Serbia's European Heritage From Dositej Obradović To OTPOR

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In search of a democratic cultural

“alternative”: Serbia's European
heritage from Dositej Obradović to
OTPOR
a
Michael Rossi
a
Department of Political Science , The College of New Jersey ,
Ewing , NJ , USA
Published online: 08 Jan 2013.
To cite this article: Michael Rossi (2012) In search of a democratic cultural “alternative”:
Serbia's European heritage from Dositej Obradović to OTPOR, Nationalities Papers: The Journal of
Nationalism and Ethnicity, 40:6, 853-878, DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2012.742987
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.742987
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Nationalities Papers
Vol. 40, No. 6, November 2012, 853 –878
In search of a democratic cultural “alternative”: Serbia’s European

heritage from Dositej Obradović to OTPOR
Michael Rossi∗
Department of Political Science, The College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ, USA
(Received 15 June 2011; final version received 11 July 2012)
Developments in Serbia’s democratic consolidation over the past six years have been
both ongoing and progressive. Yet the establishment of a widely shared and
collectively accepted political culture that has departed from the ethnocentric and
euroskeptic narratives of the Milošević era remains incomplete. Additionally, the

failure by Serbian socio-political elites in appropriating alternative narratives of
Serbian history and culture that demonstrate a tradition of shared values and
identities with other European communities has stymied public acceptance of
Serbia’s European integration and public trust among its leaders. This paper argues
that Serbian socio-political elites can appropriate narratives and symbols of Serbian
collective identity that have been either sidelined or neglected by previously
established ethnocentric narratives, and ascribe new systems of meaning and codes
of behavior that qualify European liberal democratic values. I argue that a plentiful
reservoir of democratic capital can be found in the histories of Serbian communities
in Vojvodina over the past three centuries, and the urban cosmopolitanism of
Belgrade from the late 1860s up to the present period.
Keywords: Serbia; Belgrade; Vojvodina; democratic consolidation; political culture
In June 2006, the Serbian Foreign Economic Relations Ministry announced it was looking
for an advisor to “help Serbia create a new image for itself.” As far as Serbia is concerned,
the Ministry said, it is still most commonly associated with war and instability in the eyes
of the majority of the international community. The primary role of this sought-for advisor
would be to “find a way to break away from the negative connotations and place Serbia’s
brand into international political, investment, cultural and tourism circles” (B92, “Serbia
Looks”). The initial aim of this endeavor was in response to foreign media only reporting
about Serbia’s negative aspects. Positive events in Serbia stay hermetic, the Ministry con-
tinued, while sensationalist stories such as bombings, assassinations, Milošević, Mladić,
and other topics that reinforce the perceived backwardness of the country continue to
characterize Serbia in foreign circles. Positive aspects of Serbia needed to be pushed
into the foreground, but it would be up to Serbian political and cultural leaders and ordin-
ary citizens to take the initiative.
Six years later, Serbia has undoubtedly moved closer towards (re)establishing itself
within the community of European states, repaired relations with its former Yugoslav
neighbors, elected (and reelected) a coalition of pro-Western liberal democratic parties,
achieved long-sought provisions of visa-free travel throughout the Schengen Area,
arrested and extradited all remaining indicted fugitives from the Yugoslav conflicts to
the ICTY, and worked with key international powers in finding constructive solutions
∗
Email: rossim@tcnj.edu
ISSN 0090-5992 print/ISSN 1465-3923 online

# 2012 Association for the Study of Nationalities
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.742987
http://www.tandfonline.com
854 M. Rossi
to the political and diplomatic stalemate over Kosovo, its breakaway and partially-sover-
eign province. Finally on March 1, 2012, Serbia was awarded candidate status to the Euro-
pean Union (EU). However, the granting of full candidate status that includes a formal date
of ascension is incomplete as long as a final settlement of all outstanding issues over
Kosovo remains unresolved.1 While a formal recognition of Kosovo’s independence has
not been a prerequisite for Serbia’s EU membership, key European powers have called for
a “normalization of relations” between the governments in Belgrade and Pristina.
Additionally, despite frequent pressures from members of the international community,
the Serbian government remains almost unanimously determined to retain as much
direct influence and authority in Kosovo as possible, particularly in its Serb-dominant
north, which continues to nominally function within official Serbian political and insti-
tutional parameters.2 Finally, the pro-Western governments that have led Serbia since
the fall of Slobodan Milošević in 2000 have been marred by internal conflicts between
ego-driven political actors, and have suffered ongoing criticism of both policy and char-
acter by opposition parties considerably more conservative and populist within Serbian
civic and political society, particularly in regards to further cooperation with the EU
over solutions to Kosovo. Though there is no danger of the country regressing back into
the illiberal politics of the Milošević years, a commonly accepted model of political com-
munity remains both debated and incomplete.
Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbian political culture has been characterized as
being locked in some proverbial tug-of-war between pro-Western democratic reformers
and ethnocentric national populists (Collin; Gagnon; Gordy; Thomas). Conservative pol-
itical and social groups that continue to interpret further Western integration and
cooperation with the EU as tantamount to Serbia’s sovereign capitulation view pro-EU
political leaders like Boris Tadić, Dragan Djilas, and Vuk Drašković as puppets of the
West, who would just as soon as sign away Serbia’s sovereignty in Kosovo in exchange
for international political and financial support. To join the EU, they believe, is not to
embrace democracy, but to abandon it and submit to one’s conquerors. On the other
hand, and equally detrimental to the growth of Serbia’s democratic political culture,
many of the so-called “progressive” intellectuals and civil society groups that support
EU membership interpret Serbian history in ways most Serbs are either unable or unwill-
ing to identify with. Organizations like the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in
Serbia, the Humanitarian Law Center, the Center for Cultural Decontamination, and
Women in Black are all social organizations that have long regarded Serbian political
culture as inimical to liberal democratic values, and view the same pro-EU elites men-
tioned above as quasi-nationalists who have perpetuated many of the beliefs and preju-
dices from the Milošević era. But despite their outspoken commitment in adhering to
liberal democratic values, these groups offer neither any practical strategies for reform
nor any consideration for alternative models of Serbian identity that are accepted by
people outside their own small academic social circles and international supporters.
Because of their critical positions towards national identity, these groups lack both
popular constituencies and broad-based social support among the Serbian public, many
of whom regard these organizations and its members as condescending towards and
altogether out of touch with the mainstream public. As a result, groups like these that
could serve as catalysts for new approaches in Serbian political culture have not only
failed in providing forums of public dialogue and debate on reform in the crucial years
following Milošević’s ouster, but have left the utilization of any possible historical narra-
tives of Serbian compatibility with Western and Central European development and
enlightenment outside any workable socio-political framework.
Nationalities Papers 855
In short, there are two contested models of political community in Serbia today that
offer some form of collective identity but fall short in providing any practical connection
with current political, economic, and social challenges. One is the narrative of Serbia that
resists chronic interference from perceived external enemies bent on Serbia’s weakening
and further fragmentation. The other is an unorganized mishmash of countercultural ideas
and interests that serve people who are more certain of what they are not than what they
stand for, and mostly encompass small pockets of individual non-conformity against per-
ceived Serbian ethnocentrism and nationalism. In the middle reside the majority of
Serbia’s citizens who feel increasingly alienated and distrustful of the democratic political
system, with many signs of disengagement from political and civic activity over the past
few years, and a steady decrease in support for EU membership.3 The specter of ethno-
centrism that some observers still believe haunts Serbia is receding; however, the persist-
ence of conflicting cultural legacies from the 1990s is a clear sign that twenty years after
the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia and ten years after the fall of the Milošević
regime by a popular uprising, Serbia remains stymied by a crisis of confidence in its pol-
itical leadership, a deepening of political-cultural polarization, and a lack of shared vision
of the future.
Serbia is a consolidated democracy, but it is a democracy that has yet to produce a
democratic political culture that place strong emphases on public dialogue and debate
over current socio-political issues, inclusive and participatory forms of citizenship with
non-Serb communities, and a vibrant, diverse and critical civil society.4 This, I argue,
has primarily stemmed from two general factors. First, democratically-minded political
and cultural elites have largely failed in taking advantage of the plentiful reservoir of sym-
bolic capital in Serbian history, both recent and distant, in which a compelling set of nar-
ratives could be fashioned for a new, post-communist, post-authoritarian, democratic
Serbian state. While some studies have argued this is a result of some enduring legacy
of restrictive political environment from the Milošević period (Ramet and Pavlaković;
Ramet; Pond 210 – 239), I contend that alternative political cultures have simply been
overlooked and unconsidered.5 Second, the apparent failure in crafting a series of alterna-
tive democratic narratives for Serbia have been in large part due to the residual effects of
international involvement that, while under the pretext of achieving regional stability,
have actually exacerbated political tensions, deepened ethnic cleavages, and turned pre-
viously nationalistic rhetoric into mainstream political thought. Unresolved issues from
the 1990s notwithstanding, the U.S. backed unilateral declaration of independence of
Kosovo by its large Albanian majority has maintained the belief among many Serbs
that the West is determined to continue punishing Serbia while rewarding its enemies
who have been no less guilty in committing crimes against other communities during
the wars of Yugoslav disintegration. These beliefs are augmented with the increasing
realization among Serbian citizens and political leaders that full EU membership is con-
tingent upon acceptance of Kosovo’s territorial and administrative loss.
In plain language, Serbian elites have simply had neither the time nor the space to
properly focus on more mundane narratives of local and regional heritage of less nation-
ally epic proportions while Kosovo remains a distracting issue. The intellectual contri-
butions of Dositej Obradović or the vibrant coffeehouse culture of early twentieth
century Belgrade, both far more contributory to the establishment of the modern
Serbian state and society than the medieval monasteries of Kosovo, will remain in the
shadows as long as tensions persist with the Albanian community. Yet it is alternative nar-
ratives to Serbian collective identity like these that I argue can serve as positive cultural
symbols in strengthening a sense of European liberal democratic values and traditions,
856 M. Rossi
even while Kosovo remains an open-ended issue. The study of historical memory and its
relationship with state-sponsored democratic political culture serves as an important theor-
etical basis of this paper, in that it helps us identify how specific narratives and symbols
can be transformed into proactive socio-political policy.
How historical memory can strengthen a liberal democratic culture in Serbia

