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Tatjana Sekulić
Palgrave Studies in European Political Sociology
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Preface
In the first days of January 2019, we leave Sarajevo, gliding on the ice and
the snow that had fallen in the previous days. Temperatures are extremely
low, minus ten degrees. Before that, there was the struggle of conducting
the last round of interviews and collecting research documents during the
holiday breaks. The thirty kilometres of highway towards Zenica illumi-
nate the horizon of progress, foreshadowing the idea that Bosnia and
Herzegovina could become a state where mobility is possible in safety and
speed. The highway ends in front of the blast furnaces of the Zenica steel
mill, amid the reddish air that covers the landscape of an otherwise
uniquely beautiful valley. From Zenica, the road narrows into only two
lanes, which makes overtaking a car or truck a life-threatening manoeu-
vre. The road leads to Nemila, a small town along the river Bosna
the name of which literally means ‘undear’, where for some years now
there have been stalls and delays due to damage on the road caused by
floods, landslides or who knows what else. The crossing of the first admin-
istrative but also political border in Bosnia and Herzegovina is marked by
only one sign welcoming passengers to the Republic of Srpska in the
Cyrillic alphabet (the expression is identical in all three national lan-
guages—Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian) and in English. For part of our
journey we are accompanied by sights of mined houses in roadside
v
vi Preface
villages, only a small number of which were restored within the twenty-
four years of the Dayton Agreement marking the end of the open war
conflicts. After Doboj now, a new section of the highway much more
comfortably leads to the border with Croatia and, since July 2013, with
the European Union. Yet we continue in the usual direction towards the
border between the two ships—Bosanski Brod and Slavonski Brod (brod
means ship), across Sava River. Its waters originate in Slovenia, flow
through Croatia and Bosnia and finally through Serbia to meet the
Danube in Belgrade. Along the way, we stop for an Illy coffee at the Nada
(hope) gas station, where we are already friends with the staff. Entry into
the European Union this time is not so difficult—twenty minutes wait-
ing in Nemila and another forty at the border with Croatia. It then takes
us four full hours to cross the seven kilometres that separate us from the
Schengen border between Croatia and Slovenia. Hundreds of motorists
are honking simultaneously as they approach the toll booth four hundred
metres ahead of the border, the primary purpose of which is to control
the influx of cars avoiding thus heavy congestion in front of the ‘fortress’
gate. Croatia is once again the bulwark of civilization, while people—
probably mostly from the ‘diaspora’—flock back to their Western
European homes after the holidays. Slovenia also has double border
checks, with restrictive policies of the European institutions related to the
‘migrant crisis’, especially since the opening of the Balkan Route in 2015,
pressuring both countries. At last, Europe: at the border with Italy, they
just check the vignette that Slovenia required us to pay in order to drive
on the highway.
This brief ethnographic reportage illustrates how the contingent redef-
inition of boundaries of different character directly and indirectly deter-
mines the everyday life of citizens, whether they are nationals of EU
member states or residents of the accession countries. Free movement, as
one of the founding principles upon which the community of European
states is founded, is called into question under the pressure of European
and national securitization policies, for which the pretext of a ‘migrant
crisis’ and its direct association with Islamic-inspired terrorism provides a
very convenient framework. In addition to this, the old bilateral disputes
between countries—in this particular case between Slovenia and
Croatia—are being reactivated in informal and non-transparent ways.
Preface vii
and 2007 accession, which almost doubled the number of members tak-
ing it from fifteen to twenty-seven. It certainly shook the previous equi-
libria of individual national interests of the core member states and
required, above all, a huge institutional and structural effort to reorganize
the existing field of action of the Union itself. The effort of this fifth wave
of enlargement, colloquially referred to as the Big Bang, required that
each subsequent step towards the accession of new members pass a far
greater check on each institutional barrier, which the already existing
conditionality principle coherently made possible. If we can accept that
this was necessary to stabilize and re-assert the new identity of the
European Union after such a major and historically important event at
the global level, at the same time, the survival of the idea of unification is
of invaluable significance for the Union itself. It means inevitably taking
responsibility for the already launched accession initiatives both in candi-
date countries and in those whose candidacy is still in question.
