Abstract
This article belongs to a forthcoming special cluster, “Contention Politics and International Statebuilding in Southeast Europe” guest-edited by Nemanja Džuverovic, Julia Rone and Tom Junes.
In February 2016, the Citizens’ Initiative “We Deserve Better” in North Macedonia (until recently Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) organized a peaceful protest called “How many shoes were left unworn,” leaving in front of the government building the shoes of people who had emigrated from the country. Two months later, massive protests started in North Macedonia that ultimately led to government change and to paving the way for the country’s membership in the European Union (EU) through the historic deal to change the country’s name. Protesting among monuments of Alexander the Great and other newly constructed buildings glorifying the ancient history of North Macedonia, student protesters and opposition parties welcomed the intervention of international actors in order to break the political impasse. The same year a flagship development plan called “Belgrade Waterfront” drew widespread criticism from thousands of Serbian protestors that declared their right to the city and formulated a more general criticism of international statebuilding efforts in Serbia that brought neither prosperity nor democracy to the country. These two very different protests that unfolded in neighboring countries in the same year point, on the one hand, to the increasing political tensions in the region and the mobilization of bottom–up indignation, and on the other, to the very different forms that local protests could take and their different attitudes to international statebuilding efforts in the region.
The articles in this special section explore critically the interactions between “contentious politics” and international liberal statebuilding efforts led in particular by the EU. In doing so, the issue explores four country cases in Southeast Europe: Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Romania, and Serbia. These countries are either in various stages on the path to the EU or have acceded to the EU in 2007 after extensive efforts in capacity building, and statebuilding more generally. The case for a special issue with a regional focus on Southeast Europe rests on a few core tenets. Firstly, Southeast Europe, or the Balkans, has long been the subject of orientalizing tropes in popular and media discourses. The notion of “Balkanism” can be seen in many approaches and critiques vis-á-vis the region. 1 After Bulgaria and Romania’s accession to the EU (though not without problems as the continued existence of the Control and Verification Mechanism suggests) in 2007, and Croatia’s accession in 2013, the remaining countries from the region in the EU’s “waiting room” are regularly referred to as the “Western Balkan Six”—a reference to their incipient “Europeanization.” Secondly, the section focuses on countries in Southeast Europe that in divergent ways underwent a transition from state socialist regimes, thereby discarding other significant cases like Greece and Turkey. Finally, the post-communist countries in the region under discussion in this section have all been plagued by persistent problems of corruption and authoritarianism, which have not only raised questions about their statebuilding capacities along liberal democratic lines according to EU benchmarks, but have also triggered widespread protest movements in recent years. Therefore, these above commonalities warrant, in our view, a topical cluster of case studies.
Hybridization from Below
When it comes to international statebuilding, the point of departure for this special section is different from the prevailing approach in the field. So far, a substantial literature has focused on international statebuilding in the region, 2 but only a few studies have focused on hybridity 3 as the result of international interventions. This special section argues for a perception of social movements, in Visoka’s 4 words, as a public practice of hybridization where through their actions locals can comply with, but more importantly resist, adapt, or reject policies that are offered or enforced on them. This “exercise in conceptual scoping” 5 is especially pronounced in the two Western Balkan countries where international interventions had (and still have) a heavy footprint. Additionally, the analysis offers a more refined understanding of international interventions in the region, transcending the understanding that these actions are a priori implemented by coercive instruments, implying the consensual nature of the endeavor (shown in the cases of North Macedonia and Romania). This point takes the analysis one step further, by introducing the process of Europeanization as a statebuilding practice with varying results depending on the approach the EU has taken towards different countries in the region. As such, this contributes to existing debates on the so-called “EU peacebuilding framework” 6 for post-conflict regions such as the Western Balkans. Within this multi-layered approach, the findings of the four cases studies prove useful in furthering our understanding of the “local turn” in international relations.
Eventful Protests in Response to (Failed) Statebuilding
What was most surprising about the recent protests in Southeast Europe was not mass mobilization per se but rather why it took so long for citizens in these countries to mobilize. Low levels of mobilization in the region and Eastern Europe more broadly have been usually explained through the cultural heritage of socialism (the experience of authoritarianism) or with the transformation thesis—the idea that the neoliberal organization of the state combined with high levels of unemployment had restricted democracy to civic rights and formal procedures. 7 Nevertheless, it seems that popular patience seems to have run out, 8 with “eventful protests” 9 in Southeast European countries turning into a transformative experience of empowerment for old and young generations of activists alike. 10
The mobilization wave in Southeast Europe led to a surge of research focusing on a wide range of topics, from the rise of populism from below 11 to, most recently, the depletion of the commons. 12 By focusing on the ways in which activists in Southeast Europe have reacted to the policies, discourses, and consequences of international statebuilding, we add an important new perspective and a way of understanding these “eventful” protests. What is more, this section provides a theoretical contribution to the field of social movement studies that has so far explored the interaction between contention and statebuilding primarily in the light of Western historical experience. 13 Connecting contemporary social movements to (failed) statebuilding efforts in Southeast Europe is a response to recent calls to venture beyond the Western “time-space bias” in social movement studies whose theoretical apparatus has been abstracted, to a large extent, from the concrete empirical experiences of Western European countries and the United States. 14
While the protests of recent years in Southeast Europe have been undoubtedly part of the global wave of contention in the past decade, 15 they differ from “paradigmatic” protests in Europe’s Southern Periphery (Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy) in important ways, including the political and discursive opportunity structures they faced, 16 the ideology of protesters, 17 their framing and protest repertoires. 18 As analysis of the Bulgarian protests has shown, it is difficult to explore these particular protests with the same theoretical framework of “movements against austerity” that has often been applied to recent movements in Western Europe. 19 Street protesters and trade unions in countries such as Belgium, France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain were indignant at the “betrayal” or “corruption” of democratic capitalism by neoliberal policies, leading to the decline of democracy. 20 However, as Gagyi notes, in East and Central Europe, democracy came with austerity and other neoliberal economic policies. In many cases, there was no democracy before austerity. 21 The same holds equally true for the states of Southeast Europe where statebuilding efforts by international actors have been often accompanied by harsh economic conditionalities and policies of restructuring. 22 Thus, while the protests in Southeast Europe were part of the global wave of contention, they differed in many important ways because of their particular historical experience of statebuilding and their position in the world system.
