interview by Ladislav TOMICIC and Igor FUKA
VLAISAVLJEVIC: I have been thinking about that problem for a while now, and believe that unfortunately I haven't had much success in finding an answer. It is hard to believe that I have spent all these years trying to discern the connection between politics and war, or culture and war, and that I haven't finished the project long time ago. The topic is much more difficult than it may appear. Briefly, we can say that every post-war policy in this region is actually a policy of war. By saying policy of war I mean that the very subject, the originator of that policy is actually a wartime subject, created in war. Chief factors of current political scene were shaped by wartime events, and wartime enmities. For example, immediately after the war I looked into the process of reconciliation in Bosnia-Hercegovina. My conclusion was that self-destruction of wartime subjects is the necessary condition for reconciliation. However, wartime subjects cannot self-destruct since their discourse, their vision of reality, their attractiveness to voters, all of that stems from their wartime achievements. Wartime subjects do not seek true reconciliation. They seek something totally different - recognition. Wartime subjects will always seek mutual recognition. That's an epic characteristic - in every war warring sides exaggerate the strength of their enemies. By exaggerating the strength of your enemies you make your own achievements seem more formidable. For example warring sides from WWII kept strengthening each other. Without Titoism, there would be no Chetnik or Ustashe ideology and the other way round. The victory of Titoism has taught us one important lesson - wartime victories are an illusion. They always have on their side dead who are insufficiently dead and will be continuously brought back to life to play the role of enemies. Thus, the victory ends up being meaningless. On the other hand the epic stories persist, always stay current and resurface in every new war. Why do primitive people keep fighting? They talk about war, listen about war, and listening about war they have to fight. Tito's victory implied constant discussion of the battles on Sutjeska and on Neretva rivers. It demanded that specters of enemies be constantly invoked. As long as the enemy lives, the victory is something significant, something great. Once the enemies died, and no one had patience to listen about war, then scepters came to life, took over the living and we got a new war. That means that all of this is yet another repetition of the same scheme. We are not leaving the vicious circle of violence and war. No matter how many of your enemies you may kill, they keep coming back, even if only as ghosts that drive the living. Epic politics is my term for the chain that connects scepters and the living. A victor, by praising his victory motivates his enemy and that scheme is being repeated and allows the same scene to be again restored.
In that case legitimacy is circular, since it is constructed on the friend-enemy basis. We still do not have clean political ether. For example, as soon as today someone starts talking about equality in front of law, that story already implies the story about wartime brotherhood - that we shared the same fate, same danger and possibility of extermination. Thus that legitimacy is actually pseudolegitimacy. It is essentially the mediaeval principle of honor and praise of epic glory, which is actually ridiculous. There exists a permanent caricature of the political, which is being renewed here. In the real sense legitimacy would imply annulment of wartime policies and consequently we do not have it in the modern political sense of the term. Here in elections voters choose their favorites based on the principle of wartime brotherhood, based on their determination to join in the conflict. Even the generations that did not taste the war follow the same pattern of political expression, which is something that keeps coming from the war. That pattern is a reconstruction of the precisely the same landscape as before the war. From one war to another we have a constant reconstruction of epic politics.
Processes are faster, because there is increasingly less space for the epic scene. Modernization is squeezing the epic of war and thereby making it seem like a caricature. Recall Tudman's, Alija [Izetbegovic's] and Milosevic's pseudo historical spectacles, their scenes of political expression. Already today we can see examples that mock that sort of epic politics. For example, Titoism lasted as long as the population was prepared to listen to wartime stories. There modernism takes the stage. At the horizon of modernism you have entropy, something lacking in the pre-modern age when epic stories were inexhaustible. Nevertheless there is also a process of internal destruction, especially noticeable in recent Balkan wars. War veterans are the best indication there. Every politics is also a politics of war if ultimately it justifies its decisions by legitimacy they would provide to war veterans. In Titoism that meant providing legitimacy to national heroes and mothers. To state your political goals in front of them was a source of legitimacy. Therefore, it was very important to gather war veterans and to deliver speeches in front of them, a regular practice on anniversaries of all important battles. When Tito gathered war veterans he at the same time gathered his immediate collaborators, powerful officials. Today, when a politician gathers war veterans, he gathers people who are on the margins of the society and the problem of providing legitimacy has thereby become drastic. Therefore, internal destruction can be observed through distancing of war veterans from centers of political power, while that power still cannot function without war veterans and without legitimacy that they provide to such politics.
Whatever war veterans say - that is mainstream policy. I named that "the sacred concept" without which politics cannot function. The sacred status requires blood of war heroes. Thus we have sacred soil at the location of an important battle, there are sacred names - names of locations where blood was spilt, and you have sacred men who went through those battles and earned legitimacy by surviving. If an organization whose members are such individuals says something that cannot be easily dismissed. On the other hand, they keep making mistakes. In the political sense they demonstrate their lack of experience or maturity, since they are unable to follow the course of the ruling politics, which attempts to portray itself as an expression of spontaneously declared will of war veterans. That provides endless opportunities for manipulation. "Green berets" enjoy a lot of respect and their stand prompted a significant number of people not to attend the concert of Bijelo Dugme.
It may be true that I am one of those who do not offer solutions, but on the other hand I feel quite distant from those individuals who are permanently in the limelight and insist on providing descriptions and evaluating current events. Actually, they are not putting much effort in descriptions since according to them everything is obvious and therefore does not require description; that is their initial mistake, because there are no obvious events; every event gives you an opportunity to speak about something that is hidden or insufficiently visible.
I insist on certain impressions and characteristics that to me seem to warrant more attention. Therefore, I not only provide descriptions, but also attempt to learn something from those descriptions, something that is important and needs to be underlined. I believe that in the subliminal sense the best theoretical work is politically practical and that belief separates me from independent intellectuals, who are convinced that theory is exhausted. The only thing left to them is moral intellectualism or empty moral discourse in the worst sense of that term. Ultimately they are saying "just look how exalted I am!" and "I have such pure and uncompromising views about everything unlike our politicians!"
Nevertheless, there is still one problem, and that is that your theoretical work does not have much influence on political practice. I would dare claim with high confidence that 90 percent of politicians haven't read a single page of your books.
Since I know a lot about the publishing scene in Sarajevo, I know that books barely sell, perhaps several tens of copies of a book in one year. Books are part of elite culture that has nothing to do with reality. On the other hand, that's precisely why I find media appearances interesting, providing that the rules of the game are not modified. [Jacques] Derrida [modern French philosopher] is my role model when it comes to dealing with the media. Today, it is very important to talk for the media in the way that precludes being understood by the audience. On one occasion Derrida was supposed to give an interview to Le Monde. They told him - you are a philosopher, but please be careful, you'll be speaking for a very wide audience and they cannot understand your usual descriptions of your philosophy. Derrida's response to that was to decline to give an interview. His response: "You want me to repeat the same platitudes that your readers have been hearing for ages and have been trained to accept". Similarly, I would like to tell my audience something new, something they do not know. Their first reaction will be lack of understanding, but it is very important that people also hear from the media things they do not understand, since that happens very seldom.
How can your theoretical findings be applied in political practice?
By recognizing those theoretical findings and by using them to incessantly strike the predominant modes of political thinking at its weak points, criticizing and denouncing them as varieties of epic political thinking. It is necessary to explain that it actually has nothing to do with politics. Instead it is simply a mythology based on the most recent war. That requires critical presence of independent intellectuals and people who will appear in politics with different legitimacy. Can you imagine after these wars politics that does not base its legitimacy on the war and war veterans? You cannot. That is the problem!
How did west Europe overcome that problem? What about French, Germans, and English, for example?
