Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-9pm4c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-26T14:15:10.328Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Hybrid Discourse of the Serbian Antibureaucratic Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2019

Marjan Ivković ,
Tamara Petrović Trifunović  and
Srđan Prodanović
Marjan Ivković
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, Serbia
Tamara Petrović Trifunović*
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade, Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, Serbia
Srđan Prodanović
Affiliation:
University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, Belgrade, Serbia
*
*Corresponding author. Email: evena304@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article investigates the discursive logic of the antibureaucratic revolution through discourse analysis of three Serbian dailies: Politika, Borba, and Večernje Novosti. We conceptualize this discursive logic as a “hybrid discourse,” employed by Slobodan Milošević’s faction of the political elite and by prominent Serbian press outlets in their discussions and reporting on the diverse Serbian protest movements of the day. The core of the hybrid discourse, as our analysis demonstrates, consisted of the symbolic interweaving of different types of citizens’ discontent in order to present them as one single demand for societal “reform” that resonated with the agenda of the Serbian political elite. We argue that the hybrid discourse and the antibureaucratic revolution itself had a structural role related to the crisis of systemic legitimacy in Yugoslavia. The hybrid discourse performed the operation of what we term the “reversing of the symbolic fixing of antagonism between the ordinary actors’ discontents and the structurally inevitable reforms,” introducing instead the discursive fusion of the two vocabularies.

Keywords

antibureaucratic revolutionhybrid discoursestrikesKosovoreformsocial changeYugoslavia
Type
Special Issue Article
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , July 2019 , pp. 597 - 612
Copyright
© Association for the Study of Nationalities 2019 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Boltanski, Luc. 2011. On Critique. Cambridge, UK: Polity.Google Scholar
Dyker, David A. 2011. Yugoslavia: Socialism, Development and Debt. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gagnon, V. P. 2010. “Yugoslavia in 1989 and After.” Nationalities Papers 38 (1): 23–39.Google Scholar
Grdesic, Marko. 2015. “Populism as Interaction: How ‘the People’ Happened in Serbia in 1988.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison.Google Scholar
Grdešić, Marko. 2016. “Serbia’s Anti-Bureaucratic Revolution as Manipulation? A Cultural Alternative to the Elite-Centric Approach.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58 (3): 774–803.Google Scholar
Hayden, Robert M. 1999. Blueprints for a House Divided: The Constitutional Logic of the Yugoslav Conflicts. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Hardy, Cynthia, Harley, Bill and Phillips, Nelson. 2004. “Discourse Analysis and Content Analysis: Two Solitudes?” Qualitative Methods 2 (1): 19–22.Google Scholar
Ivković, Marjan, Trifunović, Tamara Petrović and Prodanović, Srđan. 2015. “Srpsko-albanski odnosi u socijalističkoj Jugoslaviji: protesti na Kosovu i teret sistemske legitimizacije.” In Figura neprijatelja: preosmišljavanje srpsko-albanskih odnosa, edited by Pavlović, Aleksandar, Zaharijević, Adriana, Draško, Gazela Pudar and Halili, Rigels, 153–172, Belgrade: IFDT & KPZ Beton.Google Scholar
Kerčov, et al. 1990. Mitinzi u Vojvodini 1988. godine: rađanje političkog pluralizma. Novi Sad: Dnevnik.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto. 2005. On Populist Reason. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Lazić, Mladen and Cvejić, Slobodan. 2007. “Class and Values in Postsocialist Transformation in Serbia.” International Journal of Sociology 37 (3): 54–74.Google Scholar
LeBor, Adam. 2004. Milosevic: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lowinger, Jake. 2009. “Economic Reform and the ‘Double Movement’ in Yugoslavia: An Analysis of Labor Unrest and Ethno-Nationalism in the 1980s.” PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University.Google Scholar
Lydall, Harold. 1989. Yugoslavia in Crisis. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Mimica, Aljoša and Vučetić, Radina. 2008. Vreme kada je narod govorio: Odjeci i reagovanja u Politici, 1988-1991.” Beograd: Institut za sociološka istraživanja.Google Scholar
Musić, Goran. 2016. “‘They Came as Workers and Left as Serbs’: The Role of Rakovica’s Blue-Collar Workers in Serbian Social Mobilizations of the Late 1980s.” In Social Inequalities and Discontent in Yugoslav Socialism, edited by Archer, Rory, Duda, Igor and Stubbs, Paul, 132–154. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl. 2001. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Ramet, Sabrina P. 1992. Nationalism and Federalism in Yugoslavia, 1962–1991. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Ramet, Sabrina P. 2004. “Explaining the Yugoslav Meltdown, 1 ‘for a Charm of Pow’rful Trouble, like a Hell-broth Boil and Bubble’: Theories about the Roots of the Yugoslav Troubles.” Nationalities Papers 32 (4): 731–763.Google Scholar
Sachs, Jeffrey and Lipton, David. 1989. “How Yugoslavia Can Save Itself.” Washington Post, December 31. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1989/12/31/how-yugoslavia-can-save-itself/64cd3d31-cda1-4ab5-b470-4dd4581c07c5/ (Accessed December 25, 2017.)Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A. 1998. Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Vladisavljević, Nebojša. 2002. “Nationalism, Social Movement Theory and the Grass Roots Movement of Kosovo Serbs, 1985–1988.” Europe-Asia Studies 54 (5): 771–790.Google Scholar
Vladisavljević, Nebojša. 2008. Serbia’s Anti-bureaucratic Revolution: Milošević, the Fall of Communism, and Nationalist Mobilization. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
Vujačić, Veljko. 2006. “Slobodan Milošević: Charismatic Leader or Plebiscitarian Demagogue.” In World Order after Leninism, edited by Tismaneanu, Vladimir, Howard, Marc Morje and Sil, Rudra, 107–126. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar
Woodward, Susan L. 1995a. Balkan Tragedy, Chaos and Dissolution after the Cold War. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.Google Scholar
Woodward, Susan L. 1995b. Socialist Unemployment: The Political Economy of Yugoslavia, 1945–1990. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar