187 periphery. See centre–periphery relationships Perlić, Goran, 182, 183, 192, 193 Pešić, Jelena, 54 Pešić, Vesna, 46, 70, 272 philanthropy, corporate, 204, 206–10, 212–14, 216–20, 226, 229, individual, 204, 206–8, 210–14, 216–31, legal regulation of, 212– 14, 270, rational, 37, 204–5, 209, 212, 217, 219–20, 222, 224–27, 231–32, traditional, 37, 204–5, 209–10, 212, 220, 221–22, 231–32 philanthropy development, 33, 37, 102, 204–20, 224–32, 235, 262, 268, 270 (see also philanthropy) planned interventions, 19, 23–24, 269 (see also development; reforms) pluralism, and civil society, 151, 188, 237, 241, 274, in Milošević Serbia, 52, in socialist Yugoslavia, 47 Poland, 6, 11, 14, 54, 107n22, 107n24, 246, 277–78 policy, anthropology of, 84, and neoliberalism, 65, 66 Pontis Foundation, 32, 87–89, 91–94, 95, 107n10, 233n1 populism, and Milošević regime, 50, 51, 52, 57, and nationalist

civil society, 36, 108, 124–28, 136n2, in post-Milošević Serbia, 63, 135, 280, 282–83 (see also hegemony; nationalist populism; neoliberalism) positionality, 25–26, 171n7, 254 post-Milošević hegemonic project, 18, 35–38, 45, 64–65, 72, 80–82, 86–88, 99–100, 109, 115–17, 118, 123–24, 142–43, 160, 168–69, 174–76, 198–99, 203–4, 205, 220, 232, 235, 246, 265–68, 276, 280, 282, 288, and liberal civil society, 18, 35–38, 61–62, 72, 73, 75, 80–82, 86–88, 96, 99–100, 104–5, 115–16, 142–43, 168–69, 203–4, 205, 220, 232, 235, 265–68, 276, 288, and nationalist civil society, 35–36, 110, 114, 115–16, 123–24, 135, 266, 275, and organizations of people with disabilities, 175–76, 198, 267, 275 post-Milošević Serbia, continuities with Milošević regime in, 63–65, 67, 69–70, 246–52, 274, 279, 283, liberal civil society in, 72–75, the state in, 65, 69–70, 119, 122– 23, 142–43, 146–49, 150 (see also capitalism; constitutions; crisis; economy; elections; foreign aid; media; monarchism; nationalism; nationalist populism; pensioners; populism; public sector; unemployment; welfare; wages) postsocialism, 7–8, anthropology of, 7–9, 22, 246 (see also Eastern Europe; development; transition) post-Yugoslav civil society in Serbia, 19, 28, 36–37, 39n12, 47, 174–75, 265, 267, 275 (see also organizations of people with disabilities) poverty, 3, 23, 53, 55, 57, 67, 110, 126, 128, 221, 224, 228, 280, 284 poverty reduction, 12, 144–45, 188

Index | 335

Poverty Reduction Strategy Implementation Focal Point, 144–47, 149, 157, 167 power bloc, concept of, 16, and hegemony, 25, local, 252, 254, 256, and nationalist civil society, 135, and the postMilošević hegemonic project, 62, 64–65, 272, 274 Prague, 27, 206, 214 Praxis school, 30, 46 precarization, 68, 108, 109, 205 principal–agent theory, 159–60, 225 privatization, and liberal civil society, 266–67, in Milošević Serbia, 54, 55, 56, in post-Milošević Serbia, 66–67, 130, 282, 284, 286, of state functions, 152, 153, 188, 217–20, in Yugoslavia, 53 ProAktiv, 28 ‘pro-European’ politics, 3, 71, 74, 80, 83, 86, 102, 123, 274, 276, 280 professionalization, 5, 16, 70, 102, 142, 199, 225, 271, 275 (see also organizational rationalization) programme budgeting, 153, 157, 158 projectification, 142, 148–50, 192, 268 project management, 103, 148, 207 project proposal writing, 105–6, 160, 193, 194, 230 project system, 175, 191, 192, 193, 195, 197, 275 public advocacy, 28, 34, 38, 190, 199, 200n5, 234, 235–46, 252–62, 264n2, 268, 270, 271 public goods, 216–20, 221, 225, 231– 32, 267, 268, 284, 287 public interest representation, 12, 38, 143, 151, 166, 169, 171n8, 177, 190, 196, 199, 235, 236–37, 239, 242–43, 245, 270, 271, 274 public procurement, 143, 159, 160 public realm, concept of, 218, and liberal civil society, 37, 216–20, 231–32, 235, 242, 266 public sector, and liberal civil society, 59, 69–70, 73, 103–4, 105–6, 141, 150, 217, 223, 260, in post-

Milošević Serbia, 68, 69–70, 91, 282 public space, 35–36, 115–17, 129, 254–56, 282, 284, 286 public tendering, 143, 156–60, 161, 165, 170, 191, 192, 197, 259 Putin, Vladimir, 15 Putnam, Robert D., 12 Rajak, Dinah, 209–10 Ranđelović, Katica, 183, 197 reforms, discourse of, 3–4, 9–10, 38n2, 63, 83–84, 89, 91, 96–97, 99, 190, ‘illusion of’, 96, 272, and international interventions, 3–4, 49, 66, 69, 89, 91, 142–43, 146– 49, 186–87, 235–38, 241–42, 245, and liberal civil society, 4–5, 35, 36–37, 60, 62, 63, 74, 75, 82, 96–97, 99, 103–4, 142–43, 154, 156, 158–61, 162–71, 175, 190, 192, 209, 212–20, 225, 235, and neoliberal governmentality, 22, 23, 65, and transition, 4, 9–10, 38n2, 220, 270 (see also civil society; economy; European integration; planned interventions; welfare reforms) regime change. See electoral revolutions; October Revolution religion. See Serbian Orthodox Christianity; Serbian Orthodox Church repipheralization. See centre– periphery relations responsibilization. See neoliberal governmentality retraditionalization. See neotraditionalism rights, civil, 272, equal, 176, 184, 275, and the EU, 184–85, human, 6, 42, 46, 184–85, 222–23, 270, 272, 273, 283, individual, 12, 20, 21, 46, 56, 267, 270, LGBT, 28, 117, 124–25, 127, 134, 272, minority, 48, 127, 272, of persons with disabilities, 172, 173, 175, 184–

336 | Index

85, 185–86, 187, 188, 189–90, 195, 267, 270, 275, political, 272, welfare, 52–53, women’s, 127, 189, worker, 131 (see also antidiscrimination; civil society; liberal civil society; liberalism; nationalist civil society; NGOs in Serbia; organizations of people with disabilities) Romania, 79, 90, 95, 100, 101, 252 Rose, Nikolas, 240 Roseberry, William, 17 RTS (Radio Television of Serbia), 61, 82, 113, 130, 256 rule of law, and civil society, 10, 12, and liberal civil society, 56, 270, 271–72, 285–86, and liberalism, 6, 10, 56, 271–72, 285–86 rural areas, 34, 58, 124, 227–31 Russia, 6, 8, 15, 54, 86, 117, 121, 125, 159, 220, 246, 277, 282 Saint-Savaism, 125–26, 127 Sampson, Steven, 13, 59 Sarajevo, 46 Schengen Agreement, 79, 83 secularism, 117–18, 272 SEIO (Serbian European Integration Office), 80, 89, 141–42, 146, 147, 150 self-management, 47, 53, 178, 179–80, 242 self-managing communities of interest (SIZ), 47, 182, 183 self-responsibility. See neoliberal governmentality Serbian Orthodox Christianity, 53, 113, 114, 116–18, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125–26, 210 Serbian Orthodox Church, 35, 112, 113, 114, 116–18, 122, 129, 136n14, 157, 160 Serbian Progressive Party, 135, 258, 279–283, 285, 286, 287 Serbian Radical Party, 82, 110, 135, 258, 279, 280, 282–83 Šešelj, Vojislav, 135, 282

