By: Zlatiborka Popov Momčinović
Originally published in: Perspectives;
Publisher: Heinrich Böll Foundation
What civic participation might be in BH?
So-called civic participation is a disputed notion, for in political sciences it is often measured by perceivable concepts and activities such as voter turnout, participation in various associations, political informedness, readiness to be politically active, sense of internal political efficacy1… Such measurements often neglect the substantial dimension, and Almond and Verba, pioneers in the field of so-called political culture, admitted this as well, as people may be politically active for the sake of non-democratic values, not to mention that, on the surface, totalitarian regimes featured a high degree of manipulative political participation.
In BH this might be the case. People who vote do so out of ethno-nationalism, or because they are absorbed in the political party system for prosaic reasons such as getting a job in a country with almost 50% unemployment in return for political favors they do to the existing, predatory political elites. According to some researchers, every other family in BH is somehow connected with or influenced by some political actor.2 These people do vote, they speak about politics, although there is often nothing to speak about. Furthermore, primordial ethno-nationalism is silencing any kind of political phronesis, and people who do vote and speak about politics are merely repeating an empty ethno-nationalistic rhetoric, which is always present and demands to be taken for granted.3 Primordial identities have always been there and must be accepted as such, without any critical reasoning, representing therefore Nietzsche’s notion of the “eternal recurrence of the same”.4
Many civic-oriented people do not vote, and even avoid speaking about politics, in contrast to the disciplined voters who regularly vote for the reasons mentioned above. The question emerges, are people who do not vote citizens or not? In his Politics, Aristotle used to define a citizen as someone who participates in political life. But how to truly participate in the BH political system without being co-opted by the ethno-nationalism or by some sort of empty civic populism? And we do have to admit that in BH a strange sort of civic populism exists that is unfortunately used to fill the void of the non-functioning state that pretends it is there for a reason (such as fostering the memories of the medieval Bosnian state or the heritage of ZAVNOBIH,5 although such notions cannot justify the idea of an abstract state of all citizens). On the other hand, the idea of abstract citizenship has its critical function: to fill the void of non-existent citizenship so as to create an opposite image to the actually existing ethno-national state.
Some researchers and theorists also refer to the so-called political or positive abstinence that differs from negative abstinence.6 The former group encompasses people who do not vote because of an insufficient political ‘supply side’ and who are dissatisfied with the political system in general, while the latter group encompasses people who are not at all interested in politics and “know” nothing about it.7 In their research about political abstinence, Puhalo and Perišić claim that the majority of abstainers are able to give reasons why they are not voting, despite the fact that the society directs a kind of moral criticism against non-voting people.8 Although without inclusion in the public sphere, people remain in an existential shadow,9 the fact is that political participation in its various forms is something that always can and should be both induced through theory and claimed in practice. Indeed, what we might call “knowing nothing” is not so clearly separated from knowing but not going to vote, because people may deliberately avoid knowing anything about what is happening in the corrupt political state and fake BH democracy.
Are nonparticipants true participants?
My opinion is that people in BH who do not participate in political life, despite the important difference between negative and political abstinence, are nevertheless citizens. Not because they possess an abstract citizenship from birth, but because they refuse to participate in the corrupt political system of cronyism. Both can be seen as symbols of anti-politics, which is not the same as being apolitical. Maybe they represent Havel’s notion of being a true citizen by avoiding co-option by the superficial measure of being participative. They may represent the ethical civic community that is not visible to the extent it deserves, but which does exist below the surface, waiting to emerge and to collect the dispersed and suppressed civic energy.
The most recent protest in BH showed us that there are evident reasons to support the idea of underground citizenship. Protesters, on the one hand, rejected the notion of abstract citizenship that smaller, civic-oriented parties are fostering and trying to impose.
Protesters demanded social rights, which abstract citizenship often neglects.10 Therefore, the abstract language of “empty” citizenship cannot attract a significant number of votes, and ethno-nationalist parties are thriving because of that, since they have a concrete, ethno-national (fake) substance. On the other hand, protesters resented the ethno-politics as a performative system that is imposed as a framework of any possible politics and found themselves in the middle of No man’s land. They lay on the mine that will never fully explode for their bodies are there to cover it, for eternity!
The politics of the body as a form of perverse political participation in BH
Therefore, the notion of biopolitics is perhaps a better toolkit to explain what is going on in BH than Havel’s notion of ethical civil society, although these two concepts are not mutually exclusive, the reason being that civil society in BH is in thrall to the notorious liberal concept of abstract citizenship, and its simplification to mean little more than entrepreneurship, either at the level of economy or politics.