In its most basic understanding, I define historical memory as a series of constructed nar-
ratives about the past that a specific group shares and reifies through social and political
institutions in order to explain current political, social, cultural, and economic circum-
stances. Put another way, historical memory is a study of both what people remember
and how people remember it. While it has been used in conjunction with more broad-
based understandings of “collective memory”, which can denote various forms of group
consciousness, identity, and affiliation (Olick), historical memory is a state-sponsored
interpretation of a particular past event, individual, place, or ideal that state leaders and
intellectuals link to the present through a series of narratives and symbols.6 Both narratives
and symbols are critical for broad public acceptance of new political cultures because they
convey proscribed meanings and messages through familiar settings. Monuments, com-
memorations, public holidays, civic initiatives, school curricula, even simple acts of
naming streets and public squares, all serve to provide current socio-political policy
with a sense of legitimacy (Aronoff Israeli; Davis; Lowenthal). In this regard, historical
memory provides a crucial element to political culture by mapping the transformation
of collective identity into power, and from power either into authority or as challenges
to authority.
It might be easy to conclude that all that needs to be done then is to find key cultural
symbols and narratives from the past that will serve as relevant models of democratic pol-
itical culture for the present. However, to do so presupposes not only the availability of
needed symbols, but that said symbols can serve as a “useable democratic legacy” for
socio-political actors in reorienting the state towards a democratic culture.7 All symbols
contain meanings that cannot be separated from core identities; however, these meanings
can be interpreted for multiple contemporary purposes if they are coded to address current
political issues and social values. It is not the historical event that is vital for the strength-
ening of a political culture, democratic or otherwise. Rather, it is how social and political
actors transmit interpreted narratives of “the past” to a consuming public through symbolic
meaning. Understanding culture as a collection of core beliefs in which societies period-
ically ascribe new systems of meaning and codes of behavior is a way of bridging the con-
ceptual gap between culture as a rigid form of social cohesion and the prospects of
reinterpreting symbols for new situations.8
As shown in other works on crafting democratic political cultures, elite consensus
around the interpretation of local historical narratives and symbols can inculcate a sense
of pride in one’s heritage that is fully conducive towards democratic ideals (Edles;
Kubik, Power; Misztal; Petro; Schwartz). The successful functioning of a liberal democratic
culture depends quite extensively on how well social and political actors can interconnect
new policies with familiar symbols. First, senior officials in the new democratic system
should clearly identify and articulate the primary policy goals and objectives the state
needs to address in moving towards institutional consolidation and gaining domestic and
international support. Once these objectives have been framed, a second group of officials
consisting of cultural and literary historians, civic leaders, and ethnographers assist in what
Nicolai Petro refers to as a “cultural audit”, by which key symbols are identified and specific
democratic narratives are constructed that can encapsulate the policies the government
wishes to promote (191). Once symbols are associated with narratives compatible with
specific policies and integrated within a larger systemic socio-political framework, dissemi-
nation of this new political culture should be a feature of subsequent state-sponsored initiat-
ives, such as education development and public commemorations.
In regards to Serbia, a number of narratives can be constructed that emphasize a tra-
dition of inter-ethnic cooperation, citizen-based dialogue and debate over collective iden-
tity, and active social dissidence and protest against perceived political mismanagement.
In many respects, Serbia’s “European narratives” of identity account for much of its
modern history of social and political development, and include many individuals and
events that are already recognized and celebrated either at the national or local level in
some capacity but have not been formally translated into symbolic capital for a current
liberal democratic culture. These narratives are also compatible in easing the transition
towards eventual EU membership in that importance is placed on regional multiethnic
identities such as Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern province that has a particular Central
European heritage, and its capital Belgrade, which has enjoyed a history of more than a
century of being an urban cosmopolitan center for music, art, literature and intellectualism
derived from both the West and the East.
The process of constructing a shared socio-political community that fuses Serbian col-
lective identity with the positive European values of citizenship, democracy, social justice
and modernity is a multi-step process significant to the readjustment of values and ideals
from the authoritarian period. A first step is recoding familiar national symbols that, due to
their importance and pervasiveness in national identity, can neither be discarded nor
ignored with new narratives that preserve traditional cultural values amid a reduction in
anti-foreign sentiment. A primary example is the Serbian Orthodox Church, which histori-
cally contributed to the preservation of Serbian national consciousness amid foreign rule,
and facilitated early modern developments in education and civic organization in relative
cooperation with other ethnic and religious communities. Recent histories of the Church in
relation to the disintegration of Yugoslavia have often acknowledged its function as a
bastion of nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-modernism, much of which stems from the
tacit support it gave to the Milošević regime and its subsequently critical views of EU inte-
gration and uncompromising positions on Kosovo (Vukomanović). These activities cannot
be disputed, but it is erroneous to characterize a centuries-old institution on some of its
characteristics of the last twenty years, because it overlooks the positive aspects of its
national contribution and disqualifies its important role in democratic historical memory.
A second step is recalibrating potentially familiar and more locally-appreciated
symbols, through the construction of new narratives that are historically known but
have remained politically inactive and unappreciated. A primary source of potential demo-
cratic symbolic capital is the early modern period of Serbian socio-political development
in the Habsburg lands of what would become Vojvodina, Serbia’s northern province. The
establishment of a small but vibrant Serbian bourgeois society within a network of eight-
eenth- and nineteenth-century urban centers along the Hapsburg-Ottoman frontier pro-
vided the foundation of Serbia’s modern intellectual, economic, and political classes,
and has the possibility of yielding a number of fruitful narratives of Serbian communities
accepting close ties with international and multiethnic associations while preserving and
cultivating a national identity among those associations.
A third step is recrafting a number of recent events into political symbolism, specifi-
cally the years of popular dissidence against the Milošević regime that not only resulted in
the toppling of that government but also produced a number of civic, artistic, and literary
858 M. Rossi
expression that arguably was as vibrant as, and in many cases more sustained than, the
anti-authoritarian movements that characterized much of Central and Eastern Europe a
decade prior.9 Surprisingly however, these social movements, acts of dissidence, and
passive challenges to regime ideology have neither developed into a series of narratives
in Serbian historical memory, nor have they been appropriated as symbolic material for
a new democratic Serbian state, largely due to the contestation among Serbs as to
whether or not those events produced any real positive development outside formal
regime change. Nevertheless, the role of popular protest in eroding the legitimacy of
the Milošević regime and ultimately bringing it down is irrefutable and therefore raises
the need for a concerted study of Serbia’s recent history that acknowledges the fall of a
non-democratic regime by people power instead of foreign intervention.
Recoding active symbols, recalibrating known but inactive symbols, and recrafting
recent historical events into new symbols is a three-step procedure that would allow us
to argue that the establishment of a liberal democratic political culture in Serbia can
emanate from its own traditions and heritage. While this risks conflict with entrenched
groups keen on maintaining a distance with Europe, it is the histories of these periods
that elites in Serbia today need to draw upon for democratic and cultural capital if it
wishes to transform social consciousness from being passive observers to active partici-
pants in democracy. While these narratives neither challenge nor replace the importance
of more established collective identities framed around Kosovo they provide a number
of crucial services. First, they make available much needed symbolic capital to Serbia’s
pro-Western reformers who are eager to complete EU integration while maintaining a size-
able percentage of public support. Second, they assuage the fears of many nationally con-
scious social and political groups which continue to wield significant influence in Serbian
political culture that the state need not abandon its own traditions and values for “foreign”
Western trends. Finally, these narratives refute many of the long-held positions by studies
that have concluded there is some sort of cultural pathology in Serbian society that must be
contained and replaced with Western cultural and institutional models if it is to achieve
any kind of democratic maturity. Democratic transitions need not be characterized by
what some scholars have noted as a need to “break” with the past; nor should said tran-
sitions be accompanied by Western-backed elites attempting to impose some sort of unfa-
miliar Calendrier Republicain. To conduct either or both places the legitimacy of the
government in question and weakens its ability to enact necessary policy reforms.
The rest of this paper offers some suggestions for utilizing historical events and key
historical figures as symbols for new narratives that emphasize adaptation and acceptance
of new social and economic conditions in Serbia. These narratives, by no means exhaus-
tive and admittedly particular to two regions for this study, focus on three general themes
that are congruent with current efforts at reestablishing Serbian collective identity as part
of a larger European community of nations: an active civil and intellectual society debat-
ing social and political issues of the time, a tradition of inter-ethnic cooperation based on
shared values and ideas of citizenship, and patterns of community-based protest against
perceived political and social injustices both within Serbian political institutions and
among international circles. What is more, these narratives place particular emphasis on
more regional symbols centered on the Vojvodina region and Belgrade, which increases
the likelihood of public familiarity and acceptance, and also increases the importance of
the region to the overall national character. Not only does this wean Serbian political
culture away from the limited democratic historical memories of Kosovo, it also offers
new symbols to Serbian collective identity that are compatible with other models of
European development.10
Serbia’s heritage of European-oriented intellectualism