Simović, Natalija, 289n3 Šljivić, Ljubisav, 248–51, 253–54, 258 SlovakAid (Slovak Agency for International Development Cooperation), 87, 91, 92 Slovak Democratic and Christian Union–Democratic Party (SDKÚ-DS), 75, 92, 93 Slovakia, 5, 279, foreign ministry, 89, 90, 91, 92, and links with Serbia, 81, 89–90, 107n16, policies towards Serbia, 25, 90–92, postsocialist politics in, 89–90, 91, pro-EU networks in, 91–93 Slovak-Serbian EU Enlargement Fund, 81, 87–89, 92–96, 98, 266, 274 Slovenia, 45–46, 53, 71, 100, 194, 284 Smith, Adam, 10 Šobot Jeličić, Branka, 179, 181, 182, 184, 193, 194–195, 200n16 social democracy, 72, 74, 256, 272 Social Inclusion and Poverty Reduction Unit, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150 Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Yugoslavia, 179, 180, 183 socialist Serbia, legal regulation of civil society in, 178, 200n8, 76n4, social organizations in, 178, strikes and demonstrations in, 49–50, 51 (see also antibureaucratic revolution; associations; Communist Party; crisis; dissent; nationalism; nationalist populism; unemployment) socialist Yugoslavia, 36, 42–43, 45–48, civil society in, 45–49, 50–51, 55–56, 172–84, 275, discourse on civil society in, 11, 45–47, institution of local communities in, 47, 242, reforms in, 46, 49, 50, 53, reperipheralization in, 49, 110, shift to capitalism in, 49, 53, social organizations in, 47, 178–80, 183, 200n8, strikes

Index | 337

in, 48, youth organizations in, 47, 178, 179 (see also associations; Communist Party; constitutions; crisis; dissent; self-management; self-managing communities of interest) social ownership, 54, 248–49, 253, 282 social protection (socijalna zaštita), 152, 186, 188, 191 (see also welfare reforms) South Africa, 262 South-East Europe, 67, 70–72, 279, 283–84 (see also Balkans; Western Balkans) sovereignty. See nationalist civil society; state Soviet Union, 47, 117, 177, former, 41, 67 Spoerri, Marlene, 61 sports clubs, 157, 177, 194, 247 (see also associations) SPS (Socialist Party of Serbia), 51–52, 53–55, 58, 76n6, 248, 249, 250– 51, 263 Stabilization and Association Process, 71–72, 82–83 Staniszkis, Jadwiga, 54 state, anthropology of, 8–9, 21, 86, and civil society, 4, 9, 10–12, 13, 14, 16–17, 18, 19, 21–22, 24–25, 35–37, 43, 44–45, 46–47, 56, 266–67, and common interest, 44, discursive construction of, 8, 22–23, 44, and the economy, 44, efficiency of, 69, 75, 143, 148, 152, 188, 267, 282, and globalization, 21–22, and governmentality, 21–23, in Foucault’s work, 22–23, integration of, 23, 44, materiality of, 9, 23, 44–45, 86, in Milošević Serbia, 52–53, 53–55, in postsocialist settings, 8–9, 54, poststructuralist (governmentality) approaches to, 8, 9, 20–22, 44, reform-

oriented agencies of, 73, 106, 150, 245, 268, and society, 8, 9, 23, 44–45, and sovereignty, 9, spatiality of, 180, strategicrelational approach to, 35, 44–45, 51 (see also independent regulatory bodies; privatization; projectification; welfare reforms) state capture, 70, 103, 157, 249 (see also particracy) state–civil society partnerships, 18, 36–37, 82, 101, 102, 141–43, 144, 148–49, 151–53, 167, 168, 169, 170, 175, 196, 209, 266, 267–68 Statehood Day, 119, celebrations in Orašac, 119–24 State Union of Serbia and Montenegro, 76n5, 90–91, 162 Štiks, Horvat, 6, 283–84 Stojanović, Snežana, 238, 239, 243, 244 Stojiljković, Milan, 227–28, 229–31 strategic planning, 79, 207–8, 225, 231 Štrbac, Orhideja, 259, 260 student activism, 11, in former Yugoslavia, 284, in postsocialist Serbia, 58, 60, 86, 90, 103, 105, 112, 128, 129, 227, in socialist Yugoslavia, 48, 50 subhegemonic agendas. See liberal civil society; nationalist civil society; organizations of people with disabilities subjectivity, 8, 262, and governmentality, 19–20, 240, and liberalism, 20, 242, and neoliberalism, 20, 21, 240, 242 subject positions, 24–25, 45, 273, 275 (see also liberal civil society) subnational level, 37–38, 219, 235 (see also local level) suspicion, 231, towards NGOs in Serbia, 37, 205, 220, 221, 222–24, 230, 231 (see also trust) Tadić, Boris, 83, 84, 119, 121, 123, 130, 153

338 | Index

technocracy, 67, 278, 283 (see also liberal civil society) teleology. See Europeanization; transition temporality, 122 The Hague see ICTY third sector, 15, 270 (see also civil society; NGOs) Tito, Josip Broz, 45, 181 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 10–11, 12 Trag Foundation. See BCIF transnational integration, 18, 35, 36, 65–67, 70–72, 80–82, 86–88, 96, 99–100, 104–5, 109, 115–16, 123–24, 142–43, 146–49, 168–69, 265–68, 277, 282 transparency, 12, 22, 36–37, 142, 143, 154, 157, 158–61, 166, 170, 175–76, 205, 221, 224–25, 228, 243, 266, 267, 270, 273, 274, 283, 286 (see also accountability; competition; efficiency; financial reporting; neoliberalism; public procurement; public tendering) Transparency International, 38n1 Transparency Serbia, 156 transition, 4, anthropological critique of, 5, 8, 11, blocked, 62, and civil society, 9, 11–12, 12–13, 18–19, 21, 42–43, 49, delayed, 62, 63, 84, discourse of, 4, 6, 7, 8, 25, 38n2, 49, 62–64, 76n10, 84–85, 108, 134–35, 195, 206–7, 270, 272, end of, 4, 283–84, hegemony of, 18–19, 64–65, 81, 104, 220, 235, 272, 275, 277, 279, 283–84, 288, and liberal civil society, 35, 42–43, 81, 220, 237, 285–86, 288, ‘losers of’, 63, in Serbia, 18, 38n2, 62–64, 84, 110, 267, 279, teleology of, 8, 25, 64, 84, 206–7, 237, unblocked, 63, 64, 220, 274, ‘winners of’, 63, 67 (see also capitalism; civil society; democracy; Europeanization; evolutionism; liberal civil society; nationalist civil society; NGOs, reforms)

transitional justice, 71, 223 (see also war crimes) transnational governmentality, 21, 245 Trump, Donald, 134, 135 trust, 12, 14, towards authorities and parties in Serbia, 63, towards NGOs in Serbia, 204, 205, 224, 226, 231 (see also suspicion) UK (United Kingdom), 32–33, 134, 279 (see also Brexit; British embassy in Serbia; DfID; FCO) Ukraine, 90, 186 UN (United Nations), 55, 184, 187 uncivil society, 111 unemployment, in post-Milošević Serbia, 67, 68, 69, 109, 124, 128, 223, 280, in socialist Serbia, 49 United Arabic Emirates, 285 United Nations Development Programme, 38n1 urbanity, and liberal civil society, 46, 56, 57–58, 254–256, 265, 288 USA (United States of America), 10– 11, 60, 61, 69, 91, 134, 212, 216, 279 (see also ISC; USAID) USAID (United States Agency for International Development), 31, 34, 41, 43, 43–44, 163, 165, 169, 208, 209, 210, 237, 238, 241–42 utility companies. See October Second; Varoš utility-maximization, 20, 159, 219 (see also instrumental rationality) Varoš, 253, 257, 259, 260 Vasilevska, Živka, 162, 163, 164, 166 Veljović, Stevan, 88, 92, 94, 95–96 Veselinović, Dobrica, 286, 287 Vetta, Theodora, 110, 242, 243–44 veze (links), 70 Virtus awards, 208–10, 212, 219, 235 Vojvodina, 27, 58, 75, 91, 110, 116, 172, 234, 254, 255, 256, 259, 263, 286–87, organizations of people with disabilities in, 173, 181, 182, 193–95, 200n9, under Milošević, 50–51, 53, 264n3,

