Organized Innocence and Exclusion: “Nation-States” in the Aftermath of War and Collective Crime

Vlasta Jalusic Organized Innocence and Exclusion: “Nation-States” in the Aftermath of War and Collective Crime But it is only an illusion that nationalism’s goal is a state. Although “organic” national states look like a natural prod­ uct of the idea about an “organic” nation and defensive nationalism seems to be the only guarantee of preserva­ tion of its “authenticity,” that state is only a prerequisite of nationalism. Olivera Milosavljevic (2002: 44-45) INTRODUCTION: BUFFERS AGAINST RESPONSIBILITY IN THE YUGOSLAV CASE Much has been said and written by now about the critical issues of tran­ sitional justice in the post-Yugoslav situation, and about the problem­ atic (non)dealing with the recent war and criminal past in Serbia and elsewhere. Yet the failure to deal with the past, especially its crimes, is only one mark of the persistence of a deeper problem that helped to create the circumstances in which collective crimes were made possi­ ble —circumstances that still persist, even though the war is over. As Arendt remarked when analyzing the elements of totalitarian domina­ tion, these phenomena can, in the form of several “temptations,” not social research Vol 74 : No 4 : Winter 2007 1173 only survive a system that has been defeated but can persist further and crystallize in one form or another (Arendt, 1986: 459). W hat are these circumstances? I have argued elsewhere that the Yugoslavwar and massive crimes, especially in the case of Srebrenica, cannot be under­ stood by a single-cause explanation, such as calling nationalism the origin of all subsequent evil (Jalusic, 2007). In addition to many precipi­ tating human actions and omissions, a specific climate and mentality had to be created in order to prepare people to participate in, commit to, or tolerate the crimes that occurred. This extended process of prepara­ tion can be described as the creation of what I call the “organized inno­ cence syndrome.” There are three main ways ofapproaching the recent war and mass crimes and their consequences in some of the most involved regions of the former Yugoslavia-like Serbia, but also beyond. The first primarily involves denial and silence about the criminal past and an attempt at “forgetting,” at leaving it to oblivion. The second represents an attempt at exonerating oneself by being a victim the violent structures, propa­ ganda, and powerlessness, and blaming nationalist politicians and corrupt elites. The third and most problematic is a thorough “contextualization ” of crimes and their apologia in the context of the new state building, sometimes also as an open justification ofwhat has been done, which can serve to legitimate further exclusion ofgroups from member­ ship in the state, insofar as it is not based on excessive violence or mass killing. This last way of approaching the criminal past is a substantially new development since the Nazi crimes ofthe Second World War and the subsequent postwar attempts to come to terms with them. The novelty is that, for the first time since Hitler, total exclusion from the state is considered unproblematic in a part of Europe—provided it did and does not involve the violent and uncivilized evil of mass killing. This tribal, nationalist understanding of the nation-state and its function in the region after the collapse of socialism began to prop­ agate with the growth of Serbian tribal nationalism and was used to “justifjy] ethnic cleansing with the goal of the protection of territory for one’s own people” (Devic, 2003:1; V. Dimitrijevic, 2003). Understanding 1174 social research this new climate is crucial to learning the lessons of the post-Yugoslav outcomes, which are much broader than the local or regional conse­ quences. While taking place within regional borders, these events pose questions similar to those arising from the crisis ofthe European nation­ state in the first half of the twentieth century, although the answers might be different. The problem is thus not only that one is rendering irrelevant the past and the crimes committed in the name of something, someone, or someone’s identity (N. Dimitrijevic, 2006a), or that such a “culture of silence” accompanied by an attempt at this kind of “forgetting” does not lead to oblivion but instead corroborates the wrong past...