The character of the enlargement/accession process is such that it can-
not be stopped, or reversed, without very serious repercussions both for
aspirant countries or countries seeking to withdraw their membership,
and for the European Union itself. Brexit is the first experience for which
there is still no adequate term contrary to the term enlargement. In any
case, this concerns the guaranteed freedom of each member state to leave
the Union, while there is no instrument for the other member states to
make such decisions conditional. The procedural rules, but also the sanc-
tioning of such a decision, are just being written in the case of the United
Kingdom. The unanimity principle is sought when it comes to the acces-
sion of new member states and only after the European Commission has
assessed that all the conditions for accession have been fulfilled. Countries
starting from a very low level of development, especially related to the
economic dimension, but also to the political and social ones, as is the
case with the Western Balkans 6 countries must make a far greater effort
to reach the minimum standard levels while at the same time disposing of
far lower resources. The same could be said for Bulgaria, Romania and
Croatia, and to some extent Slovenia and Hungary. The political, eco-
nomic and social resources that these countries can count on in the acces-
sion process are almost entirely directed toward fulfilling the conditions
imposed by the Stabilisation and Association Agreement (SAA), though
the real priorities of these societies may be others. The constant
x Preface
The twelve-year research and the writing of this book would not be pos-
sible without the participation and support of my family, friends and
colleagues, and many other significant encounters. One of these was with
scholars related to the European Sociological Association Research
Network 32—Political Sociology, and to the European Consortium
for Political Research, Standing group for Political Sociology, where I
finally felt at home concerning the way of conceiving Europe sociologi-
cally. Carlo Ruzza and Hans-Jörg Trenz gave the book project their sup-
port from the beginning, and my gratitude goes firstly to their constant
inspiration and reflections on the EU. I found the research by, and dia-
logue with, Virginie Guiraudon, Niilo Kauppi, David Swartz, Virginie
Van Ingelgom, Oscar Mazzoleni, Cristina Marchetti and Alberta Giorgi
extremely stimulating, as well as that of many young scholars who took
part in the work of the networks over the past few years. Sharla Plant and
Poppy Hull followed the production of the manuscript for Palgrave
Macmillan and helped to create the final version with constancy and
kindness. Many thanks to Fabio de Nardis, editor-in-chief of Participazione
e conflitto (PACO), and to Valida Repovac-Nikšić and Sanela Čekić-
Bašić, editors-in-chief of Sarajevo Social Science Review (SSSR), for allow-
ing the reuse of two articles whose previous versions were published
in 2016.1
xiii
xiv Acknowledgements
Finally, this book, which took up so much of our life and time, is dedi-
cated to my husband, my fellow traveller, Amer Hadžihasanović.
Note
1. Sekulić T. “Constituting the social basis of the EU. Reflections from the
European margins”, Partecipazione e conflitto, 9(2) 2016, 691–716;
Sekulić T., “Harmonization in Turbulent Times. Western Balkans’
Accession to the European Union”, Sarajevo Social Science Review, Vol. 5,
n.1–2/2016, 91–110.
Contents
xvii
xviii Contents
Index233
List of Figures
xix
List of Tables
xxi
Introduction
The main aim of this book is to shed light on the contradictions underly-
ing the EU enlargement process, challenging the common assumption
that the integration of an extended European space might be possible
without mutual transformation of the institutions and agencies involved.
The paradox that I will try to identify and explain here lies precisely in the
dominant approach, which argues that the EU can enlarge by transform-
ing the new arrivals only, without changing the whole. Conversely, the
enlargement process affects the European Union as such (and its member
states), which, on each new occasion, has to learn how to welcome new
members and adapt its own institutions and narratives to the new situa-
tion. EU politics and EU enlargement policies are understood here as
constitutive elements of complex integration dialectics, within which
Europeanization acquires a plurality of meanings, being regarded at one
and the same time as an institutional building process based on the prin-
ciple of harmonization with common laws and standards, as a project of
empowering social actors as carriers of individual rights and liberties and
as a way of imagining the emergence of a transnational society (Trenz
2016: xviii).
After the accession of the ten new member states in 2004, and of
Bulgaria and Romania in 2007, the following stage of enlargement fatigue
had become a sort of stumbling block for future integration of the conti-
nent, with serious consequences for other accession countries with
xxiii
xxiv Introduction
The inquiry sets out to understand the way in which the ‘transformative
power of Europe’ acts as a circular instead of a unidirectional force
(Dallara 2014; Elbasani 2013; Kochenov 2010; Sadurski 2012). ‘Policy
translation’ is seen here not only as the transfer of knowledge to be imple-
mented by imposing prescribed meanings onto the receiving context. On
the contrary, analysis of the accession process will take into consideration
the interpretative subjectivities of the actors, that is their capacity to give
new meaning to any single policy proposal. Moreover, the re-contextual-
ization and re-interpretation negotiated among actors involved in the
Introduction xxvii
Research Design
The conceptualization of the field created several methodological prob-
lems, as what was to be examined, that is the interplay of EU integration
and accession processes from an actor-oriented and situated approach,
was ‘essentially in motion’ (Smith 2006: 2). Moreover, as these processes
unfolded in a multitude of different sites (Burawoy et al. 2000; Hannerz
2003), in which diverse and multiple problems were constantly emerging
(Vidali 2013), the reduction of the field’s complexity and the decisions
about methods, data-gathering and analysis required significant atten-
tion. My extensive practical and scientific experience of crossing physical,
institutional and symbolic borders and barriers regarding the specific
European space-sets considered in this research made the challenge of
developing a viable ethnographic approach to these transformations cru-
cial. How could the various institutions involved in the enlargement pro-
cess be made ‘ethnographically accessible’ (Smith 2005)? Was it possible
to make the communication dialectics involved in ‘practice bound net-
works’ (Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2008) among different agencies both
at the EU and at the local level more transparent? Would this approach
allow for better understanding of ‘how these processes work in different
sites—local, national and global’ (Shore and Wright 1997: 11)?
With these questions in mind, I developed a research approach based
on three main dimensions:
The field data collection and analysis covers the twelve-year period
from 2008 until 2019, that is from the year before the establishment of
the second Barroso Commission (November 2009–October 2014) to the
end of the Juncker Commission (November 2014–November 2019).
Since the focus of this study is European integration as a process in which
time operates as a structural component, a longitudinal approach was
adopted. During this time span, Croatia became a member in July 2013
and the five-year moratorium on enlargement was proclaimed in 2014;
the new phase of negotiations started in 2014 with the so-called Berlin
process, proposing a new pattern of political pressure and accession assis-
tance by the EU for the Western Balkans, the last step of which took
place in Poznań in July 2019.
The first part of the analysis consisted in mapping the structural and
normative aspects of the process of integration of the aspirant countries
in its institutional dimension, with a particular focus on the ways in
which the enlargement/accession procedures based on the conditionality
principle shape and constrain the space for negotiation. The normative
barriers to full EU membership were investigated through a critical dis-
course analysis (Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2008) of the main procedural
instruments of the accession process, that is each country’s (Progress)
Reports from October 2008 to May 2019 and the annual EU Enlargement
Strategy Papers. Particular attention was given to the monitoring and
evaluation of ‘achievements’ and ‘shortcomings’ concerning mostly the
political criteria, that is democracy, public administration reform, rule of
law, human rights and the protection of minorities, regional issues and
international obligations.
The second part of the inquiry focused on the way in which the actors
institutionally involved in this specific ‘nexus of practice’ narrated the
process of accession and their own role in it and how they interpreted the
specific context and the ‘other side’ agency. The semi-structured inter-
views, the instrument I found as most appropriate for grasping the infor-
mal views and opinions of the institutional actors, were held in two
periods: the first from 2009 to 2011, the second from 2018 to 2019. The
informants were selected on the basis of their specific institutional role in
multiple sites: those with seats in Brussels (Directorate General for the
European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations,
xxx Introduction
Missions and Embassies of the WB countries to the EU) and in the capi-
tals of the WB countries (state institutions such as parliament and gov-
ernment; Delegations of the EU to each country). Sometimes the
informants responded personally to the request for an interview; at other
times the interviewee was proposed by the specific office responsible. In
any case, the main criterion for the selection was the person’s concrete
engagement in the day-to-day communication flow between the space-
sets of the process. Interviews were also conducted with representatives of
the civil society of the WB countries, that is activists from NGOs involved
in the public debate on EU integration and selected independent intel-
lectuals, considering these two categories of actors competent informants
not directly influenced by the dominant national or European approach.
In this light, the study aims to explore the ‘empty space’ between, on
the one hand, what is envisaged as a ‘policy of conditionality’ operating
by political pressure, epistocracy, hegemony of ‘best practices’ and ‘know-
how’, and control over the access to and distribution of funds and, on the
other hand, the political, social, institutional and economic conditions
and actors’ capabilities on the ground. My attempt to raise inconvenient
and unexpected questions in order to challenge the dominant official nar-
rative of the institutional actors elicited a variety of reactions. The inform-
ers from the EU side were upset, impenetrable, confidential, reserved,
distant, friendly, resigned or efficient. The ‘other side’ was regularly more
open to dialogue, but at the same time expressed disillusion and resigna-
tion, often activating the stereotyped vision of the social and cultural
‘self ’ and diagnosing a dangerous social and political paralysis of their
respective societies, further worsened by the stalemate in accession.
The final round of interviews was conducted in 2018 and 2019. The
choice of taking a longitudinal approach allowed me to grasp the chang-
ing perception of the actors participating in this special form of social
action and simultaneously always ‘embedded within a multitude of eco-
logical conditions’ in their spatial, material or semiotic dimension (Wodak
and Krzyżanowski 2008: 189). The interviews were analysed using the
critical discourse approach, where each unit was related to social and soci-
ological variables and institutional frames and to the wider historical and
socio-political dimensions of the specific context (Abbel and Myers in
Wodak and Krzyżanowski 2008; Galasińska and Krzyżanowski 2009).
Introduction xxxi
The main analysis and findings of the empirical part of the research are
presented in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6 of the book. Firstly, in Chap. 4, the frame-
work of the analysis is designed and argued for, and the methodology
explained and discussed. Then, in Chap. 5 the results of the critical dis-
course analysis of the Reports, Opinions and Enlargement Strategy
Papers of the European Commission are presented and discussed, explor-
ing the ways in which the progress of each country along the path of
European integration has been discursively constructed and represented
in these key documents over the twelve-year period. Chapter 6 analyses
multiple voices of the actors and their narratives, positioned both in
Brussels and in the capitals of the seven states, which permitted a recon-
struction of the main forms of discourse production with regard to the
accession of the Western Balkan countries. Finally, in Conclusions (Chap.
7), the reflection on the contradictions and paradoxes that mark the
European integration and enlargement/accession process turns to the
current crisis of the European Union, understood here as requiring a
much deeper questioning of the European model of democracy and of its
‘nesting citizenship’ perspective. In this light, the difficult process of
Europeanization of the Western Balkan societies through conditionality
revealed not only the lack of capacity of these states to meet the condi-
tions imposed but also the inner fragility of the EU as such, and of its
governance structures, unable to address the crisis by democratic means
in a better way and to give new impetus to the European integration
project.
Many important issues remain marginal if not completely absent in
my analysis, of which the following are just a few examples: the correla-
tion and tension between global capitalism and democratization in its
neo-liberalistic turn in the perspective of European integration or the
genesis and effects of the Eurocrisis from 2008 onwards. The political
elite component, both local and European, lies at the margins of the pres-
ent research, notwithstanding its central importance for the creation and
fulfilment of accession conditions and achievements. The phenomeno-
logical approach to the analysis, using the methods and techniques of an
institutional ethnography of the process, combined with the critical dis-
course studies approach and methodologies, aims however to produce
new knowledge and insights into the “evermore complex relationship
Introduction xxxiii
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1
Europe from East to West, from South
to North: Harmonization in Turbulent
Times
The critical mass of people, men and women of all generations, who
took an active role in the events started to grew steadily. One after another,
the communist governments, from East Germany and Poland to
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, former Yugoslavia
and the Soviet Union, were forced to surrender their totalizing political
power, monopolized for decades. The first more or less democratic elec-
tions took place in all countries of the region no later than the spring of
1991. However, the revolutionary nature of these events was revealed in
the years to come, this time without any mediation, upsetting the life-
world of many people. It is still difficult, after three decades, to give an
exhaustive interpretation of it.
Seventeen years later in 2006, the protagonist of the Romanian film
East of Budapest, a local TV journalist in the small, outlying town of
Vaslui, asked the direct participants in those historical events ‘whether
there had been any revolution in their town’. In this ironic fashion, the
director of the film, Corneliu Porumboiu, raised two questions: if these
people had been active participants in the revolution or just passive spec-
tators of an inevitable collapse and, more crucial, what Romanian society
had become in the post-Ceausescu period. To understand both of them,
he suggested, we should return to the source of the historical moment
and try to capture, in a Weberian way, the motivations and interpreta-
tions that the actors themselves gave to their actions.
Why should it be so important to understand the extent of awareness
with which the actors of the 1989 revolution faced the complexity of the
transformation triggered by the fall of the Berlin Wall? The key words in
his reflection were: crisis, de-legitimation and collapse of the communist
regimes and, above all, social agency. So, who are the actors in the seizing
of power as a genuine revolutionary act? Members of civil society in every
single country involved? Revolutionary movements like Solidarnošć in
Poland or the ethno-nationalists of former Yugoslavia? New political
elites thrown up from the communists ranks? In addition, how and how
much did these actors contribute to the crisis, de-legitimation and col-
lapse of the communist regimes? Did the action of the masses, in terms
of participation in the revolutionary ‘liberation’ of their societies, occur
when the regimes had already imploded? Finally, what was the model of
citizenship that transition, more or less liberal and democratic, produced
1 Europe from East to West, from South to North… 3
regimes but still different. The post-totalitarian phase was crucial, accord-
ing to Linz and Stepan, as it made possible a further stage of liberalization
and democratization, opening the first ruptures in the totalizing con-
structs of the regime.
The authors stressed that the transition process in some of the twenty-
seven post-communist countries analysed during the first five-year period
following the 1989 events had led to the creation of non-democratic
regimes, as in several post-Soviet countries or in the former Yugoslav
states, while in others the democratic model was more firmly consoli-
dated. As they were aware of the high level of conflictuality underlying
the transition in post-totalitarian regimes, especially for multinational
federations, the universal quality of democratization remained the funda-
mental category for the authors and basic for a comparative analysis,
developing specific critical categories, reference frames and evidence.
Transition as Revolution
In 1990, while the events in Central and Eastern Europe followed one
another at an unexpected rate—simply ‘raining down’, as the historian
Stefano Bianchini commented informally— Habermas described what
was happening in terms of Nachholende Revolution, translated in English
as a ‘catching-up revolution’ and in Italian as rivoluzione recuperante
(Habermas 1990). He was not the only one to identify the character of
the ongoing transformation as revolutionary but at the same time distant
and divergent from the classic models of the nineteenth-century bour-
geois revolutions or of the communist October Revolution in 1917.
The difference was identified in the absence of new concepts and ideals
for the future, re-born and revolutionized societies. Cohen and Arato, for
example, were more optimistic, defining what was happening in terms of
‘self-limiting revolution’, as it was capable of preserving social plurality,
with the hope of reflexive continuity in the democratic revolution (Cohen
and Arato 1992; Arato 1994). Dahrendorf and Offe considered the trans-
formation in terms of ‘democratic revolution’, emphasizing its complex-
ity and extremely problematic appearance (Dahrendorf 1990; Offe
1994). Ash coined a concept of ‘refolusion’ to describe the specific
8 T. Sekulić
It could be argued, not without reserve, that theories that have attempted
to explain the collapse of communist power in all real socialist societies in
Europe in terms of revolution are historically located in the early period
of transformation. What brings together the authors who share this
approach is a kind of caution that makes them hesitate to apply the label
‘revolution’ to these movements. For many scholars it was not just a mat-
ter of reducing the problem to the interpretative dilemma of ‘reform or
revolution’. The flux and forms of transformation questioned the very
concept of revolution and its historical forms, testing and exploring the
possibility of radical change as such in contemporary European societies
through new and alternative languages and dispositives.