Index | 339

264n5, in socialist Yugoslavia, 50, 51, 76n4 volunteering, 14, 70, 113, 152–53, 167, 193, 220, 226, 287 VRER (Vršac Region – European Region Movement), 248, 249, 250–51, 257, 258 Vršac, 28, 38, 234–35, 236, 238, 247–64, 264n3, 271, 273, 284 Vučić, Aleksandar, 280, 281, 282, 283 Vučković, Nataša, 30, 31, 32, 40n21 Vukomanović, Svetlana, 31 Vuković, Vjekoslav, 289n3 Vujović, Sreten, 56 vulnerable groups, 67, 144, 188, 239 wages, in NGOs in Serbia, 59, 223, in post-Milošević Serbia, 59, 67, 68, 100 war crimes, 71, 83, 106n4, 121, 136n10, 220, 222 (see also transitional justice) war veterans, 39n12, 137n16, 181 Wedel, Janine, 246–47 welfare, in Milošević Serbia, 52–53, 55, in post-Milošević Serbia, 67–68 welfare reforms, in Italy, 220, in Serbia, 36–37, 95, 152, 175–76, 186–89,

191–92, 198–99, in Slovakia, 94–95 (see also organizations of people with disabilities) Western Balkans. See EU (European Union) Western Europe, 4, 20, 68, 85, 108, 109, 236, 277 ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ Initiative (Inicijativa Ne da[vi]mo Beograd), 284–88 workfare, 176, 186, 187–88, 199, 267, 278 (see also welfare reforms) World Bank, 38n1, 66, 68, 105, 144, 147, 187, 188, 191–92, 267, 273 World War I, 51, 254, 255 World War II, 39n12, 51, 120, 177, 179, 181, 255, 263 Yugoslav wars, 39n12, 53, 55, 57, 62, 86, 106n6, 183, 194, 221, 224 Zagreb, 46 Zarkula, Jovica, 248, 249, 250–51 Zečević, Miodrag, 178, 179, 180 Živković, Čedomir, 248, 250 Zrenjanin, 28, 182, 190

DISLOCATIONS

General Editors: August Carbonella, Memorial University of Newfoundland; Don Kalb, University of Bergen & Utrecht University; Linda Green, University of Arizona The immense dislocations and suffering caused by neoliberal globalization, the retreat of the welfare state in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the heightened military imperialism at the turn of the twenty-first century have raised urgent questions about the temporal and spatial dimensions of power. Through stimulating critical perspectives and new and cross-disciplinary frameworks that reflect recent innovations in the social and human sciences, this series provides a forum for politically engaged and theoretically imaginative responses to these important issues of late modernity. Volume 1 Where Have All the Homeless Gone? The Making and Unmaking of a Crisis Anthony Marcus

Volume 8 Class, Contention, and a World in Motion Edited by Winnie Lem and Pauline Gardiner Barber

Volume 2 Blood and Oranges: Immigrant Labor and European Markets in Rural Greece Christopher M. Lawrence

Volume 9 Crude Domination: An Anthropology of Oil Edited by Andrea Behrends, Stephen P. Reyna and Günther Schlee

Volume 3 Struggles for Home: Violence, Hope and the Movement of People Edited by Stef Jansen and Staffan Löfving

