The key prelude to the recent parliamentary elections in Croatia took place significantly earlier in the form of private messaging on Viber. The actors were the future state attorney Ivan Turudić and the former "Queen of Knin" Josipa Rimac. Replicas of that involuntary dramolet entered popular lore and, much more importantly, the content of the opposition campaign. It was not the first media "leak" of messages from the already politically and judicially crossed Rimac, but this had the strongest political resonance. From them, we could find out how politics takes place outside of official channels and protocols, how institutions are bypassed and how government is actually governed. For the opposition, they served as the ultimate proof of the corruption and erosion of institutions that is taking place under the control of the HDZ.
As in numerous previous cases of uncovering affairs, journalistic-oppositional treatment attributed to them some kind of endemicity. It is about affairs and models of government that are supposedly first and foremost a feature of Croatian political life. And the opposition has thrown all its electoral cards at convincing the people that it is a crisis of unprecedented proportions that is leading us to political and institutional ruin. As we know, the people were not fully convinced and the HDZ remained in power even after the elections. The intellectually self-confident standard liberal columnists and analysts looked for answers in various euphemisms of declaring the people politically illiterate and stupid. Or at least morally deprived. However, a nonchalant political-moral x-ray of the people rarely offers a diagnostically clearer picture of things. Especially if that nation is excluded from global trends as if it is really the same, as the poem and methodologically deprived historiography say, since the seventh century.
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It is almost always analytically more generous to expand the frame a little. And this time we have Jonathan White, a professor of political theory from the London School of Economics. A few months ago, he published a paper in an academic context dedicated to the role of WhatsApp groups in contemporary political governance, and a few days ago he adapted the conclusions of the paper to a journalistic format and provided us with an article in the New Statesman. Our task is to see and transfer the conclusions to our context in order to at least loosen the provincial perspective in our politics. White, namely, warns that communication technologies have always been an integral element of the technology of government. Just as the appearance of, for example, the press or the telegraph changed politics, so did the Internet, or in the specific case of a platform like WhatsApp or in our case Viber.
In order to legitimize the research hypothesis, White presents a series of examples of leaking the content of communications on WhatsApp groups across Europe over the past few years. The sheer amount of those scandals would be enough for us to take a more sober look at domestic cases and not attribute them exclusively to the corrosive action of the HDZ as such. But White is primarily interested in the attractiveness of message communication itself directly or in closed groups for political power holders. It brings with it a dose of efficiency, bypassing numerous procedures and public officials, but also the feeling of belonging to a narrow circle of those involved in the group. As we all know, group dynamics often sidestep larger discussions. Not everyone sees the messages at the same time, some are more up-to-date than others, and the natural, non-protocol tone of communication contributes to the authenticity of the decisions themselves and stronger belonging to the circle of those who make them. The inertia of institutions and the whole complex of bureaucratic obstacles are bypassed. White is not at all naive in his assessment of novelty - closed groups that made decisions outside of established procedures have always existed - but new forms of communication also bring some qualitative, to some extent, already listed shifts.
The new form of communication, as the scandals suggest, also carries a significant level of risk compared to previous forms of secret circumvention of procedures. It is much more difficult for them to hide their tracks and it is easier for them to reach the public. This fact alone raises a common-sense question: why then, apart from mere communicative inertia, do politicians insist on such a way of communication without any excessive caution? Namely, leaking such messages can seriously damage their reputation. It can, of course, but political reputation works quite differently today than the way Dalija Orešković, for example, imagines it. In order to clarify this functioning, White reaches for the traditional distinction in political theory, which points to two types of legitimation in the political domain: legitimation by the result (output) and procedural legitimation. Put simply, the first counts on the fact that those who are governed will use the result as a criterion for evaluating governance, regardless of how it was achieved, and the second relies on the procedure as a kind of protection of democratic processes.
White believes, and apparently also, for example, HDZ voters, that eternal enigma of Croatian political analytics, that legitimization by the result has an advantage over procedural legitimization today. And that in fact the discretion and social charm of closed WhatsApp groups only "added" to the widespread political sensibility. There is no doubt that the institutions have collapsed and that trust in them is quite weak, but the voters will not respond to that process to the greatest extent by agreeing to a kind of aesthetics of procedurality, so dear to our left-liberal opposition. They will seek immediate results, regardless of the politically disputed path of their realization. It is a phenomenon that numerous analysts have already dubbed the seemingly oxymoronic term technopopulism. Again simplified, and you can find it in more detail in last year's text by Mislav Žitko, it is a combination of a technological, elegant solution to a political problem and an excess of populist charisma. The predominance of this type of governance technology primarily stems from the weakening of political parties as social institutions and their mere competition on the political market, given the trends that public opinion research agencies point to.
The collapse of political parties as an institution of mass participation, in which decisions are at least nominally made in consultation with the base and taking into account its immediate interests, led to the result that legitimization became more attractive, because the procedure remained an empty shell, an object of aesthetic fascination. And the object of aesthetic fascination for those who are not concerned with material and political results and have the privilege of devoting themselves to procedures as if they were Knifer's meanders. This does not mean that procedures are unimportant. They are very important and necessary, but they cannot be made more attractive by insisting on moral leeway. Institutions can function only through the wider democratization of participation in political decisions. In this way, those who participate also have the motivation to monitor the decision-makers and to punish them if they do not follow the procedures that bring results. With apologies for the excessive dose of self-confidence, the Croatian opposition will never win power until it realizes this. And even then it won't be easy at all.
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