However, such a collapse of post-totalitarian regimes in the late 1980s
and early 1990s in Central and Eastern (and Balkan) Europe was not
foreseen by scholars and intellectuals or by political elites (or intelligence
systems?) throughout the globe. Everything took place quickly and unex-
pectedly. For decades the Iron Curtain separated Western Europe from
the Soviet Union and other members of the Warsaw Pact, Albania,
Romania and the even more liberal socialist Yugoslavia. All of these post-
totalitarian systems shared the legacy of totalitarianism inherent in terms
of the dominant Marxist-Leninist ideology that created political, social
and cultural structures in which political violence was intrinsic, as a
10 T. Sekulić
One of the most important books to analyse the effects of the first transi-
tion and consolidation period, published after the tenth anniversary of
the fall of the Berlin Wall, was edited by Tismaneanu. The concept of
‘revolution’ appeared again as a key one to explain the transformation,
but the content of the book clearly indicated a loss of certainty about
previous interpretative models regarding the results and consequences of
the transformation. The title of the chapter written by Chirot was ‘What
happened in Eastern Europe in 1989?’; Judt wrote about ‘Eighty nine,
the end of which European Era?’; Michnik moved from revolution to
‘The Velvet Restoration’ and Zhelev’s final question was ‘Is Communism
Returning?’. There emerged a growing awareness of the depth of the
change, and of its radical consequences, not only for the states and societ-
ies directly involved but also for Europe, and for a new global order,
whatever it might be. In 1999, the European Community was still far
removed from the enlargement to ten CEE countries, in 2004 and 2007.
The process of democratic transformation was hampered by the
(ethno-)nationalistic goals of the new governments democratically
elected, exasperated in the case of former Yugoslavia. However, even
where the ‘ethno-national question’ was not declared to be the first task
to solve—a premise for further democratization, as in Albania, Poland,
Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria—a huge deficit of democratic political
culture and the establishment of capitalism in weak economies without a
consolidated system of regulations produced enormous effects on social
structures, deepening social inequalities and aggravating social poverty
(Azmanova 2009; Sekulić B. 1999). In 2000, it was evident that in many
cases the corruption of the new political and economic elites eroded the
positive results of democratization, such as, for example, the consolida-
tion of ‘electoral democracy’—the peaceful exchange of power between
political parties and coalitions through free elections. With the fall of the
Wall and the Iron Curtain, capitalism in its new globalized forms con-
quered the field at the global level, hardly questioning the basic Western
ideal of ‘democracy and capitalism’ (Altvater et al. 2013). The capitaliza-
tion of the new democracies has proved to be a contradictory process
1 Europe from East to West, from South to North… 13
The tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall passed in a moment
of great uncertainty, with the NATO bombing of Serbia, Montenegro
and Kosovo and the eve of other crucial events, such as the terrorist attack
of 11 September 2001, yet before any clear opening by the EU to Eastern
European countries in terms of membership. The answer to the fierce
attack by Al Qaeda, the war in Afghanistan, followed by the attack on
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq strongly unbalanced the fragile institutions and
normative structures at the international level, which proved unable to
prevent two episodes of genocide which ended the century of violence:
Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995.
During the next decade, ten post-communist countries entered the
EU; other Western Balkan countries developed relationships based on
integration as candidate or potential candidate countries, together with
Turkey and Iceland. The Southern European area was on the boil and
exploded in 2011 with the Arab revolutions: the violent turmoil in Egypt,
Tunisia and Morocco, the war in Libya, and afterwards in Syria. Just
before the ‘Arab spring’, in the Albanian capital Tirana, the democrati-
cally elected government opened fire on demonstrators who were protest-
ing peacefully against the election results and governmental policies.4
In that same period the European Union painfully managed to pro-
duce the constitutive text of the Lisbon Treaty, severely shaken by the last
economic crisis that began in 2008, yet unable to establish the ground for
a common foreign policy, as claimed and discussed by Habermas and
Derrida (2003).
These are some macro variables that constitute the frame for reflections
about the significance of 1989 and of its consequences. Michnik, Heller,
Offe and Snyder, for example, tried to propose a new evaluation of the
significance and of the contingent results—if not the global ones—of the
transformations, always with extreme caution (Michnik 2009; Heller
2009; Offe and Snyder 2009). Nowadays it seems that violence is making
14 T. Sekulić
Those who have directly known servitude and oppression, and for whom
freedom is the greatest value and gift, have not ceased rejoicing to this day.
I myself am of that camp. Regime change, as far as I was concerned, was a
miracle that one hoped for but did not expect to see, and a miracle it has
remained. (…) All I can hope … is that we too shall be able to produce an
equally fine tale under the title of “Thirty Years On”. (Heller 2009)