Still, there is an overlap between the two, for, according to Hannah Arendt, modern politics is absorbed by so-called political economy. In ancient Greece, being political meant not to be absorbed by private interests, while in the modern society it means to invest private interest in the realm of politics.11 In BH, it means to “invest” your ethnic body at the level of both the political economy and the politics of national banality, where nationalism is produced every day as business as usual.12
But BH escapes even Arendt’s insight. It is a divided country with no true political economy at the state or any other level.13 The economy has nothing to do with production in a Marxist sense, but with the production of Foucault’s regulated bodies that feed biopolitics. Being political therefore means to be active in the sense of primordial biopolitics, and not in the sense of being entrepreneurs, although the latter notion can and should be criticized as well, as Arendt did. Yet, to be a simple body does not mean that one is a “pure” body, without any features. To be a body is to feed both the political system and the political economy, even when they do not exist. But with the existing body politics, the political system and political economy will have a physical proof of existence! The very fact that even the bodies “buried” in the mass-graves are used for the sake of biopolitics proves that claim, as well as that BH exists as a country of dismantled citizenship inhabited by both mass graves and by those who have remained.14 and are continuously sacrificed for the needs of the political elites that have privatized the entire state.15
Civil society as the alternative arena of political participation
Civil society is another arena where people can step out and stake a claim to their citizenship. Taking into account the fact that BH political society is based on exclusion, activism in civil society provides the space for extending the so-called “us intentions”16. That is to say that civic activism provides space for the inclusion of different identities that, although particular, are included in the universal struggle over citizenship.
Numerous women’s groups, organizations of people with disabilities, of ethnic and sexual minorities and so forth, represent the above mentioned struggle over citizenship, based on inclusion and political activism. Yet, on the other hand, as in other so-called transitional societies, BH civil society faces some obstacles: it is often reduced to NGOs, which leads to its bureaucratization and particularization. The very fact that there are 10,000 NGOs registered in BH (although some of them do not truly exist, in the sense that they are inactive) and that, in a constant struggle for grants, their activities show signs of competition in the civil society market, shows the limits of how civil society in BH operates. According to Helms and some other researchers, it operates in a form of closed circles through which communication and different activities flow.17 Yet, it is still an arena for a different political culture, based on principles such as solidarity, mutualism, anti-hierarchy, volunteering, self-definition, critical thinking and exchange, even when these principles are not fully fulfilled.18 Voices of many marginal and discriminated groups in BH, such as LGBT people, are starting to be heard thanks to activities of the civil society. In civil society, the very notion of citizenship and political participation is not questioned, but placed within a broader context and critical thinking regarding the very possibility of participation and emancipation within the rules imposed by the system itself.
“Critical intelligentsia” and political participation
Although the very notion of an intelligentsia is disputable, I will refer to a lecture by Franciscan theology professor Šarčević that was held at the Catholic faculty during the conference Evil of Violence in Ethical Conflicts. According to professor Šarčević, intelligentsia is either fanatical or cynical. Fanatics refuse to accept reality as such, and cynics accept it. The former are active, the latter withdraw. But what they share is that they resent the existing ethno-political system. Yet, the problem is that they cannot be socially productive. A fanatic, eager to change the reality, will impose the rules of how to criticize the system. The same is true concerning cynics, who remain imprisoned by so-called never ending criticism.
Nevertheless, both types of critical intelligentsia represent a sort of political participation at the level of critical reasoning in the public sphere. Indeed, how to measure the social productiveness of any criticism and critical reflexion? It is there to pose dangerous questions, to bring some illumination and to induce people to think.
Being a person and citizen means to be engaged in dialogue between myself and I, and other human beings! Arendt’s notion and explanation of Nazi crimes after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, and her conclusion that he was unable to think show the importance of these processes in the modern, alienated world. In BH, both war criminals and the existing elite show an inability to think, and notorious war criminals have succeeded in maintaining networks they have established during the war and remaining directly or indirectly in power.
The union of elite and mob that Arendt referred to while describing totalitarian systems leads to the question whether such a unity exists in the BH society. It also poses another, dangerous question: Are the people who represent the voting machine of the existing political parties a mob? And are people who live hand to mouth and are not politically active actually a mob, and not the representatives of Havel’s ethical civil society? During the protests, media spin tried to represent protesters as an uncoordinated mob, although some influential intellectuals also joined the protesters. Yet, even if we accept this abusive terminology, calling them a mob, still a disputed term and misused by conservative ideology and thought, people in BH, especially protesters, cannot be considered a mob.