One of the most important factors to Serbia’s modern national development was the settle-
ment of large numbers of Serbian communities in the so-called Hapsburg Military Frontier
(Vojna Krajina), a part of what is now Vojvodina, in the late seventeenth century. An
equally crucial factor resulting from this was the sustained independence and administra-
tive growth of the Serbian Orthodox Church, the only institution that remained intact from
the medieval period with the ability to preserve and nurture collective consciousness.
Through a series of agreements between the Austrian emperor Leopold I and the
Serbian Patriarch Arsenije III in 1690, over 200,000 Serbs had migrated from their ances-
tral lands in Kosovo and other regions of Ottoman-controlled southern Serbia to resettle in
Hapsburg territory in which religious autonomy and limited self-government were granted
in exchange for active military service along the Hapsburg-Ottoman border.11 New centers
of Serbian ecclesiastical authority were soon established, with a Serbian Orthodox Metro-
politanate centered in the town of Sremski Karlovci and operating through a network of
monasteries that stretched from Trieste through its heartland in Fruška Gora to the moun-
tains of Transylvania. Continuing duties enjoyed under the Ottoman millet system, the
metropolitans of Karlovci were just as much statesmen as spiritual leaders. Serbian
church officials acted as veritable diplomats, civic administrators and negotiators for the
Serbian community, and could be found as often at royal courts and general assemblies
as they were in monasteries and churches. Though primarily mindful of their religious
commitments, the Metropolitans of Karlovci had a notably progressive outlook in actively
supporting higher education and civic development as a way of preserving collective iden-
tity via socio-economic development.12
The patronage of the Serbian Orthodox Church, coupled with the institutional support
received from Vienna, provided a fertile environment for the growth of an active bourgeois
society of merchants, civil servants, doctors, lawyers, and teachers who founded Serbia’s
first modern publishing houses, gymnasiums, lyceums, and civic organizations. By the
mid-eighteenth century, Serbs were able to receive a primary education in their own
schools administratively and financially supported by the Serbian Orthodox Church
(Petrović). Many future intellectuals later attended higher learning at some of the most
prestigious universities of Central Europe where they were exposed to philosophies and
ideals from the Enlightenment, the Scientific and Industrial revolutions, and the Age of
Nationalism. In all, these fledgling communities formed an intricate network of merchants
and civil servants that worked between the Austrian, Ottoman, and Russian empires, and
eventually served as the first generation of political and intellectual elites in the newly
established Serbian Principality after 1804 (Pappas; Paxton; Vucinich).
Within the Military Frontier, the city of Novi Sad grew into the most culturally devel-
oped Serbian urban center of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was aptly
referred to as the “Serbian Athens” (Srpska Atina) due to its role as a center of learning,
commerce, and artisanship. By 1850, Novi Sad boasted nine political and literary journals
that were published and printed on Cyrillic presses. Its first čitaonica (reading room),
opened in 1842, and a National Theater was founded in 1861.13 Among the Hapsburg
Serbs, advances in cultural development made steady albeit muted progress on account
of Hungarian efforts to stifle most efforts at self-determination by Slavic communities.
The literary foundation Matica Srpska was founded in Budapest in 1826 and moved to
its present location in Novi Sad in 1864 where it served as the first real national institution
of Hapsburg Slavs and the most important cultural institution for all Hapsburg Serbs.14
Matica Srpska was, and remains to this day, an entirely self-funded organization that
860 M. Rossi
relied on the contributions of its members. Wealthy benefactors also supported the upkeep
of Matica Srpska, chief of whom was Sava Tekelija, one of the richest and most influential
Hapsburg Serbs of his time, who contributed funds to not only keep the foundation alive,
but through the Tekelija Fund provided scholarships for young Serbs seeking education in
universities throughout the Hapsburg empire.15
Matica published some of the first scholarly works of Serbian history and literature. Its
chief literary journal was Ljetopis (Chronicle), a publication which began in 1824 and
became the primary vehicle for literary, historical, and cultural expression (Kimball
360). Its editors displayed a keen interest in making Ljetopis not just a literary journal
for Serbs, but a medium of communication for other Slavic communities. Numerous
articles focused on the literatures and literary activities of Czech, Polish and Russian
writers. Frequent writing contests were given for the best contributions in new drama,
poetry, prose, and translation. Works by notable European scholars and thinkers such as
Voltaire were translated into Serbian. In 1839, Matica dedicated a series of publications,
lectures, and writing contests to the 450th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo (Kimball
361). Ljetopis has remained in continuous print.
Within the newly established Serbian Principality, talk of opening a reading society,
“where a large number of newspapers, without which every man in the world is fatal to
political life, and various books would be available,” permeated the conversations of
Serbia’s nascent intellectual elite in the first few decades of its founding.16 The Srpsko
čitalište u Beogradu (Serbian Reading Club in Belgrade) was opened on March 8, 1846
amid joyous celebrations and several speeches. “We have made one more step towards
European education”, proclaimed Maksim Simonović, Lyceum professor and editor of
the bi-lingual Serbian-German newspaper Srbskij ulak – Serbischen Courrier.17 The
goals of the Reading Club stipulated that “every Serb regardless of whether he is an eccle-
siastic, a military man, or an ordinary citizen can become a member of the society
[club]”.18 At its height in 1856, the Reading Club had close to 350 members, a collection
of 138 foreign newspapers, and its own lending library that contained nearly 3,000 titles in
multiple languages (Karanovich 180– 182). While this may appear meager in comparison
with other European cities, the gains made, when placed within the context of the relative
absence of any formal education or literacy in Serbia a few decades prior, are
remarkable.19
The Društvo srpske slovesnosti (Society of Serbian Letters) was the first learned
society formed in Serbia in 1842. The society’s aims was to develop and spread knowledge
in the Serbian language, and further the translating of works of classical literature, as well
as Western textbooks on astronomy, philosophy, geography, physics, and other subjects.
In addition to working with Matica Srpska, it established academic links with
St. Petersburg and Zagreb in 1851 and with academies in Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and
Budapest in 1855. Between 1857 and 1861 the society maintained ties with no less than
17 institutions. It was actually the Society’s enthusiastic interest in Western and
Russian liberalism and revolutionary nationalism that forced the enlightened yet institu-
tionally conservative Prince Michael Obrenović to finally shut it down in 1864.
However, the society was reborn as the Srpsko učeno društvo (Serbian Learned Society)
in August of that same year, and reorganized again in 1887 as the Srpska kraljevska aka-
demija nauka (Serbian Royal Academy of Sciences), an advanced academic institution
that served as the progenitor to the modern-day Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti
(Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts). Through its various incarnations, the Society
provided one the most critical links in the rapid Westernization of Serbia over the next
few decades (Petrovich 349 –351).20
By the 1890s, Serbian learning adopted an appreciation of realism in the arts and posi-
tivism in the sciences. A series of theoretical, scientific, and literary works from the West
that reflected these new ways of thinking beyond romanticism and sentimentalism dra-
matically altered Serbian political culture.21 This new generation of Serbian literati
wrote on the increased need for civil liberties, better standards of living for the masses,
and critical thinking in historiography. The advent of realism and academic pragmatism
in Serbian writing added to the number of literary journals, with the most academically
professional, such as Otadžbina (Fatherland) (1875), consciously modeling itself on the
reputable journals of western Europe and containing high quality articles and essays by
some of Serbia’s most prestigious academics in literature, history, and political science.
In 1892, the Srpska književna zadruga (Serbian Literary Cooperative) was established
and soon became the most active publishing house in Belgrade. The society published
Serbian works from medieval texts up to the modern period in addition to translating
foreign classics. Within a few years, it was noted that “there was scarcely a literate house-
hold in all of Serbia whose shelves did not display the familiar blue covers of the coopera-
tive’s series. The reputation of many a Serbian author was assured when the cooperative
selected his work for publication” (Petrovich 517).
Belgrade’s first permanent theater was established in 1869. The National Theater, as it
would be called, was symbolically built from stones of the now torn-down Ottoman Stam-
boul Gate to inaugurate, on Prince Michael’s initiative, the transformation of Belgrade from
a Turkish garrison town into a modern European city. Most theatrical performances at the
time had clear national overtones such as The Marriage of Tsar Dušan, The Death of King
Stefan of Dečani, The Battle of Kosovo, and Prince Marko and the Arab. But theaters also
performed Western plays and introduced many Serbs to Western culture. Through the
theater, many masterpieces of French, German, English, and other European literature
came to Serbia, and along with them, greater ideas of human freedoms and personal liber-
ties. The acting troupe Omladina (The Serbian Youth) was particularly known for perform-
ing the works of Shakespeare, such as Romeo and Juliet (first performed July 18, 1857),
The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, and Richard III. Other
performances included the dramas of Voltaire, Schiller, Goldoni, and Hugo. As a French
visitor to Belgrade in the 1860s reported in La Revue bleue, he was astonished to find “in
this outpost between East and West, in a building surrounded by Turkish-style hovels and
primitive cobblestone streets an actress (Vela Nigrinova) playing Dumas’ La Dame aux
Camélias with a skill worthy of Paris” (Petrovich 356).
Alongside the steady development of and appreciation for Western cultural thinking,
Serbian politics beginning in the late 1830s was characterized by a small and enlightened
social class that was educated abroad, and who governed a state that was overwhelmingly
rural, illiterate, and patrimonial with a determination to place their fledgling state on par
with other established European nations. The tasks for developing a modern Serbian state
and society similar to the European centers these elites studied in were met by a resistant
monarchy eager to maintain absolute power and an indifferent peasantry that adhered to
the pre-modern realities of might makes right. It was the Liberal Party of the 1860s that
was the first to construct a Serbian historical narrative that emphasized representative gov-
ernment as an inherent feature of Serbian society as characterized by the zadruga, or pre-
modern extended family unit, that functioned as local agricultural collectives and in
which decisions were reached via group consensus. Under the leadership of the gifted states-
man Jovan Ristić, and interpreted further by the writings of the early socialist Svetozar Mar-
ković, Serbian political culture placed heavy emphasis on the folk democracy of the peasant,
as symbolized through a heritage of self-reliance, communal egalitarianism, and resistance
862 M. Rossi
to foreign oppression. As debates on the relationship between state and society continued
into the twentieth century, newer political parties continued to build on these narratives
of the democratic peasant through campaigning for elections in the name of the people
(Stokes; St. Protić “Serbian Radicalism”).
Belgrade’s blending of Serbian and European cultures culminated in the decade pre-
ceding the First World War under the constitutional monarchy of King Petar I Karadjord-
jević in what has come to be known as Serbia’s “Golden Age of Democracy” (1903–
1915).22 Having received his education in Geneva and Paris, King Petar was deeply
imbued with the ideas of Western liberalism and parliamentary democracy, and personally
translated John Stuart Mill’s essay “On Liberty” into Serbian. It is this period in which
Stojanović (Srbija 1 – 2) notes Serbia is regarded by its historians as a “European
liberal-bourgeois state” (Čubrilović 282), a “liberal monarchy” (Živojinović 115), a
“modern parliamentary state” (Popović 89), in which a flowering cultural achievement
and political liberalism marked the “brightest days in the history of modern Serbia”
(St. Protić Radikali 17), and conclusively, if somewhat euphorically, the “most democratic
state in the world” in political outlook (Ekmečić 546).
What also marks the first two decades of the twentieth century as an exceptional syn-
thesis of Serbian and Western democratic narratives was the strong sense of South Slavic
unity among Serbia’s leading cultural intelligentsia. In 1874, the Liberal newspaper Istok
published an article that proposed Serbia assume the role in the Balkans that Piedmont had
taken for Italy more than a decade earlier. This implied that leadership in Belgrade actively
support liberation movements among Serbs and other South Slavs still under Hapsburg and
Ottoman rule, with a goal of eventual unification into an enlarged and self-sufficient state
(Stokes 32). Under King Petar, a vibrant Serbian intellectual movement attracted artists,
writers and thinkers from all over Southeastern Europe. In 1904, the First Congress of
Southern Slav Youth was held in Belgrade to commemorate the centennial anniversary
of the First Serbian Uprising, which was celebrated by the attendees as the first Balkan
liberation movement. Those Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgarians in attendance
agreed on a joint-resolution to lend aid to all South Slavic communities still living
under foreign occupation and stressed the importance of educational development as a
means for liberation (Miljoković-Djurić 2). Alongside the Youth Congress was the First
Yugoslav Artistic Exhibit. It too was a commemoration of the First Serbian Uprising a
century before, and like the Youth Congress used the centenary anniversary as a means
of emphasizing the shared cultural and historical heritage of Southern Slavs, displaying
over 450 works of art from throughout Southeastern Europe. Prominent art critics includ-
ing the young Serbian female painter Nadežda Petrović and the Croatian sculptor Ivan
Mestrović hailed the works of fellow contemporary Paja Jovanović as the crowing
achievement of Serbian pictorial art, whose paintings on the life of Tsar Dušan, particu-
larly The Proclamation of Dušan’s Law Code, were lauded for their realistic imagery as
well as visualizing the political and social achievements of a South Slavic state. The Artis-
tic Exhibit functioned as a sort of World’s Fair for South Slavic artists who found common
interests that spanned national and religious divisions.
Literary works continued to find congruency between Western European and Serbian
ethics and were most visible in the writings of Bogdan Popović and his student Jovan
Skerlić, himself an avid supporter of Serbian cultural history from the seventeenth to
the nineteenth centuries. Through his critical works on Serbian literary history, Skerlić
is credited for separating Serbian patriotism from overly emotional embraces of tradition-
alism. He was opposed to extreme forms of both Westernization at the expense of Serbian
identity, and even more so Pan-Slavism at the complete rejection of all Western values and
ideas. The strength of the individual, he believed, lay in the ability of finding one’s destiny
through personal experiences in one’s own environment. While ideas could be borrowed
from the outside, foreign models were not to be aped, nor should daily life be neglected for
a romantic past that never actually existed. Still, Skerlić was convinced that Serbia’s future
lay in its acceptance of Western values within its own cultural matrix. In this regard, he
may be considered an adherent of “Neoslavism”, which rejects the classic Slavophilic con-
ceptions of a romanticized past based on kinship and blood, and emphasizes the appli-
cation of Western ideas of citizenship as a basis for social equality of all Slavic
communities (Čolović 96). Represented in the form of political myths, the past, he
believed, was a tool to navigate one’s own path to a modern European democracy, not
to be jealously safeguarded as a barrier to modernity. In this, Skerlić drew inspiration
from Svetozar Marković and particularly Dositej Obradović, one of Serbia’s greatest intel-
lectuals as well as one of its most progressive thinkers of his time. It was in the writings of
Obradović that Skerlić and other likeminded Serbian Yugoslavists found the link between
Western political thought and Serbian patriotism.23

Obradović was born in the Temesvár region of eastern Banat in 1743 and developed a
passion for reading at an early age. Enamored by the lives and experiences of many of the
Church Fathers, he ran away to Hopovo monastery in Fruška Gora in 1757 and for three
years was a tonsured monk. However, having saturated the monastic libraries and realizing
there was more in life than insular piety, he left the monastery in 1760 and set forth on
travels that led him throughout Europe and the Near East. His autobiography narrated
his forty year “adventures” to “his fellow men and to tell them whatever good and sensible
things I have heard and learned from others.”24 While living in Germany for many years,
he enrolled at the university at Halle in 1782, and attended lectures by Professor Johann
August Eberhard on “philosophy, esthetics, and natural theology” It was at this “abode
of the Muses and of all manner of divine sciences” where he became an avid proponent
of contemporary trends in rationalism and enlightenment while deeply lamenting the
absence of such learning and literature in his homeland.25 Deciding to publish works in
Serbian, Obradović spent most of his professional life in Leipzig and Vienna where he
worked extensively on promoting a modern Serbian literary language and modern
Serbian literature. While never abandoning his Orthodox faith, nor losing any sense of
connection between intellectualism and personal religious piety, he became particularly
critical of the attempt by organized religion at stifling individual creativity, as well as
its emphasis of ritual and custom over true belief and reason. It was this extensive scholar-
ship that led Karadjordje, the founder of the modern Serbian state in 1804, to invite him to
Belgrade as Serbia’s first Minister of Education, which he served as until his death in 1811.
As preparations for the commemoration of the centennial anniversary of Obradović’s
death began in 1910, cultural intellectuals lauded him as the greatest Serbian educator
since St. Sava, Serbia’s patron saint. In the Serbian Literary Review, Obradović was
hailed as a
. . . great spiritual father, a man who introduced the Serbian people to the ideas of the times and
to contemporary culture. He was the first critical thinker among the Serbs who taught through-
out his lifetime about the ‘educated, rational, and a love for the truth.’ More than anyone else,
he saw to it that the Serbs were a great intellectual and spiritual whole despite their religious
and state differences. He placed Serbian folk thought on a modern base, and he was the first to
proclaim the principles of intellectual unity.26
In the year leading up to the actual centenary event, plans were made in Belgrade to erect a
monumental statue of Obradović, and to republish his collected works alongside newer
publications on critical analyses of his philosophies in a commemorative book Spomenica
864 M. Rossi
(Memorial). Plans were also made for the construction of the Dositejev dom (The Home of
Dositej), which was to serve as a Serbian and South Slav cultural center and would include
libraries, reading rooms, auditoriums for lectures, concert halls, and space for exhibits.
The celebration of the life and works of Obradović actually continued until nearly the out-
break of the First World War. Though the lofty aspirations for the creation of Dositejev
dom never came to fruition, a memorial statue of his was unveiled in 1914, appropriately
in the park immediately opposite the University of Belgrade. Along with the highest
ranking academic leaders throughout Southeastern Europe gathered at the unveiling, the
National Theater presented the play Mladost Dositeja Obradovića (The Youth of
Dositej Obradović), and the Metropolitan of Belgrade led a Moleben (Liturgy commem-
orating the dead) at the Cathedral Church of St. Michael. In reviewing the entire series of
commemorations, Skerlić noted that it represented one of the greatest manifestations of
Serbian and South Slavic fraternity.27
Yet the champions of Obradović’s progressive nationalism were unable to preserve
this narrative of a unified South Slavic state cemented in the cosmopolitanism of

Serbian Belgrade. While the following passage was written in 1911 for the actual 100th
anniversary of Dositej’s death with an air of hopeful optimism, there is a sense of disap-
pointment that the envisioned future, occurring at the time of this writing, has not been
realized:
A Hundred Years Later
Belgrade, May 15, 2011
A typical morning in May in the year 2011 A.D. is dawning, bright with sunshine, over quiet
Belgrade. . .
We have just arrived by train from Zagreb and are looking for accommodation, and then we
will go and look for the Dositej Building. Tonight there is a lecture and a discussion, which we
were invited to from Zagreb, on the erstwhile cultural situation of the Serbian and Croatian
people.
The Dositej Building is a magnificent place, situated in the most beautiful spot in the city
center. From the terrace, you have a splendid view, over the rooftops, of the surroundings,
which are stunning by nature and which man has made even more stunning by means of
modern culture. All Serbian cultural societies have been united in the Dositej Building.
There are several conference halls, many working sections, and an excellently equipped
reading room, which holds journals and newspapers from the entire Slavonic South. Ladies
and gentlemen go in and out of this cultural meeting place. All the signs are in Latin and Cyril-
lic letters. The largest of the conference halls, splendidly decorated, is being prepared for this
evening’s lecture . . . A new topical subject has been chosen for the lectures tonight: the uni-
fication of Bulgarian and Serbo-Croat literature, which merged with Slovenian literature ages
ago (excluding purely popular literature) . . . [O]f particular interest is the lecture on the erst-
while, i.e. separate, state of the Serbian and Croatian people, which has been a compact indi-
visible unit for a long time now, wielded together by a series of severe crises and
experiences. . .
After that we took the train to Skopje to travel to Prizren and to the Adriatic; finally, we
returned to Zagreb via Dubrovnik and Sarajevo. Everywhere we felt at home, and everywhere
we encountered the trend towards unity and national concord in full bloom, deeply rooted in
public opinion and everyday life, and inspiring the vigorous and passionate life of the people.
We remembered the lecture of Mr. Vidović in the Dositej Building and wondered how one
could ever have lived under conditions so different from our days! How primitive and barbaric
those times were! But history is their living witness and there is nothing we can do but hope
that its memory will always prevent the return – God forbid! – of the bad times we have
safely left behind us!28
Hopeful optimism is indeed an appropriate way of characterizing much of early modern

