Capitalism from Outside?: Economic Cultures in Eastern Europe after 1989

Becoming European: Hard Lessons from Serbia: The Topola Rural Development Program

Becoming European: Hard Lessons from Serbia The Topola Rural Development Program Mladen Lazić Introduction Contemporary economic culture in Serbia, the characteristics of which resulted from several contradictory historical processes, cannot be analyzed by simply “de-constructing” these characteristics into simple dichotomies like East and West, traditional and modern, or socialist and capitalist. Serbia’s historical development—in which belated modernization took the form of socialist quasi-modernization shaped as a “liberal”/quasi-market/opened-toward-the-West system that finally ended in a civil war, international isolation, and economic collapse— produced a complex mixture of value orientations that could serve as a basis for quite different modes of socio-economic reproduction.1 This mixture has been characteristic of wider social groups, defined by their level of education, urbanization, or age, but it also cuts through subgroups and even individuals, leading to ambiguities in their general life goals and everyday behavior. The pronounced complexity of recent events produced ambivalent expectations among foreigners, especially Westerners who have worked in Serbia, so that their views on the cultural characteristics of the local population have also been marked by incongruities and contradictions. The Topola Rural Developmental Program (TRDP), a three-year economic aid program run by a Western agency in a rural environment, provides a very good opportunity to study the encounters of these internal and external cultural mixtures and ambiguities. 1 For more on these intricate characteristics of the Serbian historical development —torn between Eastern and Western, traditional and modern, socialist and liberal, autarchic and oriented-toward-the-world patterns of socio-economic reproduction—see Lazić (2005). 184 Mladen Lazić Methodological Remarks This Serbian case study combines a quantitative and qualitative approach in which the quantitative methodology has a secondary role: a survey of 500 inhabitants of Topola municipality (random stratified sample) demonstrates the general evaluation of the Topola Program by people who are supposed to be the project’s main beneficiaries. In our qualitative research, 10 respondents occupying different positions in Topola Rural Development Program were interviewed: five Westerners and five employees from Serbia. The interviews were semi-standardized and the respondents from one cultural background evaluated the cultural patterns of the “Other.” Our Western respondents were highly educated (all with postgraduate degrees), occupied managerial roles in the project, and nearly all of them had rich experiences working with people from other cultures (in developing countries). Serbian respondents varied in all these characteristics : education (from high school to postgraduate degrees), positions in the project (a driver, a clerk in administration, program coordinators ), and previous contact with other cultures. However, these differences reflect the organizational structure of the project, in which Westerners had managerial and professional roles only, while local employees covered a much wider spectrum of roles. Research Field Settings TRDP was a regional development project conceptualized and financed by the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) and implemented by OPTO International (a private Swedish firm) in the Topola region in Serbia in the period 2002–2005. Topola is a municipality with approximately 26,000 inhabitants located in central Serbia, some 80 kilometers south of Belgrade. Relatively underdeveloped, the region has struggled with a steadily decreasing population since the Second World War. The vast majority of inhabitants live in rural settlements and agriculture represents the most important economic sector in the municipality.2 The bulk of smallholders are peasants with three to eight hectares of arable land. Although 70 percent of the land is used for commercial crop farming, small individual 2 Farmers make up some 45 percent of Topola’s population. holdings have been further fragmented into unconnected plots, making them unsuitable for modern agricultural machinery and hardly profitable under modern market conditions. Industry in Topola developed during the socialist period consisted of a few small food-processing plants, one textile factory, a small mining company, and a foundry. TRDP began after the removal of the Milošević regime in 2000. At that time, the Topola region was drastically pauperized (like the rest of Serbia), the result of fifteen years of civil war, international isolation, war with NATO, economic collapse, obstacles to post-socialist transformation , and so on.3 For Topola, this uncertain period brought over 4,000 unemployed and 500 poor inhabitants who are entitled to social benefits. Furthermore, some 1,000 people from Croatia and Kosovo found refuge in Topola’s environs. By 2000, most of local industrial enterprises ceased production and the local infrastructure was in ruins...