SERBIA AS AN UNFINISHED STATE
SERBIA AS AN UNFINISHED STATE

Author(s): Nenad Dimitrijević
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Politics, Constitutional Law, Governance, Government/Political systems, Electoral systems
Published by: CEDET Centar za demokratsku tranziciju
Keywords: unfinished statehood; statelessness; constitutional continuity; rule of law; legalism; democratic transition; monopoly of violence
Summary/Abstract: “Sober observers will soon get the impression that the very fundamentals have been challenged here. The impression is that Yugoslavia is actually an unfinished state. It looks like a repository of open options, which resists to all attempts aimed at its precise definition. In the vacuum that spreads behind the communist con­ cept (or more precisely non-concept) of statehood, a variety of plants has grown, turning the lack of prerequisites for life into their own precondition for life.” These words, written in 1987, pertained to the statehood of socialist Yugoslavia. In a different way, they give a precise diagnosis of the essence of the Milošević regime. In a different way, they also apply to Serbia after October 2000. In this paper I will try to explain something that today, in April 2003, could be astonishingly obvious: that the assassination of the Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Đinđić is directly related to the character of statelessness in Serbia, i.e. to the main features of a situation in which it was impossible to identify the state in a precise way. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to determine who had and who did not have the right to use the instruments of coercion, nor did reliable rules exist that would separate the allowed from the forbidden types of behavior.

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