Serbian social and political development. Even as early as the 1860s, Serbian intellectuals
were utilizing narratives and symbols from as recent as a century before as a way of
finding congruency between their own cultural traditions and larger patterns of European
civilization. Serbian civil society in both Novi Sad and Belgrade was marked by strong
desires to become part of a European community of nations, and while many intellectuals
acknowledged Serbia’s current subordination to more advanced societies in Western and
Central Europe, the question of how changes necessary for progress, modernity, and
democracy could be made while simultaneously fostering pride in the uniqueness of
their own identities and values had shaped the writings and philosophies of nearly
every social, political, and cultural thinker at the time. Far from being wary of other cul-
tures, Serbian elites proudly envisioned their country to be a future member among them.
These narratives demonstrate two critical points to modern Serbian historical memory:
that receptivity to Western ideas, values, and ethics has long been a part of Serbian
national development, and that this receptivity was championed by leading national
figures and institutions. These developments, argues Petrovich, “flourished because of
Serbia’s receptivity to Western European culture and its ability to absorb that culture
without being absorbed by it, to assimilate it while yet preserving its own national cul-
tural identity” (577).
Narratives of inter-ethnic cooperation and citizenship

To date, Vojvodina remains one of the most multiethnic regions in all of Eastern Europe.
Serbs, Hungarians, Croats, Slovaks, Ruthenes (Rusyns), and Romanians have lived
together for centuries in relative peace, and the multiethnic composition of the land is fre-
quently promoted by Serbs to counter external assumptions that they are a nationalistic
people determined to establish an ethnically pure Serbian state. Though there is a
danger in romanticizing Vojvodina’s multiethnic character to a degree where sporadic
interethnic problems are ignored, it is noteworthy to observe that the region has retained
its multiethnic character more so than any other region of the former Yugoslavia. This
demographic composition is an important symbol not only for promoting Serbia’s
multi-ethnic composition, but that Serbian socio-political history within the region was
closely linked to cooperating with other ethnic groups, notably the Croats.
In the early 1840s, the Hungarians had successfully gained a series of political and
national rights in the Hapsburg Empire. However, in attempting to use these newly won
rights in consolidating power in lands under their authority, they effectively prevented
the extension of the same rights and privileges to non-Hungarian communities. Sub-
sequent efforts to “Magyarize” the countryside by mandating Hungarian as the only offi-
cial language, and Hungarian history as the national history of the region, forced the Slavic
communities to respond, which nearly tore the Hapsburg Empire apart.29
On May 12– 14 (May 1 – 3 Julian Calendar), a Serbian National Assembly was held in
Sremski Karlovci. There, Metropolitan Josif Rajačić addressed a crowd of nearly 15,000
Serbs, Croats, Czechs, Poles, and Romanians, proclaiming the autonomy of Vojvodina in
the territory of Srem, Baranja, Bačka, Banat, and parts of the Military Frontier in regions
where the aforementioned districts were included as a “political union . . . based on liberty
and perfect equality with the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia”
(Ćirković 201). A People’s Committee was established as an assembly body, cultural
and linguistic rights were extended to the Romanian communities, Rajačić was elevated
from Metropolitan to Patriarch – the first Serbian Patriarch since the abolishment of the
866 M. Rossi
medieval Patriarchate of Peć in Kosovo in 1766 by Ottoman authorities – and Stevan

Šupljikac, a Serbian colonel in the Austrian Border Guard was elected as voivode, or
duke, of the region. The “Vojvodina Assembly”, as it came to be known, was a mass gath-
ering of Serbian social and political actors from both sides of the Danube, including a
young Jovan Ristić, a student of the Belgrade Lycée and future Serbian statesman.
By the end of May, the Hapsburg Serbs openly declared their rebellion against
Hungary, and even Vienna provided limited support to the Slavs of the region by
appointing the pro-Hapsburg and popular Croat leader Josip Jelačić as ban, or
viceroy, of Croatia. Very quickly, a joint Serbo-Croatian struggle was established
under the combined leadership of Patriarch Rajačić and Ban Jelačić. Ideas of mutually
enjoyed freedoms of liberty and religious tolerance quickly broke down numerous
social and ethnic barriers between the two communities. Serbian churches in Zagreb
proudly flew the Croatian tricolor flag in a sign of solidarity with the Croatian people,
while Croatian leaders in the city attended Serbian Orthodox liturgies. Even more sym-
bolically, Orthodox and Catholic Easter fell on the same Sunday in 1848. Through a
joint-arrangement, Croat and Serb communities in Zagreb and Karlovac agreed to
send delegates to symbolically guard Christ’s Tomb in the others’ churches on Good
Friday.30 On Easter Sunday, Serbs and Croats walked together in a combined Easter Pro-
cession throughout the city as church bells from both Catholic and Orthodox churches
peeled throughout the day. Combined liturgical Easter services were held in the main
cathedrals of both churches, conducted in Church Slavonic, rather than Latin. Ljudevit
Gaj, an early Croatian supporter of Serbo-Croatian ethnic and linguistic unity, and
founder of the “Illyrian” Movement, which aimed to unite the South Slavs of Dalmatia,
reflected in his newspaper Novine (News) that such camaraderie between Catholic Croats
and Orthodox Serbs was something not seen since before the Great Schism of 1054
(Krestić 40– 41). A few weeks later, Gaj noted another joint Catholic-Orthodox religious
procession in the ethnically mixed town of Osijek in central Slavonia, praising this social
harmony as having
. . . no other purpose than to show that we, followers of either confession, enjoying full equal-
ity, each adhering to his own religion, wish to live in peace and love as brothers of the same
blood, each keeping to his own creed, without any hatred or reproach. We should therefore not
from now on ask one another what church you belong to but what race you belong to, so that as
blood brothers of one mother Slavia we should come to accord and all together defend our
language and nationality against our well-known enemy, who is trying with every available
means make us quarrel, so that he can all the more easily subjugate us and thereby destroy
our freedom and national independence!31
Expressions of brotherly love between Serbs and Croats reached an emotional climax
on June 5, 1848 when in the presence of Patriarch Rajačić, Josip Jelačić was formally inau-
gurated Ban of Croatia. Eyewitness accounts tell of a day of jubilation as Serbs and Croats
embraced one another and danced in the streets. Priests from both churches held joint
prayers for the health and well being of both leaders and both peoples. Both Jelačič and
Rajačić were equally active within their own communities in promoting Serb – Croat
unity and assuaging fears of one side attempting to use this opportunity to dominate the
other politically, religiously, or economically. On September 7, 1848, Jelačić called
upon the Croatian bishops to instruct their clergy on how to reassure their parishes that
the Serbian Orthodox Church had no aims of proselytizing, and that the spiritual foun-
dations of both the Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox churches were based on the
same principles and teachings of brotherly love by Jesus Christ. Two days earlier,
Rajačić issued a proclamation condemning all Serbian actions of discord, dishonesty,
and unbrotherly love to the Croats as anathema to both God and the Serbian nation. Both
proclamations were printed and distributed to their respective societies in both the Latin
and Cyrillic alphabets.
The high degree of co-fraternity shared between Serbs and Croats during the 1848
revolutions was further enumerated in the “Fundamental Rules of Public Education for
Croatia and Slavonia”. Elementary schools were instructed to teach all their students in
the “mother tongue” and that “in observance of the principles of equality, both the
Latin and Cyrillic script are to be taken into consideration” Furthermore, only in
matters of religious teaching would Croat and Serb instructors respectively lead class.
In all other instances of curriculum, teaching appointments were based on merit rather
than meeting ethnic quotas. Appointments to the general civil service also reflected
high degrees of integration as Serbs were duly represented in political bodies throughout
the region, printed their own newspapers, proposed legislation and comprised some of the
most dedicated soldiers in Jelačić’s armies (Krestić 52– 53).
The common struggle shared between Serbs and Croats against Hungarian authorities
represented in political cooperation, ecclesiastical brotherhood, and the voluntary mem-
bership of each side fighting and dying for the liberation of each others’ homelands
throughout the southern Hapsburg Empire, all provide positive narratives of Serbian
efforts at building a multiethnic society and establishing co-fraternity with an ethnic
group in which efforts at reconciliation and cooperation has been only a recent develop-
ment. Relations between Serbia and Croatia have significantly improved in the last few
years, largely due to the amicable relationship between former Serbian President Boris
Tadić and the recently elected Croatian President Ivo Josipović. While each state con-
tinues to view the events of the 1990s through competing historical memories, both
leaders have made symbolic and well as diplomatic overtures of reconciliation, including
acknowledging wartime atrocities committed by both sides. A deepening of this reconci-
liation can be further strengthened through historical narratives of co-fraternity during the
social revolutions of 1848 that emphasized shared values of citizenship and community a
century before Tito’s vision of Yugoslav “brotherhood and unity” became policy.
Additionally, the events of 1848 provide further symbolic capital to the Serbian Orthodox
Church as a national institution that is both receptive to popular sovereignty and coopera-
tive with other religious groups, notably the Croatian Catholics.
Narratives of anti-authoritarian protest

Patterns of community-based protest against political and social injustices characterized
the vibrant student protest movements against Milošević until its fall from power.
Throughout much of the communist period under Tito, Yugoslavia remained in close com-
munication with the West and its citizens enjoyed some of the widest degrees of social,
economic, and intellectual freedoms of any single-party state. Whereas other Eastern
European cities had been reduced to Europe’s cultural periphery by decades of Soviet-
dominated socialism, Belgrade, along with Zagreb and Sarajevo, remained at the
cutting edge of artistic and literary scenes and produced a generation of Yugoslavs that
could travel anywhere throughout Europe and abroad, find work in other countries, and
remain altogether connected with the rest of the world. Indeed, one of the prevailing atti-
tudes among Serbs, and most other former Yugoslavs, was that they felt superior to their
fellow communist neighbors in nearly all aspects. Being “Yugoslav” meant not backward-
ness and tribalism, but cosmopolitan, worldly, and “Western”. As noted by Collin,
868 M. Rossi
Yugoslavs felt they were never like them, those badly-dressed, ill-fed, wan-faced children of
Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany in their enforced
timewarp. Yugoslavs had money (although much of it was borrowed from the West), they
could take holidays abroad . . . they watched the latest Western films and bought new rock
records. Yes, their country was no paradise, but at the same time it was no prison . . . They
viewed the other Eastern Bloc states as poor relations: sad, grey and dull (11).
It was the strength of this cosmopolitan heritage and a sense of being a part of Europe’s
contemporary cultural community that provided much of the impetus for protest among
various elements of Belgrade’s youth under the politics of Milošević. Many university stu-
dents remembered life in the final years of Yugoslavia and supported the social and media
freedoms they and their parents enjoyed for decades. To them, the politics of Milošević
and the utilized historical memories of an ethnocentric and narrow-minded Serbian politi-
cal culture were not only unfamiliar to them, but altogether backward and irrational. To
them, Yugoslav, and by extension Serbian, identity was all about being part of a large
dynamic society in Europe. It was reflected in their secular Western-oriented lifestyles