Varieties of Responses to Statebuilding in Southeast Europe
While the social movements analyzed in this section can be conceived as agents of hybridization responding to international statebuilding initiatives, we need to emphasize that the particular policies of statebuilding, as well as the agency of local actors, have varied among the cases, leading to a situation in which there are a lot of similarities between the political opportunity structures in these countries, but also important differences. Institutional settings differ strongly between states, with Balkan countries being poignant examples of “states in impasse.” Even EU member states in the region such as Bulgaria and Romania can at best be described as “weak states.” 23 In addition, there are substantive differences between the strict conditionalities and mechanisms of control for the countries that are not yet EU members and those who are. A lack of control mechanisms for post-accession countries plagues both Bulgaria and Romania—a phenomenon described as “post-accession hooliganism.” 24 Similarly, while all countries discussed in this section have experienced the democratic backsliding characteristic of the broader region, 25 polarizing memory politics and the constellation of the ensuing conflicts and representations by political elites are quite different. 26 Unlike Bulgaria and Romania, Serbia and North Macedonia are countries that are still recovering from violent conflicts.
The protests analyzed in this section often arose as a response to a dire economic situation. In part, this is unsurprising considering that one of the main components of transition and statebuilding in the region has been the heavy reliance of international statebuilders on comprehensive market liberalization and trade deregulation, leading to what Pugh describes as “reduction of the role of the state, the squeezing of collective and public space, a quest for private affluence.” 27 However, what is interesting in the Southeast European case is the dramatically different response of social movements to this issue. While in Serbia (and to some extent Bulgaria) the movements framed present socio-economic conditions as the result of ill-fated international projects in the region, in the case of Romania and North Macedonia the solution for the protracted economic crisis has been to favor more reliance on international actors (mainly the EU).
Despite differences between the cases, in all of them there have been increasing tensions between different types of local actors. In the mobilizations analyzed here, grassroots protesters distanced themselves not only from political parties but also from NGOs, revealing an increasing tension between social movements and NGOs. This was fueled by longstanding suspicion and resentment towards foreign-funded NGOs as “colonizers” or promoters of Western interests. 28 While civil society was conceived in the beginning of the transition period as a broad-church, non-institutionalized form of living together and living in truth, 29 actors in some of these protests tried to portray civil society as an essentially elitist concept excluding people interested only in material concerns such as their electricity bills. Spontaneous grassroots movements in Bulgaria coined terms such as “people’s civil society” merging nationalist and civil society rhetoric, while remaining suspicious of institutionalized NGOs. 30 In a sense, these protests marked an eventful comeback of participatory activism at the expense of transactional activism represented above all by the NGOs that had dominated the political scene as the preferred form of international statebuilders. While the outcomes of this “limited” radicalization from below have varied in different contexts, it has opened space for new types of political actors and led to the formation of types of activist networks that are both transnational and strongly locally embedded.
It should also be noted that all protests discussed in this section have taken place in countries that are marked by high levels of youth emigration and brain drain. Thus, one of the questions the section explores is what happens to protest activists in the case of migration. Contrary to what the classic Hirshean perspective on “exit” and “voice” would suggest, it seems that migration does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the personal engagement of activists. One of the reasons for this is the wide use of digital media to follow protest at home and participate despite distance. But digital media not only have been used to maintain transnational networks, they have also been actively employed to organize, coordinate, and transmit information to the public in national contexts where the mainstream media have been captured by oligarchic circles and established political parties. 31 It comes as no surprise that creative uses of digital media have often accompanied initial attempts at democratic experimentation, including independent spaces for cultural and political exchange in Serbia.
In light of the above, this special section consists of four contributions, each on a specific country case. Two articles are dedicated to cases within the context of the former Yugoslavia, also known as the Yugosphere. In their article on Serbia, Džuverović and Milošević discuss the “Don’t Drown Belgrade” movement and the series of protests this movement organized in Serbia’s capital in 2016, portraying social discontent with the socio-economic outcomes of the post-conflict phase. Conversely, Stefanovski investigates the impact of the “Citizens of Macedonia” platform on the policy outcomes of the Przhino Agreement brokered by international actors and aimed at reintroducing democracy in the North Macedonian captured state. The remaining two articles of this special section deal with social movements in the countries of Southeast Europe that are member states of the EU. Junes and Rone take stock of the protests in Bulgaria in 2013 and 2017 and examine if and how political participation continued when protest activists decided to go abroad. Subsequently, Gubernat and Rammelt analyze the “We want a country like abroad!” movement, which was prevalent in Romania for the past six years aiming to re-create a value-based discourse around the idea of belonging to the European Union. By bringing these cases together, we hope to provide a broad and in-depth reflection on protest mobilizations in reaction to international statebuilding in Southeast Europe in recent years.
