Abstract
The basic argument outlined in this article is that the Serbian political elite has managed Serbia’s contested past through covering and cultural reframing rather than public acknowledgement. I show here that in the creation of a current Serbian calendar, as a state-sponsored practice, there is an extensive usage of impression management techniques which enabled a different reading of the calendar at both the domestic and international levels. It is further claimed that the calendar serves multiple functions and meanings: on the one hand, it tends to present Serbia as a democratic and progressive state, but on the other hand, it legitimizes a wide range of emotions at the local level. In other words, the new Serbian calendar is made both to meet European expectations and further Serbian interests to join the European Union, but also to allow wider audiences in Serbia to express feelings of animosity, injustice, and frustration as a means of settling historical accounts.
Introduction
This article argues that nation-states may employ impression management (IM) techniques in editing and performing state-sponsored memory projects so as to reframe and conceal contested elements of their past. Such application of IM proves to be useful in transmitting different messages at both the domestic and international levels. The use of IM is suitable for such purposes because its various techniques allow for different emphasis, thus framing comprehension and perception of the social context in significantly alternate ways, depending on the audience.
This article demonstrates how the Serbian political elite uses IM techniques in the current Serbian calendar to evade dealing with its contested past and better its chances to enter the European Union (EU). National calendars are not an instrument for representing a historic reality, but a device for setting forth certain agendas; to what extent a narrative is convincing and credible depends on its rhetorical and performative power. The ways agendas are justified and legitimated teach us what IM techniques are used in the attempt to persuade audience at both the national and international levels. I show here that while placating the international community by simulating adoption of democratic values, the current Serbian calendar also legitimizes a wide range of emotions at the local level. The desired outcome is that the European reading of the current Serbian state would emphasize Serbia’s positive democratic changes. In addition, the local Serbian population would find a large set of references in the new calendar, which could help them express their grievances, feelings of injustice and victimhood, and even claim superiority toward their significant others, first and foremost—Europe.
My aim is to explain the rationale behind the way in which the new national calendar in Serbia is edited, instrumentalized, and authorized. I will do this following two separate yet connected lines of inquiry: the first refers to significant changes adopted in the Law on Holidays over the past two decades. The second line of research addresses the construction of an official narrative in The State Program for Commemorating the Anniversaries of Historic Events of the Serbian Liberation Wars, 1 henceforth referred to as The Program. This is a legally binding document, approved by the Serbian government, 2 that serves as a written manual for the current calendar practices of present-day commemoration. Together with changes apparent in the Laws on Holidays, one can get a deeper insight into how political elites use the current national Serbian calendar to reframe certain aspects of Serbia’s contested past.
Many elements of national image and identity intended for external display are inconsistent with local practices and beliefs (Strang and Meyer, 1993). The discrepancy between nation’s image as perceived by others and national identity as a reflection of self perception expresses itself in two considerably different versions of “the-world-as-it-should-be” (Dzenovska, 2005: 174). This discrepancy contains some tension, and I suggest here it might be rather successfully overcome, or at least reduced, with the help of some IM techniques.
I will show that, in the creation of the current Serbian calendar, four dominant IM techniques were used as part of Serbia’s self-presentation: acquisitive ingratiation, conformity, exemplification, and denial. The first technique, acquisitive ingratiation, occurs when one controls scarce or valuable resources that the ingratiator hopes to acquire at minimal personal cost (Jones, 1964). It is also often called “attraction management,” where the task and challenge of the ingratiator is to discover what the audience finds attractive, and then provide it (Schlenker, 1980). The second, conformity, relies on a general tendency to like those whose values and beliefs are similar to one’s own, and to express opinions or acts in a manner consistent with another party’s attitudes, beliefs and values in order to increase liking. Conformity is often used in situations where there are power differences: the more difference there is in the power between parties, the more likely it is that the lower one will imitate behaviors and values of the higher one (Rosenfeld et al., 1995). The third, exemplification, is a technique commonly used to stress positive attributes through examples of good and moral acts, heroism, and victimhood. The exemplifier wants to be admired and respected for its integrity, and usually presents itself as willing to suffer to help others, while in reality it also attempts to make others feel guilty because they are not acting according to the same morality and integrity values. The fourth technique, denial, occurs when one is confronted with a threat to one’s self-integrity, embodied by a stereotype that one believes is being applied to oneself. Of the many ways that people can cope with a threat to their self-integrity, one of the simplest is denial. Individuals and groups that are concerned with IM appear more likely to rely on denial in order to reduce the likelihood that others will adopt a threatening view of themselves (Von Hippel et al., 2005).
