The distant democratiser: representations of the EU and their political uses in Serbia (original) (raw)

Abstract

The European project is ostensibly associated with democratisation, but how socio‐political discourses and practices in countries aspiring to the EU accession reflect this link is often poorly understood. My anthropological work‐in progress suggests that the prevalent preoccupation with normative ideas, legal harmonisation and formal institutions proves profoundly unsuited for interpreting the whole range of representations of the EU and their political uses in Serbia. In the revealing case of the 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, EU-promoted values such as LGBT rights ended up presented and approached as something foreign while the violent protesters approximated more closely a mass‐based and culturally entrenched nationalist movement. The European Commission applauded that the militarisation of the Parade kept participants from harm, but this also limited its transformative impact and enabled politicians to play up the governmental‐technological rhetoric of the state’s monopoly of power. Thus, the democratic principles equated with the EU may be positioned as alien and limited to alliances of particular civil‐society and state elites. I elaborate by analysing “political subjectivities” of civil‐society actors who could be assumed to be the prodemocratic and pro‐European avant‐garde, but whose often ambiguous understandings of the EU and European integration encompass modernity, tolerance or order alongside ideas of centralisation, partiality, or incoherence. The EU’s democratisation efforts should move beyond top‐down legal and formal‐institutional channels toward a dialogue with local political culture, in order to destabilise seemingly natural divisions which block a broad, grassroots societal transformation. Such processes may be already in progress: Jelena Karleuša, a pop‐singer whose music and private relationships place her closer to the conservative‐nationalist pole of the dichotomous folk model of “two Serbias”, surprisingly condemned the expressions of homophobia with a forcefulness which triggered and mainstreamed a lively public debate.

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