that owed its existence both to the relative openness of Tito’s Communist system and to
the experiences of travelling to, working in, and communicating with other parts of the
world that system was linked to (Group of Authors). Indeed, throughout the organized
student protests against Milošević in the winter of 1996 – 97, a large banner reading “Bel-
grade is the world” was carried at the head of column of marchers to emphasize Belgrade
being an international city and its members’ consciousness of their connection with the
rest of the world (Milić, Čičkarić, and Jojić).32
In May 1989 Youth Radio B92 was founded and quickly grew into one of the preemi-
nent media outlets in the city for democratic proponents and political dissidents. Blending
elements of professional reporting like the BBC with the “shock jock” attitudes of college
radio stations, B92 emerged as a media outlet that exercised free speech and critical think-
ing through serious investigative journalism on everything from organized crime to life
under internationally imposed sanctions to the victims of the Yugoslav wars, all alongside
playing rock and roll and jazz by popular Yugoslav and international artists. Veran Matić,
one of B92’s principal founders, noted that in order for Serbia to establish a genuinely
alternative social movement, politics and culture had to be synthesized in a kind of feed-
back loop, mutually reinforcing the other. In this regard, the use of music as a form of pol-
itical culture served to both reinforce one’s own political message and challenge messages
of nationalism.
The national politicians had created this perpetual cycle in which their culture helped them
and supported them, and they in turn supported it, and both perpetuated the other’s existence.
Populist songs supported bad politicians, then eventually they began to support the killers. It
turned into a business relationship. So we had to oppose not only their nationalist agenda but
their populist culture. That’s what gave us our strength – if our station had been founded on
some political ideology, it would have been long gone by now. But because we used this idea
of liberation through culture, we were able to survive (Collin 28–29).
B92 would also lead the way in pioneering the use of the Internet as an alternate source
of information after the state had made several attempts at shutting down the station, as
well as being a primary source for dissident voices organizing a series of anti-regime
rallies in the late 1990s. By the time of the collapse of the Milošević regime, it was the
only radio station that offered alternative opinions on politics, society, and culture, and
the only station that continued to play songs other than the kitschy Turbo-folk songs
that dominated the airwaves and came to be associated with the regime by both its
fans and detractors.33
A final factor in Belgrade’s democratic symbolic capital is the organized student oppo-
sition movements against the Milošević regime in the mid to late 1990s. Though it has
since come under scrutiny by more conservative elements for allegedly receiving
Western financial aid and training, the student movement OTPOR (Resistance) was instru-
mental in first organizing apolitical and nonviolent social opposition to Milošević’s gov-
ernment and eventually contributing to its downfall in October 2000. Its leaders
specifically drew guidelines from American scholar Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Non-
Violent Action, and more specifically his handbook From Dictatorship to Democracy,
as strategies for organizing against the regime. Since 2000, OTPOR has also sent volun-
teers and provided assistance in organization and logistics to other social movements
against non-democratic regimes including Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and 2005,
Kyrgyzstan in 2005, and most recently the revolution in Egypt that overthrew Hosni
Mubarak in 2011 (Baker; Smith; Brooks and Teodorović). The now famous OTPOR
symbol of a black and white clenched fist has come to be internationally recognized as
a symbol of protest and resistance and was openly used by student movements in Egypt
(“Revolution in Cairo”). Though it never transformed into a political movement after
2000 and consciously distanced itself from any organized democratic political opposition
party when active, it nevertheless provides one more possible symbol for a Serbian liberal
democratic narrative.
The final years of the Milošević era would also place Novi Sad as a focal point of
democratic dissidence through the “EXIT Festival”. In the summer of 2000, students
from the Faculty of Technical Sciences and the University of Novi Sad gathered at the
student park along the Danube for concerts, parties, and art performances organized by
three students, Bojan Bošković, Dušan Kovačević, and Ivan Milivojev. But because of
the upcoming elections between Milošević and the Democratic Opposition of Serbia
coalition (DOS), the event quickly turned to one of discussions on how to resist state-spon-
sored programs of xenophobia, nationalism, and media censorship. The musical events
now blended with social and political activism inspired by the American music network
MTV and lasted for 100 days, ending with a huge “Get Out the Vote” Party one day
before the monumental October 5, 2000 election that saw the defeat of Milošević. The
event became known as “EXIT” to denote both the political exit of Milošević, and the
symbolic exit of Serbia from self-imposed isolation over the past decade.34
The EXIT festival held the following year was moved to the fortress of Petrovaradin
across the Danube, and attended by more than 200,000 people from across the former
Yugoslavia and Europe. It was Serbia’s first experience at including, and being included
with, communities from all over Europe since the 1990s. Drama performances from differ-
ent regional theaters accompanied workshops and roundtable discussions that aimed to
promote reconciliation between the nations of the former Yugoslavia. News of the festi-
val’s success quickly spread throughout Europe and was billed by many as Serbia’s inter-
national comeback party. For the first time in years, the public image of Serbia was of
youth, music, and internationalism, instead of war, nationalism, and Milošević. The
EXIT festivals soon became one of the biggest music venues in Southeastern Europe,
and one of the most popular throughout the entire European Continent. In addition to
billing top musical performers, the EXIT Festival continued its role of raising social
awareness over political issues such as trafficking and sexual exploitation in the region,
gender equality, economic issues, environmentalism, unemployment, and substance
abuse. In 2004, informational literature on these subjects was handed out to the public,
and symposiums were organized with journalists, police, civil activists and intellectual
figures. Though the cooperation with MTV, a one-hour documentary on the subject of
870 M. Rossi
drug and sex trafficking was filmed and aired in 20 countries throughout Eastern Europe
(B92, “Ugovor”).
More recent issues concerning the scrapping of all travel visas for Serbs and other citi-
zens of the Balkans to the rest of Europe were the focus of EXIT 2006, which was dubbed
the “Visa Abolishment Campaign”. Prior to the festival, EXIT coordinators held a
“NOT60EUROS!” movement in protest of the high fees Serbs and others had to pay
just to get a visa to travel. People from throughout Europe were encouraged to record
the phrase “NOT60EUROS” in their own language and send it to EU parliamentary
members. During the festival, a large billboard with a picture of the Eiffel Tower with
the heading “Greetings from Europe” was set up for visitors to have their picture taken
in front of it. The picture would then be sent to them as an e-card with e-mail addresses
of EU institutions, Balkan governments, and media outlets to show that these people
are the same as tourists in front of the real Eiffel Tower, except that they are unable to
travel there. By 2007, not only was EXIT a phenomenal success, but nearly one-third
of its visitors were foreigners (B92, “Foreigners”). Despite the many fears that it has
lost its original intention of being a symbol of democratic openness and has given way
to large corporate sponsors and advertising media, EXIT still represents a strong affirma-
tion of the multiethnic character that has always described Vojvodina, and remains the
largest, and quite possibly most effective, event shared between Serbia and the rest of
the world.
A cautious yet optimistic way forward

The preceding examples of Serbia’s historic compatibility with Western democratic values
challenge many of the prevailing assumptions made in the last twenty years about its politi-
cal culture being endemically rigid, anti-Western, ethnocentric, and chauvinistic. As stated
previously, these examples are far from exhaustive, and offer only a sample of what could be
appropriated by state institutions for a “usable past”. While I have focused on narratives that
are particularly “Serbian” in political cultural character, a series of equally compelling nar-
ratives and symbols can be derived from the Yugoslav period, both interwar as well as com-
munist, in which shared values and issues between Serbs and other ethnic groups coincided
to form a multiethnic and cooperative society (Djurić and Šuvaković; Lampe; Wachtel).
Additionally, there is plentiful symbolic capital to be drawn from historic individuals like
Nikola Tesla, whose scientific contributions are internationally renowned, and contempor-
ary celebrity athletes like Novak Djoković, whose athletic achievements and personal
charisma have made him into a veritable one-man brand name in improving Serbia’s inter-
national image.
Responsibility for “activating” a series of symbols into useable democratic narratives
all rest with political, civic, and cultural organizations. The ease of constructing new
democratic narratives out of a series of preexisting symbols however, depends on their
use in current political culture, as well as their potential receptivity in popular memory.
Recoding active symbols, such as the Serbian Orthodox Church, is certainly not proble-
matic in terms of familiarity, but likely challenging in regards to crafting new meanings
and identities for a cultural institution that is largely regarded as a bastion of conservative
national ideology since the breakup of Yugoslavia. Yet this is a highly critical and necess-
ary step in the construction of a series of democratic historical memories for Serbia in that
the Church is an institution that can neither be ignored nor dismissed as an irrelevant
aspect. Thus, in attempting to purge the state from the legacies of the last twenty-five
years, Serbian leaders need to be cautious in regards to what narratives and symbols are
expendable, and what are adaptable. Engaging in “mnemonic reconciliation” is a more

