Ugo Vlaisavljević - Lecture

So everywhere around you can see people, you can meet people with long and powerful roots. In their feet, in their minds, in their hands, everywhere, and it is like a network and you are like a fish, if you do not have those roots you can be caught in the most unpleasant way, perhaps a very painful one. So, I would like to give you a little bit of the context of Bosnia and Herzegovina. First, the regional context. Montenegro got its independency just a few days or few weeks ago. So, there is a kind of a very powerful echo which goes through the region all-around that another small nation state is created now belonging to the network of nation states in Europe and everywhere. So, this is a contribution from the region in the time of globalization, in the time of building the European Union etc. and it looks like, perhaps, the threshold to enter the EU is to be homogenized, small, kingdom-like or dukedom-like of Staatsburg-like state, just to have a patchwork of this homogeneous states to enter this federation, consociation called the EU. Another thing, also, which makes a powerful echo here is the path to independence of Kosovo. And now the final thing in the chain of this independency drive is the famous statement given by president of the government of Republika Srpska, Mr. Dodik, who disturbed the public opinion in BiH especially in Federation and here in Sarajevo, in his reaction to all the events around he said that also RS should have a referendum, people’s plebiscite, majority will declare to follow the same path to independency. You know the problem with the Dayton agreement here: we have two states within one state or even three not recognized states in Herzegovina, the first part, Croat part, Herceg Bosnia the third part of not actually recognized by Dayton agreement but functioning as a reality of three minorities in ethnical national way here in BiH. Actually we have divided the country into pseudo-states or political entities with their own government, their own public institutions, education systems etc. So, this has been the shortest way just to put you in the local context. 

I will speak now of the topic of the general will of the majority conceived in this ethno-national way, of the people who have a specific colour, a firm self-identity, convictions and who also have their roots, roots and kinship, alleged blood kinship including ethnicity, ethnic community etc. So I will speak a bit of the politics of mistrust and the famous referendum thing which is, as you know, expressing the will of the people, something which should be allowed, and in the same time it is the stuff of division, disruption, split, and ethnic hatred even. So within this context I think it’s very important to shed some light on the thing calledtrust. In the academic community, in the media, nobody speaks loudly enough of the thing called trust. I am a little bit deprived of the possibility to depict you this topic, to speak on it in such expressive ways so as to be shown in some pictures, but also my predecessor succeeded in giving something invisible using visible things.

Trust is something which was analyzed by Freud, in the psychoanalysis, as a question of transfer; nobody can say what actually transfer is. It is something that happens between us when I am speaking to you, or when you are speaking to me, it’s something like a tie which is invisible, which comes from the hearth, from feelings, from emotions, but you can’t guarantee it, you can’t take it for granted, you can’t have it as something you are certain to be produced between us etc. We who are teachers and who are working in public spaces, we have this exculpable experience of having or not having this transfer of trust. You are speaking to people and see that they don’t listen to you, that they have a boring hour, and sometimes it happens and it happens as a very powerful thing. Local politicians know how to produce this transfer, but they are doing it in this register of brotherhood feelings, which is always misused, which is politics of transfer in a very bad way, in the worst way possible, so they have the so-called charisma which is to say that they immediately take to the hearts of people. But, if you are an analysts, if you are politically aware of what they are doing, you will see that this is a miserable way of recruiting and grouping people around you, of pushing them to some horrible ways and tracks. So, what is the politics of mistrust here when everybody trusts his or her own politicians? A few days ago, a famous political philosopher came to Sarajevo, a trained sociologist, Claus Offe who is teaching at the Humboldt University in Berlin and he depicted a kind of a box. He is quite known in his texts in his books of making drafts of different boxes, so please allow me to make a draft of this box of trust. 

So, it is very simple. On the bottom of the box you have two Ms which stand for masses, and on the top two E for Elites, political elites in principle. So the box of the trust is to say that if you are going to have a successful political community, you should have something like a substantial trust between masses and elites which is to say that masses should have trust in their political elites (arrows towards the top of the box). Another thing is the opposite way. You should have the trust from elites to the people who have elected them. Another thing which has to be added is to have trust among the political elites, among the leadership of political parties, which has to be both sides, and those masses supposedly divided, because they voted for different political elites, they should also have some sort of political trust among themselves. When we are looking on this picture of trust we could say that (it is a picture of mistrust) in BiH in the first place due to the war, but perhaps politicians profited, benefited from this mistrust even in launching the war. We can say that this is the diagram of mistrust in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is to say no trust of masses in their political elites, no trust between political elites, and no trust of elites to masses. So, everything actually is disrupted here and this is the picture of mistrust actually ruling BiH. This was my response to Claus Offe’s presentation in a debate we had after his presentation and he said to me: Oh, oh, oh, you are even more pessimistic that I am. 

