It has been thirteen years since the independence of Montenegro. How independent is she today?
After the disintegration of the DPS, and especially during the struggle over state legal status, we had the opportunity to witness the birth of something magical - something that I like to call "state-building pop", the latest offshoot of which is the song by the group D-Moll dedicated to the thirteenth anniversary of the historic May 21. Aside from the fact that the lyrics of the song reduce the country to geological and hydrometeorological phenomena, which we are used to, I find a new, almost erotic moment more interesting, which gives the impression that the celebrants not only love Montenegro, but also show paraphilic tendencies towards it. The song, on the other hand, is nothing more than a lavish symptom of our pathology that inadvertently deconstructs the official narrative: everything we love about Montenegro is what we inherited - either from mother nature or from our ancestors, but nothing that we have achieved in these few generations of ours. .
And yet, I would like to hear a verse that celebrates the achievements of Montenegro as a political community, so that we celebrate Independence Day in unison while mentioning the grandfather sold to the Russians, listing all the armchairs of Peđa Bošković, calculating the kilowatt-hours paid to the Italians, remembering all the expensively paid incompetence of Ivan Brajović... It would be nice to glorify the state of Montenegro that we created, the one that shapes our everyday life. And not only beautiful, but also correct, because that and only that is our country, and we can be proud of that and only that; only the results of our work. The dominant form of the libidinal role in Montenegro, on the other hand, only indicates that we have no capacity for patriotism, but only for something that could be called "state fetishism" - we love the parts that are symbols of totality.
It would be nice to glorify the state of Montenegro that we created, the one that shapes our everyday life
Let's say that we became independent od Belgrade does not mean that we have gained autonomy za Montenegro as a political community. Society's feedback on public policies seems to mean nothing to decision makers. Just look at the state-making elites' need for external validation: if someone dares to say that we have serious (systemic) problems, they are immediately covered with a story about how they are malicious because "we received positive evaluations for that from the highest international addresses". We are citizens only during elections, and between them our vote is irrelevant. Do you realize how cynical, not to say demented, it is when it comes from those whose mouths are dry with sovereignty?
The government regularly measures our patriotism.
To be simple: patriotism is when we pay taxes, because not paying them is one of the hardest blows you can give to the stability of a country. For me, on the other hand, patriotism is not when it hurts us that someone does not respect state symbols, but when we react to the oppression of others in the name of what those symbols represent. In this sense, the civil obligation must not be towards the existing regime, but towards the ideals to which that state strives, and ours should be a "civic, democratic, ecological and social justice state, based on the rule of law". Independence does not consist in the fact that the party power centers decide how to "valorize" the common good through the sale, but it manifests itself as autonomy when we, the citizens, stop them in this wrong intention.
Whether something can be counted as "success" depends on the value system, not solely on dry data
It is civic awareness, to understand that socio-political issues are actually issues of values; and that it is not enough to say that "A is the cause of B", because the public must know whether B is desirable, whether A is ethically acceptable, and whether the cost is even worth the effort. Here, the regime shows economic progress by hairdressing statistics, by, for example, interpreting the consumer basket to the level where a citizen needs 2,06 euros for all three meals a day, practically eliminating poverty in the country. On the other hand, the progress of the economy is expected, for example, by the "valorization" of rivers by reducing them to their hydroelectric potential, also distorting indicators of the profitability and eventual harm of those projects. I mean, whether something can be counted as "success" depends on the value system, and not exclusively on dry data.
It is not the same national as public, nor is it the same state as social interest. For God's sake, Hitler's national and state goal was Living Space! You should be careful of everything that justifies your morally questionable actions with "state reason", i.e. "national interest". Instead of being based on the relationship of rights, obligations and responsibilities of citizens towards the political community, i.e. public interest and common good, our official policy of love for the state is based on emotion towards sedimentary rocks and pieces of textiles, and manifests as service, loyalty and servility to the party that has changed more "national" and "state interests" in thirty years than the total number of ruling parties in Montenegro itself.
What do you think about the divisions that exist even after the referendum?
The referendum campaign was a fight between two populist movements, which promised miracles if and only if the reborn elites from Belgrade and those from Podgorica were defeated, so that the people would take matters into their own hands. The same discourse they used together ten years earlier. But, as usually happens, what starts as a populist movement ends up as an elitist order. Whether we like it or not, the state we got is a necessary product of populism that is deeply rooted in a type of Montenegrin nationalism that many "old liberals" shied away from.
However, as Parta Chatterjee noted, nationalism in itself means nothing unless it is part of a progressive politics that transcends it, because otherwise the achievement of its official goal - national independence - becomes form without substance. Not only did we not take a step towards that progressive politics that would move away from the dominant ethnopolitics, but we deepened the pre-referendum antagonisms, institutionalized them, and reduced politics to ethnopolitics on the public stage, while behind the curtain the most gruesome neo-patrimonial-neoliberal devastation of the very substance of this is taking place. states that, in the long term, will only create favorable conditions for the birth and growth of what we are supposedly defending against now - right-wing populism.
Where are we compared to the nineties?
