Stubbs_Dreaming of Europe

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Dreaming of Europe?: narratives and shapes of three waves of

associational activism in Croatia

Paul Stubbs, April 2013.

This presentation builds on some of my recent work on activisms in

the post-Yugoslav space, including ongoing collaboration with BojanBilić, and touches on my work on Europeanisation and social policy inCroatia, a collaboration with Siniša Zrinščak. Much of it derivesfrom a recent text on Activism in Croatia which appears in the latest

issue of the Croatian journal Polemos. I realise that what I have to

say is, at best, tangential to the core themes of the conference and

the panel and, certainly, does not look at ‘impact’ as it is usuallyunderstood in terms of a linear process of a affecting b. I ask you

to bear with me as I explore a slightly different set of questions,

relating different waves of what I term “associational activism” inCroatia with different phases of the country’s relationship to aEuropean and European Union imaginary. If it helps, the good news is

that I will not take long and, since I live in Zagreb, the organisersincurred no financial costs in getting me here. We will all survive

what I have to say, and be able to resume our business as usual after

I have finished.

In exploring what I term the narratives, shapes, claims and practices

of three waves of activism in Croatia at the interface of, broadly

speaking, peace, human rights, gender equality and social and

environmental justice, I am wondering out loud whether, and if so

how, it matters that these coincide with three very different phases

of Croatia's relationship to the European Union. Please bear in mind

that I am arguing not in terms of causality but rather coincidence

or, more accurately, in Foucault’s terms, homology.

In the European Union, a lot has changed since late 2004 when Jeffrey

Rifkin published his book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of

the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, seeing the EU, in

contrast to the USA, as a beacon of light, ushering in a “new age ofinclusivity, diversity, quality of life, sustainability, universal

human rights, the rights of nature, and peace on earth”. Livingwithin Angela Merkel’s new European nightmare of disciplinary

austerity creating what Slavoj Žižek has recently called “a divided

Europe” with one part “reduced to being a zone with a cheaper labourforce, outside the safety network of the welfare state, a domain

appropriate for outsourcing and tourism” and where “the gap betweenthe developed world and those lagging behind will exist within Europe

itself”, is taking us further away from the dream. Luckily, dreamstake longer than this to be erased from the memory, so that a kind of

‘cognitive’ or better ‘ideational Europeanisation’ is stilloccurring, including in Croatia, in which actors, including NGOs and

citizens’ movements are more conscious of, more vocal about, better

networked around, and more successful in advocating for, certain

agendas such as gender equality, social inclusion, and environmental

justice, even if the price to pay for ‘EU-isation’ is incorporation

into a certain, narrow, technical, managerialist, expert-led,

projectised and bureaucratic frame.



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But I am jumping ahead here. Let me return to the three waves of

activism in Croatia I mentioned earlier. The 'first wave' refers to

the various anti-war initiatives which emerged in the Croatian space

in the early 1990s, primarily the network of individuals, groups and

projects around the „Anti-war Campaign, Croatia“ (ARK). What is,

perhaps, of most interest is the argument, best expressed by Bojan

Bilić, that the wider anti-war engagement of the period “appropriatedthe already existing activist networks which were created as a result

of trans-Yugoslav political co-operation”, notably 1968 studentprotests (I would add the Croatian spring of 1971), feminist

initiatives from the 1970s and environmental and peace activism from

the 1980s. As well as being an antidote to the notion that ‘civilsociety’ was brought to the region by USAID in 1991 or so, this workof historical recovery points to both the continuities as well as the

breaks in activist scripts in newly independent Croatia. Conceived as

‘a network of networks’, ARK can be interpreted through a number of

different lenses, as a set of interlinked friendship and solidaristic

networks; as an example of civic courage, ‘speaking truth to power’in terms of keeping alive certain basic values; as a living

experiment and site of intense learning which, particularly in its

magazine ArkZin, managed to combine a new aesthetics and a new

politics; and as initiating explicitly semi-autonomous spin-offs

working on diverse aspects of a practical and conceptual response to

the wars and the rise of authoritarian nationalisms. The European

Union, disengaged politically and involved only in providing

humanitarian assistance, was largely irrelevant, although the

movement’s embracing of the values of ‘European civilisation’, at atime when they were least in evidence and, indeed, when the trope of

‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ and ‘Balkan backwardness’ were being used tojustify non-intervention, is striking.