challenging, and in many situations more important, facet in recoding political culture
for democratic narratives since it requires evaluating which elements of existing tra-
ditional culture, including some popular and not altogether non-controversial narratives
of the old regime, are worth preserving.35 As this paper has argued, far from being an
obstacle to progress, the Serbian Orthodox Church has been paramount in providing iden-
tity and organization to Serbian communities and Serbian collective consciousness for
centuries through the promotion of education and literacy in the first primary schools
and gymnasia as ways of preserving national identity under foreign rule and cultural devel-
opment within civic institutions. Even more to the point, the Serbian Orthodox Church
continues this role today for many Serb communities in Kosovo by acting as an interlocu-
tor with Albanian and international officials.
Recrafting known but relatively inactive symbols for Serbian historical memory may
be easier to utilize in that there is potentially less cultural contestation surrounding their
meanings. The symbols of early modern Serbian history in the Military Frontier and the
Serbian Principality have never been subjected to similar types of political interpretation
and cultural appropriation as Kosovo and Serbian Orthodoxy. The monasteries of Fruška
Gora, important as they are to early Serbian political and cultural development, carry not
nearly the same type of cultural weight as the monasteries of Kosovo. The writings of
Jovan Skerlić and Dositej Obradović have never been appropriated for ethnocentric pol-
itical culture. King Petar Karadjordjević is widely remembered as an enlightened consti-
tutional monarch, and no war has ever been waged in the name of Sremski Karlovci. All
these examples have an advantage in that they have remained symbolically neutral and are
thus able to be easily appropriated for historical memories which emphasize strong ties
between Serbs and central Europe. Questions might arise as to what is “familiar” or
even potentially relevant to a public audience. Narratives of inter-ethnic cooperation
and citizenship between Serbs, Croats, and Romanians in Vojvodina are themselves far
more salient to Vojvodina than, say, Sandžak or Kosovo. But even here, the ideas of
Serbian political culture having a heritage of shared values and concerns can be extended
to potentially similar narratives that involve specific examples in Novi Pazar, Niš, and
even Prizren if such patterns of interaction ever existed. What is important for the entirety
of Serbia is not what specifically happened in Vojvodina in the nineteenth century, but
whether other regional narratives can provide local elites with similar useable symbols
in which people can find solutions to their problems of liberal democratization without
abandoning their own histories, customs, and traditions.
Recalibrating recent historical events for political symbolism may present something
of a challenge in that they have not been accepted by all Serbs as part of their collective
identity. The legacies of the Milošević era are still contested, and many Serbs, particularly
older generations and those that support national populist parties, regard the democratic
governments that have run Serbia since 2000 as corrupt, inept, and responsible for what
they consider being a further deterioration in the quality of life from the previous
regime. On the other side, active participants of the student protest movements have
also become disillusioned with the post-Milošević governments that not only failed to
carry the creativity and momentum of the democratic opposition into practice, but co-
opted many elements of the old regime into its political system. Yet the examples of
public protest against an entrenched regime, the widespread rejection of ethnocentric
chauvinism by Serbia’s student body, and the fact that the regime was finally overthrown
by Serbia’s own citizens instead of international pressure all affirm the importance of
people power for a society that has long been regarded by analysts as acquiescent of
872 M. Rossi
Milošević’s policies and is today afflicted with a significant degree of socio-political

inertia. The symbolism of public protest and dissidence throughout the 1990s, and
especially culminating in the 2000 elections can yield positive narratives of Serbia’s citi-
zens holding their officials publically accountable for their actions.
Some of these narratives and symbols from Serbia’s history have already been utilized.
In the last two years, exhibits have been sponsored to commemorate the life and works of
Sava Tekelija in part with the 185th anniversary of the founding of Matica Srpska in late
2010 (Blic Online), and Dositej Obradović on the 200th anniversary of his death in 2011
(Danas). Yet while these commemorations affirm the importance of these figures in
Serbia’s historical memory, a primary mechanism for building comprehensive public
awareness of and acceptance for alternative political cultures is through education, both
in grade schools and in universities. To date, secondary and high school Serbian history
textbooks remain rather bland in coverage, with little change to the presentation of
material since the communist period. As a model for emulation, Serbian educators can
follow the successful example of curriculum development used in Novgorod in the