We often refer to the "dark nineties", but today's ethnopolitics is radically different from that of that period: then we had ethnicization of politics, today, however, we live politicization of ethnicity. Ever since the split in the DPS, the gradual politicization of the "narcissism of small differences" has been at work in two chains of signifiers of (ethno)national identities which, of course, have completely torn apart society as well. You don't have to go beyond the family level to see the depth (of politicization) of that split. If, for example, you were to look at the last twenty years from a bird's eye view, you would see the polarization between nominally "pro-Western liberal-bourgeois Montenegrins" and supposedly "anti-Western conservative-nationalist Serbs". Therefore, it is not so much about cultural as about political differences, because what we are observing are two ideologically opposed articulations of national identities.
Maybe we don't shell Serbs like Croats, deport them like Muslims, or beat them like Montenegrins, but as a country we try with all our might to disgust them with "everything Montenegrin" and arouse spite.
As a product of the need to mobilize and organize society in two blocs - first in the struggle with Milošević, and especially in the struggle for state legal status - the Montenegrin identity was gradually formed as inclusive, i.e. multicultural, multi-confessional and multi-ethnic; according to the Montenegrin formula ? all minorities minus Serbs; which is marketed as a citizen's story, supposedly free of all prejudices, and yet with a clearly identified antipode: turning an entire ethnic group into "non-citizens". We can debate to what extent the terms "Montenegro" and "Serb" are or were not mutually exclusive or antagonistic in the last two centuries, but what is important is that this was not a one-way process, it was about double ghettoization Serbs in Montenegro: as a form of political differentiation in relation to the political resignation of part of the demographic determinant "Orthodox life" Serbs established themselves as monocultural, monoconfessional and monoethnic and, as such, saw themselves as the last defense of "their", mostly traditionalist Montenegro Above, so they set themselves up as opposition to everything that violated their conception.
And in what, from their point of view, could this "identity theft" be embodied in the DPS regime, which used every opportunity to humiliate them, every crisis to declare them an enemy, every chance for reconciliation to further alienate them. On July 22, 1999, Slavko Perović himself accused the regime of "Montenegrin nationalism" and that "through the media, it is creating an anti-Serb mood in Montenegro for some future time, if they need it." Slavko made one mistake - not only the media were used for these purposes, but the entire ideological state apparatus was used to turn the Serbs into a complete otherness - which allegedly wanted the demolition, and not actually a different concept of the state, so now they don't even know how to include them in the order that was just built on the political narrative that their integration inevitably means the end of independent Montenegro.
Maybe we don't shell them like Croats, deport them like Muslims, or beat them like Montenegrins, but as a country we try with all our might to disgust them with "everything Montenegrin" and arouse spite. Here is the answer to why someone would "cheer against their country": because that supposedly their country has done nothing to make them feel it is theirs. Do you understand, the only constant in the state policy of post-socialist Montenegro is the delegitimization and demonization of a certain ethnic/national group as the enemy? The bottom line, then, is not whether the nationalism that plagues us is Serbian or Montenegrin, but that, depending on which one was "on the budget" in the last thirty years, both manifested their worst features through the state governed by the DPS.
Is there another side to that coin?
Of course. As a nation that was presented first as a "loser" in 2006, and then as someone who wants to rob us of our hard-earned independence, who could that nation turn to? To the state institutions of Montenegro? Unfortunately, the representatives of this nation seem to have fully accepted the projected image of themselves, so they continued to market and legitimize it as something that should be actively lived. The majority of Serbs thus themselves became prisoners of their own opposition, defiance, exclusivity and, why not say, problematic politics that they perceived as "theirs", as part of their national identity, so anyone who considers Putin a dictator would not have a lot of respect for Kosmet and tennis. , is ashamed of the genocide in Srebrenica, recognizes and accepts the Montenegrin nation, inclined to atheism and declared a "Montenegro".
It is double ghettoization which I am talking about, and those relations of equivalence that bind political attitudes to national identities have divided and antagonized the poles of society so much that the process now functions according to its own logic of movement and destroys everything that could potentially unite us. You are originally a sovereignist, of the Muslim faith, of liberal-left orientation, ali you lead protests against DPS and you are not for NATO because you are a pacifist? Well, of course you are a Chetnik, what else can you be!
Have we learned anything from history?
We can be angry, cynical, or mocking, but before we condemn, let's try to understand that none of the opponents of the regime hate independent Montenegro, but react to what, legitimate or not, they see as injustices done in its name, and that's a big difference. Trauma, especially when it is for a large part of the population, cannot and must not be the basis for building a state - and just look at that series in our country: 1918-1919, 1945-1948, all the shocks from 1988 to 2006. One would think we would have learned something.
We didn't, because in Montenegro, time doesn't flow, it piles up, so that's why the repressed always returns to us in a monstrous form. The state does not even try to do something for all citizens, but rather tries to make those under trauma feel like losers, to be punished, perceived as traitors. And when you have been subjected to such treatment for years, can you really perceive that country as your own?
In Montenegro, time doesn't flow, it accumulates, so that's why the repressed always returns to us in a monstrous form
The regime thinks that by deepening divisions it is keeping itself in power, but it's not doing just that – it's also feeding a monster that has largely gotten out of control. John Carpenter once said that there are two basic types of horror narrative; that right in which the monster that is outside comes into our community, but also the one left who realizes that evil has always been in the community - in ourselves. We have so lost the ability to imagine, we think Montenegro without DPS, it seems to me that it is time for a leftist twist in our story. Because only with such a realization does the space for emancipation and true change open up.
Bonus video:
