Ethnic Mobilization in Serbia - EURAC

1. Definitions of Nation and Ethnic Mobilization
Ideal-type definitions of an ethnic nation, ethnic mobilization and ethnic
politicization (nationalism) are prerequisites for the purposes of this project. The
textbook definitions of these phenomena were nearly absolutely replicated into
reality during the wars that raged in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, especially
in Serbia. To comprehend the issue of national minorities, one must first
understand which national ideas predominated amongst the majority peoples, their
protagonists, and on which nationalist ideologies they founded the states that
emerged from the ruins of Yugoslavia. This paper shall focus on the ethnic
nationalism that developed in Serbia.
In the Balkans, a nation is predominantly perceived in terms of ethnicity,
and the Serbs are no exception. At times of crisis and during the ethnic
mobilization that began in the mid-1980s, the Serbian nation politicized its ethnic
identity to such an extent that it reversed the degrees of modernization and
complexity it had previously achieved. In just a few years (from 1985 to 1991), it
turned into an exclusive “us-group” that saw itself as a “natural” i.e. organic
whole homogenized by the plebiscitary elected leader (Slobodan Milošević). The
structure of its activity resembled the ancient tribal formula: leader-conationalsenemy,
1 which involved waging a war to salvage and unify the Serbian people and
their “ethnic lands”. The politicization of the Serbian ethnic identity provoked
strong feelings of ressentiment towards other peoples with which it had lived in
the same community; at one point, all other peoples were defined as the enemy
threatening to destroy the Serbs. Ethnic integration was ensured by homogenizing
emotions on Serbian suffering and Serbia’s sacrifices for and goodness to other
peoples which had not responded in kind. Serbian ethnic mobilization (on which
volumes have already been written) reflects all textbook features of politicized
ethnic nations, including the strong affective (irrational) component that is easily
aroused and mobilized by an authoritarian leader. If these features also comprise
war as the most efficient way of ethnifying a nation, of drawing ethnic borders and
consolidating the power of the leader and his ruling structures, it can safely be said
that the wars the Serbs waged had precisely such a role. The cultural elite assumed
upon themselves the role of awakening national awareness of the anguish and
vulnerability of the Serbian people; they stoked the feeling of fury demanding
revenge; they revived the national myths and memories of historical and unhealed
traumas (the Kosovo myth about heroism and betrayal, the Serbs’ expulsion from
Kosovo, the genocide they suffered in WWII, etc). Irrational fears and
aggressiveness were fuelled by nearly all means of public communication, movies
and theatre plays, and by a deluge of new historical interpretations of past events.
Departing from the example of the Serbian nation, we propose the following
definition of ethnic mobilization:
Ethnic mobilization is a state-building movement of a people led by an
authoritarian leader who had succeeded in assuming control over the state
apparatus, the media, the Church and the cultural elite, the involvement of
which is prerequisite for achieving the emotional, cultural and political
homogenization of the nation’s awareness of the common enemy war should be
waged against.
Serbian ethnic mobilization aimed at state-building would not have been
possible had the other peoples/minorities in the then Yugoslavia themselves not
1 More on ethnic structures in Aleksandar Molnar, “Narod, nacija, rasa” (People, Nation,
Race), History of the Origin of Nationalism in Europe (Belgrade Circle and APAKIT, Edition
Krug, Belgrade, 1997).
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