The Sacrificed Body: Balkan Community Building and the Fear of Freedom

Conclusion: Community, Communalism, Communism

185 conclUSion community, communalism, communism A TV sketch by the Sarajevan New Primitives collective, which aired some time in the late 1980s, illustrates the absence of political ambition and ideals among contemporary youth when juxtaposed with the generation of their parents, the protesters of 1968: joining student protests after decades of hiding in the forest, unaware that Tito’s repercussions for 1968 had long ceased, a former protest leader arrives at an unnamed Bosnian university in the 1980s, complete with his Jimmy Hendrix gear and a guitar. Greeted by students who protest by shouting, “We want goals!” “We need ideas!” and “Meat in every meal!” the “veteran protester” poses with much pomp. In a hilarious exchange with the political leadership of the university, he is unable to comprehend the new vacuous phraseology. True to his old beliefs, he keeps shouting slogans against “technocracy” and in support of the “unlimited liberation of thought and expression.” The student leaders, however, are easily coaxed into abandoning their protest after being promised larger servings of meat in the canteen, at which the “veteran” leaves disgusted. While scathing of the 1980s generation’s absence of political consciousness, the episode is 186 conclusion no less critical of a specific kind of idolatry for the “cause of 1968,” with its monopoly on the ideals of liberation. The grand inspiration behind the Belgrade protests, but also the worldwide protests of 1968, was the early Marxist motto that freedom for the individual means freedom for all. Although promising to be a push toward the genuine liberation of the human subject, the 1968 movements instead ended with a whimper. Behind the resonant slogans demanding “everything and now”—promoting a radical break with the past, with the conservative complacency of their parents’ generation, and with the entire apparatus of ideological indoctrination—existed, it turned out, a deep anxiety, almost a hope, that something would somehow interrupt this wave and resolve the stalemate that the protesters themselves did not know how to end. Tito’s speech to the Belgrade students offered exactly such a deus ex machina conclusion and an easy way out of a confusing dead end that promised no concessions on either side, even less a plan for what would happen when the revolution was over. The protesters’ relieved celebration at the announcement of Tito’s alleged endorsement of their demands was soon to be followed by a veritable storm of regime repression that forever revoked the hard-won improvements in civil liberties from previous decades. Even more strikingly, however, this new repressive wave permanently undermined “third way” aspirations between Cold World polarities that Yugoslavia represented at the time, regardless of the country’s political shortcomings and economic ineffectiveness. Instead of expanding its potential as a model of different policy in a dichotomous world, the entire country was sacrificed to solidification and the “purification ” of each of its constitutional national bodies from an increasingly longer list of undesired elements, the result of which is the current heir states’ mimicking of and dependency on the West, which is little less than colonial in nature. We would not be mistaken to say that Yugoslavs did not have the courage necessary to see their own emancipatory project evolve into a society that could have been (why not!) a model for others but instead chose petty ethnoreligious nationalism as a means of escaping the tightening grip of the totalitarian state. One ideological dogmatism thus smoothly and imperceptibly replaced its predecessor, while old political players continued to swim in the new currents after making cosmetic changes to their biographies. Despite the deserved criticism that the protests of 1968 (on the global level) have been exposed to in the decades that followed, they could be considered the last attempt at what we could tentatively define as a worldwide political change whose failure made possible the rampant hijacking of politics by conservative and right-wing elites dealing one blow after another to civil liberties ever since. Small wonder then that this very last demonstration conclusion 187 of people’s inability to live up to their bold demands in the face of blunt force and their own fears should become many a conservative pundit’s favorite punching bag.1 In a world that seems afraid to dream big, ineffective actions with limited goals merely reinforce the status quo of the system that caused them in the first place. At the time I am writing this, we...