The second wave includes some of the ARK spin-offs, and refers to the

more professionalised and projectised 'Non-Governmental

Organisations' under the influence, to an extent, of external donor

funding and preference for particular organisational forms and

structures. This coincides with a conjuncture in which the European

Union moved from a distant utopia to an achievable technocratic goal.

In this conjuncture, far from over, the shape of activism tended to

be squeezed, more or less willingly, into a narrow organisational

form with real effects on its transformative power. I do not want to

be (mis)understood as suggesting that activists completely lost their

‘cutting edge’ in this period: just consider the significant,

continued, impact of Platform 112 in shaping the terms of the debate

about whether Croatia should be judged as ready to join the European

Union. However, as the older generation of activists were joined by

those trained in 'capacity building', 'leadership' and 'project

planning and management', the idea of a 'third sector' - neither

state nor private for profit - as a site of employment, with a

particular structure, shape and trajectory, tended to dominate. This

was not, for many activists, a move from politics into technocracy;

rather, it was the setting for a new kind of ‘technopolitics’ of thekind needed to benefit from significant European Union and other

funding, in the form of what Aida Bagić termed 'NGO-isation' tendingto reward particular kinds of organisations concentrating on „issue-specific interventions and pragmatic strategies with a strong

employment focus“.



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I have caricatured the second wave, primarily because what is both

interesting and, perhaps, surprising, is the rise of a 'third wave',

a new group of interlinked activist initiatives and movements

including the Zagreb Philosophy Faculty student protests and the

Right to the City movement active against the building of a shopping

centre in Varšavska in Zagreb, and now against the building of a golf

resort in Srđ, Dubrovnik. These movements emphasise struggles against

commodification, crony capitalism, and the erosion of the right to

public space. Many activists in the third wave oppose Croatia's

European Union membership, bringing, therefore, a sense of the need

for a different kind of utopia. According to Srećko Horvat and Igor

Štiks, the rise of a new, organised, original and critical left inCroatia, influenced by the Arab spring, by anti-austerity movements

in Greece, Spain and elsewhere, and opposed to neo-colonial forms of

EU disciplinarity in South East Europe forces us to „rethink thecategories used to explain the social, political and economic

situation in the Balkans“. What are we to make of their argument thatthe movements are anti-regime, critical of the linkages between

political elites, businesses, media corporations, organized crime,

predatory (foreign-owned) banks, corrupt judiciary and, most

interestingly of all, „corrupt unions“ and „NGOs promoting the holyunion of electoral democracy and neoliberal economy“? For most third

wave activists, I suggest, the NGO shape is, either irrelevant, part

of the problem, or a useful means of attracting project-based funding

which can then be used for wider political aims. These ‘new spaces ofprotest’ are, perhaps, more like ARK in terms of being hotbeds of

learning and laboratories for action, more than opportunities for

employment.

Beyond these simplifications, the message here is that it is

dangerous to generalise about associational activisms outside of

time, space, scale and focus. It is to question the universalising

logic of the discourses of civil society and NGOs, therefore. It is

also to recognise, in the words of Leonard Cohen that “there is acrack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. One current

focus, in work with Bojan Bilić, is on LGBTQ activisms where one

finds, simultaneously, aspects of NGOisation and more radical,

experimental, and political alternatives.

In the end, my ongoing research suggests that the kinds of scripts

that develop during formative social action tend to be relatively

resilient, even in the face of changing political, institutional and

historical conditions. The complexities of whether these scripts are

locally, nationally, regionally or globally formed, and how these

(dis)junctions are lived, is also important. I have suggested that

the discursive frames, the modes of analysis, and the repertoire of

responses within the three waves of activism in Croatia are

sufficiently different as to merit more research. The challenge

remains to build associational activisms which combine radicalism and

inclusivity, and to create more spaces for genuine inter-generational

learning. The really great thing is that social action and social

change was not killed off by NGOisation even if, for a while, the

‘how’ and the ‘what’ became somewhat conflated. To quote a recent

text on peace-building in Bosnia-Herzegovina by Nebojša Šaviha-Valha,“technology should not be a substitute for, but has to be a



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complement to, a fundamental understanding of underlying processes

and structures in order to make a change in the system”. I am not fora moment suggesting that this is news to any of you; rather that the

need for praxis, as the dynamic imperative of social change, is,

sometimes, left out of the logical frameworks within which we

operate. Thank-you.

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