Forward to part 5, Conclusions"Ethnic Conflict as Demobilizer: The Case of Serbia"
V.P. Gagnon, Jr.
One of the most striking aspects of the Serbian case, and the one that most puts into question hypotheses relying on assumptions of ethnic solidarity, has been that, despite the image of egregious injustices inflicted on Serbs in Kosovo, Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, despite the discourse of genocide and anti-Serbian conspiracies, the strength of appeals to ethnic solidarity was in fact surprisingly limited. Part of this is seen in the above-cited need to structure the debate not in terms of ethnic solidarity per se but in terms of egregious injustices. Another part is seen in the emphasis on economic, social justice, and ethnic peace issues. But perhaps the strongest evidence is seen in the actual effects of appeals to ethnic issues.
Of course the first public manifestations of Serbian national sentiment fostered by the regime came several years before multiparty elections, in particular beginning in late 1987, after Serbian party chief Slobodan Milosevic and his conservative allies managed to consolidate control over the Serbian communist party. Between this event and early 1990, the most significant type of political event in Yugoslavia was what was termed “the happening of the people,” that is, what appeared to be massive, spontaneous rallies and mobilization of Serbs throughout Yugoslavia around issues of economic, social and ethnic or national discontent. As in the rest of Eastern Europe, people in Yugoslavia too had grievances related to repression of issues linked to ethnic sentiment, and it was to be expected that these issues would become politically significant. But these rallies addressed the economic and social problems facing workers at least as much as purely ethnic or national issues. And they did not lead to violent conflict.
These rallies were at the time portrayed by some Serb academics and analysts as signs of incipient democratization, comparable to later mass rallies and anti-regime mobilizations in other parts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But in fact, there was a very significant difference. The rallies in Serbia and Yugoslavia were organized and orchestrated by the regime; they were not at all critical of the Serbian government, and in fact participants often chanted slogans in support of Milosevic and other communist party leaders and carried their pictures. Even the qualification as mobilization is somewhat questionable. These “mobilizations” in fact had more in common with communist-era “mobilizations” than with the massive outpourings in other East European countries: workers were given a day off with pay, a bus ride to another town, and free food in exchange for participating in the “mobilization.” Although to be sure many participants took part of their own free will, out of a true sense of liberation from perceived past oppression, it cannot be overlooked that this “mobilization” was in fact orchestrated from above.
In addition, the goals of these “mobilizations” were to support the existing regime only in an indirect way, rather than to get the active support of the population. The main goal was to overthrow party leaderships at local, regional, republic and even federal levels who disagreed with Milosevic, that is, to oppose the enemies of the regime. The rallies most often took place at the same time as a party leadership meeting, in front of the building in which the meeting took place, and was used to instill fear into Milosevic ’s opponents in these local or regional leaderships so they would step aside and allow new people to be put into place. The cost to participants was relatively minor, and the psychic benefits were very high. To the extent that one can speak of mobilization of actors who are not directly politically relevant, in an authoritarian system where the mobilization is organized by the authoritarian regime itself, one can say that the regime managed to mobilize significant parts of the population to participate in these rallies. But these mobilizations did not lead to violence along ethnic lines.
As described above, once the regime needed the direct support of the population, and was opposed by forces outside of the communist party, the content and form of its political strategy shifted dramatically toward issues of economics and peace. Thus rather than exacerbating the situation in nationalist terms, and resulting in a spiral of hypernationalist reaction, the Serbian regime and its opponents began a process of ethnic underbidding, in an attempt to seem more moderate on ethnic and other issues. The overall results of these strategies are striking, and seem to disprove hypotheses about ethnic outbidding and mobilization spiralling into violence.
In the December 1990 elections, when Milosevic in effect ethnically underbid his nationalist opponents, he received 65 percent of the vote against 16 percent for the SPO's candidate. The even more vocally nationalist Serbian Radical Party (SRS), which used a rhetoric of ethnic conflict (calling explicitly for expulsion of non-Serbs from Serbia and for war to create an enlarged Serbia, for example) and was thus portrayed in the media, received only 2 percent of the vote.
After the election, the moves in early to mid-1991 by Milosevic and his allies to provoke conflict in Croatia and to block compromise in the talks over the future of Yugoslavia, together with his inattention to nonethnic demands, enabled the opposition to mobilize the population against the regime on purely non-ethnic issues. Interestingly, at this time the SPO's leader, Vuk Draskovic, began ethnic underbidding, and although not renouncing his nationalist viewpoint, accused the SPS of war mongering and called for peaceful negotiations to realize the interests of Serbs and of Serbia in Yugoslavia. Indeed, Draskovic publicly questioned the need for war and in fact criticized the destruction of civilian targets and whole cities by Serbian forces in Croatia.[29]
Another telling indication of the limits of ethnic solidarity was the response to the army’s efforts to draft men to fight in the war in Croatia. At a time when the Serbian media was filled with images of genocidal Ustasha massacring innocent Serb women and children, the attempts to mobilize young men and reserve forces in Serbia to fight against the Croatian fascists was stunningly low. Turnout rates in Belgrade ran about 5 percent. The rates in smaller cities and the countryside the rates were somewhat higher (about 20%), but were still quite low, and could be attributed to a combination of social pressure and the lack of hiding places rather than to a sense of solidarity. In addition, in this period upwards of 200,000 young men fled the country in order to avoid fighting.[30] For this reason, the war in Bosnia was fought not with soldiers from Serbia, but with Serbs from Bosnia itself, who were drafted and had little choice but to fight if they were in areas controlled by Karadzic’s forces (although here too those who could leave did; less than 1/2 of Bosnia’s prewar Serb population stayed in the Republika Srpska.) This hardly squares with the image of irrational nationalistic Serbs who could barely restrain themselves from going out and killing non-Serbs.
