European reports have become a very special literary genre. Otherwise, there would be no drama after each publication: what is written there, whether we are praised or not. Then they start - the interpretations. Such and such. You can hear everything there.
However, the president's depression is a new moment. Đukanović's rhetoric is naturally quite different in the (relatively) new political context. As much as he tried to relativize the evaluations and European findings before, he now became frankly disappointed and depressed after the new report.
But the new government enthusiastically shows that it will leave significant traces in the Montenegrin practice of public nonsense or populist relativization of European assessments. So - it seems that there is still no imaginable government whose relationship with the EC would be truly partner-like, and the reports would not be endlessly interpreted, and often falsified, but perceived as important and meaningful instructions on the so-called the European way.
It is noticeable that there is an attempt to present that stagnation is not the same as regression. And, essentially it is. Stagnation is sometimes the most dangerous form of regression. Because you are regressing, and you think it is not so.
So, if you clear up the terminological confusion, the latest report is very - unfavorable. And accurate - because it speaks of an immature society without serious self-reflection.
The DPS model of faking reality is very present in the new government as well. It should have been one of the key and most powerful points of differentiation, but it didn't. This is precisely a fundamental and serious mistake that, in one way or another, can hit this government, as well as this society, on its head.
By the way, "report" as a literary genre is not an invention of EC or our time. The report was one of the key textual models of early colonial literature. Garislaso de la Vega El Inca and his Commentaries on the Incas is a report, the first attempt to show Europe what the new world was (was) for those to whom it was the old and the only one. Or “A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies”, published in 1522, where the Catholic priest Bartolomeo de las Casas, told a gruesome story of the spiritual enslavement of the Native Americans. The writer of this book gave up his property in Haiti, freed all the slaves and led the fight to preserve the natives and their culture. Certainly, the forerunner of Liberation Theology.
The report included descriptions of new worlds, different peoples, and of course, it was always written from the perspective of a superior culture, or Power. As then, so today.
That urge which was at the center of colonial literature partly evolved into the scientific experience which, in modern times, was brought about by the heroic phase of anthropology - when, in fished out communities on the Pacific islands, scholars like Malinowski or Margaret Mead studied these societies frozen in time, often and staying a long time among them. And the West read their books as - reports from the last Nedođi.
"Report on the Blind", a novel within a novel, part of the brilliant novel "On Heroes and Graves" by Ernest Sabat, in addition to being exciting literature, is one of the deepest interventions into the mechanisms of paranoid experience of the world. And one of Borges' late books has this word in the title - Brodie's Report, and it contains some of his most beautiful stories.
In addition to the EC Report, the domestic public received another, tragic and deeply disturbing, posthumous "report" in the form of a recorded address to the public by a former secret service official. Again, it was guessed in all directions: who was he referring to when he said this or that. What madness is he referring to when he says that "this madness must stop"? Does this frenzy have anything to do with the depression the president is talking about?
As usual, Montenegrins learn the lessons of (personal) responsibility and integrity the hard way. Before we become an (accepted) part of Europe, we should at least learn to read European reports. Not as exotic literature, but as - realistic prose about us.
Bonus video:
