Tag Archives: (post)socialism

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine

After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the charismatic President Zelensky, who has addressed parliaments in Brussels and Westminster to rapturous applause. In Britain, football stadia and Oxbridge colleges (including my own) have draped themselves in the Ukrainian national colours. There is little or no attempt to representation of the Russian perspective. It is light versus darkness, innocent victims versus post-communist megalomaniacs, Europe versus Oriental Despotism. In her recent contribution to this blog, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn presents the binary in terms of the right of smaller peoples to choose freedom in the face of Russian neo-imperialism.

The evidence seems so clear cut that only a Putin stooge or an idiot could argue differently. But anthropologists have a habit of complicating matters and they are not alone in doing so. You don’t have to be a Marxist to highlight the humiliation heaped upon Russia by Western leaders unable to discard their Cold War blinkers; but David Harvey addresses this emotional dimension particularly well. The West bears a lot of responsibility for creating the monster called Putin: it rebuffed Russian efforts to integrate into western institutions, instead targeting their closest relations for admission to the world’s most militarily powerful and economically prosperous alliances (Kalb 2022). Elsewhere, Michael Hudson has pinpointed the American interests that lie behind spectacular demonstrations of renewed Western unity; the catastrophe in distant Ukraine is already a defeat for Europe, and especially Germany, by the military-industrial complex of the capitalist hegemon, in combination with the key sectors of resource extraction and finance.

Image 1: The CIA was actively involved in the maidan demonstrations of 2014; it did not trust Ukrainian “civil society” to secure an optimal outcome for Washington, photo by Ivan Bandura

Few of the analyses I have read so far engage with the history and geography of the places where the violence is unfolding. I suspect most Western Europeans and North Americans perceive Ukraine naively as the historic homeland of the Ukrainian people, regrettably complicated by a subversive Russian minority. In fact, the territory of contemporary Ukraine has been occupied by many diverse populations since prehistoric times (Magocsi 2010 provides a dispassionate and comprehensive history). The dominant elements in the last millennium have been Slavic. Kyiv was the centre of the first Rus’ polity. The city was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 and was not reintegrated into a Slavic state until centuries later. A Ukrainian national consciousness emerged only in the late Tsarist era. When the great empires of the region collapsed at the end of the First World War, the majority of former subjects hardly knew what their identity was (or should become) as citizens of a nation-state. In the case of Ukraine, this learning process has dragged out over a century. It is being completed before our eyes in the most tragic way imaginable.

This particular history needs to be born in mind constantly when commentators write about “the Ukrainian people” as an entity of great antiquity. It goes without saying that the writers of history books in today’s post-Soviet Ukraine can evoke national heroes who repelled invaders in the distant past. This is in fact easier terrain than the twentieth century. Elizabeth Dunn is right to note that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a product of forcible incorporation into a new empire, that of the USSR. She does not describe the chaotic and violent circumstances in which very different Ukrainian polities were constructed on the ground in 1918-9, when the national flag was already the flag in use today. She does not mention the large-scale pogroms that characterized the larger of these embryonic Ukrainian states. The dark history of repressed Ukrainian nationalism continued during and after the Second World War (see also Kalb 2022), when most of its leaders collaborated with Nazi occupying forces and instigated new campaigns of terror against Poles as well as Jews. Dunn cites the result of the referendum of 1991 as evidence that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens wished to regain their sovereignty. She does not detail the circumstances in which this referendum was held, following an attempted coup in Moscow, when the socialist empire had already imploded. Earlier in that same year (despite a national revival in the years of perestroika), a large majority of Ukrainian citizens voted not for independence but for a continuation of the Soviet Union in some form.

It is easy to get lost in such details and anthropological case-studies are unlikely to help. We need tools for comparative analysis at the macro level. In an original comparison of the demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Andre Gingrich (2002) proposed the concept of “dethroned majorities” to help grasp the virulence of national sentiment both inside and outside the boundaries of the shrivelled states that emerged from imperial collapse. It is instructive to consider contemporary Ukraine in this light, where the “dethroning” was interrupted for almost a century by socialist federalism. In this post-imperial conjuncture, the familiar range of ressentiments at the former imperial centre has been intensified by the broken promises of the West. Simultaneously, emotions also run high among those motivated by a mission to consolidate a new nation-state on exclusivist principles, with a particular distaste for co-citizens suspected by virtue of their nationality of identifying with the ancien régime.

Structurally, the comparative analysis of socialist empires should be extended to China. While copying many aspects of Soviet nationalities policy, Mao was careful to maintain continuity with the Qing dynasty: thus even “autonomous” regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang were integral components of the sovereign nation-state. Although few Cold War scholars in the West took Soviet federalism seriously, without this “decorative fiction” the constituent republics would not have been able to proclaim their independence as they did, hastening the final disintegration of the USSR.

Does each sovereign state have the right to seek out new partners freely and without restriction? International law guarantees this, but again it is worth considering real-life comparisons. Elizabeth Dunn invokes Canada and Mexico hypothetically, but the case of Cuba seems more pertinent. When the Soviet Union (responding to Western initiatives in Eurasia) sought to place missiles on the territory of its ally in 1962, President Kennedy triumphed in the ensuing diplomacy. So much for sovereignty. If we are to avoid double standards, it is incumbent on us in the West to see the expansion of NATO through Russian eyes, i.e. as aggression.

The Russian Federation has swallowed the admission to the Western military alliance of several former allies and even the Baltic states that were formerly inside the empire. But it has always stressed that Ukraine was different. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric concerning Ukraine is open to the same objections as that of his neo-nationalist opponents: essentialist notions of the Eastern Slavs as one people eternally are no more convincing than Adolf Hitler’s justifications for the Anschluss of Austria. So Dunn is right: Ukrainian citizens should have the right to opt for new allegiances. Some observers may object that they have not done so freely, that the CIA played a key role in the Maidan demonstrations that toppled an elected government. The circumstances were tarnished. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the “European” course would in any case have triumphed eventually. With millions of Ukrainians already working in the West as labour migrants, the material incentives to benefit from consolidating this affiliation were overwhelming.

At the supra-national level, the European Union must be similarly free to decide who is eligible for “priority partner” status and who is to be left out in the cold. But those who formulate and justify these policies in the name of “democracy promotion” have elementary obligations to reckon with the consequences of their implementation. The combination of geopolitical security considerations and intimate historical connections make for a complex configuration in which it was irresponsible of the West to forge ahead in transforming Ukraine into a neoliberal “vassal state” (Kalb 2022) while isolating Russia.

Almost thirty years have passed since Samuel Huntington put forward his own distinctive vision of how cultural factors would come to dominate geopolitics in the wake of the Cold War (Huntington 1996). The conservative political scientist, though hardly an expert on East-Central Europe, paid considerable attention to Ukraine. He saw the country as divided by a “fault line” between east and west. In the west, Galicians had been free to nurture national sentiment under the Habsburgs, while the Greek-Catholic Church had introduced elements of pluralism characteristic of the West. No such pluralism was tolerated in the Russian-controlled territories, which according to Huntington belonged to a distinct civilization. This binary makes anthropologists uncomfortable but it is not entirely fabricated. East-west differences have been clearly visible in Ukrainian voting patterns since the 1990s, as the country oscillated between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments. Nationalist sentiment has always been strongest in western cities such as Lviv. This is not the sort of nationalism that commends itself to liberals in Brussels. In practice it has meant, for example, significant constraints on the evolved rights of Hungarian and Rusyn minorities in Transcarpathia.

Might any positives emerge from this tragedy? It is hard to be optimistic. Persistent nationalist blemishes in Ukraine might be excused in light of the post-imperial conjuncture, and corrected once the country is inside the European Union (though the examples of neighbouring Hungary and Poland are not encouraging in this regard). Another pious hope would be that the corruption riddling Ukraine’s post-Soviet kleptocracy (until now so similar to that of Russia) might be more effectively addressed following accession.

In any case, rapid accession is surely inevitable. When the “dethroned majority” resorts to such brutal action, Huntingtonian fault lines will finally be transcended. Ukraine will not have to oscillate any longer. Having paid a ghastly price in blood, it will be welcomed as a worthy member of the Euro-American civilization, thereby taking its long history of imperial peripherality to a new level. Fast-track admission may also be offered to Moldova and Georgia. NATO membership will perhaps have to be postponed for all three, but only for as long as Western Europe remains highly dependent on Russian gas and oil.

It is hard to see any grounds for optimism at all concerning Russia. The Kremlin will dig in and continue to behave badly in fogs of nationalism. Putin and his eventual successors will emphatically deserve to remain in that category of “other” (for the free West), with all glimmers of a post-Soviet escape route extinguished. Russia will continue to occupy that slot at least until an alternative “other” has taken shape (perhaps the socialist empire that rejected the federal model?).

Meanwhile the immediate winners of this catastrophe are Washington, numerous large American corporations, and generally the manufacturers of weapons and flags.

Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

References

Gingrich, Andre 2002. “When ethnic majorities are ‘dethroned’: towards a methodology of self-reflexive, controlled macrocomparison” in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox eds. Anthropology, By Comparison. London: Routledge. pp. 225-48.

Hudson, Michael. 2022. “America defeats Germany for the third time in a century.” Monthly Review online blog, 28th February: https://mronline.org/2022/02/28/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kalb, Don. 2022. “‘Fuck Off’ versus ‘Humiliation’: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East.” FocaalBlog, 1 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/01/don-kalb-fuck-off-versus-humiliation-the-perverse-logic-towards-war-in-europes-east/

Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2010. A History of Ukraine. The Land and Its Peoples. (Second Edition) Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Cite as: Hann, Chris. 2022. “The Agony of Ukraine.” FocaalBlog, 11 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order.  While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty.  Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921.  Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes”  (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.

Dimly lit firefighters stand amid smoke and ruined buildings.
Image 1: An apartment block in Kyiv (Oleksandr Koshyts Street) after shelling, 25 February (Credit: Kyiv City Council, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR3ieAzQ7Nt8LBf62tYs1P2fORG-QVNV1uP-8DNiZqlZ6j1tJHFRaI1Rrzg#/media/File:Житловий_будинок_у_Києві_(вул._Кошиця)_після_обстрілу.jpg)

Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.”  He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”

Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.  

Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:

“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).

The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets.  But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia.  As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.

Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).

The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020).  Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.

David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.  

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University.  Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992.  Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation.  Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs.  Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.

References

Bilous, Taras. 2022. “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv”, Commons, February 25, https://commons.com.ua/en/letter-western-left-kyiv/

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen.  2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004.  Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.

Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.

Hall, Derek, 2002. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to Harvey.” https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/28/derek-hall-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-response-to-david-harvey/

Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.

Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos

Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.

Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/

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Paul Stubbs: Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina

A man at a microphone speaking to a crowded room.
Image 1: Shows Tuzla Plenum, 2014 (Photograph by Tamara Opačić from H-Alter, 17 February 2014, http://h-alter.org/vijesti/plenum-je-uvijek-korak-ispred, Used with permission).

The space where I live and work is described and prescribed by its past, by what it no longer is: post-Yugoslav, post-socialist, post-conflict, some even claim post-colonial. This world is rarely framed in terms of what it is or what it might become. Stef Jansen in his ethnography of residents in a block of flats in Sarajevo wrote of „yearnings in the Dayton meantime“ (Jensen, 2015), capturing a liminal space framed by a craving for the possibility of hope and the seeming impossibility of ‘returning to normal’ within the dystopian governance arrangements in Bosnia-Herzegovina deriving from the Dayton Peace Agreement of December 1995. In focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina here, I reflect on the temporalities of (failed) external political engineering, the proliferation of (failed) projects and the performative practices of everyday life, refusing a deterministic narrative of the absence of hope without talking up the possibilities of repoliticisation.

The governance arrangements that have been in place in Bosnia-Herzegovina since Dayton, drawn up by a team of young United States lawyers, are at the centre of the problem. Somewhat successful as a peace agreement, albeit one that more or less froze the status quo and allowed the main ethno-nationalist political parties that had fuelled the conflict to continue business as usual, it makes governance of the state almost impossible. A recurring Bosnian joke is that everyone considers the constitution laid down in the agreement as unworkable but, of course, no one can agree on what to replace it with. Bosnia-Herzegovina is a sovereign federal state, with a three-person Presidency and a rotating President, based on what is referred to as “the ethnic key” with members elected from Serbian-Orthodox, Bosniak-Muslim and Croatian-Catholic constituencies. It remains a kind of semi-protectorate with many powers vested in the Office of the High Representative, merged in 2009 with the EU Representative’s office. It has a Central Bank that is carefully regulated and there are a small number of symbolic Ministries and agencies at Federal level albeit with very little power. Most power is vested in the two entities Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina – there is also an autonomous Brčko District (total population 93,000) with its own foreign administrator as the parties could not agree which entity the town should belong to. The Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina is itself divided into ten Cantons each of which has a Cantonal Governor and a full cabinet of Ministers. If we just take health and social policy as one example, there is no Federal Law, there are entity laws, and each Canton also passes its own Law. Furthermore, financing is a municipal responsibility so that rights can vary from one small part of the country to another. This means there are some 140 Ministries across the country, each with a Minister, a deputy, a couple of Assistants, a large staff, many advisors, and a large number of official cars.

Bosnia-Herzegovina remains something of a ‘crowded playground’ in which we find a proliferation of diverse actors – Sarajevo was often referred to as ‘acronym city’ as all manner of international organisations, NGOs, think tanks, agencies, consultants (‘insultants’ in local parlance) and policy entrepreneurs had a presence there (Stubbs, 2015). Indeed, as post-conflict aid money dwindled, the Sarajevo central office would usually be the last to close, existing on scraps from the donor table. Sometimes, as what became euphemistically known as an ‘exit strategy’, an international NGO would create its own FrankeNGO, a local spin-off, with no certainty as to what kind of monster might emerge. The distortions of an immediate post-conflict economy could be observed at both a macro-level (estimates of donor aid making up 15% of total GDP were being sprayed around a while ago) and at the micro-level. You would be significantly better off as, say, a university professor if you could retreat to your weekend house full-time and rent your inner-city apartment to an NGO for an office or a flat for its staff. You could also make ends meet by receiving honoraria from all manner of agencies for writing reports, even those of questionable quality and originality. Still, today, the crowded playground is populated and dominated by all manner of flexians, in Janine Wedel’s terms (Wedel, 2009), blurring boundaries between the public and the private, the national and the international, the state and the non-state, and more. In crowded flex land, it is the army of intermediaries, brokers, translators (literal and metaphorical), operating in the cracks and interstices of governance, and almost completely non-transparent, that possess the real power.

Central to failed futures is ‘the project’ as an organizational form; a managerial-bureaucratic process; a funding modality and a practice of governmentality. ‘Projectification’ is a peculiar assemblage of repertoires, processes and practices, drawing together material, human, and non-human resources, calculative logics, consisting of temporalised stages that, whilst highly contingent, serve to technocratise and depoliticise the lifeworld and, in mundane ways, reproduce the everyday techniques of neoliberalism (Scott, 2021). Projects operate at variegated speeds across multiple sites and scales. They also come in waves or clusters: in Bosnia-Herzegovina the first wave of ‘stand-alone’ projects was notable for their sheer arbitrary diversity, short time scales, and rapid shifts from one theme or target group to another.  The second wave were ‘pilot projects’ – as I was told in the late 1990s “Bosnia has many pilots but no aeroplanes”. ‘Pilots’ were meant to have the potential to be ‘scaled up’ and become sustainable; that is to become long-term or permanent features of the governance landscape. In a third wave, more explicit systemic reform was prioritised, through ‘projects of strategic support’, aiding Ministries and agencies to plan, implement and evaluate reforms, and introduce new laws and regulations. Such projects were brought closer to centres of policy making whilst also keeping a distance through sub-contracting arrangements, a range of ‘implementing partners’ and, not unusually, the creation of new parallel agencies, often with a chameleon-like character, to ‘drive reform’ and ‘bypass’ those likely to stand in the way of ‘progress’. A number of donors invested a great deal in agencies that, often, became empty shells, literally and figuratively.

Bosnia-Herzegovina is marked by the absence of the kind of statecraft that provides what Jansen refers to as ‘grids’, institutional frameworks that calibrate and order individual, household and community concerns, providing a modicum of basic orientation in terms of what to expect from the authorities. The state, along with the family, is ‘semi-absent’, with state practices highly uneven, often indifferent, or else over-punitive (Hromadžić, 2015). A study of mothers of children with disabilities points to the erratic, ambiguous, fraught, provisional, contingent, unpredictable, even ‘mysterious’ nature of care services. Surviving, for anyone reliant on state support, is a constant struggle to gain access to the right people who, if you are lucky, if all the pieces fall into place, might offer help that is as far away from a structured, system-based, ‘right’ as it is possible to get (Brković, 2017). One conceptual entry point here is the ‘semi-periphery’, a deeply contradictory space, promoting ‘rapid modernization’ in conditions of deindustrialization, desecularisation, repatriarchalisation and anti-intellectualism (Blagojević, 2009). Reforms are simultaneously accepted and opposed, imitated and rejected, in thin, degridded, structural conditions.

Quite deliberately, I want to end this essay in two alternative ways. In one, the longing for normalcy breeds a kind of passivity, a resignation if you wish, an erosion of the capacity to aspire and, at best, an ironic dismissal of the absurdity of governing practices. The phrase bit će bolje can often be heard uttered by South Slavic speakers but it means the exact opposite of its literal translation – ‘things will get better’. This is captured in a quote from Ivo Andrić’s novel Na Drini ćuprija (The Bridge on the Drina), published in 1945, describing local responses to attempts by the Austro-Hungarian Empire to modernise the town of Višegrad in the late 19th century:

“The newcomers were never at peace; they allowed no one else to be at peace. It seemed that they were resolved with their impalpable but ever more noticeable web of laws, regulations and orders to embrace all forms of life … and to change and alter everything … Old ideas and old values clashed with the new ones, merged with them or existed side by side, as if waiting to see which would outlive which. … The people resisted every innovation but did not go to extremes, for to most of them life was always more important and more urgent than the forms by which they lived.” (Andrić, 1995: 135)   

Nebojša Šaviha Valha (2013) discusses the phenomena of raja, referring to one’s interlocking circles of trusted friends, often based around an activity (coffee raja, skiing raja, hiking raja, …), where one can be oneself and practice zajebancia, enjoying oneself in an uninhibited way. For Šaviha-Valha, raja is seen by many Sarajevans, and Bosnians more generally, as that which was held onto against all odds during the conflict and subsequently becomes a kind of auto-ironic way of both critiquing the absurdities of the political elite but, in the end, resting on that critique and settling for raja as quotidian survival.      

For my alternative ending, it is worth noting that as of 8 June 2021, Bosnia-Herzegovina had the third highest rate of COVID deaths per million population in the world, behind only Peru and Hungary. The first wave of the pandemic was marked by a corruption scandal in which a fruit-processing company with close links to political leaders secured a lucrative contract to import ventilators from China that proved to be deficient. Today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina is also policing the border with the EU and is a major holding centre for refugees and asylum seekers held in appalling conditions, many of whom have been violently pushed back by Croatian and Bosnian authorities. Localised acts of solidarity with the asylum seekers do still occur but not on the scale of responses along the so-called ‘Balkan route’ in 2015, when a kind of inter-generational geopolitics of solidarity saw grassroots activities offering practical and political support to migrants from Libya, Syria and elsewhere.

These actions followed on from protests in February 2013, termed bebalucija when, after a law on personal identification numbers was declared unconstitutional, politicians from the major nationalist parties failed to reach agreement on a new law meaning that new-born babies could not obtain a passport nor a health insurance number. In a sense, it was precisely the absurdity of an impasse over personal IDs that triggered the anger of the protesters, reaching a crescendo when a three-month old child died in June 2013 because she was not allowed to enter neighbouring Serbia for treatment. Later, several days of rioting began in the industrial city of Tuzla in February 2014 when workers from several factories who had lost their jobs clashed with police outside the Cantonal Government building. The unrest spread to many other towns and cities, mainly in the Federation and, although widely reported to have ‘run out of steam’ they remain important for the experiment of direct democracy through plenums that lives on today across the post-Yugoslav space. I will not try to formulate some principles regarding the relationship between the everyday and the political in terms of which ending is more likely. As Stuart Hall remarked (Hall, 2007: 279), such things are always “open to the play of contingency”.

Paul Stubbs is a UK-born sociologist who has lived and worked in the post-Yugoslav space since 1993. He is Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Economics, Zagreb and a former Co-President of the Association for the Anthropology of Policy of the American Anthropological Association. His edited book on Socialist Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned Movement is due to be published in 2022.

References

Andrić, Ivo. 1995. The Bridge Over the Drina. London: Harvill.

Blagojević, Marina. 2009. Knowledge Production at the Semi-Periphery: A Gender Perspective, Belgrade: Institute for Criminological and Sociological Research.

Brković, Čarna. 2017. Managing Ambiguity: How Clientlism, Citizenship and Power Shape Personhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina, New York: Berghahn Books.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Epilogue: through the prism of fan intellectual life,” in Brian Meeks and Stuart Hall (eds.) Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: the thought of Stuart Hall, London: Laerence & Wushart: 269-291.

Hromadžić, Azra. 2015. “Loving Labor: Work, Care and Entrepreneurial Citizenship in a Bosnian Town,” in Stef Jansen et al. eds. Negotiating Social Relations in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Farnham: Ashgate.

Jansen, Stef. 2015. Yearnings in the Meantime: ‘Normal Lives’ and the State in a Sarajevo Apartment Complex, New York: Berghahn Books.

Scott, David. 2021. (Dis)assembling Development: Organizing Swedish Development Aid through Projectification, Doctoral Thesis, Karlstad University, Sweden, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1509382/FULLTEXT02.pdf

Stubbs, Paul. 2015. “Performing Reform in South East Europe: consultancy, translation and flexible agency”, in John Clarke et al Making Policy Move: Towards a Politics of Translation and Assemblage, Bristol: Policy Press: 65-94.

Šaviha Valha, Nebojša. 2013. Raja: Ironijski aspekt svakodnevne komunikacije u Bosni i Herzegovini i raja kao strategija života. Zagreb: Jesenski i Turk.

Wedel, Janine. 2009. Shadow Elite, New York: Basic Books.

Cite as: Stubbs, Paul.  2021. “Liminal Temporalities of Hope in Bosnia-Herzegovina.” FocaalBlog, 17 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/06/17/paul-stubbs-liminal-temporalities-of-hope-in-bosnia-herzegovina/.

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