However, it is of utmost importance to stress that I will not engage in an examination of the current public discourse, nor of the way in which the new Serbian calendar is accepted or rejected. This is primarily due to the fact that currently there exists almost no such research. 3 Therefore, the focus of this article will be solely on exploring how the state, via the newly tailored national calendar, manages and reframes the contested elements of Serbia’s past for both its internal and external purposes.
Impression management and contested past
Although IM has its origins in sociology, such as in the works of Ervin Goffman (1959), it is also rooted in the literature of organizational psychology (Riess, 1982; Schlenker, 1980; Tedeschi, 1981). The term “impression management” refers to the process by which individuals attempt to control the impressions of others (Leary and Kowalski, 1990). Schlenker (1980) defined IM as the attempt to control images that are projected in real or imagined social interactions. IM presents constructive and favorable images to the public, encouraging a positive outcome. It is a common underlying process that involves social and cultural implications.
Goffman’s dramaturgical analogy explains IM through intersections between actor(s), audience, stage, and performance. His analogy positions individual and collective human behavior in a social setting, while emphasizing its interactive and goal-directed nature. The same is true when analyzing nation-states. States are goal-oriented and engaged in IM (Meyer et al., 1997) for the purposes of controlling the “situational context” (Goffman, 1959) in a global sphere. Like individuals, nation-states need to define both the situation and the several roles played by others in that situation. This is done through communicating each other’s identities and goals via strategic representations, designed to establish, maintain, and protect desired identities (Rosenfeld et al., 1995). Using IM facilitates the development of those desired identities (Leary and Kowalski, 1990). This is particularly important when analyzing how young nation-states present themselves globally, because today it is internationally accepted that every nation should create its own self-image to improve its chances on the global markets. However, a possible downside of the IM theoretical framework would be an over-instrumentalized approach, bordering on rational choice theory. Thus, I do not imply that national identity, or even national self-image, are solely artificial constructions, but rather competing, negotiated notions of individuals and collective selves that operate in a discursive terrain (Verdery, 1991).
This is particularly true for nation-states with a “difficult” past. Although academic literature shows numerous possibilities of dealing with contested past, I find Rivera’s (2008) classification particularly useful in relation to the wars of the 1990s. This is due to the fact that each post-Yugoslav country is engaged in one of three offered solutions: The first is to publicly address the past, which may be beneficial for a society as a means of proving moral righteousness (Levy and Sznaider, 2002; Olick 2007) and even of exploiting culpability, for example, through war tourism (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). 4 Second, various memory agents may produce multi-vocal and fragmented spaces and commemorations which are constructed in a way that allows for multiple readings (Vinitzky-Seroussi, 2002; Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz, 1991). Finally, for numerous reasons, some nation-states may prefer concealing and obfuscating contested elements of the past (Aguilar, 1999; Giesen, 2004; Rivera, 2008). It is important to stress, however, that both remembering and forgetting are by nature selective as well as strategic, and are never exploited to their fullest.
National calendars and new beginnings
The state, as an agent, has the central task of building national memory and the ceremonies surrounding it. States, having the power to implement the master narrative, create, as part of national identity, “the state-sponsored memory of national past” or “national memory” (Young, 1993). State actions have a symbolic power, that public actions by non-state actors lack (Blustein, 2012). However, one should avoid an over-instrumentalized approach, since the process of memorialization is dynamic and always, to some degree, spontaneous.
A master commemorative narrative represents a basic storyline that is culturally constructed, and provides the group members with a general notion of their shared past (Zerubavel, 1995). The master commemorative narrative is based on turning points and liminal events, such as wars, but the choice of an original event is always dependent on group needs, or selected parts of it, that are capable of dictating master narrative in the present. Following wars, the state’s aim is to create a sense of common memory, as a “foundation for a unified polis” (Young, 1993: 6). The politics of “naming the war” (Ashplant et al., 2000: 17), together with the national calendar and other state-sponsored commemorative practices, may be viewed as a powerful means to mark discontinuity between past and present (Ben-Amos, 2003; Winter, 2006), as well as that between the new and former regime (Misztal, 2003). Zerubavel (2004) particularly illuminates the way in which national calendars serve as cognitive maps, organizing structures of national identification that primarily stress the importance of temporal continuity and periodization as a means of articulating collective identities. The institutionalization of commemorative holidays establishes an annual cycle of remembrance, designed to ensure mnemonic socialization through recalling certain “sacred” moments (Zerubavel, 2003).
The Serbian context: cycles of ideologies
Current attempts to establish a new master commemorative narrative in Serbia have met with a considerable amount of resistance, chiefly because Serbian participation in the wars of the 1990s was anti-heroic, filled with violence, atrocities, and bloodshed. Moreover, it lacked any public consensus and was contested in multiple ways.
The previous event chosen as the master commemorative narrative for the Yugoslav nation was placed in World War II (WWII), and was channeled through partisan ideology. Consequently, “the immediate solution of class identity” (Bjelić, 2002: 53) was intended to replace previous national identities, and thus provide the political elite with a means of simplifying and explaining cultural and ethnic differences. Serbian national identity, in addition to other ethnically based identities, was pushed aside by the government in socialist Yugoslavia, which sought to form a multi-ethnic nation—the Yugoslavian nation. However, with the break-up of Yugoslavia, the master commemorative narrative collapsed as well.
In Serbia, the Yugoslav master commemorative narrative was replaced with extreme nationalism. Serbian leadership, headed by President Slobodan Milošević, endeavored to exploit deeper layers of Serbian history, by gradually building the “real” beginning of the Serbian nation using the myth of Kosovo. After being canonized at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Kosovo Battle of 1389 is today remembered by Serbs as a heroic fight against the Turks, which ended with a period of five centuries under Ottoman rule. Framed in Biblical–Christological patterns “as a fateful loss of the Serbs” (Šuber, 2006), it relied on three central motives, each of which was exploited by the 1990s regime: sacrifice as a heroic choice, betrayal as the most disgraceful act, and the idea of Serbs as the chosen people.
Serbia lost all the wars it participated in during the 1990s, and exhausted all the economic, political, and military resources of the Serbian population. Thus, the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević in 2000, together with a growing pressure for implementing democratic changes from the EU, United States, and various transnational actors, created an atmosphere in which Serbia’s ties with its past were once again ruptured.
Laws on holidays
Although the different layers of Serbia’s past gradually started to disappear from the official discourse, they continued to fester in various areas of living. According to the Law on National Holidays of 1997, the official holidays of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SRJ) 5 were the New Year’s Eve on 1 and 2 January; The Day of the Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia on 27 April 27; International Worker’s Day on 1 and 2 May; Victory Day on 9 May, and Republic Day on 29 and 30 November. At the level of the Republic of Serbia, 7 July is commemorated as Uprising Day during WWII, and there is also National Serbia Day on 28 March. This controversial date represents the adoption of several amendments, changing policy toward the autonomous regions of Kosovo and Vojvodina as well as the establishment of Milošević’s regime. Aside from these, St Sava Day is celebrated in all Serbian schools on 27 January. Additionally, all employees are entitled to take 1 day off on the basis of their religion: Orthodox Christians on 7 January, Julian Orthodox, Catholics, and other Christians on 25 December, Christmas Day, or on the second day of Easter; Muslims on Eid al Fitr or Eid al Adha; and Jews on Yom Kippur.
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had essentially ceased to exist in 1991. Thus, the celebration of Republic Day was anachronistic and confusing, as it represented the establishment of Yugoslavia; nevertheless, it continued to exist until 2002. Consequently, in 1997 the state decided to amend the prior basis for celebration, and promoted it instead as the date when the Monarchy was replaced by the Republic in 1945.
Following the regime overthrow of 5 October 2000, in July 2001, several significant changes occurred within the Law on National State Holidays in the Republic of Serbia. First, Republic Day, celebrated for almost six decades, disappeared together with Uprising Day on 7 July. Second, the Milošević period’s National Serbian Day on 28 March was abandoned, and the Day of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, symbolizing the 1992 Žabljak Constitution between Serbia and Montenegro (27 April), gradually disappeared and was replaced with Serbian Statehood Day inaugurated on 15 February. Third, St Vitus Day (28 June), a remnant of the Kosovo Battle, only began to be (officially) celebrated in 2001, though as a working day. Finally, Orthodox Christmas and Easter officially became non-working holidays. As all religions had the right to have 1 non-working day based on their tradition, Orthodox Christians had to be placed on an equal footing and were thus granted the right to stay at home on their Saint Day. 6 This seemingly minor correction demonstrates a new ideological trend, where differences on the basis of religion are utilized to stress and assert the indisputably orthodox character of the Serbian nation. In 2007, the law amended the Law on State and Other Holidays in the Republic of Serbia, merely adding a few corrections of syntax, primarily in order to formalize the official break from Montenegro and the end of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
“The Program for Commemorating the Anniversaries of Historic Events of the Serbian Liberation Wars”
The Program aimed to further explain, organize, and shape knowledge, while stressing certain historical events and individuals as a means of rearranging a new and desirable set of values. It came to life after a process of debate lasting several years, in which an eight-member committee, 7 together with various professionals, “negotiated” over Serbian history and past events. Although I was continuously denied access to the records of the committee sessions, an advisor in the Ministry of Labor and Social Policy provided me with some significant information regarding the process. He pointed out that the Committee held numerous meetings, and actively cooperated with “all historical institutes in the country, institutions of science, museums.” I argue that the nature of this process should be questioned, since all of the abovementioned institutions are state-sponsored, and their agendas are harmonized with the needs of the ruling political elite. In 2005 the first draft version of the Program was issued, while the complete version was published on 11 March 2009. It was published on Serbian Veteran’s Legacy, the official government web site, by the Committee for Fostering Traditions of the Liberation Wars, a permanent governmental body of the Republic of Serbia, established in 2001. 8 Most of the work on the Program was done between 2007 and 2009, 9 since “it was necessary to adapt it to local needs, and align it with international standards and with similar programs by governments in many European countries.” 10
The document includes significant anniversaries, commemorative days, national and religious holidays, as well as important Serbian figures, 11 together with a brief description of why specific days are commemorated and exhaustive explanations of the protocol for each of them. Every commemorative day is followed by the date of its commemoration and a concise explanation regarding the date, place, interval, and period of its commemoration or celebration. It is a 16-page document that introduces the reader to the “historical events of the liberation wars of Serbia,” 12 numbering 21 in total. Out of 21 commemorative days, 1 day is dedicated to the distant past and celebrates the Kosovo Battle; 8 are related to nineteenth-century Serbia; 6 to the Balkan wars and WWI; 5 to WWII; and only 1 to the recent wars of the 1990s.
Two different but supplementary frameworks are apparent in this important manual: The first deals with the ways in which the current commemorative master narrative is adjusted to the values of the international community, while the second stresses the underlying subtext in constructing the significant “other” as suitable for the local purposes. Both frameworks refer to a set of strategies whose main purpose is to position the message in a precise semiotic context, and to build easily recognizable mental schemes and maps (Zerubavel, 2003). Two complementary motives are present: The first is to assert Serbia’s democratic foundations, while the second stresses both the righteous and liberating character of all the wars Serbia has fought, as well as its victimhood.
Serbia’s democratic foundations: international context
The decision to place the master narrative in the nineteenth century is designed to legitimize the current Serbian nation-state as being born out of a prolonged and arduous struggle for freedom, based on democratic values. The nineteenth century does not only commemorate major battles and crossroads, but more importantly, the foundation of Serbia’s legal system and institutions. The reason for placing the master commemorative narrative into the nineteenth century is that this century, in the words of a committee member, 13 is perceived as “acceptable by the European Union,” since “the 20th century is colored with significant ideological differences and no common satisfactory event is to be found” (Kovač, cited in Petrović, 2012: 11).
The main holiday and ideal point of departure for Serbian nationhood was found in Candlemas (Serbian-Sretenje), the Serbian Statehood Day. This day combines two different events in one date: the First Serbian Uprising (1804), representing the beginning of Serbian liberation, and the declaration of the Serbian Constitution (1834), encapsulating the beginning of Serbian existence as an independent state. Candlemas is a religious holiday, also known as the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, and this further Christianization of Serbian national holidays reinforces the argument that the State is officially declaring the Republic of Serbia as primarily belonging to Orthodox Christians (David, 2012). The two underlying events of the Serbian Statehood Day are not widely accepted as the most important events in Serbian history (Šarić, 2012). However, the holiday narrative establishes a symbolic link between the First Serbian Uprising against the Turks and the Candlemas’ Constitution to the later creation of state, where the Constitution narrative particularly emphasizes its modernity and focuses on human rights. The merging and matching of these two symbolically compatible events, that is the First Serbian Uprising and the Constitution’s declaration together with the Orthodox Christian holiday of Candlemas, was intended to bring together components that would portray the “New Serb” as enlightened and civilized, yet, again, traditional, religious and constantly fighting for freedom. Such concoction, as will be further discussed, is present throughout the entire calendar.
Serbia’s cultural affinity with European tradition is persistently emphasized through a set of “democratic values.” Naturalization of “European values” is achieved by presenting Serbia, from its early beginning, as developing according to democratic principles. Using conformity technique proves to be most effective when there is a change of opinion (Jones, 1964): It is when the ingratiator switches from a divergent opinion to an agreeing one, that the target assumes the ingratiator values that opinion enough to change. This in turn strengthens the positive feelings the target has for the ingratiator. In Serbia, democracy is understood as harmonization with EU standards, and Europe is perceived as a powerful ingratiator in possession of valuable and desired resources. Thus, strategically choosing events that potentiate democratic values and blur contested elements of Serbia’s past, as presented in the Constitution’s declaration event, has been purposefully directed toward pleasing the international community. The national calendar has been adapted to conform with EU democratic values while Serbia aspires to acquire EU resources at the lowest possible cost. Such reasoning resembles the IM technique of acquisitive ingratiates.
Nineteenth-century Serbia is portrayed as being enlightened, planting the seed for further democratic development, from the establishment of an executive authority “Praviteljstvujušči Sovjet” (1805), to the Second Serbian Uprising (1815) that primarily underscores the successful “diplomatic negotiations” and the fact that Knez Miloš “spent 15 years building, in a peaceful manner, the autonomous position of Serbia inside the Ottoman Empire” 14 and finally with the glorious declaration of the Constitution (1835). As the Program suggests, the complete independence from the Turkish occupation was only finally reached in 1878 on the Berlin congress, primarily as a result of prolonged diplomatic efforts and the early development of Serbia’s legal institutions.
Another trait of Serbia’s attempt to be presented in the best light possible on the international scene is apparent in potentiating Serbia’s part in the anti-fascist struggle. The Day of Victory, 9 May, commemorates not only the end of WWII, but moreover the Day of Europe, where Serbia bravely fought fascism and anti-Semitism while supporting “nonviolence and understanding.” 15 Although this rhetoric is aimed at claiming Serbia’s democratic foundations, in reality, anti-fascism is continuously being nationalized, through the claims of equally legitimate movements, equating Chetniks with partisans. As part of IM conformity technique, the attempt to be accepted into the “moral community of shared memories” (Margalit, 2002) as a strong supporter of the anti-fascist struggle is also expressed by the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide in WWII, where Serbia commemorates the tragic killing of Serbs, Jews, and the Roma people. This commemorative date, embedded with multiple meanings, symbolizes the breach of the Ustasha concentration camp in Jasenovac (Croatia). The Day of Remembrance was already established in 1992, on the request of the Museum of Genocide Victims, 16 whose agenda was to “demonstrate the suffering of the Serbian people via Jews” (Byford, 2007: 56). Thus, this date represents continuity with Milošević agenda, where the extermination of Serbs, Jews, and Roma is equated; and while it aims to conform to international demands of the Human Rights Regime, at the local level, it actually enables further promotion of nationalism and victimhood. It appears that the strategy of the ruling political elite is to satisfy both demands: convergence to the EU, and fortification of local nationalism (Subotić, 2011). The use of IM techniques further enabled this two-fold strategy.
The Serbian significant other: Europe in the local context
I argue here that by using IM techniques, the image Serbia portrays for the international public as well as in forging national identity for local purposes discloses its current construction of otherness. This argument is based on Appadurai’s (2000) notion that the subjective positioning of a particular nation within the world is of the utmost importance in making sense of existing imaginary categories. Thus, through the gaps in constructs of national image and identity, Serbia reveals its subjective place and feelings in relation to its significant “other,” in this case—Europe.
It has been argued for quite some time that Serbia has a fundamentally complex and contradictory relationship with the West (Čolović, 1993; Lazić, 2003; Volčić, 2008). The ambivalent relationship toward Europe is easily found in the calendar. On the one hand, Serbia is eager to join the EU and is therefore adjusting to its agenda. On the other hand, it is perceived in Serbia that the West is responsible for “stealing” Kosovo, a Serbian “symbol of freedom, resistance, patriotism, national being, chivalry and heroism.” 17
This is precisely the reason why incorporating IM into state-sponsored commemorative practice helps to better understand how political elites navigate between international and local concerns in order to please often contradictory demands. On the one hand, Serbia claims not only to belong geographically but, more importantly, culturally, to Europe, where, as explained previously, conformity proved to be a suitable technique to boost such a claim. Yet, on the other hand, Serbia highlights its heroic sacrifices for Europe and affirms Europe’s indebtedness to it, but also claims its right over Kosovo, which is profusely stressed through the exemplification technique. At the local level, such tailoring of the national calendar leaves space for expressing grievances over Serbia’s lost, feelings of injustice for being “robbed” of Kosovo, victimhood and even moral superiority over Europe, as Serbia’s debtor.
Contrary to conformity technique, where the focus is put on deliberately creating an image that fits European values, in the IM technique of exemplification, moral deeds and sacrifice are put forward. Exemplification, as a tool of performance comparison, is extensively used to prove that all the wars Serbia participated in involved liberation and righteous struggle and to portray this as an ongoing tradition. This manner of event selection is intended to establish the fact that the common Serbian has some innate attributes of the highest moral standards, particularly those of heroism and sacrifice for the sake of others. This is apparent in the list of events chosen in the calendar, starting with the Battle of Kosovo (1389). It is also incorporated in the Serbian Statehood Day as the beginning of the First Serbian Uprising (1804–1813), which symbolizes the “inception of the liberation struggle to form an independent state.” 18 The exemplification of moral excellence, as a suitable IM technique for claiming perennial and righteous aspirations for freedom, is further elaborated in the First Uprising, portrayed in the four exemplary battles: Čegar, Mišar, Ivankovac, and Deligrad. They offer the perfect backdrop, evoking a mythical atmosphere in which a small and freedom-loving people fight against a giant and brutal “Other.” In the battle of Čegar, it is explained that the Turks monstrously severed numerous Serbian heads, building a tower out of their skulls, known as Ćele-Kula. The battle of Mišar is described as the battle of David and Goliath, where a small Serbian army of 7000 foot soldiers and 2000 vedettes bravely defeated 40,000 Turks. The battles of Ivankovac and Deligrad continue to portray heroic victories and unfair battles between a small Serbian people led by Karađorđe and a giant Turkish army. Next in chronological order, the Kumanovo Battle (1912), as opposed to other battles in the calendar chosen to strengthen Serbian righteousness and self-sacrifice, was purposefully selected as an exemplification technique of claiming historical rights over the territories of Kosovo.
Likewise, WWI receives much attention and becomes the focal point of the great Serbian ethos, in which a young and small nation heroically overcomes huge obstacles. It is due to outstanding bravery that Serbia defeats a far more powerful enemy with tragic consequences to its own destiny. The narration in the document overtly uses IM technique of exemplification to imply that Serbia paid an enormous price while fighting not only for its own freedom, but for the freedom of Europe in its entirety. This saga is outlined through three great battles: the Battle of Cer (1914), the Battle of Kolubara (1914), and the breach of the Thessaloniki Front (1918).
Exemplification of a righteous struggle and self-sacrifice in WWII follows exactly the same pattern. It starts with the symbolic beginning of WWII in Serbia, on 6 April 1941, where not only “the casualties were great, but the destruction of educational, cultural and medical facilities of huge proportions took place.” 19 Out of a considerable number of battles during WWII, the Program chose to single out the battle of Kadinjača, which successfully represents the essence of the heroic but tragic Serbian fight for freedom. For example, it is stated that “the soldiers of the Radnički battalion sacrificed their own lives to enable the rescue of enormous numbers of people as well as the continuation of the armed struggle for the liberation of the country.” 20 The breach of the Srem front in 1945, a massive battle, is described as “the longest and hardest battle of WWII,” where it is emphasized that, though victory belonged to the Yugoslav army, the battle took place on the Serbian land of Srem.
Such a long list of heroic struggles and self-sacrifices is aimed at tacitly suggesting also the just character of Serbia’s participation in the 1990s wars. However, the most striking fact is that the use of IM technique of denial allows us to see what is actually omitted from the calendar: instead of dealing with Serbia’s role and responsibility in the 1990s wars, it is hushed away by the image of the ultimate Serb—righteous and morally superior. Although nation-states rarely commemorate their own misdeeds, it immediately strikes attention that the only commemorative day out of almost 10 years of war in the 1990s, of which at least a portion was undeniably due to Serbian aggression, promotes the memory of Serbian victimhood during the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing as the wars’ central motive.
The denial of negative attributes, such as a contested Serbian role in the wars of the 1990s, together with conforming to the EU standards, promoting self-sacrifice and the tradition of liberation wars over history, are all goal-oriented IM techniques through which Serbia aims to acquire European resources at a minimal national cost. Thus, acquisitive ingratiation is built-in into the current Serbian calendar, and it presents strategic thinking designed to positively influence Serbia’s international image as a shortcut for gaining certain benefits.
Calendar—work in process
On 5 December 2011, the Serbian parliament adapted the Law on Amendments and Supplements to the Law on State and Other Holidays, and so two additional non-working days were added to the calendar. The first is a Memorial Day of Serbian Victims in WWII (21 October), addressing the local needs for further claiming of self-sacrifice and victimhood, but also “stressing the importance of Serbia in the anti-fascist struggle.” 21 It sets apart Serbians from other victims (Roma and Jews), and in that blurs the historical facts and represents the continuation of WWII memory agenda, again, further establishing the victimization of Serbs throughout history. The second holiday, Armistice Day in WWI (11 November), the day when “weapon was finally quiet,” 22 already existed in the calendar as from 2005, but was now upgraded to a non-working holiday since “that’s how it is commemorated in all victorious countries.” 23 It also reflects “the politics of peace, which are of utmost importance for Serbia’s future aspirations.” 24
Two additional alterations were made: First, the Serbian Statehood Day is to be celebrated with two non-working days instead of one, which was meant to emphasize its centrality and to single it out from other commemorative days. Second, what was previously the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide in WWII was now declared to be also the day of Remembrance for all genocide victims. Such framing leaves plenty of room for interpretations, since it commemorates everyone and no one at the same time.
Conclusion
It seems to be a cultural phenomenon in which nation-states, in ways more calculated than ever, are engaged in constructing and editing national images and identities through various state-sponsored practices, with the aim of reframing a difficult past and portraying the nation in a more positive light. I here suggest that IM techniques may be strategically used by governments and applied to the entire range of nation-state sponsored practices whose aim is, on the one hand, to construct a certain image for international display, and, on the other, to shape a certain national identity for local purposes. IM techniques allow for different readings of a desirable national identity at both the local and international levels.
From what has been described above, it is possible to conclude that at the international level, in many aspects, Serbia behaves like a job applicant who is “trying to look good and lies to do it.” It strategically embraces acquisitive ingratiation techniques as a shortcut to EU resources while both conforming to democratic values and denying any responsibility for the wars of the 1990s. Furthermore, a self-presentation is developed through the exemplification of Serbia’s “good deeds,” such as the struggle against fascism, a culture of negotiation, and continuously fighting anti-Semitism. It seems that the Serbian case strikes one as an exemplary case study to show how contemporary states deal with the requirements of a global Human Rights Regime.
By contrast, on the local level, the promoted memory of Serbian victimhood is repeatedly exemplified and preserved. Nineteenth-century Serbia has been revived and symbolically rebuilt, and the new Serbian commemorative master narrative has been placed in that century, thereby completely shutting its eyes to the wars of the 1990s. According to the current Serbian calendar, those wars and atrocities apparently never happened, and if they did, Serbia had nothing to do with them. More importantly, such tailoring of the calendar blurs Serbia’s responsibility and accountability for those wars.