Mob per se has no critical reflexion, while protesters in BH did have it and still do. They showed as much in using the toolkits of unconventional political participation that can be seen in the eagerness to establish some form of direct democracy (citizens’ plena), their discourse and mocking insights about politics in BH, but also the EU. They recognized the crises of representative democracy on the global level, which force one to choose between things that have been offered in advance. They drew some sympathy from abroad, but mostly from critical intelligentsia and non-mainstream political parties. The EU sent ambivalent messages. They stated that politicians should listen to the people, they even showed some sympathy toward the protesters and, we supposed, offered various forms of help, but at the end the EU also remained stuck within its own perception of what citizens are. Voting remained the main mechanism, and the protesters are maybe no longer lying on the mine of No man’s land, but on the remnants of the empty citizenship at the global level after the explosion of the mine that never existed in the world, including the EU. For, on the one hand, the modern concept of political participation was created in a world where hierarchy is normal (e.g. it emerged in the context of the cruelest form of capitalism), and therefore, according to Žižek, it sublimates the minimal dialectic of emptiness and surplus.19 Despite the openness of the citizenship concept in the West and the EU as well, current events prove Lacan’s warning that democracy can offer nothing but the small pleasures (Les petites jouissances)20 and therefore produces crises, excesses and hysteria. Therefore, BH has to be more European, but Europe must also struggle to avoid BH’s and Balkan’s ethno-national doom.21
References:
1 Almond, G., Verba, S. (2000): Civilna kultura. Politički stavovi i demokracija u pet zemalja. Zagreb: Politička kultura.
2 Tolimir-Hölzl, N. (2014): “Bosnia-Quo vadis?,” Südosteuropa Mitteilungen, 05-06/2014, S. 103.
3 See Mujkić, A. (2010). Pravda i etnonacionalizam. Sarajevo: Centar za ljudska prava Univerziteta u Sarajevu i Fondacija Heinrich Böll, Ured u Sarajevu.
4 Ibid, p. 38.
5 The so-called declaration of ZAVNOBIH, which is often praised by some civic oriented people and political parties, defined BH as neither Serbian, Croatian nor Muslim, but as both Serbian, Croatian and Muslim and therefore excluding Others, although in that period the concept of Others had different connotations. According to Đinđić, the Others were citizens, neither workers nor member of the political elite and therefore negatively defined. The situation in today’s Bosnia is similar, as Other citizens are also defined in negative terms, as non-members of the constituent people and dominant collectivist ideology. See Sitnić, A., Ždralović, A. (2013): Građani/ke u kolektivističkoj ideologiji: Sociološko-pravna analiza položaja ‘Ostalih’ u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Centar za političke studije.
6 Puhalo, S., Perišić, N. (2013). Apstinenti u Bosni i Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 17.
7 Ibid
8 Ibid
9 Issak , J. C. A (1996). “New Guarantee on Earth: Hannah Arendt on Human Dignity and the Politics of Human Rights”, The American Political Science Review, 90 (1), pp. 61-73.
10 The behavior of the liberal Naša stranka is a good example to support this thesis, when the new Labour Act was adopted.
11 H. Arendt (1998). The Human Condition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, pp. 24, 33.
12 Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
13 Many factories are closed, but at the same time the notorious shopping malls are flourishing. This does not make BH a „modern“ consumer society, but a society, or better to say bureacratic state which is consuming bodies of its own people. The proportion of people employed in the state administration is the highest in Europe, while at the same time unemployment is also the hightest in Europe, nearly 50%.
14 See Husanović , J. (2012). „Kultura traume i identitarna politika u BiH: kritika ideologije pomirenja“, Diskursi, Br. 3/2012, str. 12-23.
15 Lasić, M. (2010). Mukotrpno do političke moderne, Mostar: Dijalog, str. 173.
16 Mujkić, A. (2007). Mi, građani etnopolisa. Sarajevo: Šahinpašić.
17 7Popov-Momčinović, Z. (2013). Ženski pokret u Bosni i Hercegovini. Artikulacija jedne kontrakulture. Sarajevo: Sarajevski otvoreni centar, CEIR i Fondacija CURE.
18 Pavlović, V. (2004). Civilno društvo i demokratija. Beograd: Građanske inicijative, FPN i Čigoja štampa, str. 80.
19 Žižek, S. (2007). Škakljivi subjekt. Odustni centar političke ontologije. Sarajevo: Šahinpašić.
20 Van Haute, P. (2002). Against Adaptation. Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject. New York: Other Press.
21 Lasić, M. (2010). Mukotrpno do političke moderne, Mostar: Dijalog, str. 169.