Dissatisfaction with the war in Croatia, as well as growing unrest over the war being provoked by Milosevic's allies in Bosnia, contributed to the anti-war movement in Belgrade, in which even many nationalistically-oriented intellectuals and the Serbian Orthodox Church joined in to call for Milosevic's resignation. Thus in the May 1992 elections, the SPS received the votes of only 27.5 percent of the total electorate,[31] while 36 percent did not vote at all (the opposition had called for a boycott).[32] Its coalition partner, the chauvinistically-oriented SRS, was presented by Belgrade television as respectable and not as extremist, although it clearly appealed to those for whom ethnic outbidding was a positive thing. Yet even with the blessing of Serbian television, the SRS received the votes of only 19 percent of the electorate (at a maximum, 24 percent of Serbia's Serbs). So over half of the electorate (and at least 43 percent of Serbia's Serbs) rejected the SPS-SRS coalition despite the images of injustice.
Although the wave of opposition seen in spring 1992 was submerged under the rising tide of "injustices against innocent Serbs" in Bosnia, the appearance on the scene of Milan Panic shows even more clearly the explanatory weakness of the concept of ethnic outbidding. Panic, from the time he was named federal prime minister in July 1992, took an almost anti-nationalist line.[33] Yet in the election campaign for Serbian president between Panic and Milosevic in November and December 1992, a time when the most vocal anti-war and liberal elements of the country had fled abroad and images of innocent Serbs under attack from Mujehedeen and Ustashe flooded the airwaves, the SPS strictly limited Panic's access to the broadcast media.
The ethnic conflict literature, with its hypotheses about the dynamics of ethnic outbidding and the priority of ethnic solidarity, would have predicted that the Serbian leadership should have given Panic all the air time he wanted, since his rhetoric alone would have discredited him. Yet the regime was clearly quite afraid of Panic's challenge. Not only did it severely limit his access to the media, it satanized him as a foreign agent sent by the west to subvert Serbia's independence. Nevertheless, at the start of the campaign, in October, Panic had a favorable rating of 76 percent, while Milosevic's was 49 percent.[34] In the election itself, 5-10 percent of voters, mostly younger ones who would support Panic, were turned away from the polls, and many people's names had disappeared from the voting lists in Belgrade, the center of Panic's support. Yet despite massive fraud, exit polls taken during the voting itself showed an even split of 47 percent each for Panic and Milosevic. (This result is even more striking if we keep in mind that this 47 percent for Panic does not include the massive numbers of young men who had fled the country to avoid being drafted to the war in Croatia, and who would have been natural supporters of Panic.) Even the regime's official statistic, 56 percent to 34 percent in favor of Milosevic, is startling in this context. Likewise in the December 1992 parliamentary elections, also subject to fraudulent procedures, the regime was able to "mobilize" less than one- half the electorate, and only one-fifth (about 23 percent of Serbs) were mobilized mainly on ethnic conflict issues. Fully half the electorate (and at least 40 percent of the republic's Serbs) remained at home or voted for democratic opposition parties.
The results of the December 1993 elections were similar.[35] The SPS stressed peace in Serbia, political stability, the fight against criminals and growing differentials in wealth, denounced the "looting of state property" and called for a review of all privatizations to date; it managed to obtain 38 percent of the vote, or 27 percent of the electorate. The Radicals, who were no longer in coalition with SPS and had been presented by Belgrade television in their true colors (as war criminals, etc.), received 10 percent of the vote. The SPS's new chauvinistically nationalist coalition party, headed by war criminal Arkan and given much positive coverage on television, received less than 2 percent of votes cast. Thus only 15 percent of the electorate voted for blatantly chauvinistic parties, while at least 47 percent of the republic's Serbs supported either democratic opposition parties or abstained from voting, hardly a massive mobilization based on ethnic outbidding.[36]
While the ethnic or national question was clearly one part of political discourse at times of elections, and the “Serbian question” was one that all candidates had to address, there was no automatic mobilization of “Serbian ethnic solidarity” leading inexorably toward greater conflict, no rising up en masse of “the Serbian nation” against other ethnic groups. Indeed, although the SPS and its allies managed in rigged elections and quite favorable circumstances (virtual control of mass media) to receive the votes of about 50 percent of the population--which at a maximum would include 62.5 percent of Serbian population of Serbia--the emphasis on non- ethnic issues, the way in which ethnic issues were framed, and the quite obvious fear of the anti- nationalist candidacy of Milan Panic puts into doubt an image of ethnic politics spiralling inexorably toward ever more-extreme and conflictual policies due to the need to gain electoral support or to mobilize the wider population. The dominant image of Serbs under threat of genocide in Bosnia and Croatia, and the outside world's complicity in this injustice, makes these findings even more intriguing.
In fact, as I’ve shown elsewhere,[37] the violent conflict along ethnic lines in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina was not the result of mass mobilization on ethnic issues, or of nationalistic propaganda driving people into a frenzied killing of others. Although there were some instances of individuals claiming to be motivated by the propaganda, the overall conflict cannot be explained by looking at these individuals. Rather, the violence was a purposeful policy, undertaken by order of political leaders, using the army and paramilitary groups. The “uprisings” of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, though undertaken against the background of real concerns of Serbs in those republics, was a very well thought-out and planned policy. Far from being the result of a nationalistic mobilization, the violence was accomplished by force of arms and the resulting fear among all of the population, Serbs and non- Serbs. This was not a spiralling of hypernationalism or ethnic outbidding out of control, but rather a purposeful strategy by particular people within the political, military, economic and cultural elite.
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This page last revised 10/20/99