Hauntology and HARDtalk

Written for Kosovo Online by Srdjan Garcevic, founder of The Nutshell Times

With even more sequels and prequels and the same celebrities delivering the same liberal homilies year after year, culture and politics, at least in the West and its orbit, seem a bit stuck.

This is far from a novel insight: it has been almost two decades since Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds decried the fact that global popular music seems only able to play with the ghosts of the past. To describe this, they borrowed Derrida's concept of "hauntology," who himself used the term to describe the spectral influence of Marxism in the post-Cold War West.

The aesthetics and worldview of the HARDTalk interview with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić seemed very "hauntological."

The past decade has rendered the HARDTalk format painfully obsolete. This format typically features a journalist who plays a stern arbiter of truth and morals, engaging in a rigorous and often confrontational interview with a high-profile guest. However, the repeated failures of prestige media to accurately report on a variety of crucial issues, from Russiagate and Hunter Biden's laptop to COVID-19, have significantly undermined the journalistic credibility necessary for interviewers to be taken seriously. On the other hand, the increasing popularity of politicians, such as Donald Trump, who do not feel like they need to be lectured by their interviewers, has further made the show seem very dated.

Even more antiquated were the topics. Excepting the mention of Trump, the whole interview could have been made at any point during Vučić's time in power and arguably even with any Serbian leader since 2000. While it is somewhat understandable that the host, Stephen Sacur, did not want to bring the UK audience up to speed with the minutiae of Serbian politics and kept it focused on themes familiar to the viewership for the past two decades - Srebrenica, the status of Kosovo, Russia - he did not seem to reference the fact that the UK left the EU, nor acknowledge that anything changed in Serbia of the world. In the time capsule where this interview took place, the EU accession standards and policies are still sacrosanct, the 2000s Western "rules-based order" is still hegemonic and has not been found strange, and the UK has no opinion or interests of its own.

In a lot of ways, it was a softball interview.

The interviewer could have asked Vučić much more pressing questions, arguably more enjoyable for the UK viewers: about the political balancing of economic development and sustainability in the plans to mine lithium in Serbia, which caused a stir in the country, or what does a statesman who still keeps in touch with both Russia and the West think about the current escalation in Ukraine, which looks increasingly bleak. Instead, we got canned lines from Vučić's opponents about "authoritarianism" from a state media journalist from a country that is increasingly content to jail people for social media posts.

However, this unwillingness to acknowledge that the world has changed makes this hauntological rather than just nostalgic. An essential feature of hauntology is the burden of expected but unrealized futures. While we can say that the 1990s and 2000s were burdened by the fact that we did not live up to the post-war promises of space exploration or social equality, the world in 2024 does not live up to the expectations of the liberal Western press from the 1990s and 2000s: history resumed (contra Fukuyama), "West Wing"-style policy wonks who promised to sort everything out are no longer in charge (even in the US). Liberalism is no longer the only game in town.

These tectonic changes are hard to swallow, significantly, as they will cost many people status and jobs across the world. Indeed, as things stand, BBC will discontinue HARDTalk next spring after a 28-year run. The last US Presidential election campaign indicates that the future of the interview format will be more free-flowing and Roganesque. More importantly, these changes indicate that our Western interlocutors can and should also learn something from Serbia's history and current approach to global politics rather than just hector and judge us.

While HARDtalk may be done, the ghosts of the liberal worldview of the 1990s and 2000s that it encapsulates will still haunt us for a while, as they don't seem willing to let go and let the world continue unstuck.