1990s, which introduced a regional studies component that included “a Novgorodian
and Russian self-awareness . . . [and] an ability to compare [its] own national, European,
and regional histories, and discuss different versions of historical events” (Petro 157).
Lessons involved formal reading and writing coupled with visits to local landmarks,
museums and archaeological sites, role playing simulations, and volunteer work in local
organizations. Similar initiatives can be planned for Serbian students, but it is important
to first establish elite consensus on what symbols to use and what narratives to convey
through them.
The establishment of a widely accepted set of liberal democratic narratives in Serbia
can not only ease the transition of the state towards eventual EU membership, but it can
inculcate a sense of public awareness that their own traditions, cultures, and historic
figures are just as democratic as any other European community. Interpreted in a way
that emphasizes Serbia’s historic yearning to be a part of that European community
while still retaining a national character and pride in its own heritage, a balance
between the apparent cultural divide separating “Serbia” from “Europe” may finally be
bridged. The key to liberal democratic consolidation in Serbia is therefore not a rejection
of culture, but a deconstruction of old historical memories that interpret the past and appro-
priate symbols for authoritarian ends. It must also be accompanied by an active pursuit of
cultural reinterpretation that emphasizes additional narratives that validate the democratic,
inclusive, and cosmopolitan character of the Serbian people.
Acknowledgements
This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Association for the Study of
Nationalities (ASN) conference, hosted at Columbia University 14– 16 April 2011.
I would like to thank my fellow ASN panelists and especially the two anonymous
reviewers for their insightful comments and editorial suggestions that helped me clarify
many of the theoretical aspects of this manuscript as it developed into a larger article.
Notes
1. Serbia formally signed the Stabilization and Association Agreement on April 29, 2008. Full rati-
fication by all EU members had been stalled primarily by the Netherlands insisting Serbia fulfill
all outstanding obligations to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia
(ICTY). On May 26, 2011 Ratko Mladić, former Bosnian Serb Army Chief of Staff, was arrested
and extradited to the Hague five days later. Goran Hadžić, former President of the Republic of
Serbian Krajina and the last remaining fugitive at large, was also captured by Serbian authorities
on July 20, 2011 and extradited to the Hague two days later. On October 12, 2011 the European
Commission recommended that Serbia be granted official EU candidate status, which was
expected to be formally granted that December. But recent conflicts in northern Kosovo
between local Serbs and KFOR soldiers over disputes surrounding freedom of movement and
operation of EULEX, the EU-based administrative authority in Kosovo, prompted Germany
to postpone Serbia’s EU candidate status until the following year.
2. See for instance the report by the International Crisis Group, which identifies a significant degree
of financial funding and political support for local Serb institutions by Belgrade, but also
acknowledges perceptible rivalries between local party officials eager to retain strong influence
in day to day matters of administration and state officials in Belgrade interested in maintaining
authority over these officials as a way of claiming sovereign legitimacy over at least this
compact area of Kosovo.
3. According to the Serbian government’s Office for EU Integration, only 53% of respondents
polled in June 2011 would “support accession of our country to the European Union.” By
October, the level of support had further dropped to 46%, the lowest level of support since
2000 (B92, “Opposition Leader”).
4. See Dahl (35–43), in which he identifies five general criteria for democracy: effective partici-
pation for debate and cooperation by all elected officials, equality of voting, “enlightened under-
standing” in which both elected officials and citizens have access to information concerning the
benefits and potential consequences of policies as well as alternative ideas, control and manage-
ment of policy, and full universal suffrage. I use Aronoff’s (“Political Culture”) definition of
political culture as shared meanings that are socially constructed, and that either affirm or chal-
lenge the legitimacy of political institutions, offices, and procedures of a polity. As such, “pol-
itical culture is employed to establish or contest the legitimate parameters of collective identity.”
5. Aside from newspaper editorials and international officials continuing to note the need for
Serbia to “come to grips with its past” so many times the statement has become almost
clichéd, even recognized scholars like Ramet continue to hold surprisingly sweeping beliefs
that “it is widely understood that xenophobic nationalism is a vital part of Serbian culture
today” (42).
6. For the purposes of this article, I define narrative as a conscious connection of previously
unstructured and possibly even unrelated events, figures, and ideas into a seemingly emplotted
framework of logic and reference. I understand symbols as the tools of narrative, both tangible –
as in the form of monuments, commemorations, and rituals – and intangible – such as feelings
of belonging, patriotism, and tradition. For a sociological study on the development of narra-
tives, both community and national, see Zerubavel. For a study on the uses of cultural
symbols in political identity, see Swidler.
7. The term “usable democratic legacy” is taken from Linz and Stepan (452) though the emphasis
in their work on legacies is more focused on institutional legacies instead of cultural. Insti-
tutional legacies certainly have a profound influence “for the transition paths available and
the tasks different countries face when they begin their struggles to develop consolidated democ-
racies” (55). But in an important article, Kubik presents an alternative argument of “cultural
legacies” that are not automatically “received from” the past but are rather “transmitted” by pol-
itical and social actors (“Cultural Legacies”). Cultural legacies may be “transmitted” in a par-
ticular way to reflect conditions from institutional legacies, but they are fashioned by
contemporary agents for current purposes. They are not unavoidable, and uncontrollable,
obstacles that forever make a state and its society a prisoner of the past.
8. This is the conclusion I ultimately based my dissertation on (Rossi). I significantly draw from the
conclusions reached by Laitin’s “two-faces of culture model” that incorporates both culture as a
system of limited, yet flexible, meaning from the works of Clifford Geertz, and culture as a form
of social and political practice for contemporary narrative as argued by Abner Cohen (1–20).
9. Poland is the major exception to this comparison. See Kubik Power.
10. For the sake of brevity for an already lengthy paper, I am leaving out discussions on recoding
symbols for Kosovo, which would require a separate study for proper explanation and analysis.
Kosovo, like Serbian Orthodoxy, is inextricably linked with, and will remain an integral part of
Serbian history and identity. However, the prospects of appropriating a narrative around Kosovo
that is compatible with both Serbian ethics and European values of democracy and co-fraternity
874 M. Rossi
will remain elusive as long as a settlement with the ethnic Albanian community, which utilizes
similarly contentious and ethnocentric narratives of historiography, is incomplete. Additionally,
this task requires intensive efforts by both sides at “de-coding” highly developed narratives that
existed long before, but were institutionally strengthened by the events of the last twenty years.
Suffice to say, the flexibility for re-interpreting narratives that have gained a certain degree of
autonomy from political actors is highly limited, but not impossible.
11. This event, known as the Velika seoba Srba (Great Serbian Migration) is itself a celebrated event
in Serbian collective memory, most directly symbolized through a painting of the same name by
the Serbian artist Paja Jovanović in 1896. Historical memory of the Great Migration of 1690 is
often linked to additional narratives of repeated Serbian collective suffering in Kosovo and
ethnic persecution. Yet for all the symbolism of commemorating where Serbs migrated from,
it is surprising that little focus has been given to where Serbs migrated to and what became
of these communities.
12. Though Arsenije III was the Patriarch of a reconstituted autonomous Serbian Orthodox Church
within the Ottoman Empire, his move to Austria in fact removed him as “Patriarch” in Peć, the
historical center of the Church. Serbian patriarchs continued to administer in Peć until 1766
when it was reabsorbed into the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. The Metropolita-
nate in Karlovci was thus an acknowledgement of its technically subordinate role to Peć at
least until 1766.
13. The first Serbian Reading Room was founded in 1841 in Irig, a town a few kilometers from
Novi Sad. By 1870, there were twenty-one Serbian Reading Rooms throughout Vojvodina,
all of whose primary aims were to preserve Serbian language and literature amid increasingly
oppressive Magyarization. See Kimball, 364.
14. The word matica literally means “queen-bee”. However it can also be understood as “home”,
“source”, or “headquarters”. In this case, a rough translation could be “Home of the Serbs”,
or even “Serbian Source”.
15. Sava Tekelija (1761– 1842), was the first Serb doctor of law, and a great Serbian benefactor and
philanthropist. He was also present at the Assembly of Temesvár (modern day Timişoara) in
1790, in which its Serbian and Romanian participants advocated the administrative autonomy
of Banat, its formal separation from the Hungarian Kingdom, and the recognition of equal
rights and political privileges for Serbs and Romanians throughout the Empire.
16. Miloš Popović. Srpske Novine no. 91 13 Nov. 1843 (qtd. in Karanovich 177).
17. Cited by Svetislav Šumarević. Čitalište Belgrade, 1938: 25 (qtd. in Karanovich 179).
18. Srpske Novine 31 May 1846 (qtd. in Karanovich 180).
19. According to Srpske Novine, in 1856 Serbia received 138 different foreign newspapers: 5 in
Serbian (Vojvodina), 1 in Bulgarian, 2 in Croatian, 4 in Russian, 1 in Czech, 3 in Polish, 3 in
Modern Greek, 84 in German, 7 in English, 21 in French, 4 in Italian, 2 in Hungarian, and 1
in Turkish. Serbia received more foreign newspapers than newspapers published at home.
The only two newspapers in Serbia were Srpske Novine (Serbian News), and Šumadinka (Šuma-
dijan Woman). See Karanovich, 181.
20. It is also worth noting that the Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti (SANU) is the same
institute in the late 1980s and early 1990s that spearheaded a series of controversial histori-
cal narratives associated with the Serbian national revival in the twilight of Yugoslavia’s
existence; the most (in)famous being the 1986 Memorandum, which decried the entire
postwar Yugoslav state project as an attempt at weakening, dividing, and ultimately subju-
gating the Serbian nation by making them demographic minorities in a series of sub-state
republics and autonomous provinces controlled by non-Serb communities. Today, SANU
continues to function as one of Serbia’s premier intellectual centers, and while it has
mostly eschewed the nationalistic rhetoric of the 1990s, it is still regarded as a conservative
think-tank by social scientists in Serbia and elsewhere, despite its more liberal-oriented
beginnings.
21. Among the works translated into Serbia were Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s What Is to Be Done?
(1869), Borzoi Turgenev’s Smoke, On the Eve, and Fathers and Sons (1869), Nikolai Gogol’s
Inspector General, and Taras Bulba (1870), and Dead Souls (1872), Rousseau’s Emile
(1872), Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus (1872), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, and Quatre-
vinght-treize (1872), Alphonse de Lamartine’s History of the Girondists (1875), Ernst Haeckel’s
Natural History of Creation (1875), and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1879). See
Petrovich, 512– 513.
22. Western sources on Serbia under Petar I remain scarce, and this lack of information to non-Serb
readers has kept most of this history relatively unknown. For a general history in English, see
Petrovich, 534 –611. For a recent study of the period in terms of political, cultural, social,
and economic developments, see Stojanović, Kaldrma.
23. The similar ways of thinking between Skerlić and Obradović is clear in the following two pas-
sages. In 1902, Skerlić wrote “there are many people in our country who disclaim against the
‘rotten West’, and who talk with exaltation about some ‘Serbian’ and ‘Slav’ culture. They
have taken from the ‘rotten West’ their clothes and habits, and institutions and appetites, but
not that which makes the West so great, in which it really is a great teacher: a sense of individual
dignity, liberty, initiative, that serene, enterprising, sober spirit which has built all civilization . . .
and for us there is only one cure: to open wide our doors to the West and its ideas, the West
which thinks, which acts, which creates, which lives a full and intensive life, the only one
worthy of being called human life.” Skerlić, Feljtoni, skice i govori. Belgrade: 1964: 66–67
(qtd. in Čolović 101). Likewise, Obradović makes a clear testament to the value of Western pol-
itical thought in writing “I would have my fellow countrymen venture to think freely in all
matters, reflecting and passing judgment on all they hear. You know well, my dear friend,
that all nations which merely cling to old opinion and customs must needs lie in eternal and
hopeless darkness and stupidity . . . Not thinking, not reflecting, and making no use of the
reason and intellect that God has given them, not taking example from the learned and enligh-
tened nations, they remain forever in an endless and lamentable torpor.” Andrija Stojković.
Životni put Dositeja Obradovića: od šegrta i kaludjera do filozofa i prosvetitelja i Karadjord-
jevog ministra prosvete. Belgrade, 1989: 211(qtd. in Fischer 74).
24. Cited by Noyes in Obradović (“Introduction”, 107).
25. Ibid., 282– 283.
26. Srpski Književni Glasnik 23: 9 (1910): 715, qtd. in Miljoković-Djurić, 144–145.
27. Srpski Književni Glasnik, 32: 11 (1914): 872, qtd. in Miljoković-Djurić, 156.
28. Stojan Novaković. “Nakon sto godina..” Hrvatskosrpski almanah. Belgrade: n.p., 1911. Dositej
Obradović 1811–1961. Ed. Mladen Leskovac. Belgrade: n.p., 1961, qtd. in Fischer, 67– 68. The
actual building commemorating Obradović in Belgrade today is an old small Turkish house,
which functions as a modest museum to both him and Vuk Karadžić, the language reformer
who lived a generation later.
29. For a general history of Serbia and the surrounding region during the 1848 revolutions, see
Petrovich, 242– 246; Krestić, 29 –57; and Rapport, 140– 151.
30. Karlovac is a town in northwestern Croatia, near Zagreb, and is not to be confused with the town
of Sremski Karlovci, the seat of the Serbian Metropolitanate in Hapsburg lands. However, the
name Sremski Karlovci is derived from Karlovac as roughly meaning “Karlovac in Srem”,
similar to Frankfurt am Main and Frankfurt an der Oder, and Kosovska Mitrovica and
Sremska Mitrovica.
31. Viktor Novak, “Kako su Hrvati i Srbi u Karlovcu 1848 zajednički proslavili Uskrs”, Politika,
April 8, 9, 10, 11, 1939, qtd. in Krestić, 41.
32. The phrase “Belgrade is the world” carries two interesting meanings. In Serbian, the word “svet”
(world) can also mean “sacred” or “holy”, which suggests that in attempting to voice their belief
that Belgrade was more than just a Serbian city, its historical character and dynamics were what
was “sacred” to them over the distant an unfamiliar Kosovo, which had been already heavily
fused with nationalist symbolism as being “sacred” to the Serbian nation, though few Serbs
had ever been there.
33. Gordy (104, n 2) defines “turbofolk” music as a subgenre of “neofolk” music that characterized
much of the state-controlled media outlets of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Serbia, Macedo-
nia, Bosnia, and Croatia. Whereas “neofolk” music utilized “styles and structures borrowed
from various folk forms combined with pop instrumentation and arrangements”, the more par-
ticular turbofolk music placed a primary emphasis on commercial dance and disco motifs to
frame a reduced but still noticeable folk element. The term “turbofolk” was originally coined
by the Serbian rock musician Antonije Pušić (Rambo Amadeus) as a derogatory and satirical
term to describe the co-opting of folk forms and imagery with the state sponsored nationalism
of the Milošević era. The term stuck as a music genre and is widely regarded as being associated
with the glitz, glamour, and criminal elite of the 1990s. The genre is still widely popular
throughout Serbia and the former Yugoslavia, but since 2000 has grown to resemble more main-
stream pop-glamour music.
876 M. Rossi
34. According to the EXIT website, the festival is proclaimed as a “State of EXIT”, which means “a
state for those who share values, environmental awareness, and tolerance and are open to the
different cultures and also want to make the world around them a better place.” EXIT – Exit
History.
35. On the importance of “mnemonic reconciliation”, including references to literature noting the
important relationship between the deepening of democratization and social memory, see
Kubik and Linch. On the uses of providing “counter-hegemonic” meanings to highly familiar
“canonical” narratives and symbols, see Brysk.
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Serbia's European Heritage From Dositej Obradović To OTPOR

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On: 25 December 2014, At: 01:20

Nationalities Papers: The Journal of

In search of a democratic cultural

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.742987

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In search of a democratic cultural “alternative”: Serbia’s European

euroskeptic narratives of the Milošević era remains incomplete. Additionally, the

ISSN 0090-5992 print/ISSN 1465-3923 online

How historical memory can strengthen a liberal democratic culture in Serbia

Serbia’s heritage of European-oriented intellectualism

Western political thought and Serbian patriotism.23

this narrative of a unified South Slavic state cemented in the cosmopolitanism of

Hopeful optimism is indeed an appropriate way of characterizing much of early modern

Narratives of inter-ethnic cooperation and citizenship

medieval Patriarchate of Peć in Kosovo in 1766 by Ottoman authorities – and Stevan

Narratives of anti-authoritarian protest

dynamic society in Europe. It was reflected in their secular Western-oriented lifestyles

A cautious yet optimistic way forward

expendable, and what are adaptable. Engaging in “mnemonic reconciliation” is a more

Milošević’s policies and is today afflicted with a significant degree of socio-political

follow the successful example of curriculum development used in Novgorod in the

U of Chicago P, 1986. Print.

Serbia. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1990. Print.

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