Now what I am going to say, is that we still have some kind of a very firm, powerful trust in this political community divided and disrupted one that we now face in BiH. But where does that trust actually take its origin? Perhaps the whole situation now created, 10 years after the war, produced by the war, could be entitled something like the politics of mistrust as, in a way, one can’t imagine to have a situation like that without the strategy and policy of mistrust. So, as a somebody who is working in the field of cultural and social anthropology, I have been interested for years in the question what actually ethno-nationalism is, what it means. Everybody around me, even among the scholars, not to speak of ordinary people, behaved like they knew what ethnic identity actually is. And I think this is a substantial problem, because ethnicity here doesn’t have its natural ground, it is produced, and it is obvious that it is produced, because there is no substantial kinship, no blood ties among people. Those who are Bosniaks, Croats or Serbs in BiH perhaps have the same roots, same origins in the scientifically, rigidly understood ethnic sense. Which is to say that the ethnic identity is produced in the interpretations of the culture, interpretations in the scholarly works of historians, folklorists, politicians. I think there is a serious enigma connected with this question of ethnic identity. So I have a kind of response, suggestion to say what it means actually, what the substance of ethnic identity is. I think it is mistrust. A long history of mistrusts, though connected with the working of politics. We know that this ethnic identity is produced by politics, but what I am suggesting is, a very important thing to grasp, that politics has produced this ethnic identity, but not as people used to think with the help of successful politics and outcomes of this politics, but, on the contrary, with a constant, long historical failures, non-success, lacks, political defeats in the literal sense of the phrase. What does it mean? We have a long tradition of democratic politics. We entered the modernity here in BiH one and the half century ago, in the region even earlier, so there is something like public democratic institutions, political institutions in their proper sense. We have had this for a long period of time, but what we do not have is the success of the politics. What does it mean? It means that this politics never functions the way the politics is supposed to do. In what way? If we take politics as an encounter, facing, meeting the other, working, talking, debating, discussing, dialoguing withthe other, this means that the other is there from the beginning in a very essential way, it should be and is to be included in politics. The failure, the major failure is that this meeting with the other never succeeded. So, you have constant dissipation, division of this meeting with the other, splitting with the other actually has been occurring for a long, long period. What is ethnicity in this ethno politics today? Is this deprivation of possibility to work with the other. It’s a huge, huge disappointment of everybody in politics, of everybody in her or his believe that it’s possible to work and debate with the other. So the ethno politics is the core trust, or the rest of the rest of the trust in the other, which is to say even in ethno politics when I as a Serb, or Croat or Bosniak when giving my voice, giving my ballot I am electing my political elite I still do not believe in that. This is a very important fact, even in today’s elections, in yesterday election, those who are giving their ballots to their representatives they do not believe in their elites, which is to say they are voting in a state of urgency, they are voting in a state of being forced to vote, they are voting just to avoid the wining, victory of the other, of the other political elite. So, the connection of supposed trust is the connection of mistrust. I am going to vote for You because if they win, it will be very bad for us. I do not believe You, we have a long collective experience that our political elites are not bad, they are the worst possible, they are horrible they can’t succeed in anything, but still, it is important just to survive, to preserve ourselves, so it’s the politics of giving your vote in a state of urgency in order just to make your mark, to survive at the age of existence. So, this is it. The politics of survival against those who are threatening us. So, the ethnicity is nothing more but the trust in those who are not to be trusted, but are to be trusted in order to avoid the consequences of mistrust in the other. So, what politicians are promising during elections on the day of elections to their followers? They are saying in advance: We are not going to be successful. So, the most successful politician would openly say: I am going to do nothing about You. I am a looser. I am the one who can’t do anything in politics. He is the looser in politics in a proper sense of the word. I am not going to negotiate with them, I do not believe in them. So, please, follow me, we are not going to believe them. And everybody is saying implicitly or openly to those who are going to follow him, to those who have the same kinship, it is a thing to do with kinship: Believe me, because You have this time this name. You’ll be recognized as mine. You’ll be preserved in a state of urgency because you have the leadership of the same type, with the same family of proper names. Why have I this view on all this? Because I have a certain name. Vlaisavljevic means that the family origins are Serbian. And, actually I am not. I am more Muslim, no, I am not so much Muslim, I am a Muslim partially, I am a Croat actually, no I am not enough Croat. So, there is something like virtual refugees here. There are apatrides who didn’t leave their country. There is the rest, so called the rest in our political space, of those who are of mixed origins but this is also something which is an ideological myth. Everybody is mixed here, no pure origins, this is ideology. You can imagine that Alija Izetbegovic is more Serb then Karadzic, that Karadzic has more Muslim origins than everybody else. Because, this filiation is not to be traced at all it is not possible to be traced, because the maternal line, the feminine mother line is not inscribed among proper names. And proper names perhaps are empty, they are void of substance, of ethnic origins they supposed to transfer. So this is quite a complicated situation, the same as with trust and mistrust. So, what is the thing with the referendum? That is the open invitation to mistrust, to say: Nothing in politics can happen here in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the only way is to believe me, have trust in me and we will all go out of this framework. 

Dodik is actually a Moses who is promising to his Jewish followers, in this case Serbs, to leave the country of political slavery, negotiations, debates, and political proper. But, actually, everybody here is doing the same. Everybody is promising that nothing should be promised in politics proper