NACIONALIZAM/POPULIZAM VERSUS GRAĐANSKA OPCIJA - SRBIJA
NATIONALISM/POPULISM VERSUS CIVIL OPTION - SERBIA

Author(s): Božidar Jakšić
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Politics, Civil Society, Sociology, Nationalism Studies
Published by: CEDET Centar za demokratsku tranziciju
Keywords: Nationalism; populism; civil tradition; civil option
Summary/Abstract: Serbian nationalism expressed its power both as an ideology and as a movement - to a much lesser extent it was articulated as a theoretically designed orientation - in the last two centuries of the second millennium. It was articulated in two Serbian uprisings against Turkish rule. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, he relied on two myths that were strongly alive in the Serbian people - the Saint Sava myth and the Kosovo myth. To that mythical foundation, he added more than seven decades of struggle for the creation of an independent Serbian state in the nineteenth century, in order to show his imperial face in the Balkan Wars and his strong patriotism in the First World War at the beginning of the twentieth century. Finally, at the end of the First World War, they will incorporate their statehood into the foundations of the joint state of the southern Slavs (without the Bulgarians) - the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In those struggles lasting more than a century, Serbian nationalism showed exceptional absorptive power, which distinguished it from most other Balkan nationalisms that were exclusivist-oriented. It was this power that made him, in the language of contemporary political theory, "less transparent", apparently less aggressive, more tolerant in accepting others, but by no means less powerful. On the contrary! At the end of the twentieth century, Serbian nationalism lost this power - it itself became exclusivist and populist, so that it itself made a strong contribution to breaking up the common Yugoslav state. Serbian nationalism and populism first brought the Serbian people and other citizens of Serbia into conflict with their neighbors and even the whole world, and then in those conflicts they destroyed the motivational and material assumptions for the economic, political, cultural and moral renewal of society. Thanks to the great motivation of citizens, the political regime in Serbia changed at the end of 2000. Are Serbian nationalism and populism weakened by this? It is difficult to give an unequivocal answer to that question, and even more difficult to give a positive answer.

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