That issue is addressed by my hypothesis regarding demographics of small nations. The problem is that as far as small nations are concerned war always implies danger of extermination - total disappearance. Big nations do not have that experience of war, not even in world wars. Here every war brings a possibility of genocide. Another of my conclusions is that for small nations peace is worse than war. If they are included in an empire, small nations are protected to a certain extent, they get a feeling of inclusion and that small body within a bigger body feels quite safe and protected. But here lies a deadly danger - assimilation. Up to a point an empire offers a shelter, big culture and well organized state apparatus, while on the other hand it turns you into something you are not. For small nations that process is more treacherous and dangerous than processes that take place in war. It presents a real danger. Let me propose here an unusual assertion, which I would very gladly defend: Yugoslavia did not fall apart because it was unsuccessful; it fell apart because the process of assimilation, that is the process of brotherhood and unity was too successful! At one moment that could especially keenly be felt in Croatia: the difference between Serbian and Croatian languages, between Serb and Croat identity had disappeared. We had a process of integration that threatened to end in total assimilation in some sort of Serb-Croat nation. The forced separation of something that had grown almost fused together over the time was essentially cutting of a living tissue. Peace, therefore, brings assimilation, which is very dangerous for small nations. Political leaders keep recognizing that danger, so that our politics is permanently in the state of emergency and its main purpose is to alarm the nation. In war one says - we'll be saved by peace, we only need to survive. In peace - we'll be saved only if we do not become the same as others. Therefore, we can only survive if we stay in the state of war with them, if we do not recognize them as friends, but as enemies. Here, I must mention that in my opinion one of the main reasons for the breakup of Yugoslavia was the end of the Cold war, which led to pacification and unification of Europe. Yugoslav unity required an absolutely different, true enemy, someone who was sufficiently different and sufficiently big to bring south Slavic nations together. The moment a German or someone else stopped being an enemy - that unity did not have an engine anymore. Therefore, Yugoslav unity was also a product of war politics. By disappearance of enemies the scene was shaken up and reality started to cave in.
After listening to you talk about assimilation, one gets an impression that according to you Croatian language subtitles of Serb movies are not necessarily a bad thing?
In peace culture and language take the role of frontlines in war. Cultural policy is just another means for waging a war. The opposite is also true. Cultural policy is a policy of countering assimilation. Today we do not have culture in the sublime sense of that term. Essentially, all culture in this region is anti-assimilationist. That prompted my controversial article "War as a biggest cultural event.
All those processes that lead towards reintegration of Srpska are positive. A country should not function like this. However, if the integration process were to be real it has to come from within. Nothing can be resolved by external intervention. That hard-line position must be whittled away from within. We must have links with Srpska that do not function only on the political or national level. If Srpska were to be abolished by foreign intervention it would only make things worse, definitely not better. Federation Bosnia-Hercegovina and Srpska still view each other as opponents, which is a leftover from the war. Therefore, change must come from within.
I have seen that discussion and it was funny when such a question was posed in the Sarajevo public, although I must admit that it was also courageous. Sarajevo has for a while now been an ethnic city, even an "extremely" ethnic city. No other European capital is as ethnically homogenous as Sarajevo. The political situation in Bosnia-Hercegovina indicates that here we have totally pure and ethnically homogenous territories and regions. Sarajevo is no exception.
Given ethnically clean regions and war politics about which you have spoken, pessimistic predictions that Bosnia-Hercegovina will not be able to survive as a united country seem realistic?
Bosnia-Hercegovina can be organized as a consociational democracy, a three-national country, but this time based on the truly territorial principle, a federation of territories. In theory that would be easier to do now since territories are ethnically clean. Of course, it is horrendous that such a state has been achieved by ethnic cleansing.
Are you effectively supporting Croat demands for the third entity in Bosnia-Hercegovina?
Let me be completely clear. If there is already one entity and if Bosnia-Hercegovina is a country with two entities, then the demand for a third entity is completely legitimate. Panicked reactions to that demand stem from the prevalence of the nation-state model in this region, the illusion that it would be possible to create a Bosnian nation.
The problem is that we cannot achieve constituent status of nations in the way that is proposed today. The constituent status exists only in theory, while in reality there are defined [ethnic] majorities and minorities in clearly defined territories. That problem has led to the failure of the return process and the failure to again ethnically mix the population and cancel wartime goals or results. On the other hand, we cannot spend an eternity awaiting a miracle that will bring back our pre-war lives.