Volume 10 Communities of Complicity: Everyday Ethics in Rural China Hans Steinmüller

Volume 4 Slipping Away: Banana Politics and Fair Trade in the Eastern Caribbean Mark Moberg

Volume 11 Elusive Promises: Planning in the Contemporary World Edited by Simone Abram and Gisa Weszkalnys

Volume 5 Made in Sheffield: An Ethnography of Industrial Work and Politics Massimiliano Mollona

Volume 12 Intellectuals and (Counter-) Politics: Essays in Historical Realism Gavin Smith

Volume 6 Biopolitics, Militarism, and Development: Eritrea in the Twenty-First Century Edited by David O’Kane and Tricia Redeker Hepner

Volume 13 Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor Edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella

Volume 7 When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue and Other Essays in Historical Anthropology Hermann Rebel

Volume 14 The Neoliberal Landscape and the Rise of Islamist Capital in Turkey Edited by Neşecan Balkan, Erol Balkan and Ahmet Öncü

Volume 15 Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex Stef Jansen Volume 16 Where Are All Our Sheep? Kyrgyzstan, A Global Political Arena Boris Petric, translated by Cynthia Schoch Volume 17 Enduring Uncertainty: Deportation, Punishment and Everyday Life Ines Hasselberg Volume 18 The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility Edited by Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak

Volume 19 Breaking Rocks: Music, Ideology and Economic Collapse, from Paris to Kinshasa Joe Trapido Volume 20 Indigenist Mobilization: Confronting Electoral Communism and Precarious Livelihoods in Post-Reform Kerala Luisa Steur Volume 21 The Partial Revolution: Labour, Social Movements and the Invisible Hand of Mao in Western Nepal Michael Hoffmann Volume 22 Frontiers of Civil Society: Government and Hegemony in Serbia Marek Mikuš

Innovative Approaches to Anthropology!

FOCAAL JOURNAL OF GLOBAL AND HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY Editorial Board:

Don Kalb, University of Bergen and Utrecht University Sharryn Kasmir, Hofstra University, New York Mao Mollona, Goldsmiths College, London Mathijs Peklmans, London School of Economics Oscar Salemink, University of Copenhagen Alpa Shah, London School of Economics Gavin Smith, University of Toronto Managing & Lead Editor: Luisa Steur, University of Amsterdam

Focaal is a peer-reviewed journal advocating an approach that rests in the simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights, and global vision. It is at the heart of debates on the ongoing conjunction of anthropology and history as well as the incorporation of local research settings in the wider spatial networks of coercion, imagination, and exchange that are often glossed as “globalization” or “empire.” Seeking contributions on all world regions, Focaal is unique among anthropology journals for consistently rejecting the old separations between “at home” and “abroad “, “center” and “periphery.” The journal therefore strives for the resurrection of an “anthropology at large,” that can accomodate issues of postsocialism, mobility, capitalist power and popular resistance into integrated perspectives. RECENT ARTICLES Emptiness and its futures: Staying and leaving as tactics of life in Latvia DACE DZENOVSKA The desire for disinheritance in austerity Greece DANIEL M. KNIGHT Conjuring “the people”: The 2013 Babylution protests & desire for political transformation in postwar Bosnia-Herzegovina LARISA KURTOVIC Finding a place in the world: Political subjectivities and the imagination of Iceland after the economic crash KRISTIN LOFTSDOTTIR

Between Afropolitans and new Sankaras: Class mobility and the reproduction of academics in Burkina Faso MICHELLE ENGELER “Forging New Malay networks”: Imagining global halal markets JOHAN FISCHER Shelling from the ivory tower: Project Camelot and the post–World War II operationalization of social science PHILIP Y. KAO The racial fix: White currency in the gentrification of black and Latino Chicago JESSE MUMM

berghahnjournals.com/focaal ISSN 0920-1297 (Print) • ISSN 1558-5263 (Online) Issues 80, 81, & 82/2018, 3 issues p.a.