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17. Heading for confrontation
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17. Heading for Confrontation The achievement of the Radical Party was bringing the masses into the political scene. Seeking out and politically organizing the peasantry by involving it in an elaborate party structure (consisting of party membership card and fees, local committees, regular party conventions, etc.) which acquired the dimensions of a nation-wide political organization, “the Radicals created the first political organization in the Balkans to give the term popular sovereignty a practical, visceral meaning.”146 At the same, through their populism, they released mass instincts, which, in multiple ways, ran counter to the broader prospect of modernization .147 From 1881 to 1883 the Radicals adopted an obstructionist, uncompromising policy under the premise of “the worse, the better” and made use of every means available to discredit their opponents, irrespective of the usefulness or not of their policies. Faced with the bellicose disposition of King Milan, who mistrusted the Radical Party and its program of political reform as demagogical and revolutionary, and conscious of the unwillingness of the Progressives , their onetime allies, to concede to them any political power, the Radicals deployed a variegated register of oppositional tactics: legal struggle in the Skupština for constitutional change which would guarantee the sovereignty of popular representation and public struggle in the mobilization of public opinion. A series of chance events came to their assistance, or were purposely instrumentalized in their agitational campaign: the bankruptcy of the General Union, the company charged with the construction of the railway, a project that the Radicals had opposed from the very beginning, and the reluctance of the government not only to assume responsibility, but provide a public explanation, in the Skupština. The state salt monopoly was disliked by the population , and was turned by the Radicals into an anti-taxation campaign, whereby rumors were spread that more taxes were to follow on estate, livestock and property. Another event was the death in jail of two women affiliated with the Radicals (Ilka Marković, wife of Jevrem, brother of Svetozar, and Lena Knićanka). The resistance to the registration of 130 III. The Ambiguities of Modernity cattle, a regulation simply in compliance with Austrian veterinary requirements , was publicized by the Radicals as a new taxation measure. The royal disregard for the radical victory in a number of elections (May and December 1882, September 1883) and the measures for the disarming of the national militia together constituted the small stones that helped pile up the popular barricades of the Radicals. Persecution by their opponents only added to their fanatical zeal and contributed in enforcing their feelings of sectarianism, reciprocal solidarity and devotion to the party’s cause. Additionally, persecution “only enhanced the view in the peasant mind that to be a real Serb, a rebel of the people, meant to be a Radical. Imprisonment and harassment by the state simply proved the genuineness of their claim to authenticity.”148 Through a conscious and often manipulative use of propaganda, the Radicals drove peasants towards a total rejection of the state authority , and their response did not lag behind in ardor, with peasants even rejecting state measures against the phyloxera epidemic. It appeared as if the country was split into a peasant and a bureaucratic Serbia, in the belligerent mood of a civil war.149 Defaming the Progressives as “traitors,” the Radicals obstructed all their policies, irrespective of their usefulness. Their foreign policy was anti-national—the Radicals strongly played on anti-Austrian rhetoric—, their internal policy was bureaucratic and anti-liberal, while their economic measures flung the country open to local and foreign plutocrats and worked against the national interests. Their system of indirect taxation exceeded the economic strength of the people; commercial agreements with foreign states, particularly Austria–Hungary led to the ruin of local crafts. While the Progressives were in control of the state apparatus and made full use of its disciplinary mechanism in order to discharge Radicals from positions of local authority, the Radicals carried behind them the support of the masses, disenchanted by the state.150 Using various techniques, alongside the abovementioned demagogical approach, the Radicals succeeded in acquiring the faith of the public (for example by publishing police reports in Samouprava). The dissatisfaction of the population, and the repressive measures of the government, created the loaded atmosphere of the 1883 elections. The struggle between the Radicals and the Progressives was ultimately a confrontation between the former and King Milan. Its roots lay in two diametrically opposed notions about the arrangement of the...