On Illiberal Avantgarde Balkanism and the 1990 s

On Illiberal Avant-garde: Balkanism and the 1990 s in Croatia Orlanda Obad Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research CEU, Budapest, 2018

Duško Petrović, autoethnographic account, Sarajevo 1992: “We had a lamp in our flat in which light could be regulated by a sliding mechanism. My brother and I played with that regulator one evening, quickly exchanging the light’s brightness. Someone noticed and, because our last name was Petrović, it was suspected that we were giving some signals to the enemy. We were saved by a neighbour who joined one of newly-founded groups of defenders. He guaranteed that we were not collaborating with the Serbian enemy. Because of suspicion related to our last name, which could have been Serbian, our flat was searched by various military groups several times during the war. ”

Franjo Tuđman, 1981, (as quoted in Đurašković 2015): “In contemporary times small European nations have been threatened by denationalization and assimilation; their national independence has been endangered by. . . the hegemonism and imperialism of bigger nations which use ideologies in various kinds to mask their domination, whether in the name of Catholic Universalism, enlightened cosmopolitanism, bourgeois democracy, Nazism, Fascism, or socialism”

Noémi Lendvai & Paul Stubbs, (forthcoming): “In contemporary Croatia and Hungary, and possibly beyond, authoritarian neoliberalism can be understood, albeit tentatively, as a governmental project that uses social, political and economic means to produce targeted and systematic divisions, insecurity and abandonment resting, inter alia, on a renewed heteronormative familialism, repatriarchialization, national and ethnicized demographic renewal and anti-immigrant sentiments. Social welfare, then, is not a marginal or side effect of authoritarian neoliberalism, but a privileged arena of struggle for a hegemonic moral economy. Just as the demonization of the ‘nanny state’ was central to Thatcher’s project, a critique of the ‘liberal welfare state’ is central to Orban’s. ”

Key references: • Petrović, Duško (forthcoming): „Vrijeme bezakonja: demokratizacija nasilja u kontekstu raspada Jugoslavije” • Đurašković, Stevo (2015): „Nation-building in Franjo Tuđman’s Political Writings” (Politička misao, vol. 51/5) • Račić, Domagoj (2017): „Od socijalističke prema rentijerskoj korporaciji: vlasništvo i upravljanje poduzećima u devedesetima” (Ekonomski pregled, vol. 68/2) • Lendvai-Bainton, Noémi & Paul Stubbs (forthcoming): „Variegated authoritarian neoliberalisms: notes from the European semi-periphery”